Ramblings about art

The paradox of art history is its disconnect with art practice. Most artists don’t know that much about art history and most art historians don’t know anything about making art. This creates certain problems in the field of art history, namely an excess of bullshit. There is something sort of dumb and also disrespectful about trying to interpret an artist’s work without regard for their intentions. However, I think the theoretical cannot occupy a separate realm from the art world. Art has meaning because of art history. It builds of tradition and creates a dialogue and a critique of what has come before, especially for contemporary art.

To say that art should be about expression, pure and simple, is something I might have agreed with a few years ago. But that's a little disgusting to me now. I think specifically of the New York School, Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning. There’s something chauvinist and self-indulgent about the mentality that the artist is this genius who jizzes all over the canvas in the ultimate explosion of his creative force. Sorry to get graphic on you, but this view is sexist and deserves that metaphor, at least historically, because women were excluded from this sort of art making. The female reaction to this male-centric egotism came later in the twentieth century in the form of social, political art that draws explicitly on art history to mount a critique of what had come before.

The idea that you should appreciate a work of art for its aesthetic, emotional quality solely is obscenely purist. You are supposed to stand in front of the painting in a reverie of contemplation? Rothko apparently intended his paintings to provide an almost religious experience, moving the viewer to tears. Ad Reinhardt’s monochromes contain gradations of color so slight that he wanted viewers to spend long periods of time looking at his paintings, almost meditating. Do your eyes view the piece separate from your body, separate from the physical world, only in a weirdly spiritual, cerebral realm? According to Clement Greenberg, yes. That is his idea of modern art, and the basis of a good chunk of the twentieth century mentality. Yet how can you expect art to exist in some higher realm of existence? You’d be fooling yourself if you thought that most people experience it in this way.