change to pop art

Arriving in the art world at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant paradigm, Johns and Rauschenberg reacted against what they considered the exaggerated emotional and philosophical claims of the older painters for their art. Rauschenberg later recalled that "The kind of talk you heard then in the art world was so hard to take. It was all about suffering and self-expression and the State of Things. I just wasn't interested in that, and I certainly didn't have any interest in trying to improve the world through painting." Similarly, Johns explained that "I'm neither a teacher nor an author of manifestos. I don't think along the same lines as the Abstract Expressionists, who took those sorts of things all too seriously." Instead of self-expression, the two young artists wanted to find new ways to use art to reflect everyday life. Rauschenberg famously declared that "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" Johns echoed the same idea: "I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I'm interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgments."

The brash and iconoclastic Rauschenberg made a number of symbolic attacks on Abstract Expressionism. In 1953, he literally erased an Abstract Expressionist work. After obtaining a drawing from Willem de Kooning for the purpose, Rauschenberg carefully rubbed out the image, then framed the smudged sheet and hand-lettered a label, "Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg. "In 1957, Rauschenberg mocked the supposed spontaneity and uniqueness of the Abstract Expressionists' work by making two collage paintings, Factum I and Factum II, that appeared identical, even to the drips and splashes around several large brush strokes. Most damaging, however, was Rauschenberg's innovation of a new form of art. In 1954 he began to attach real things to his canvases, in order to make his paintings independent objects rather than illusionistic representations of them: "I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." Rauschenberg named these three-dimensional works "combines," and they became so influential for successive generations of younger artists, many of whom were eager to break away from the traditional two-dimensional picture and the sanctity of traditional art materials.

- David Galenson

Robert Rauschenberg - Factum 1 and Factum 11 (1957)

modernism / postmodernism

Discussions of the arts, design, fashion and sub-cultures during the late 1970s and early 1980s were notable for the frequency with which the terms/concepts 'pluralism' and 'post-modernism' occurred. Before these concepts can be defined it will be necessary to examine, briefly, the earlier term/concept 'modernism'.

Modernism was an aesthetic ideology which developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which informed the thinking and practice of many radical artists. Modern architecture, art and design encompassed a variety of movements, styles and groups. While they did not all share the same checklist of essential characteristics, certain assumptions and principles did recur:

1. Modernists reacted against the blandness, sentimentality and historicism of the academic art of the nineteenth century. They also rejected the stylistic anarchism and eclecticism typical of Victorian art and design on the grounds that a new age of machines and technology had been born which demanded a fresh beginning. Some modernists thought it was essential to create a new style, based upon such engineering principles as 'form follows function' and the dictates of new materials, machines and methods of construction; others believed that any art and design based on such principles would be styleless.

2. Since modernists believed a new age had dawned - the modern age - they insisted on a break with the past, with history and tradition. Experiment, innovation, novelty and originality became overriding values as far as the shock troops of modernism - the avant-garde - were concerned. 'Rebel, reject what has gone before' became the rule which new generations of artists were expected to obey. Soon this became a tradition in itself (which explains Harold Rosenberg's paradoxical phrase 'the tradition of the new').

3. Some modernists rejected ornament on the grounds that it was superfluous and a residue of primitive habits such as tattooing. They preferred geometric to organic forms; they espoused the values of simplicity, clarity, uniformity, purity, order and rationality. Others sought to rejuvenate modern art by appropriating the styles and motifs of 'primitive' and exotic arts (tribal art, Japanese art, the art of the insane, naive art, folk art, and so on).

4. Modernists rejected national, regional and vernacular styles. They favoured an international style because, in their view, the tenets of modernism were universally applicable.

5. Modernists were orientated towards the future. Some were inspired by utopian visions and socialist ideals and wished to sweep away the old order in order to create a brave new environment which would in itself improve human behaviour. They saw themselves as experts who knew best, and as a consequence tended to impose their architectural and town planning solutions on the masses without regard to popular tastes, and without any consultation. Some impressive modern buildings were constructed but the cruder, cheaper, system-built tower blocks and public housing estates which appeared in the 1960s were hated by those condemned to live in them.

