Eye of the Beholder

A friend and I went to a modern art museum that was having a free-admission day yesterday. I almost canceled the outing, because modern art isn’t really my cuppa, but I went anyway, and I'm glad I did. I learned that my friend has the same feelings about modern art that I do, so we spent the day playing curators, deciding which pieces we’d keep in the museum and which should be sent back to the artists.

There were some stunners in the museum’s collections. I swooned over some large-format pieces that looked like black-and-white night-time photography but were actually charcoal on paper (and I had to get to within inches of the piece to begin to see the proof of that). There were two pieces with blown glass that we both loved, one that needed some work (a slow-motion film about fire being projected through blown glass bubbles that made their own fire/nebula-like patterns on the screen – we loved the concept but hated the film itself) and one that was perfect as it was (a huge glass bottle shaped like George Washington’s head, with grog dregs inside, lying on a carved granite pillow). An installation with indigenous American ceremonial garb made out of gaudy man-made fabrics (neon yellow organza, iridescent silver lamé, turquoise paracord, and the like) spoke to our respective native ancestry and the stripping of dignity and depth from rich, complex cultures.

Then there were the pieces we rolled our eyes at. A convoluted video installation was painfully pretentious and over-wrought. A series of banners with sloppy stitching looked like an elementary school project and insulted us with their simplistic messages. Something that looked like black building blocks getting knocked over again and again was trite and boring. Monochrome, screen-printed t-shirts with aphorisms on them looked like they belonged in the gift shop rather than a gallery.

We could respect (if not rave about) some of the pieces that clearly took skill to create (like a series of gigantic concrete sculptures about death and reverence), but the ones where it took no training, no practice, no actual artistic skill whatsoever to make them should not, in our opinion, have been allowed to take up space in a museum. That is the fundamental problem with modern art – anyone can think they’re an artist, know someone who knows someone who can get in touch with a curator, and these sad, sloppy, shallow pieces get to spend time in a place where they don’t belong.

I’m not saying these people aren’t heading in good directions, but their work isn’t museum-quality yet. Some of them need practice in their chosen medium. Some of them need more life experience to help them refine their messages. Some need to abandon whatever medium they’ve chosen and try something different that might convey their message more effectively. The curators should be looking at an artist’s work before committing to hosting it, and having an eye for quality rather than just political/cultural relevance or novelty.

Despite the drawbacks, I’m not going to abandon modern art museums. The few amazing pieces are worth the admission fee, and I can keep hoping that curators will up their game so that every piece they display has a valid reason to be there... but I think I’ll hit up a natural history museum next, to cleanse the palate.