Most paintings are boring, a few have neat colors, I thought then. Art Appreciation Level One: 90% of an art museum is crap. A decade later, I learned introductory art history; even as a neophyte I saw that French Neoclassics were revolutionary propaganda, Baroque paintings jockeyed for religious adherents, and German Expressionists witnessed the shell-shocked trenches. Level Two: art museums are reflections of history.
Level Two made painting cool, because history was cool. And by “cool”, I of course mean “brutal and tragic at every turn”. Western painting has chronicled bloody coups, chattel slavery, techno-fueled war, rising fascism, and colonial rule. These legacies are still visible in the brushstrokes of Delacroix, Dix, van Dyck, and all the other dudes who get immortalized in Western art museums. Painting galleries are cultural histories, and so I learned to love painting as a result.
The problem with modern painting, though, is that history was still being written, and so resists Level Two. The work of Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, and all the other alliterative artists of the past ~60 years had work I didn’t know how to atomize into a Hegelian view of history. (To say nothing of art I’d never encountered in a textbook!) This art was harder to understand, and therefore harder to like. Luckily, I was too curious to indulge in the “even my 6-year-old could do that” aesthetic dismissal, so eventually I just stared at enough Rothko that I began to enjoy it. Level Three: just have fun and enjoy it.
Then Chuck Close was accused of sexual misconduct. Picasso faced #MeToo. (I learned that Picasso was also the kind of narcissist who pressed the fish-bones from his lunch into clay, slapped it on a plate, and called it art.) I remembered that Western painterly genius was inspired by masks stolen from Africa and gold stolen from Mexico. I sketch the outlines of my story here, but it’s nothing new and you already know where I’m going — the whole “good art bad artist” thing was a doozy for Level Three. The final straw came in Pittsburgh (where else?). At Warhol’s museum I saw how ol’ Andy had assembly-line assistants cranking out these three-color portraits of clients (“Blue Marilyn” lookalikes) for five figures each. He wasn’t even touching the paint! He was just selling the prestige attached to owning a Warhol portrait.
Thus fell the house of cards. Warhol was overtly, avowedly capitalist,1 but he wasn’t the only one to play the game. Who would buy Picasso’s stupid fish-bone sculpture if not for status? Delacroix was no fool either; he knew Liberty would lead him to a paycheck. Goya, Rembrandt, Manet, and all the rest may have been stylistic game-changers, but they also painted rich people’s dumb horses and ugly daughters. Even Michelangelo made sculptures to launder the public image of the pope and the duke. Level Four: Western fine art is analog NFTs.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a scam created to legitimize cryptocurrency, itself a pyramid scheme meant to drive interest in blockchain. The attempt to NF-ize procedurally-generated monkeys, NBA clips, and musical sequences is pure botshit, but the collective is shocking in its sheer variety and absolute vapidity. NFTs are only this obviously stupid because digital technology allowed their rapid proliferation, but maybe Western painting has been on a slower version of the same trajectory. We’re back to Level One: 90% of an art museum is crap, but this time with market forces.
And yet, I do still like looking at some analog NFTs. What do you want me to say? The Louvre can stay open, for now. It’s not bad to Just Enjoy It sometimes, even if most paintings are less Art than NFT. Maybe we respond to Craft more than Art. Maybe Art, when it exists, is more often sub-creation than it is meeting a market demand.
… so, do museum memberships have refunds?
- No shade to a guy who had a family to feed and was no stranger to childhood poverty. I get it. But that’s prestige laundering, not art.