By the 1960s disillusionment with modernism had become widespread. On the one hand, it was a success: despite its revolutionary rhetoric, it had become the official culture of the ruling elites in western democracies; it was preserved in the very museums the futurists had sworn to destroy; it was now an orthodoxy. On the other hand, it had failed: the disasters of modern architecture; the rapid turnover of art movements and styles of little or no substance, typical of the post-1945 period. At this point, the term 'post-modernism' began to gain ground.

As Chafles Jencks, a leading architectural historian and theorist, has explained, the term 'post-modernism' signifies a half-way house: it is clear what is being left behind, but it is not yet clear what is replacing it.(The label does not supply any information about the characteristics of the works subsumed by it.) Jencks went on to argue that in the post-modern era, modernism continues - he employed the expression 'late modernism' - but it loses its dominant position as the authentic style of the modern age and becomes simply one style among a range of styles from which artists can choose.

What then were the recurrent features of post-modernism? As one might expect, they reversed or modified many of the tenets of modernism:

1. The modernist idea that there was only one authentic style for the modern age was rejected in favour of the idea that a plurality of styles - some old, some new - existed. Eclecticism, hybrid styles became fashionable again. No one style appeared to be dominant.

2. History and tradition - including the history of modernism itself - became available again; hence, 'retro-style', recycling old styles, the use of 'quotations' from the art of the past, parodies and pastiches of earlier works.

3. Ornament and decoration made a comeback.

4. Complexity and contradiction (the title of a highly influential book by the American architect Robert Venturi) and ambiguity were the values which replaced simplicity, purity and rationality. Mixtures of high and low culture, fine art and commercial art styles were encouraged as a way of producing buildings with multiple meanings capable of pleasing audiences with different levels of sophistication and degrees of knowledge.

5. In post-modern architecture and design, issues of form, space and function became less important. Architecture and design were regarded as 'languages' or sign systems capable of communicating messages. Pleasure was emphasized by means of playfulness, humour, bright colour and ornament.

6. A basic characteristic of art - intertextuality - was heightened in postmodernism. 'Intertextuality' is a term used mainly by literary theorists to signify the fact that most literary texts allude to, cite or quote, other texts. Aesthetic pleasure is often to be derived from the inter-textual play of different styles within, say, a collage.

- John Walker

primitivism nude

A cubist monumentality which leaves little room for the eroticism of previous depictions of the nude

Fernand Leger - Le Grand Dejeuner (1921)

transition toward abstraction

...which originally seems merely childish

Henri Matisse - La Conversation (1912)

modernist ideas

Arnold Schoenberg and his followers invented an atonal music which, rather like cubist painting, refused to coordinate the work by reference to central tonal organizing points, so that the hierarchy of chordal relationships that had ruled for centuries had been abandoned, and a new freedom of association between sounds had been invented.

As Schoenberg and others rewrote the previously accepted tonal grammar of music, so Mondrian and his colleagues sought a syntax for painting that would be independent of local mimesis, and yet, like Schoenberg's music, close to a "more fundamental reality."

For the modernists, the canon of past art is always available for reinterpretation, imitation, and even parody or pastiche. 'To me there is no past and future in art', said Picasso.

Like a daily newspaper, the paradigm of cubism, and the idea of the city, is the site of simultaneous happenings which we can only juxtapose with one another.

- Christopher Butler

fragmented self

When I first laid eyes on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, for example, I was drawn to Leonardo da Vinci's small masterpiece by the famous smile and struck by how the face before me appeared unified and immediately recognizable. Yet I knew that behind that familiar face was an illusion. I thought of Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar, who was the artist's muse, model, and lover. Picasso's fractured perspective creates facial features that have seemingly unnatural relationships and proportions. Most of us find da Vinci's Mona Lisa much closer to the way we normally perceive the world than Dora's disjointed planes. But the brain makes us who we are from a jumble of components that are fragmented and distributed through the cortex and thalamus in a way. that is analogous to the way Picasso sometimes painted.

