What is wrong with Comtemporary Art?
- Samed Doğan
- Mar 9, 2023
- 3 min read
Firstly, I gathered some of most liked comments belove youtube video of Jane deeth’s TED Talk for the purpose of understand people’s ideas about contemporary art:
-The problem is contemporary people
-Perhaps we need to reclassify these pieces as non-art works of visual philosophy
-What's wrong with contemporary art? The artists aren't making anything that can be appreciated without a 10 minute lecture or a degree in modern art.
-Modern Art -- like Postmodernism -- boils down to playing word games: shuffling semantic labels around to give the appearance of being profound
-I don't need to 'listen' to bad art any more than I need to listen to a bad song on the radio.
-The title is "What's wrong with contemporary art?" but then she spends most of her talk criticizing the viewer and the culture for not "listening" to art. She should then call it, "What's wrong with contemporary culture?"
-I was expecting a critical analysis of modern art. I listened to 14 minutes of nothing. Funny, that's similar to exactly what's wrong with modern art!
-So essentially contemporary Artists are philosophers with poor execution?
-I feel like if at any point a person stands in front of your work and they get nothing from it you've failed. The personal connection is found through the on sight resonance. I shouldn't have to go and make a connection first to appreciate it. If you see it and feel nothing it failed bottom line. You shouldn't look at work and feel like you're being ripped off because the artist didn't feel like making their work speak. What she calls listening I call grabbing for what isn't there.
-I want to assemble all the "modern" artists in one room and tell them: "postmodernism was fun we had a good 60 years but it smells. Let's move on." I am actually burning to see a new movement arise like it did with Pop or abstract expressionism. I have not the slightest clue in what direction it will go. Probably a counter culture of traditional high-skilled craftsmanship with a fresh twist.
-Contemporary art/artist: "It's not about how the art looks like, but the message it is trying to say. It's not about the money either, but it's for sale because I've been clueless to treating my passion as a job, but I've been a starving artist for 20 years so I hope you have some pity for me and purchase my piece for the low price of half a million. thank you"
-When I listen to Mozart, I don't need to know the meaning. I like it because its beautiful.The piece is worth studying for people concerned with the subject i.e. music,but even people who don't know what a chord is will appreciate the music. That's art.
The conclusion we can draw from here should be the following: The public accuses the modernist artists of doing elitism. Modernist artists feel they are not well understood. This shows the disconnect between the artist and the public.
One of my favorites among the comments is "So essentially contemporary Artists are philosophers with poor execution?". There should be a philosophy in art, but this philosophy should be handled with precision. An art must preserve its aesthetic value even if its philosophy cannot be understood. Here I would also like to add the following comment: "I don't need to 'listen' to bad art any more than I need to listen to a bad song on the radio."
It is quite strange that the artist said, "You are drifting into chaos", as if our lives are passing through beauty, as if we do not constantly see deaths on the news, as if the world is not being dragged into chaos.
Art should show us who we are. Not what we ought to be.
You can wacth all video here:
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