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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