- Kevin Nelson

Pablo Picasso - Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)

cubism

In the first decade of the twentieth century, art and science both underwent profound revolutions. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper on the special theory of relativity that forever changed our conceptions of space and time. In 1907, Picasso painted the picture that irrevocably set painting on a different course. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with its fractured planes, was the immediate precursor to cubism, the movement that in many ways constituted the powerhouse for twentieth-century art. As we'll see, the two events were hardly disconnected. In looking at cubism, our main focus will be not on the rise of the movement itself, but rather the way in which it constituted an idea-space in which the law of spontaneous generation began to play a key role in enabling the viewer of cubist paintings to discover meaning in them.

Cubism's status as a revolutionary art movement is hardly in doubt. As the art critic Robert Rosenblum notes, cubism "altered the structure of Western painting to a degree unparalleled since the Renaissance," achieving this goal by means of its "drastic . . . shattering and reconstruction of traditional representations of light and shadow, mass and void, flatness and depth." To grasp how radical a break with the past cubism represents, consider for a moment a typical impressionist painting such as Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette (painted in 1876—but almost any post-Raphael /pre-Cezanne painting would do). The scene shows several figures seated at a table outside a café, while dancers swirl in the town square behind them. Although impressionism of course effected its own important innovations, particularly in regard to the treatment of color perception, it otherwise generally conforms to the classical canons of figurative art. The rules of perspective and foreshortening are obeyed, with more distant figures drawn significantly smaller than those in the foreground and receding along lines radiating from a single focal point. Similarly, light and shadow are treated in a natural and realistic fashion, and the conventional relationship between form and space (i.e., that forms fit the spaces they would occupy in real life) is rigorously observed.

Now let's look at a typical cubist painting, Picasso's Landscape with Poster (1912). Immediately we recognize we are in a completely different kind of pictorial space. Classical perspective has been banished, along with the rest of the grammar of figurative painting. The unity of the picture space has been fragmented into multiple planes representing varying points of view simultaneously, as though what is being captured is the result of someone walking about. The static snapshot viewpoint of Renoir has thus given way to a dynamic configuration—suggestive of movement—in which, as in relativity theory, space and time have merged. Conflicting light sources, suggesting multiple perspectives, are presented within a color scheme that verges on the monochromatic. Figuration, although not abandoned altogether, has been severely subordinated to the abstract geometry of rectangles, trapezoids, and semicircles. The painting, far from attempting to create an illusion of an actual scene, constantly moves in and out of being an autonomous object in its own right, creating its own level of reality and obeying its own internal aesthetic logic. A crucial dimension of this logic, which is representative of the intelligence embedded in the idea-space of cubism as a whole, is the way in which the painting is structured so as to enable the viewer to spontaneously generate patterns of meaning. The viewer shifts from being a passive spectator to an active participant in constructing the painting's interpretation.

Looking at the painting more closely, for example, we notice, in addition to various schematically depicted objects (exteriors walls, doorways, windows), several words displayed quite prominently: Pernod across the top of a bottle, Leon inscribed on a billboard in bold cursive script, and near the bottom of the painting, Kub 10c. Words in fact appear repeatedly in cubist paintings—brand names, numerals, shop signs, and various parts of newspapers. As in the case of other forms of figuration, words and letters move in and out of representing something and becoming aesthetic objects in their own right, integrated into the remaining abstract forms.

This use of letters in cubist iconography, as Rosenblum points out, bears directly on the central issues of how painting relates to the real world and the role of the viewer in shaping how the artwork is experienced.28 In the case of Renoir's painting, life is depicted with sufficient realism to give the illusion of actuality, leaving the viewer with little to do except passively gaze at it. In Picasso's painting, on the other hand, objects are not so much depicted as denoted by means of a visual sign. A flat rectangle with writing on it stands for a billboard, a line in the shape of an inverted J for an archway. Cubist forms thus point to objects in roughly the same way that words do—not by means of realistic figural representation but via visual signs. We are left to read their meanings into them, aided by motifs such as bottles, glasses, archways, and musical instruments that are used over and over. The viewer, in other words, actively shapes the meanings of the painting.

What are we to make of all this? From one perspective, cubism looks like an enormous impoverishment of the rich language of classical figurative painting. "What a loss to French art!" a Russian collector remarked on seeing Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Yet in breaking decisively with the five-hundredyear-old tradition of depicting the illusion of real life, cubism inaugurated a new era. As one critic put it, "This is the moment of liberation from which the whole future of the plastic arts in the Western World was to radiate in all its diversity."

