What's My Take On: Modern Art?
By Kendall Haney
Art Enthusiast
Let’s get it straight from the get-go: I am oh so inviting of the outraged rebuttal. I’m praying someone takes to the comment section to rip me apart with well-deserved righteousness on how wrong it is for me to criticize, abuse, insult, and otherwise degrade misunderstood and tortured modern artists from the 20th century. Go ahead and scorn my opinion with the retribution I so deserve, all you art apologists and feral hipsters who coo at modern art’s corniness. I’m ready for it. The fact is, in this writer’s opinion anyway, modern art is about as artistic as a kindergarten textbook on how to draw a square, or like how the average five year old might randomly splash paint all over her classroom walls just for the fun of feeling wildly naughty.
My latest art lesson was a transition from Renaissance art, to art of a more ‘modern’ style. As most other things in life typically progress, I expected that the art in my lessons would get better and more complicated. I based that expectation on other experiences. For example, medicine has evolved from leeches as the cure-all, to high powered antibiotics that kill those no-see-ums that I desperately want to no see. Another example is computers. Did we get an even larger ENIAC to send into outer space? No. We. Did. Not. (For all those who haven’t been to a Best Buy of late, the computers got smaller. SHHHHH!)
Sadly, if you held up something done by, say…Michelangelo…, next to something done by, say, Mark Rothko, they just don’t compare. It is like the celebration of de-evolution. If art speaks for itself, you compare and tell me I’m wrong! I’ll give you a hint; the 16th century masterpiece of art seen below is on the right, and the 20th century orange blob by Mark Rothko is on the left.
Dearest Rothko of said 20th century, did you even try?
And yes, you can claim that Rothko’s block of color has a deeper, more spiritual meaning than just the color orange. He certainly didn’t mince words about telling us how deep we should be feeling about his gifted “geniusness.” But let’s face it, it’s a block of orange slathered on a canvas without proper borders that doesn’t give me anything to think about outside of “yep, that’d be orange.”
In regards to his block of orangey-greatness, Rothko said, “I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”
Well, someone had pretentious for breakfast and followed it up with a nice bologna smoothie. Let me guess, Rothko had some tragic backstory? Was he a Russian without a cause?
Oh my Gosh. How did I guess that one?
According to TheArtStory.org, Rothko was a Russian Jew born into a hostile environment. He, “immigrated to the United States…and settled in Portland, Oregon, though [his father] died only a few months after the family's arrival, requiring them to earn a living in their new country though they only spoke Hebrew and Russian. Rothko was forced to learn English and go to work when he was very young, resulting in a lingering sense of bitterness over his lost childhood.”
It turns out that in addition to being a bitter child, Rothko counted himself a follower in the existentialist movement. Also, “Nietzsche, myth, and Jewish and social revolutionary thought were all important influences on Rothko's life and art. He once wrote to The New York Times saying he would not defend his pictures, ‘because they defend themselves.’ Yet he was always a vocal advocate for artists, writing many reviews as well as essays on the complexities of the art world.”
Having read the tragedy of his tragedy, I did at least sit for a moment and wonder if perhaps I was being too hard on Mr. Rothko. Maybe people cried at his work because up close and personal it was far more vivid than pictures could ever do justice.
But as I read more about him and his love affair with existentialism especially, I realized that Rothko’s whole life centered on tragedy and doom and likely being overly emotional about everything. After all, if I compare his life to Michelangelo, it isn’t like Michelangelo had the conveniences of cars, washers and dryers, or even a guaranteed bath once a day with hot water. Rothko wasn’t the only child who went to work at a young age—Michelangelo shared that fate with him.
And to be honest, the quote Rothko gave about people crying over his art really irked me. Great painters don’t have to tell anyone how great they are a la Michelangelo. If people cried in front of Rothko, it was probably because they didn’t understand how a box was considered art and they’d just dropped a huge sum of money to hang a square in their living room.
Let’s repeat that. It’s a square. And not even a perfect square, at that. It’s more of a rectangle shape if we’re being honest here. Even Donatello’s David, something I don’t really care for, has more going for it than paint thrown on a canvas haphazardly with a brush.
Art is always changing, and that’s a good thing! Change means new ideas, and new ideas are always a good thing to consider. But what I don’t understand is why art had to go from beautiful, life-like masterpieces to splotches of paint and papier mâché. It just doesn’t seem like an addition, but more like a subtraction.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. I’m being harsh. But should I lower my standards to the point that these modern ‘masterpieces’ look like things of beauty? If you are willing to be fair, I think I’m just pointing out that we aren’t as great as before. When was the last time someone did something like Michelangelo’s Pieta? Since when should the definition of masterful be to just freehand squares because they had some deeper meaning that I can’t tell? I bet he didn’t even use a compass and a straight edge. I know he didn’t invent a high tech computer software program to ensure his perfection.
He didn’t even invent gloominess. He just excelled at it.
Maybe art isn’t about art at all when it hits the canvas or the plaster. When I think about these two artists’ lives, I also think about their attitudes toward life. Perhaps their art imitated their attitudes, and maybe just maybe, that is a truth that could be said about us all today.