Quote:See, that's the first time anyone has ever made any attempt to explain to me the point of abstract art. I think that's mostly because there are very few (if any) non-art-lovers who actually understand, appreciate, and enjoy it! And I don't know many art lovers...can't think of any off the top of my head!
Well, most art lovers are very annoying to be around. Some of them have their own specific ideas about what makes art good or bad and get really huffy when you don't agree with them, some just like
everything, and some people - frankly- are faking it so they can hang around with the cool crowd.
Quote:All I've ever heard is that they're "expressing." The natural question is, "expressing what?" In the case of abstract art, it seems that no mere mortal can ascertain the answer to that question without training, and nobody with training seems willing to explain. All the layman (well, me) can see is a bunch of noise that doesn't add up to anything. The natural reaction is, "People get paid to make that junk? Anyone can splatter paint on a canvas, so how is that art?"
Well, part of the problem is that art appreciation is mostly an intuitive thing. A lesson, no matter how generous and articulate, can't substitute for simply hanging around a lot of art over time. Abstract art must be a nightmare for professors at college, because instead of talking about the skill of the artist to represent reality accurately, they have to start asking a bunch of self-involved college students how particular paintings make them feel. I wouldn't want that job. I might just start telling them what's good and what's not, and that's probably what happens most of the time.
Most people fall into one of two camps, like on the Jung personality test. Those who are very intuitive have difficulty articulating what it is they are feeling - or more accurately,
why they feel the way they do - and those who are very articulate are usually not aware of the subtleties of their own emotions. So it's rare to find someone who can bridge the gap.
Quote:With time, I've come to associate "expression" with "nonsensical garbage that I don't understand" and therefore "that thing that ruins every artist and piece of art it touches." Can you see how I might come to view expression in art, and especially expressionism, with bitterness and contempt?
Sure. I feel the same way about punk music.
Quote:Now, thanks to you, I know a little of the what and why of abstract art and expression, and I have questions. Questions like: how can an image that doesn't mean anything evoke emotion? Is there something about abstraction that lends itself to the encoding of emotions in visual form? Because it seems to me that an image that looks like something identifiable would do a much better job of, ahem, identifying what it's talking about.
I can make a stab at this, but I'm really not trained at all, and I've never had a lot of patience for the official explanations of artistic merit. I just have my own ideas, and of course I've seen a bunch of art. But your next question is a good place to start from.
Quote:And, finally...is art better at conveying emotion than music? Because music practically *is* emotion, distilled into audible form. Music stinks at communicating ideas, though, something that art can excel at.
We're used to using our eyes to get information, and we're used to using our other senses to find out how we should feel about the information we have. That makes visual art a little counter-intuitive, but it might also be what makes it so neat. You use your eyes in a way that you're not accustomed.
It might help if you tried to think of abstract art in exactly the way you describe music: emotion, distilled into visual form. My breakthrough with Pollack was when I was looking at one of those giant conglomerations of paint drips, and I suddenly started thinking of it as Pollack's internal landscape.
When you close your eyes, things don't go black. There's a mess of static and globs and rapidly shifting multi-colored goofiness behind your eyes, and it's probably utterly meaningless. But there's also a full-body landscape of sensations and hormones and memories and thoughts and the emotional context of those thoughts, all coming and going rapidly. And each person's landscape is unique (probably).
An abstract artist places colors and shapes and drips on a canvas in a particular way because his instinct tells him that's where they should go. If his internal landscape were different, his instincts would be different, and he would make different color choices and balance the whole thing differently. So the end result is, in a way, a picture of the way the artist was feeling when he created it. And in another way, it's a picture of who the artist is. When you look at an abstract painting, you're kind of reverse-engineering it to discover why it looks the way it does. What kind of person, in what kind of state, would make the kind of thing you happen to be looking at?
Now, some people just instinctively perform that reverse engineering when they look at a painting, just like some socially intuitive people can tell how other people are feeling without a lot of external hints. But for the rest of us, it's a skill that we can get better at with practice.
Essentially, when you look at a painting, you're making contact with another human being. Good paintings are generally made by interesting people with strong emotional lives, who have the talent and the honesty to put a piece of themselves into every piece of art they make. So when you go through the process of interpreting the painting (which is lightning-fast, once you get used to it), you run into that interesting, emotional, talented person, and you can't help but feel something. Boring people make boring paintings, and highly intellectual people make sterile paintings. And children make innocent paintings without the weight of experience and pain in them, which is why there's a difference between children's scribbles and abstract art.
That's what it is at a very basic level, but you won't hear that from any art professor, because there's a lot of theory that can be more easily taught in lectures - different colors make you feel different ways, the golden mean is visually appealing, etc. - but at the heart of it, I think you have to remember that a piece of artwork is a unique thing that only one person in the world could have made, and there's a reason why it turned out the way it did. The worth of your experience with that piece of art comes in understanding the connection between its form and the intention behind it, and why you react to it the way you do. And if you don't have a reaction, given that you're open to having one in the first place, then it doesn't "speak to you". And that's where that phrase comes from.
Representational art - pictures of recognizable things - can have an emotional impact, of course, but it trades on the emotional connotations we have linked with those objects in our minds, so the process of looking at a representational work is a little different. By necessity, a picture of nothing needs to be interpreted, so the level of viewer participation is a little higher.
That's my take on it, but there's another useful starting point that my dad, who is a painter and art professor himself, harps on. A really good realistic painting has an almost magical sense of
depth, where far-away things look far away and close things look closer. And that's cool, because it's not a 3D thing; it's a totally flat picture. If an abstract artist, through the pure use of unidentifiable shapes and colors, can achieve a recognizable sense of depth, that's very cool. If you can somehow put an entire world on a canvas, a world that makes sense in terms of itself but can still relate to the real physical world, then you've done something amazing.