Cubism shifted from realistic representation to the spontaneous generation of implicit meanings for viewers themselves to discover, play with, and even elaborate. Far from being an impoverishment of art's expressive powers, cubism in fact opened up a vast new array of possibilities. In the process, it changed forever the idea-space in which art evolves. Its new grammar of abstraction, flattening, fragmentation, analytical decomposition of objects, simultaneous perspectives, and multiple ambiguities made possible an immense enrichment of meaning along manifold dimensions, as well as a deepening and broadening of art's metaphysical content.

The constant interplay between elements on different levels, allowing simultaneous meanings (visual and verbal puns) to coexist and multiply, enriched art with irony, humor, and ambivalence. By the same token, it radically undermined any simple reliance on a literal, unitary interpretation of perception. Time and space became integrated in a single flattened plane. Paintings seemed to flip back and forth between semiabstract objects creating their own reality and semifigurational works pulling the viewer back into the real world. Indeed, a typical cubist painting seemed quite profligate in the levels of reality it engendered: almost completely abstract, geometric denotation (a cube for a building), semiaccurate figuration (bottles, buildings, doorways), accurately drawn symbols (letters/words), and finally the intrusion of real objects (collage).

Cubism's witty permutations of these levels and elements and its deliberate use of commonplace objects may seem playful, but it effectively initiated a complete metaphysical reframing of art from the ground up, raising questions destined to shape the progress of art for decades to come: How does a work of art relate to the real world? How is perceptual space organized? What is the role of the viewer—passive spectator or engaged participant, continuously constructing and reconstructing an artwork's meaning? What are a painting's borders, where does art stop and the real world begin, what is inside versus outside the frame?

The depth, range, and power of the revolutionary cubist aesthetics and metaphysics, embodied visually in the radically new space it created for the artistic imagination to unfold in, lies in its discovery of a universal truth about the fundamental calculus of creativity. In effect, cubist art exploits a version of the law of spontaneous generation. Identifiable elements in a painting form a network of related elements (visual resonances and analogies, verbal puns, etc.) that invite the viewer to construct out of them a series of meaningful patterns. Furthermore, as each pattern emerges, it subtly shifts the relationships among the remaining patterns, giving rise to still larger patterns (consider how the recognition of a sexual pun in the middle of a painting might change the interpretation of other elements). Thus in a cubist painting, what shapes the viewer's aesthetic experience is the ongoing generation of meaning that is spontaneous, emergent, and self-transforming. By cocreating with the viewer multiple layers of meaning, this new grammar of painting enabled art to express more authentically the multidimensionality and complexity of human experience.

Cubism vastly enriched the idea-space of twentieth-century art—for artists and viewers alike. In the process it launched a highly energized wave of change that continued to sweep through art over the next seventy years, from constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl movement to conceptualism and pop art.

As any art history textbook will tell you, cubism was invented by Braque and Picasso. The workings of genius in this achievement are not to be denied. But let's ask Kauffman's intriguing question: Whence this order? Did it spring fully formed from the heads of Braque and Picasso? Are they alone responsible for one of the greatest revolutions in the history of art? Or were there, in Kauffman's phrase, "vast veins of spontaneous order" lying at hand that Braque and Picasso discovered and mined? In short, was the new order cubism represented in reality an example of coevolutionary change, the spontaneous and emergent result of two painters of genius interacting with the laws of self-organization?

The foregoing analysis of cubism suggests precisely that. The break cubism made with the past was above all a break with realistic representation in favor of abstraction. Not the purely nonrepresentational abstraction of Kandinsky, but a much more analytic, formal, geometric abstraction. That this occurred at the very same time that Einstein was overthrowing Newton by reintroducing geometry into physics, while simultaneously undermining our commonsense faith in the reality depicted by falling apples, is no mere coincidence, as Arthur I. Miller has brilliantly demonstrated in his recent book, "Einstein, Picasso."

