Said Leon Black, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, quoted in "MoMA to Close, Then Open Doors to More Expansive View of Art" (NYT).
[W]hile visitors will still be able to count on highlights like Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” they are also likely to be exposed to less familiar names, including Okwui Okpokwasili, an Igbo-Nigerian-American artist, performer and choreographer....Still showing the old "Demoiselles"?
Will we at least get some serious feminist critique? Try this:
Most of all, this is a painting about looking. Picasso looks back at you in the central figure, whose bold gaze out of huge asymmetrical eyes has the authority of a self-portrait. It's interesting that we're trained to see transvestite self-portraits in the art of Leonardo or Marcel Duchamp, but it doesn't often occur to us to understand this painting in that way, misled as we are by the caricatures of Picasso as a patriarchal voyeur. What he painted in 1907 is a work of art that looks back at you with furious contempt.What are you looking at with furious contempt?
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What are you looking at with furious contempt?
Serious[sic] feminist critique, but more condescending than furious.
Meanwhile, the Met is like: Ho ho, we've got mummies!
What are you looking at with furious contempt?
Affirmative Action art.
How Bourgeois.
The Met's Oceania wing, courtesy of Nelson Rockefeller, is always a peaceful part of that museum.
The left ruins another institution.
Looks like an expensive lap dance.
rehajm said...
How Bourgeois.
Louise Bourgeois is white, but French.
Karen L. Kleinfelder has a book outlining Picasso's changing relation to his models that's pretty good. She gets some of the male motivation wrong but it's a friendly appreciation. Good illustrations.
https://www.amazon.com/Artist-His-Model-Image-Gaze/dp/B012YSHCJM
Get early morning access to the MoMA in New York City. Beat the crowds at this popular attraction and arrive before the museum opens to the public for a 1-hour tour narrated by a museum guide.
Now how about something to address the gross and disturbing inequality.
I always read "affirmative action" as "affirmative affliction"
Someone should investigate who has bought works from these obscure artists recently and how many of them MoMA's donors own.
When we visited The David in Italy, in between some of Michelangelo's work, they displayed several modern art exhibits which our guide referred to as "this, this is shit."
And what happens when people compare the art of Okwui Okpokwasili with the art of Picasso and Van Gogh, and decide that African artists aren’t very good?
Modern Art is a $cam, so you can't blame people for using women and minority privilege to get a piece of the action. Also, you can be sure some art dealers will get rich off this.
Picasso started painting "Modern" art more than 100 years ago. So, it reflects the values of that time. Remember that horrible woman with Greek accent who was somehow a conservative and then wasn't? She wrote a book attacking Picasso and pretty much showed he was the ultimate Male Chauvinist, and a rich Communist.
Being a male chauvanist and a great artist are not exclusive: Cf: Miles Davis or Hemingway.
What are you looking at with furious contempt? My furious contempt
She wrote a book attacking Picasso and pretty much showed he was the ultimate Male Chauvinist, and a rich Communist.
The bibliography of publications that explain how Picasso was a male chauvinist is a long one.
Scrolling down to see the LDdA, my first thought was how dated it looked.
Picasso may have been contemptuous of his fans.
He knew how to paint in the academic style. He had the talent and had taken the trouble to learn this.
But this craftsmanship was out of fashion in his day. He was a market-driven businessman, after all. Thats what the public would buy. Besides that his modernist stuff was simpler and faster to create. More merchandise to sell. More money per working hour. He sold a lot of art.
Imagine a salon version of "Demoiselles".
"What are you looking at with furious contempt?"
Nothing, really. If I can rouse myself out of condescending indifference, I look at Picasso with mild disdain.
It's the kind of epater-les-bourgeois art that only the truly bourgeois would like. A neat trick on his part. Otherwise, meh.
I predict that six months or so after the museum re-opens we'll be reading stories about a lack of attendance and financial woes.
I fear the clock is ticking on those hopelessly ethnocentric and culturally imperialist [and utterly wonderful] dioramas at the AMNH.
To answer the prompt: I am currently looking at antivaxxers with furious contempt.
Trust the art, not the artist.
Art is a dying field, overtaken by technology. First by the camera( still and motion) and then the computer.
We had a Picasso exhibition in KC that was very educational. I still don’t like him, but now I understand his technique. What I did notice was that his relationship with his teenage “muses” girlfriends got a very different treatment from the one given Woody Allen or Roy Moore.
When will the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame induct some Norwegians or Chinese?
I admit that I am not up on the latest in modern art, but the last time I was at the MOMA, about a year ago, I saw art from artists I had never heard of. I distinctly remember a video that played in an infinite loop of a very beautiful androgynous man emoting with his eyes, and some computer search printouts that were taped up along the wall as some sort of statement. Can't recall who the artists were, but they weren't dead white males, I am pretty sure.
I got yur Picasso right here.
I like innovation in art, of course, and finding art in unexpected places, but, this: Trust the art, not the artist.
