Art Essay, Crosby, Junior Year

Sam Pickett

Even This Title is Art

When I was younger and even wimpier than I am now my mom used to say “there is safety in numbers”. That nugget of wisdom is true in some scenarios. Being lost in a spooky place at night or battling mutant alien invaders, for example. Art museums are a whole different story. When one attends an art museum with others, the dynamic often shifts from a group of kind-hearted friends to a gaggle of critics with inferiority complexes. Art is one of those topics (like religion and politics) that is impossible to successfully argue about. Personally, I would no more discuss art in a museum than I would touch the paintings “to feel how thick the paint was” (as my grandmother does).Before dismissing any art as “bad”, it is important to be aware of the concept behind it.

For years “art” had been an exclusive term. Realism was the only acceptable style of art. Religious paintings, bowls of fruit, and naked people were the extent of a “real” artists’ subject choices. There was nothing surprising about art; nothing funny or scary or controversial. Frankly, it was boring. This sense of boredom naturally progressed into new “conceptual” artists breaking every rule and making up their own.

The first group of ground-breakers were the Impressionists. At first, prestigious art schools and critics refused their work and ridiculed their talent. They were the original “starving artists”, surviving on their belief in the value of their work (and little else). Today the Impressionists (and every new art movement to follow) are praised for moving art in a new direction and breaking “the mold”.

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who said, “Well-behaved women rarely make history”. Well, the same goes for artists. When artists like Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Salvador Dali first appeared they were exceptionally controversial. Their entangled paint splatters, great canvases of color, and choppy, dissected portraits were unlike anything the world had ever seen.

Mark Rothko is one of the original revolutionaries. His great colored canvases might appear pretty simplistic at first. But Rothko was intelligent and cultured. He was influenced by Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which inspired him to “want to relieve man of his spiritual emptiness”.His work was inspired by mythology, war, and dreams, and he chose to use “art as a tool of emotional and religious expression.”

One of Rothko’s notable contemporaries was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is one of my favorites - he had a fantastic rare ability to never take art (or himself) too seriously. Throughout his career Duchamp displayed “Fountain” (more commonly known as a urinal); a bottle rack marked with his signature, and a bicycle wheel mounted to a stool. Duchamp created “found art” from “nothing”. He believed in all that art never was and saw what it potentially could be.

Duchamp and the others paved the way for artists like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. Warhol cemented his status in American culture with pop-art prints that were relatable in their simultaneous depth and superficiality. Hirst, the richest living artist to date, is best known for “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, a massive tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde.

If we are honest with ourselves, though, doesn’t abstract art just look like squiggles? In the end a urinal is really just a urinal and a dead shark is just a dead shark. Everybody and their grandmother has a bicycle, and access to paint, and urinals can be unhooked from walls pretty easily. So then why do many of us praise artists who slap price tags on ordinary objects and call them art? How are people supposed to look at paint splatters and feel moved? And where did Hirst find that gigantic dead tiger shark, anyway? Apologies for the forthcoming corny pun, but isn’t there something fishy about this whole situation?

According to Robert Hughes, a prominent Australian art critic, Damien Hirst’s works are “absurd” and “tacky commodities.” Hughes has said that commercial pieces with large price tags mean “art as a spectacle loses its’ meaning”. Hirst’s piece “For the Love of God” (a platinum, diamond-encrusted skull) sold for $100 million dollars in cash. Is that not a blatant example of art for the sake of profit, and not for self-expression? And earlier, back in 1917, the Society of Independent Artists rejected Duchamp’s “Fountain” because it “was not art.” I think in both cases the artists didn’t mean that a urinal or skull were art by themselves. Part of the beauty of art is it’s ability to be more of an idea than a concrete work.

I suppose it is a part of human nature to criticize. We criticize each other, we criticize ourselves, music, TV, laundry detergent, pretty much everything. But I have never understood why some people criticize art. Art is one of the pure, free things in this world. Art is its’ own world; an immortal organism that is all encompassing in its’ depth and relevance. “Conceptual” art gives the artist personal freedom, but more importantly it gives the viewer a personal invitation into the piece. What more do people want? I don’t know, I don’t have the answer…but I do know as surely as I know my own name that the work of Rothko, and Duchamp, and Hirst IS art. So, in the end maybe all I really have to offer is this piece of advice (for those who value their sanity): Consider very, very wisely who you visit an art museum with. For my part, I will always prefer to go alone.