It was part of Picasso's genius to have intuitively recognized very early the significance of this historic scientific shift. Furthermore, once the basic move to abstraction had been made, much else followed almost automatically. Abstract form, like mathematics itself, proved to be a rich generative engine. There are always more sets of things than things. Picasso and Braque, influenced by radical new theories in mathematics and physics that destroyed the unity of a single perspective, discovered this for themselves, and then created an art that allowed the viewer to discover it too. In an abstract space, relationships come to the fore and spontaneously multiply.

Each new element adds value well beyond its intrinsic content, interacting with all the other elements in the picture. The result could be chaos, of course, subjecting the viewer to a dizzying calculus of forms, only a small subset of them meaningful. In reality, Picasso and Braque avoid that pitfall for the most part (though some of Picasso's late cubist paintings flirt dangerously with it) by carefully educating the viewer's eye to notice certain fairly obvious sets of relations first. This has the effect of progressively building a model of meaningful relations in the viewer's mind that can then be used to seek and recognize more subtle visual and linguistic plays while disregarding meaningless ones. The mind seems innately programmed to seek the same patterns over and over. The fit get fitter.

Cubism broke with a five-century-old tradition of figurative art by reaching out to a science that was becoming radically more abstract and geometric, and in the process overturning our commonsense view of the world. This move created a weak tie that connected art with a whole domain of thought that was far removed from it. And just as weak ties turn out to be better at getting you a new job than your immediate circle of friends, so they are better at producing creative breakthroughs. Connecting to the hotspot of early-twentieth-century physics and the focus on abstract geometric form that it triggered released an avalanche of new ideas into the art world, ideas that spontaneously multiplied and are still playing themselves out. Creative ideas frequently lead to exponential growth. What hasn't always been grasped is that, conversely, under the right circumstances the exponential growth of ideas can lead to creative breakthroughs.

- Richard Ogle

simplicity

Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again. The same could have been said of Debussy, who in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex--"they smell of the lamp, not the sun."

modernism: definition

Modernism was a broad movement encompassing all the avant-garde isms of the first half of the 20th century. Although different modern-isms were often incompatible (and occasionally antagonistic) they all rejected the dominance of Naturalism and Academicism in favour of experimental art. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience.

All modern-isms shared a common feeling that the modern world was fundamentally different from what had passed before and that art needed to renew itself by confronting and exploring its own modernity. For some this meant rejecting the industrial in favour of the primitive (Primitivism), for others a celebration of technology and machinery (Futurism).

In Modernism generally, the artist's exploration of his or her vision was paramount. Although this trend was already evident in the 19th century, it became an orthodoxy for Modernists. Certain modern-isms began to question what art is, what it is for and what it supports. Through this process artistic activity and cultural critique became more closely identified with each other. The Dadaists displaced the individual entirely, replacing him with the unconscious.

Modern-isms contested between themselves whether art should explore emotions and states of mind (Expressionism), spiritual order (Neo-Plasticism), social function (Constructivism), the unconscious (Surrealism), the nature of representation (Cubism) or the social role of art in a capitalist, bourgeois society (Dadaism). Many of these trends overlapped with one another.

Art increasingly became a means of discovering truth, whether a peculiarly modern truth (Futurism) or a universal truth (Suprematism).

Jean Arp - Overturned Blue Shoe with Two Heels Under a Black Vault (1925)

The unconscious, valued for its creative powers, became central to many modern-isms, not least for the Dadaists and Surrealists who tapped into it as the source of authentic, irrational creativity. The title of Arp's work is intended to be humorous and make us pay more attention to the work itself. Arp compared his creativity to natural forces of growth. The shapes in Overturned evoke the change and movement of living organisms and are meant to refute the rationalising preference for fixed forms and definite meanings in favour of the uncertain and the undefined.

Pablo Picasso - Carafe, Jug, and Fruit Bowl (1909)

Cubism, of which this painting is an example, is regarded as the most important modern-ism. Like many modern-isms, it makes intellect central to art. It systematically explores the relation between art and what it represents, thereby completely abandoning the Naturalistic aim to paint things 'simply' as they appear to the observer. Instead, Cubists sought to convey an object's existence in time and space, representing the object from different vantages. They explored how paintings are constructed, and how they function as works of art, making explicit the questions: what is art? And: what does art represent?