Transvestite self-portraits?
Is that what that is? How could anyone know?
"Most of all, this is a painting about looking."
Since the ladies were all prostitutes in a famous whore-house in Barcelona, it's fair to say that this is a painting about "looking" (and many other things too), but perhaps not in the sense that the critic quoted in this post suggests. Picasso had a famously well-developed interest in ladies, and no doubt found the looking (and the doing) in that establishment much to his liking. And it's also fair to say that the ladies in the painting are giving their viewers a hard (and practiced) look-over -- they know well that looking is a sport that two can play, and their business transactions are more fun for both parties when each is eyeing the other. It seems to me that the transgender thing is just a mote in the eye of this critic, not something that Picasso was looking to convey. But it's a free country, so go right ahead and read that into it if it makes you feel better.
Epater la bourgeoisie never grows old, it just grows tedious.
Yawn.
Picasso was a genius not only as a painter but as marketing exec. He knew who to schmooze and what to say in order for the critics to praise his paintings.
Always a leftist, he jumped at the chance to publicly attack Franco and by joining the Communist Party, he assured 100% positive reviews from the Left-wing as long as he toed the party line (which he did). Of course, given that he became a party member when he was in his 50s and rich, he didn't really give a damn about the actual politics, it was just a great marketing move on his part.
He was always in on every new trend, and when he learned he could make $$$ with less work by sculpting he went into that.
Hemingway also became a Communist in the 40s and spied for the KGB both in Cuba and in China. Gellhorn was also a Communist spy.
Lots of artists joined by the Party because it was good for business.
Did any of you listen to the video? Typical esoteric semi-atonal music that has little to recommend it. Sorry to be a philistine but much of modern art leaves me cold. What is stranger is that you can't make out a word of RBG's wonderful words. So I went online to try and read some of her utterances and wasn't tremendously impressed. Nothing like Martin Luther King, nothing to raise the soul and the spirit. I predict in 10 years time people will be saying, "RBG who?" I did find this one though:
"We care about this institution more than our individual egos and we are all devoted to keeping the Supreme Court in the place that it is, as a co-equal third branch of government and I think a model for the world in the collegiality and independence of judges."
By refusing to resign, I sense she is doing the court a great disservice and playing to her own individual ego.
Same article in the WSJ today too. Guess i won't be going to the MOMA until October. Went last year, during the renovation, what a mess. Even with tickets paid for in advance, a total mess.
Vicki from Pasadena
It's very ugly. Reliably, a critic creates a miasma of imagined significance about it, of which little is likely true. It's mostly just crap.
But it does help keep dust off walls.
"Sorry to be a philistine but much of modern art leaves me cold."
I stopped being sorry about it years ago. It seems like it happens in every field. Eventually the prestige works are all about appealing to some weird rarified strata of critics. If an artist happens to produce something which, while being shockingly modern by the standards of a few decades before, is still capable of reaching out to normal people, every "serious" critic denounces it.
Unless your financial survival depends on the critics, it's best to just ignore them and enjoy the stuff you like.
"this is a painting about looking"
I suppose. I always thought that Manet's Olympia was a much better painting on the subject of looking, though.
Make-good installations, the equivalent of curators patting heads.
MOMA is supposed to show experimental art, off beat, lesser known art. Which necessarily means much of it will not be very good. But there are no objective standards regarding what is good enough and what is not.
If the affirmative action art is crap, it doesn't matter because most people only go once anyway.
If all you need to do to create art is fling paint at a canvas, then the door to affirmative action hangs wide open. Art dealer as political officer. Personally I don’t care because it’s all shit and it’s not my money.
buwaya said...
Picasso may have been contemptuous of his fans.
He knew how to paint in the academic style. He had the talent and had taken the trouble to learn this.
Where can I see?
Much appreciated.
Blogger tim in vermont said...
Art dealer as political officer. Personally I don’t care because it’s all shit and it’s not my money.
As Buwaya labors to point out ... This is the money that also buy schools for inculcate, media for propaganda and politics for control.
It's a furious smirk.
When I look at art for my home, it’s hard to find stuff that is indistinguishable from computer printouts. I like to be able to see the work of the brush or knife in the paint. I like it to make sense and look like it couldn’t have been printed out. I also like it to be either representational or stunningly beautiful. If it’s representational, I like it to show that the artist has interesting perceptions of the world we live in. Mostly about color. Sorry that I have zero interest in stuff that is totally “abstract” because “abstract” has a meaning, and if it doesn’t abstract something real from this world, then it’s not really “abstract,” it’s just made up shit. It’s decor that may or may not look good with that couch and rug you bought.
Anyway, the economics of art is an interesting subject, but one thing is for sure, if your art is good, I won’t give a flying fuck about your “gender” or skin color, or politics or whatever. And if it sucks, I won’t either.
"Where can I see?"
https://mymodernmet.com/picasso-early-work/
Furious contempt is cool. You have to embrace it in order to be spared from it.
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