On Modern Art

Name your favourite artist, musician, or writer, and search online for their critics, and you’ll find plenty who dismiss them. It’s the nature of creative endeavour. Whether an artist has produced work I’ve enjoyed or work I haven’t, I’m not about to pass judgement on whether or not they’re proper artists based on my particular interpretation of their art.

Does work only qualify as art if it’s great? Great in what respects, and in whose eyes? Saying “modern art is rubbish” is different from saying “this modern stuff isn’t art”. There are huge amounts of cultural output that relatively few of us could make sense of, but which speak to others and are still art. It isn’t to do with intelligence: it’s to do with one’s particular life experiences and whether or not the art speaks to them.

Even at the moment of its creation, some art is only intended to be meaningful to a minority. In the long run, most art is only meaningful to a minority, relative to all the people in every culture who’ve ever lived.

There’s an enormous gap between great art and non-art. In that gap lies most of the art ever attempted, including plenty of contentious modern art. Time helps us forget the average art of the past, including some that was once considered great and, unfortunately, some that we might consider great if only it hadn’t been discarded by its contemporaries. But when it comes to modern art, it’s still all around us, and we’re still figuring out its value—just as Constable’s contemporaries once had to, when his work was “modern art”.

Reworked from comments written for an OEDILF Forum thread, July 2010.