modernism: art as ideology

Rapid secularization during the Enlightenment period stimulated inerest in a variety of new subjects. One of these new areas of interest came to be called "aesthetics": a concern with elucidating principles such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and indeed make them examples of fine "art." Until the Enlightenment, no other society had considered art to be an entity in itself, to be set apart from its context of use (usually in ceremony or entertainment) or the content that it portrayed or suggested. What seems to us to be self-evident "art" (e.g., paintings, sculpture, poems, motets, cantatas or—in other societies—carvings, urns, figurines, masks, ornaments, dramatic performances) were not regarded as such by their makers or users. They found no reason to assume that these belonged in a nameable superordinate category, "art," that suggests a special mode of working or noteworthy social identity (being an "artist" rather than simply someone who paints) or a special result (a "work of art" rather than an altarpiece or ancestor figure).

As the subject of aesthetics developed over the next century, a startling and influential idea took hold. This idea held that there is a special frame of mind for appreciating works of art: a "disinterested" attitude that disregards any consideration of one's own personal interest in the object, its utility, or its social or religious ramifications. This unprecedented idea led to still another: the work of art is a world-in-itself, made solely or primarily as an occasion for this kind of detached aesthetic experience, which was considered to be one of the highest forms of mental activity.

"Disinterest" implied that one could transcend the limitations of time, place, and temperament, and react to the artwork of eras far removed from one's own—whether or not one understood the meaning they had had for their original makers and users. In this sense, art was "universal." Another key idea that gradually developed in the field of aesthetics was that works of art were vehicles for a special kind of knowledge—a knowledge that, with the waning of religious belief, often took on the spiritual aura and authority once restricted to the church. Still another corollary was the idea of art for art's sake (or life for art's sake), suggesting that art had no purpose but to "be" and to provide opportunities for enjoying an aesthetic experience that was its own reward, and that one could have no higher calling than to open oneself to these heightened moments.

As paintings became less and less like mirrors held up to nature or to society, viewers could no longer decipher or naively admire them. Critics assumed ever-greater importance as mediators between the artist and the public because someone had to explain to the mystified public what made an artwork good or bad and even what a work "meant." In England, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Clive Bell and Roger Fry were extremely influential as they invoked "formalist" criteria for appreciating the puzzling new work of postimpressionists such as Cezanne, or the cubists, work that could not be understood with the serviceable old standards (that anyone could recognize) of beauty of conception, nobility of subject matter, representational accuracy, or communication of valued truths. Art had become, if not a religion, at least an ideology whose principles were articulated by and for the few who had leisure and education enough to acquire them.

More elaborate and abstract formalist standards were developed America by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in order to justify abstract expressionism, a midcentury school of painting that affronted sensibilities and challenged what had previously been acceptable as art. Terms such as "flatness," "purity," and "picture plane" became the verbal tokens of the transcendent meanings viewers were told they could find in the skeins and blobs and washes of paint. Because these values were not easily apparent to the untutored observer, appreciating au became more than ever an elite activity, requiring an apprenticeship and dedication not unlike that of the artist. Never in question was the "high art" assumption that works of art—no matter how strange they looked or how unskilled they seemed to be—were conduits of transcendent, supernatural values, of truths from the unconscious, expressions or revelations of universal human concerns that the artist was uniquely endowed to apprehend and transmit.

As the "isms" proliferated and art became more esoteric and outrageous, the role of the critic became not only helpful but integral to the reception of works of art. Looking back, it seems inevitable that an "institutional" theory of art arose to explain what art is. As formulated by George Dickie (1974) and Arthur Danto (1964) (who were describing what was the case, not advocating or defending it), an artworld (one word) composed of critics, dealers, gallery owners, museum directors, curators, art-magazine editors, and so forth, was the source of conferring the status "work of art" on objects. What artists made were "candidates for appreciation," and if the artworld bought and sold them, wrote about them, displayed them, they were thereby validated as "art"—not before.

Implicit in this account is a recognition that what is said and written about a work is not only necessary to its being categorized as art, but is indeed perhaps more important than the work itself (Wolfe 1975). There is no appreciation of art without interpretation. We can tell that a pile of stones or a stack of gray felt displayed in a museum is different from a pile of stones on the pavement outside the museum or a stack of felt in a carpet store next to the museum because the objects in the museum are viewed through a lens of knowledge of their place in a tradition. "To see something as art at all," proclaimed Danto (1981, 135), "demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art." In this view, there are no naive artists and no naive art: today's artists can both explain the theories behind the works that are to be seen in museums and galleries and place their own works in these traditions.

