I am writing this in response to youtube videos where contestants play "kid art or modern art." I may seem to contradict myself from the previous paragraph, but in my mind these videos are symptomatic of a bigger problem, a lack of intellectual curiosity. To me these videos say "I don't understand this. I can't be bothered to understand this. It must be garbage because I don't understand it. I will make fun of it and dismiss it." Now as said art should not be taken too seriously, but anti-intellectualism does lead to things like the anti-vaccine movement or the flat earth people. These videos are also demeaning towards children. Yes, some artists were trying to mimic children's art because they recognized a vitality before the science got there. Little kids who are learning to walk can create fractal patterns. It is the only time in a typical human life when we can do this. So yes little kid art is special.
Art is a many headed hydra. Anymore I like to think of it as being like the Room of Requirements in Harry Potter. It can be anything the artist wants it to be. There are lots of different kinds of art and lots of different kinds of artists. Add to that the different areas of art criticism/philosophy, this is the branch that helps to process what the art is about. To some extent art criticism could be looked at as political agendas in art. The branch that tends to hold the most sway is formalism. In formalism the appearance and composition of the piece is all that matters. Hardcore formalists chuck idea content out the window. In my undergraduate experience of art form and content were given equal importance, and we were encouraged to write about our art to help shore up our ideas. In grad school two of the professors on my review panel were formalists, and they did not appreciate that I was writing about the art I was making. I remember one of them told me that when he was younger he was more content oriented and out to show off how smart he was, but then he realized he didn't have to prove that. The most important and controversial art critic of the 20th century, Clement Greenberg, was a formalist. He had strict ideas for what painting and sculpture should be. The most famous example is his notion that color should not be used in sculpture. The sculptor Henri Moore pretty much only produced white sculpture. He did do some in color, but unfortunately he gave them to Greenberg, who painted them white. Anyways that is what formalism is. There are also avenues of critical thought in feminism, and actually even for science. It does take work, but I would recomend reading multiple sources to better understand modern art because people do have their biases. A formalist will focus on compostion, whereas post modernists will look more toward content and context of work.
To begin with Modern Art is typically defined as stretching time span of 1860-1970. So I don't think the people who malign Modern Art even realize that the Impressionists are included in the scope of Modern Art as is Vincent van Gogh. People tend these artists, or at least I see their work reproduced on lots of various items in catalogs. Covering the full scope of Modern Art would probably be to time consuming for this post, so I am going to talk about the two artists I most often hear maligned: Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.
A formalist professor thoughts on Picasso (if I am remembering what he said correctly) was that he was using compositions from the Renaissance, getting rid of the true to life rendering. In the book Colliding Worlds Miller lays out more of the social context. The intellectuals at that time were fascinated by the fourth dimension and trying to figure out what it was. Mystical significance was even placed on it. Some believed it was G-d's dimension, and only G-d could see all four. Picasso had a book by the mathematician Poincare he was studying. Incidently Einstein was studying the same book, and it helped him produce the theory of relativity. Picasso did not understand the math, but it had lots of geometric drawings which he studied. He took the line about not being able to draw four dimensions as a personal challenge. This was his inspiration for Desmoiselles d'Avignon. Incidently Einstein ruled that the fourth dimension is time. This is why I said reading multiple sources is a must.
Jackson Pollock was a force of nature in art, literally. I have written elsewhere about how Pollock so far has been the only human adult capable of producing fractal patterns, but things could have turned out very differently if Clement Greenberg had not taken an interest in him. Pollock was Greenberg's ideal painter. His paintings were non representational, they were flat, and lots of color. Greenberg did not just recommend Pollock to potential buyers. Remember that the Cold War was going on, and that extended into the art world as well. So he was promoting Pollock and the other American Abstract Expressionists as American champions against Russia. He even conferred on them god-like power. He said that artists who do non representational work were creating ex nihilo (creation from nothing) a godly attribute, not a human one. Greenberg's argument was really the artists finally making a retort going all the way back to Plato. Plato summed up his estimation of visual artists in an analogy about a bed. The best bed was G-d's bed, the second best bed was the one the carpenter made in imitation, the worst bed was the artist's rendering because you could not sleep in that bed. It took a long time, but Daguerre's invention of photography freed artists from the chore of realistic rendering. Remember what I said in the beginning about the book Bluebeard, this is where that comes in. I have never seen or heard any data to this effect, but I would speculate that this is when the price of art really sky rocketed. Inflation would have to be taken into account, but I wonder how what an Impressionist artist got for a painting would compare to what American Abstract Expressionists got for theirs.
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