Oh look! That great big squiggle represents the artist's blah blah blah!

Modern art. You seriously telling me that those squiggles in the Tate Modern are art? I don't mean all the paintings of course, and the people who drew the squiggles may be very nice people who put a lot of effort in and simply were not particularly talented at art, but surely it should only be classed as art when it involves talent? Almost any adult can draw a squiggle. Saying it "represents the artist's feelings of anger, with the yellow contrasting the orange showing his sensibility to the mediums of colour and the green representing a field" does not change the fact it's a squiggle. Or piss on a sheet. Or whatever else they call "art" these days.

 

there is a lot of pretentious artists.

there is also a lot of art that many people without training, or otherwise technical knowledge, would consider to be 'stupid' because 'anybody could do it'

i guarantee if you had not seen the piece before and tried to do what they did, it would look completely different, and possibly worse. not to mention, nobody else did it...sooooo

 

I agree with OP. Just because you can squiggle a line down and interpret that as something unique, it doesn't mean you're an artist.

 

you're right it doesn't.

but if you say that, is Pollack not an artist? How about Rothko?


(I must say this picture of this Rothko piece does absolutely NO justice to how awesome it really is)

 

artists of deception

 

And how bad did Warhol suck?

 

i personally don't like warhol. he said i have no actual artistic talent, but i'm going to be an artist anyways. which is interesting to a degree - but it has spawned a whole fleet of turds that simply mimic every single trend in 'popular' art

 

The artists are expressing themselves and/or displaying their mastery of color, value, line, shape, form, texture, space, balance, movement, harmony, emphasis, proportion, unity, variety,contrast, and pattern.

You can see most of these things in the Pollack above.

 

qft

 

Just because you can paint the Taj Mahal in watercolor whilst standing on your head doesn't mean you're an artist either.

 

According to dictionary.com, it does.

 

1) I think you are lumping things more correctly described as "abstract art" as "modern art". Not all modern art is abstract.
2) It doesn't matter what category of art, most artists see the innovator, and then try and emulate what's popular. This happens with music, architecture, fashion and even language. Abstract art is not different in this sense. A small percentage is good, but the vast majority is simply artists riding the trend.
3) I agree that the abstract art forms are becoming rather ubiquitous and tiresome. Nearly every piece of public art I see installed these days is abstract with very little recognizable form or function. Very few are items meant to represent something recognizable, or act as engineering pieces to manipulate their surroundings. Far too many random stacked cubes or curved pieces of metal sitting outside a generic office building.

 

I see Rothko vs. Raphael as a sonnet vs. free verse. Both are forms of poetry and self expression. One is very fine-tuned and requires a lot of technical skill, and the other is less controlled and more primal. Which is "better" depends on the content and personal preference, and it's possible to appreciate both.
A work's success depends on what works for the viewer. I've seen childrens drawings I would consider artistic, and I've seen Renaissance art that's left me cold. I've found pebbles on the beach that have overwhelmed me with admiration, yet shrugged at sculptural works.
Art must surely be, to a large degree, about its effect. I hugely admire the skill involved in selecting the right tools and using them with precision to create something accurate and formal, but that admiration itself is not what makes me like or dislike a work of art. Above all else, it's how it makes me feel.

 

I hate damien hirst.

 

I hate these kind of arguments. It's pointless. Art is about expression, not talent. Talent helps aid someone in expressing themselve, that's all talent does. Someone with all the talent in the world, but not creativity, or expression cannot make art.

Alot of people don't like Miley Cryus and say her music sucks, but it doesn't suck. The person saying that just doesn't like her music. And if that doesn't clear things up for the idiots out there, here's an even easier and more understandable way to put this.

My favorite color is green. My least favorite color is yellow. But that doesn't mean that green is better than yellow, it means i like green and i don't like yellow. To measure these colors out and try to come up with an undeniable answer of which color is better would be stupid.

 

there is no such thing as art. only art garfunkel. art linkledder. art lebeau. art is only a suffix for the letters 'f', 'p', 'm', 't' and other such rif raff. ed harris did a great job playing pollock. art is a word that pretenders use to avoid having to take a corporate job.

 

Agreed.

eace:

 

Such discourse is a large part of how changes in opinion occur, a natural part of trends; it helps to refresh and renew, not only the current pool of art, but interest in older works.

Arguing that people should stop arguing is rather silly.

 

Abstract art usually has a lot of intricasies to it that don't stand out at first. Yeah some works of art might look like a bunch of squiggles thrown on a canvas, but if you start examining it there are a whole lot of elements going on there...balance, color, emotion....amongst other things.

I agree with everyone that has said art is about expression. Abstract art better expresses pure emotion than realism.

 

Anyone who creates something is an artist.