fallacies in modern art
i get the jacob geller take on this, i get that attaching objective value to something that is inherently subjective is a bad thing to do, and that the irritation or anger you feel when you look at some types of modern art is kind of the point of it. but at the same time i can also understand that a lot of people view modern art as not really making a deep statement, but rather just exploiting some aesthetic or artistic inefficiency in the market—and using that to create relatively low effort pieces —> post hoc attaching some deep meaning or significance to it in order to sell it better, or to have news articles written about it, and so on.
art like this generally requires consumers to trust the artist that the plaque next to a painting which is entirely white with a single black dot in the middle represents something about purity—rather than the artist just being kind of lazy about it and realising they can sell paintings like this that require relatively low effort, where people don’t seem to question it so they just keep doing it.
somebody might say even if the historical or emotional context for a piece of low effort modern art piece is entirely financially motivated, it can still be a valuable piece of art. i guess that’s… fair, if you’re okay with that. i think me personally, knowing that a low effort piece was created entirely because an artist thought that they could get away with it kinda hurts my view of the piece even if the attached supposed historical and emotional context is all technically the same. just having that extra bit of ‘oh i did this purely because it required 5 minutes of work and i made $100,000,000 off of it’, at least for me, hurts my own judgement. especially because one of the things that make me have a special interest about art history is the moviations and purpose that is both behind and reflected within the piece.
unfortunately again at the same time theres no way you can really protect against this kind of behavior or police modern art without it becoming some sort of weird fascist competition (if you’re any into art history then you’d know we’ve been through this already cough cough futurism) where people are attaching increasingly arbitrary ‘objective’ values to things that are inherently and entirely subjective