At MoMA

According to Sturgeon's law, ninety per cent of everything is crap. I recently visited MoMA in New York, and, guess what, like what most of the people having inadequate understanding of contemporary art would believe, I thought Sturgeon, an American science fiction writer, was right in his adage. You would browse a floor after another of the museum and fail to breed much familiarity between your traditionalistic taste for art and what a modern art museum, like MoMA and London’s Tate Modern, has to offer.

The Birth of the World by Joan Miro

Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Martin Puryear, Lisa Yuskavage, Anicka Yi, Martin Assig, Dan Graham, and the list goes on. Who are they? I don’t know any of them. I never heard of them, I never read about them. A wide array of drawings, photographs, statues, paintings, and all sorts of weird objects that most of us cannot relate ourselves to... What’s the point? What’s the point of all these? What’s the point of modern art?          

What make a piece of art good are the standards we hold it to. The meaning of art is often static. Not art, but its style and concepts change their meaning through time. Contemporary art is essentially a break-off from classical ideas as it challenges the accepted concept of beauty. Trying to understand modern art from our traditionalist perspective is a mistake most of us make.

The Lovers by Rene Magritte

To understand art, one needs to recognise the raison d'etre of the piece, and then evaluate it by those standards. The same applies to contemporary art, which is bad, ugly, and meaningless only if we see it through the lens of a traditionalist. Modern art doesn’t connote representation for representation's sake, but rather stimulates us to look from different vantage points.  

Modern art is about the exploration of and setting new standards of ideas, visions, and creativity. It is the art of our time. Connecting with it often requires more of us. 

The Wheel of Ixion

Life is like a treadmill, and, even more so the ‘wheel of Ixion,’ as Schopenhauer said. A wheel that never stands still. Schopenhauer uses the wheel of Ixion as a symbolism to describe our incessant will to satisfy our desires.

Ixion, the king of the Lapiths in Greek mythology, attempted to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus, who rules as king of the gods of Mount Olympus. Ixion was punished for this crime by binding to an ever-spinning wheel of fire. Ixion's suffering was eternal.

To Schopenhauer – who was possibly the only prominent philosopher to declare himself a pessimist, happiness was just a fleeting state of not suffering. Samuel Beckett makes this disillusionment more exciting in his novel Watt, which is known for its philosophical and grim humour and deliberately unidiomatic English:

‘The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.’  

We always find ourselves on a fiery wheel of Ixion that keeps spinning.

Social Media, the New Cocaine

If sitting is the new smoking, social media is the new cocaine.  

About social media, a former Mozilla employee, during an interview with BBC’s Panorama programme this week, said that ‘it's as if social media companies are taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.’

As a saying about advertising from the nineteen-seventies goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. They addict you, record your viewing habits, and then trade your time, i.e. sell your data to advertisers.

Every day, three billion Snapchat snaps are exchanged, three hundred and fifty million photos uploaded on Facebook, and close to a hundred million photos shared on Instagram. That mindless scrolling through our social media feeds! That endless checking of our phones!  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit. The list is not exhaustive.      

They say their aim is to help you connect with the world, although conversely we have lost the real connection. We have books – iBooks, Kindle, etc., but we don’t read them. We have hundreds of friends, albeit on Facebook and other social media platforms, but we don’t talk to them. The more online friends we have, the less real friends we have.

A report by the Education Policy Institute in the UK last year suggested that moderate use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels may have some benefits for children in building up their resilience, developing their social skills, and also enabling them better access to emotional support and help.

But then some things in moderation don’t work. Social media, for most of us, is one of them, hence we invent syndromes such as ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Facebook depression,’ and their bogus solution (one of which is called digital detox). It’s a collective failure.