- Ellen Dissanayake

abstraction of painting

The written word became more specialized, more abstract and less and less like pictures. Pictures, meanwhile, began to grow in the opposite direction: less abstract or symbolic, more representational and specific. By the early 1800's, western art and writing had drifted about as far apart as possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible...the other rich in invisible treasures, senses, emotions, spirituality, philosophy.

However starting in the late 19th century, modern art movements such as impressionism, expressionism, futurism, dadaism incorporated abstraction back into art. Strict representation styles were of little importance to the new schools. The main thrust was a return to meaning in art, away from resemblance, back to the realm of ideas. Meanwhile, the written word was also changing, poetry began turning away from the elusive, twice-abstracted language of old toward a more direct, even colloquial style (Keats, Whitman). In prose, language was becoming even more direct, conveying meaning simply and quickly, more like pictures. "Meaning" was not abandoned by any means, but authors were definitely moving toward a more straightforward means of communication.

Paintings increasingly took on symbolic, even calligraphic meanings (Klee), while some artists addressed the ironies of words and pictures head-on. Paintings became so "unrealistic" and abstract, that modern art itself became virtually incomprehensible to the average viewer.

- Scott McCloud

     

why modernism

The first effect of modernism was to make high-culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition. The hidden purpose was twofold: to protect art against popular entertainment, and to create a new barrier, a new obstacle to membership, and a new rite of passage to the adult and illuminated sphere. To those whom modernism excluded, the movement seemed like a betrayal of the past. Tonality and tunefulness in music; the human image in painting; the pleasing dignity of metre and rhyme - even the homely comfort of a story well told - all these ways in which art had opened its arms to normal humanity were suddenly rejected, like a false embrace. To the modernists, however, the past was betrayed not be modernism but by popular culture. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted and banalised by popular music; figurative painting had been trumped by photography; rhyme and metre had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naïve and unthinking people, was kitsch. Modernism was not an assault on the artistic tradition, but an attempt to rescue it. Such was the surprising thought expressed by Eliot and Schoenberg, and their eloquence transformed the high culture of Europe.

- Roger Scruton

is modern art that modern?

Most of all departures from the photographic rendering of appearance in pre-20^th century art are perfectly acceptable to us. We enjoy the skillful use of landscape to reinforce the meaning of a scene. The great masters’ handling of light and shade is so effective that it does not occur to us to object to its inaccuracy. We admire the perspective of Leonardo and Raphael. We accept El Greco’s elongated figures. Readers of comic strips and viewers of movie cartoons as we are, we certainly take in stride the exaggerations of caricature. Why, then, are we so often baffled by the distortions, the exaggerations of the art of our own times? Why is it so different from the art of the past?

One might answer with another question: Is it so different? Are not the artists of today doing what great artists have always done their ideas about the world through visual images? Is the difference between their works and those of the past partly due to the fact that ideas have changed and that the old images no longer have meaning? Perhaps the fault is with us; we have not moved along as fast as the artists; we are trying to see our new world in the old way instead of opening our minds and spirits to the impact of the new.

- Alice Elizabeth Chase

atonality through tonality

Petrushka was Stravinsky’s first major work to follow in the brazen path of Schoenberg’s avant-garde. But Stravinsky; unlike Schoenberg, did not undermine tonality by erasing it. He worried that atonality was too stifling, and that Schoenberg, with all his “rationalism and rules” might end up becoming “a dolled-up Brahms.” Instead, Stravinsky decided to torment his audience by making it overdose on tonality; In Petrushka, a Diaghilev ballet about a puppet who comes to life, Stravinsky took two old folk melodies and set them against each other, like wind-up dolls. As a result, the music is bitonal, unfolding in two keys (F-sharp major, which is almost all black keys, and C major, which is all white keys) simultaneously. The result is unresolved ambiguity, the ironic dissonance of too much consonance. The ear must choose what to hear.

- Jonah Lehrer