Abstract art, supposedly, gives back as much as you put into it; whether you balance the scales or settle the score, it’ll be there, ready to seize upon the scraps it’s given and double the return.
Supposedly, because all the abstract can do is gesture. Forcefully, possibly, but it’s a collection of adverbs, not the verbs themselves. A summary, like a scientific abstract. A circle, rather than the point in the paper where the compass needle was placed. You’re left to find that divot yourself, and to fill in its empty surroundings yourself, with further divots, until the paper has been weathered so thoroughly that it rips in, hopefully, a telling way.
This creates the impression that the circle tool wasn’t used, and so is a useful replacement when discussing what you can’t scribe but also can’t circumscribe
Hypocrisy —Hippocratic, not hippocampic— is where the wit resides.
The abstract form has many uses; it is valuable; works lacking depiction can be, and often are, beautiful; nonstandard approaches contain a particular meaning unto themselves.
But: (and, as both the most annoying person you’ve ever met and Sir Mix-A-Lot will tell you: “ignore everything before the ‘but’”) works of abstract art are so-called because there’s nothing else to call them, because they’re entirely made out of butter notes (that is to say, extraneous supports; P. O. U. S. (parentheticals of unusual size))
A Pollock, a Schoenberg, a Gilmore Girl— these are ciphers laid before the audience with the promise of encoded meaning (or perhaps the other way around.)
Whether or not that meaning exists is debatable; perhaps you’ll find it, and perhaps I won’t (or perhaps the other way around) and that’ll be the debate.
Am I not consanguineous? Am I not of her blood?
I’ll admit that Pollock painting, the one you didn’t actually have to click on to conjure up, is better in person, as is typical of most lauded art larger than a computer screen.
That’s true of most lauded art because it’s true of most art which is, primarily, art; if it’s equally good in a photograph or a recording (or, worse, in a review) it’s closer to being an idea than a work unto itself.
The quality which distinguishes non-representative art is its resistance to portray anything in particular. The best works exploit these distinctions to the fullest, and that resistance is strongest when it’s maximally clear the artist could have shown you anything.
When the choice to defer that opportunity is a choice, made with intention, an artist can provoke a question, instead of a dismissal: why?
Why is interesting, a ‘hook’ in the same way that how is for an artist focused solely on technique. Through how, why and what; through why, what and how, and so on.
That which isn’t abstract uses answers. Questions are secondary, posed or drawn out in specific ways.
That which is abstract primarily uses questions, and relies upon activity stirred by the conviction that they’re the right questions to ask.
When that intention is obvious and strong, when the final product is great and grand, the resulting questions are more apt, relevant, crucial.
When art is indistinguishable from a cop-out concession to muddled thought or shaky craftsmanship, particularly art which has no simple, immediate value, the questions feel weak, immaterial, impertinent.
Detail isn’t necessary, and neither scale, but they help, along with a sense of the alien.
The potlatch is only as meaningful as its execution is impressive.
That’s why the taped banana received ridicule from the general public and museum-going kids make fun of vacuums in display cases1. It’s also why giving Rothko a serious try tends to yield better results, and why turning a gallery corner to find Blue Monochrome feels like a boss battle.
I am not a faithful man; I am a knowledgeable one. I know for certain that which others merely believe.
Am I a muse? At the least. What is an artist who fails to amuse?
After having watched “Napoleon” (2023), I was left with the thought that the director would have been better served by choosing not to make a movie and instead sinking a small fraction of the budget into a splashy series of impressionistic paintings and sculptures around the general thrust of whatever ideas he wanted to proselytize.
Someone else, of course, would have to make the movie about Napoleon, but I think this approach would have at least been more fun.
Après ça, le déluge.
I’m not sure this happened exactly as described, and I’m not going to try (beyond a cursory Google) to find the exact artwork, but it was roughly this exchange, and it was a vacuum cleaner in a box along the lines of the linked image.