Thread: Art and the postmodern: What is art?

Originally Posted by John Galt

As to the quote cited in the OP, I think art is becoming less interesting to the "average Joe" because it's becoming so esoteric, as far as "popular" art goes. Sure, there's some people still shurning out paintings that have at least some resembleance to the subject they're intended to depict, or have a discernable message, but when I go to art museums I usually cruise right on through the "modern" sections because they just don't make sense. At the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, there's an installation piece (Clown Torture) that consists of TV monitors all showing a guy in a clown suit doing various things like reading the newspaper, screaming at the camera, and taking a crap. The Institute's web page describes it as "one of the artist’s most spectacular achievements to date" and says it shows "the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure." Well, it sure did get me confused and, in my opinion, failed in the attempt to resemble art, so they at least got two out of five.

I think a lot of John Q. Sixpacks out there are like me -- can enjoy a Monet or Rembrandt, Titian, or David, and even a Picasso, Matisse, or Dali now and then (I, in fact, get a good deal of enjoyment from the Surrealists, just seeing their wild imagination combined with their exceptional painting skills), but are at a loss to explain "high art" like the aformentioned Clown Torture or Piss Christ which, in all honesty, anyone could do if they had nothing better to do.

If you think that those sort of works embody or are representative of "modern art", you really have no idea what modern art is or what the term means. If you cruise right through the modern art sections of galleries because you don't see much meaning in a clown crapping (neither do I), you are doing yourself a disservice. And frankly, if you want to figure who to blame for John Q. Sixpack's disinterest in modern art, blame people like yourself who stereotype and dismiss the field based on a small number of particularly strange pieces.

I understand if you're not into abstract painting or kinetic sculpture or weirdly composed photography or whatever, but when you try to use Clown Torture and Piss Christ as the foundation of your argument about why modern art is crap or doesn't make sense, all you are really saying is "I am ignorant and lack exposure to the type of art I'm trying to criticize".

Art reflects the class nature of those who draw it. The totality of the class a person belongs too and the whole life experiences of the person of that class, etc. along with the natural development of the productive forces and of consciousness. Postmodernism is reactionary and "abstract" art reflects more upon the person who paints it than of the painting itself.

This is why socialist realism existed. As Hoxha noted in 1965: "In regard to literature and the arts which are developing in our country, as in regard to the other issues, there are not two moralities, but only one, the proletarian morality of the working class. The ideas expressed in the works should conform to this morality. A work devoid of ideas and of this morality may occasionally appear to be of some limited interest from the viewpoint of its artistic skill, but from the social ideological viewpoint it cannot have any value."

Also: "There are some who think, and think mistakenly, that by making a flying visit to the base, by sitting in a café, cigarette in hand, in order to see the various types whom they want to put in their work passing in the street, or who think that by walking through some factory or plant, they have gathered the necessary material and go home, where they start to write superficially, and sometimes entirely back-to-front, about those things and people that they 'photographed' in passing. Thus the world of such a person is restricted by the narrow petty-bourgeois concept of the role of the writer, and he thinks that his head is capable of doing great things. But can it be said that the engineers of the hydro-power stations or those who drain the marshes do not work with their heads, and that the writers alone have this privilege? No! But the engineer, quite correctly, works with the people, studies the environment, the nature, draws plans, checks them again with the people, with the best experience of others, encounters difficulties, struggles with them till he overcomes them. But should not our writer and artist work in this way, too?"

Etc. See: http://www.enver-hoxha.net/librat_pd...per_people.pdf

On socialist realism in literature specifically, see: http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/...ress/index.htm