The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

So, I personally get an emotional response to Pollock, especially that particular one, I actually have a MoMA catalog on my bookshelf with that entry bookmarked with my admission ticket from 2010 when I went to see it ( https://imgur.com/a/hFBR7Nu ). The size is a factor as well, there is no way to look at it on a computer screen that is close to how you look at it in person ( https://www.moma.org/wp/inside_out/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... ). But we definitely have different tastes.

Regarding those soviet paintings, Goya depicted war and suffering, and is very well known and highly regarded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808 . But your point is the core of what the article is trying to get at. The people who evaluate art are looking for something that isn't being satisfied by the same criteria as i.e. journalism, cuisine, even music to a certain extent.

Yeah, I can see how that's confusing. My take is that the first person to display a urinal (as an art piece) was an artist - but the second person to _try_ to display a urinal (as an art piece) was just a plumber (meaning: not an artist).

>How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules?

Why are you assuming that modern art is arbitrary, random and has no rules?

For that matter, why do you seem to assume the purpose of art is to be "judged" according to some objective set of rules?

Have you tried to study any modern artistic movements, or artists, and what those movements or artists were actually trying to express? It seems like you're mistaking complexity and technical skill for meaning, or assuming that only realistic depictions of nature have any artistic credibility.

>But a sideways urinal with some marker on it? Anyone with no skill can do random things with random items and call it art.

Don't assume that because something appears simple or obvious, that there is no meaning behind it. Maybe sometimes there isn't. Maybe the art at your campus was literally just there to look cool. Maybe some modern artists are taking the piss, like Duchamp, who was trolling the art society he was a part of with that[0].

Yes, you could assume Jackson Pollock was just throwing paint against a canvas and that can't be art because anyone could throw paint against a canvas, but like Marcel Duchamp and a lot of other modern artists, he was trying to say something[1], and that's what makes it art, not its reproducibility or realism.

Artists like Picasso and Mondrian were capable of creating traditional artwork in the classical style, but they became famous for their abstract work. I think it would be a stretch to say these people lacked talent or understanding of what art was, rather, they were trying to express their ideas in as minimalist a style as possible.

>"Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from garbage"

And any sufficiently advanced criticism is indistinguishable from ignorance.

[0]https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573

[1]https://www.quora.com/What-do-Jackson-Pollocks-paintings-rea...

These paintings are interesting as a sort of juxtaposition of the soviet "Socialist Realism" style with the harsh reality of war. They are also clearly technically adept.

Jackson Pollock's paintings are interesting because he was the first to apply his technique in a studied way. They don't translate well to the digital era, but there is a certain arresting physicality to them when you see one in real life. Many of them are huge, and are not displayed within a frame. You can get very close and see the layers of paint rising up and the aging exposed canvas beneath.

Pollock is more famous than these painters because his work is distinctive. These soviet painters are good at painting, and you obviously connect to their subject matter, but comparing their work from [1], its hard to distinguish any of them as individual artists as their styles are only subtly different, much like Pollock's early work was fairly derivative of the original abstract expressionists and much like someone today deliberately aping a Pollock would not be celebrated in the same way (if not derided as a hack).

That said, I don't think figurative art is objectively better or worse than abstract art. Its purpose is different.

I tried to understand contemporary art, up to a point, there was a time when I used to buy each issue of the FT - Weekend Edition so that I could read Georgina Adam’s articles on what was the hippest thing being transacted and the like, but in the end pretty much all of it meant nothing to me.

Reguarding the representation of war, I’m afraid 200-year old paintings don’t do it for me anymore, modern warfare is so much more different and more atrocious and industrialized compared to how things happened two or three centuries ago that we do need the power of art to make us, humans, help us understand at least some part of it all. I pretty much admire the new-Hollywood directors who had the guts to put on screen what the Vietnam war meant for all those involved, from the local Vietnamese population to the US soldiers to the relatives of the US soldiers at home. For comparison the Iraqi and the Afghan wars were pretty much invisible for today’s artists, with notable and very few exceptions (like Brian de Palma).