Disclaimer: It’s my casual, personal complaints about the modern arts. I am in no way to be authoritative or academic over this topic. However, since arts are meant for public appreciation, then me as part of the general public should have some say over some modern arts that we have nowadays. Either I am an utterly dull and anti-artistic person, or modern arts have some low-bar issues.
I have always been a stranger to modern visual arts. I believe the first thing I shared with my friends after visiting the MOMA in the NYC was “I can’t believe people actually pay to look at these bullshit.” Of course, I don’t mean all of the arts are nonsense. But, genuinely, yeah, some of them seem to be so. From what I have witnessed from the MOMA, modern arts seemingly have stepped on a weird path of anti-realism where obscure, hardly relatable and unintelligible arts are ridiculously glorified and upheld. Of course, you can still find art works that are either visually stimulating or intellectually meaningful/reflective, like the chairs of penises that remind us of the subtle toxic patriarchy, photography of cyberpunk-styled sustainable architectures, and blatantly explicit depictions of sex. However, you can also find things that are so obscure, dull and cliché that barely resonate me to any extent that I stared at them only to pretend that I know and understand such arts. Because, for real, after seeing hundreds of spilled ink paintings in museums around the world, it’s no longer exciting, and trying for hours to find the meanings of some randomly arranged geometric objects does not sound fun to me at all (and, believe me, not fun to personally experience). In the article that we read, Against Interpretations, the author spilled out all her feelings for me as she argued against the modern artworks that leaves so much blank space for minds that require more and more imaginative work on the part of the audience instead of just being a bit more straightforward about their ideas. If appreciating artworks ultimately becomes some intense work like analyzing an abstruse academic paper, it will ultimately become an exclusive club sports that no public would appreciate/value.
