Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Now I've lured you in with my intentionally provocative thread title...
I went to Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago and had a look around a very large, nicely appointed museum of modern art (the Stedelijk, if anyone knows it). Every few months I go somewhere like this in the vague belief or hope that it is somehow doing me some good, or perhaps I just like to think of myself as the kind of person who occasionally goes to galleries to see 'challenging' things. But as usual, the reaction I got from a few of the pieces was "that's kind of cool, I guess", while from others - probably the majority - it was more like "huh".
I can think of three possible explanations here:
1) The meaning of these artworks is blindingly obvious to most people but I'm just too stupid or artistically insensitive to intuitively understand it. I think I can dismiss this because no-one else in the gallery seemed to be having 'eureka!' moments as they looked at, for example, a square white canvas with a row of metal bolts stuck in it.
Also, if the concept supposedly represented by a piece of conceptual art were that obvious, they wouldn't need these little bits of text on the wall next to them to tell you what they're meant to mean. These are interesting in themselves, with their own particular cant that is remarkably consistent between different kinds of art and between different galleries and museums in different countries. "The viewer is invited into a dialogue with..."; "The viewer is forced to consider the relation between..."; well actually I don't feel like I've been invited into or forced to do anything. I'm looking at a square white canvas with a row of metal bolts stuck in it and I see...a square white canvas with a row of metal bolts stuck in it. If whatever concept the artist intended to imbue into the piece were in any way obvious, surely I would see it and wouldn't need to be told what the concept was?
An analogue in representational art would be a painting of a horse with a bit of text on the wall next to it saying "this is a painting of a horse". If you have to be told that, then it fails pretty miserably as a piece of representational art, doesn't it? (Like a proud parent to a small child who's just produced an expressive polychromatic scribble: "That's lovely, darling! What is it?") There might be some bit of incidental background information that the text could supply - that the horse belonged to Napoleon, say - which isn't obvious from the painting, but the simple fact of it being a horse should be obvious to anyone who's ever seen a horse before.
2) There really is no meaning inherent in any of these pieces, or at best the meaning is apparent only to the artist responsible for it and perhaps the handful of other artists who were involved in the same specific scene or movement. This seems a rather uncharitable explanation as it paints the whole of conceptual art as a case of emperor's-new-clothes, almost a colossal extended exercise in practical trolling.
3) An intermediate position in which the meaning of conceptual pieces is apparent to people who have studied conceptual art to a high level and 'speak the language' - so that they might get something from a piece that the rest of us would have to be told by the wall-text. This is really no different from most other highly developed academic fields; after all, a paper on topology would make very little sense to someone without at least a basic grounding in that field, but it has a great deal of meaning to people who work in it.
But this position does kind of imply that there's not much point in people who aren't schooled in conceptual art bothering to look at it.
Thoughts?
I went to Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago and had a look around a very large, nicely appointed museum of modern art (the Stedelijk, if anyone knows it). Every few months I go somewhere like this in the vague belief or hope that it is somehow doing me some good, or perhaps I just like to think of myself as the kind of person who occasionally goes to galleries to see 'challenging' things. But as usual, the reaction I got from a few of the pieces was "that's kind of cool, I guess", while from others - probably the majority - it was more like "huh".
I can think of three possible explanations here:
1) The meaning of these artworks is blindingly obvious to most people but I'm just too stupid or artistically insensitive to intuitively understand it. I think I can dismiss this because no-one else in the gallery seemed to be having 'eureka!' moments as they looked at, for example, a square white canvas with a row of metal bolts stuck in it.
Also, if the concept supposedly represented by a piece of conceptual art were that obvious, they wouldn't need these little bits of text on the wall next to them to tell you what they're meant to mean. These are interesting in themselves, with their own particular cant that is remarkably consistent between different kinds of art and between different galleries and museums in different countries. "The viewer is invited into a dialogue with..."; "The viewer is forced to consider the relation between..."; well actually I don't feel like I've been invited into or forced to do anything. I'm looking at a square white canvas with a row of metal bolts stuck in it and I see...a square white canvas with a row of metal bolts stuck in it. If whatever concept the artist intended to imbue into the piece were in any way obvious, surely I would see it and wouldn't need to be told what the concept was?
An analogue in representational art would be a painting of a horse with a bit of text on the wall next to it saying "this is a painting of a horse". If you have to be told that, then it fails pretty miserably as a piece of representational art, doesn't it? (Like a proud parent to a small child who's just produced an expressive polychromatic scribble: "That's lovely, darling! What is it?") There might be some bit of incidental background information that the text could supply - that the horse belonged to Napoleon, say - which isn't obvious from the painting, but the simple fact of it being a horse should be obvious to anyone who's ever seen a horse before.
2) There really is no meaning inherent in any of these pieces, or at best the meaning is apparent only to the artist responsible for it and perhaps the handful of other artists who were involved in the same specific scene or movement. This seems a rather uncharitable explanation as it paints the whole of conceptual art as a case of emperor's-new-clothes, almost a colossal extended exercise in practical trolling.
3) An intermediate position in which the meaning of conceptual pieces is apparent to people who have studied conceptual art to a high level and 'speak the language' - so that they might get something from a piece that the rest of us would have to be told by the wall-text. This is really no different from most other highly developed academic fields; after all, a paper on topology would make very little sense to someone without at least a basic grounding in that field, but it has a great deal of meaning to people who work in it.
But this position does kind of imply that there's not much point in people who aren't schooled in conceptual art bothering to look at it.
Thoughts?
Last edited: