Modern Art is Sh*t

[pbrower2a]

(01-12-2020, 06:33 PM)Remy Renault Wrote:

(05-13-2016, 10:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...The old art is better than the new art  -- to no small extent because the bad art of times long past has long disappeared from sight. How much Renaissance art went into the bonfires of the vanities? Probably few bona fide masterpieces.  Recent oily canvases that people cared little to preserve  went up in smoke. Mediocre canvases -- like student works -- typically got painted over because canvas wasn't cheap.

Neoclassical painting is likely spent as a means of lively expression. Going beyond the achievements of classical artists is practically impossible. Most genuine achievements in performance,  creativity, and academic achievement require about 10K hours (Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers) of preparatory work in childhood and adolescence before one achieves mastery enough to assure that one can churn out masterpieces easily. Beyond 10K one may have questions of possibility.  Starting later gets one quickly to a brick wall (people quit developing intellectual power around age 20, so there is no "growing into" some achievement after age 25). 

I don't think this is necessarily true. Van Gogh didn't begin painting at all until he was 27, and Cezanne was a nobody in his twenties. And fiction writing is far from a young person's game. The prefrontal cortex isn't even fully developed on average until age 25. Not all geniuses are/were necessarily child prodigies. Malcolm Gladwell to whom you attribute the 10K hour rule has also written extensively on late bloomers and has even said himself genius shouldn't necessarily be linked to precocity, even if they do often coexist. And needless to say, there are plenty of people who go back to school later in life and perform better academically than they did as an adolescent. So as for all intellectual development stalling at 20, extensive neuroscience research suggests otherwise. And besides, age 20 is simply an average. Just as some men are 5'5 others happen to be 6'5. Why should neurodevelopment be any different.

Thank you for reviving an old Forum that had gone into near-oblivion. In most cases, genuine excellence in some field of extreme achievement implies that one has done much in one activity at the expense of another, especially if the two activities are incompatible. Thus mastery of baseball pitching and playing a violin are incompatible. If Justin Verlander (arguably the greatest baseball pitcher of his time) plays a musical instrument, then he probably doesn't do it particularly well. Even if one does something that is not at all artistic by any definition but that takes an incredible amount of time to accomplish (let us say becoming a dentist or CPA) such nearly precludes artistic achievement due to the time that his work takes. Ordinary work such as driving a truck, milking cows, selling linens in a store, or bar-tending is incompatible with a high level of artistic achievement. Maybe if one can make a living doing art or performance one gives up the old bread-and-butter job.  

"And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas" (Burt Bacharach, Do you know the way to San Jose?)... at some point one gives up the dream if one can't make a living at it and never will, and becomes a letter carrier or a manager-trainee in a fast-food place... and gets to live a normal life. Well, we need our dairy workers, truck drivers, retail clerks, bartenders, nurses' aides, and letter carriers -- don't we?  Most of us have no desire to waste our money on artistic schlock or our time and money on watching bad movies and theater performances or listening to tone-deaf violinists. But even with legitimate art, pottery-making is incompatible with playing an organ or with writing novels (including the much-deprecated bad romance and science-fiction novels that have commercial value for inexplicable reasons). 

Late bloomers can happen... maybe someone puts the 10K hours in while in his forties, or puts in the last 5K required hours in in his fifties after having come up short.  I'm not convinced as a rule in child prodigies because what is amazing at age 10 is rarely so impressive at age 30. As an example with a pianist, Daniel Barenboim became a far better musician after pianist after he had some mature experiences. That may be as important as technical mastery.   Maybe someone gets the emotional maturity and must express it in art... who knows?

But back to the quote on the old art being better because much mediocre-to-bad art got destroyed, used for a non-artistic purpose (such as ballast if a sculpture), or painted over. The masterworks were much more likely saved from any bonfire of the vanities. Renaissance works with incompetence such as flawed perspective or bad proportion were often lost or destroyed. Or, if they are devotional, they end up going to some parish church well off the tourist lanes. We have yet to fully assess the merits of modern art, and even I have some critical ideas. First, one does not break the conventional rules of perspective, proportion, or overall realism (such as that shadows do not go in different directions) without compelling cause.