We've been making videos about art
and sharing them on YouTube for coming on four years now,
a veritable internet lifetime.
Here's what I've learned about art in the process.
Let's start with the bad news.
Art is pretentious.
I see this word again and again in comments directed
at artists, at art in general, and at those who talk about art
and think it's cool.
It's most often stated in response
to art that is conceptual or really abstract, or doesn't
seem to have taken a lot of work to create.
On our "Case for Yoko Ono" video,
one commenter says, "Pretentious stupidity."
on our "Case for Minimalism".
One writes, "Interesting video.
Minimalism is still pretentious trash, though."
On our "I Could Do That" video, someone else shares,
"Modern art is pretentious and is
created by lazy, unskilled, and artistic brats
for elitists that will go out of their way
to get these in an attempt to show how deep and artistic they
are."
Now let's consider these comments
with the definition of pretentious
in mind, one of which is "attempting
to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture,
et cetera, than is actually possessed."
so if it's artists being referred
to as pretentious, then yeah, artists do regularly
attempt to impress by affecting greater importance, talent,
and culture than is actually possessed.
In fact, it's the leap you pretty much have
to take to create anything.
It's your foolish hope that you might
go from not knowing how to do something
to doing something, and then eventually doing it
well enough that you might want to share it with other people.
The creative process, as I've witnessed it,
is generally plagued by insecurity, frustration,
and doubt, alternated by brief moments of pleasure
in having made something you think is halfway decent,
followed by having to summon ludicrous amounts of confidence
in order to share that thing with other people,
and concluding with night sweats as you wonder immediately
after, and then forever after, whether you are a fraud
and your work is terrible no matter how many people say they
like it.
Or nobody seems to like it, and you have
to believe that they're wrong.
Or that the next thing you make might be good, and keep
at it because you still have this tenacious desire to make
the things that you're making
I'm generalizing, of course, but every artist I know
is genuinely brave.
You don't know whether something you made
is any good until you put it out there.
And even still, it's hard to know.
Of course you want to impress other people with it.
"Fake it till you make it" applies to almost every field,
and certainly art is one of them.
The successful artists I've met have this unstoppable need
to keep making, no matter what their inner voices
or actual voices tell them.
Now if it's art that's being referred to as pretentious,
then I kind of have to agree with that as well.
Art is made of a bunch of random stuff, objects and materials
and substances and sounds and movements that often aren't
expensive and don't have inherent value outside
of the cost of materials.
Through a kind of alchemical process,
or artists take these things and turn them into something else,
endowing them with meaning and value
that doesn't reside within the materials alone.
Sometimes these processes are hugely labor intensive,
and sometimes they may not have taken a long time
but are nonetheless moving, at least to you.
These mere clumps of materials are
trying to impress you, regardless of the fact
that they are only made of dirt, rocks, water,
and their derivatives.
So yeah, art is pretentious.
More bad news.
The only difference between expensive and inexpensive art
is name and reputation.
This is another recurring theme in the comments.
One person responded to "I Could Do That"
by saying, "Even if I did create these more simplistic art
pieces, they wouldn't be worth millions of dollars."
And this is mostly true.
Because of the aforementioned situation
where clumps of material are attempting to impress us,
the market value of art is heavily, if not entirely,
determined by perception.
Let's take this striped painting by Audrey Stone,
on sale for the equivalent of about $4,700 US dollars,
and compare it to this striped painting
by Bridget Riley that sold last year at auction
for the equivalent of over $1 million US dollars.
The Riley painting is substantially larger
than the Stone painting, and size does factor
considerably in the sale of art, but not to this degree.
The reason why the Riley painting sold for so much more
is that Riley has been creating abstract works
in this vein since the 1960s, when
she was part of the influential Responsive Eye
exhibition at MoMA in 1965.
She's been internationally recognized since.
Her name is synonymous with the op art movement,
and for the past 50 years Riley has used line, shape, and color
to convey movement and create entrancing optical effects.
Audrey Stone is younger than Bridget Riley,
and while she has been included in a good number of shows,
she hasn't attained the same level of renown,
at least not yet.
Riley also has a track record of auction results
that demonstrate to collectors that the pricing, however
ridiculous, has a rationale.
That record also shows that it will probably retain its value,
if not increase.
You may think Stone's painting is better,
but that has no bearing on the monetary value of the work.
There is more demand for Riley's work,
and thus it will fetch higher prices
in galleries and auctions.
Riley's work also carries with it
a history, like how gold sunglasses are gold sunglasses
unless they're the gold sunglasses that Elvis wore.
There are arguments you could make
for why the Riley painting is objectively
better than the Stone painting.
But determinations of quality, for me,
don't rest on solid ground.
There's taste, trend, and hype that
figure into an art work's worth, along with systemic sexism
and racism.
And those factors are always shifting.
And on that topic, "The art market
is a scam perpetuated by the rich to launder money."
This is a recurring sentiment in our comments as well,
and it's also sometimes true.
"Adam Ruins Everything" made an episode
where he describes the art market
as a massive price fixing scheme that
benefits wealthy collectors and excludes most artists.
He points out that even those who
donate their works to public museums
aren't necessarily doing so out of the kindness
of their hearts, but because it can be a massive tax write off.
But the art market is not synonymous with art.
And in fact, there's a lot of excellent contemporary art
that circumnavigates the market and critiques the way market
forces affect the valuing of art.
Think of the Guerrilla Girls or William Powhida or Banksy.
There's much more to the experience of art today
than the ugly aspects of the market.
The art market Adam describes can
dominate, or seem to dominate, your experience
of art in a few major cities.
But in the rest of the world, and even
in less fancy areas of those same big cities,
there's a lot of art happening completely separately
from dark art market forces.
No one's getting rich on that other side of the art world.
But on the plus side, no one's getting rich.
In undeniably good news, people are open minded about art.
You may be surprised to hear this one.
Haters gonna hate, but the huge majority
of the comments on our videos are positive.
Our case for videos present an argument
for why you should care about or pay attention
to an individual artist or a kind of art.
And much to my surprise, we do manage
to convince a few people.
"All right, I accept your case for Yoko Ono,"
said one commenter.
Another said, "OK, fine.
I won't hate on Yoko Ono."
Someone else said, "Man, every time I get
persuaded that I was wrong on my assumptions about these artists
when I watch these.
Thank you for opening my mind."
And another said, "If you keep making these videos,
I'll have no artists left to dislike."
My favorite moments come when the video doesn't sway you,
but you're still really cool about it, like the comment,
"I appreciate the positivity of these videos.
I really dislike Yoko Ono's art, but I'm
happy that there are people willing to defend it."
Or, "Still don't like minimalism just aesthetically,
but these are great points, and can get behind this 100%."
I mean, these are almost better than praise.
It means you considered what was said,
approached it with openness, but also trusted your judgment
to disagree while also being accepting, even embracing,
of the contrasting views of others.
But even, or especially, when people
are nasty in their disagreement, I find solace in the fact
that people care about art.
Sure, it may manifest in angry, unrepeatable comments.
But when someone says "I hate modern art with a passion"
I find myself oddly reassured that the person cares at all.
In my museum work, I often fear that while the galleries
may have had people in them, what's going on in their heads?
Are they there just walking from artwork to artwork
at a pace they hope won't give away that they're just thinking
about lunch?
Although that is me sometimes.
When I hear anger, I hear that people
have firm ideas about what art is,
or at least what they think it should be.
And for me, that opens up a space for us to talk about art,
to consider where our views about it might overlap,
and gives me hope that we might allow art
at the time and attention and consideration
that I believe these pretentious clumps of material deserve.
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