Reading Notes｜Modern Art

The main contents of "150 Years of Modern Art" and "Philosophy of Art":
Please copy the title of the book and paste it into the search box, find booksellers such as Blog Lai or Douban Book Review, and read it.
The soul asks:
Why do you want to write/copy the content of the book by default? Shouldn't most of the profiles on the Internet be written more professionally than the authors after reading it? It's definitely not because I'm too lazy to write.

modern Art

Since Dadaism, the expression of art (or anti-art) has tended to be pure ideas and limited to the expression of idea messages, so much so that the expression of aesthetic messages of the work itself has been completely abandoned. This results in readers reading information that they already have, but reinterpreted under a new framework. The readers at this time are indeed participating in the creation, but this creation has no artistic significance for the reading itself. In essence, it is equivalent to translating one's own words into words in another language. This discourse makes the original words of the reader seem to have the breath of modern art, but the core has not changed, but it is nested in an unfamiliar In the form, in the end, the author himself did not express anything, only provided a form and turned away.

Readers who put their own message in, arrogantly call it art, precisely because the reader puts in the message and blurs out whether the message is their own or the author’s. The reader thinks it resonates with the author, but the fact This is just a trap left by the author to the reader. It's like a street liar holding ten pieces of paper and asking you to choose a natural number from 1 to 10. Whichever one you choose, he has the same as you. So, is it the artist who expresses ten open minds at the same time? No, he didn't express anything, he just set a range for you to choose, and then told you when no one was around that you chose the same as him.

Including the current NFT, many works of art have long been reduced to money laundering tools. The value of these so-called "unique works of art" is not in "art", but in "uniqueness" . For example, the intuitive work of a child in the early days or the fried monkey. It is also because of its unique characteristics that it is an excellent choice for short-term investments and, in turn, for money laundering. This cycle, by the way hype.

In the age when the Internet is not yet developed, people need to find those works of art with characteristics that are difficult to copy, and use auctions and other forms to hype up a trend, style, or a certain "artist"; in the age of the Internet, it is unnecessary, because The number of audiences that help hype has increased, and hype makers no longer have to forcefully instill some impressions that are suitable for group memory. The uniqueness of artworks, except for the first work of a certain style, is also no longer so necessary. The speculation is the conceptual value : its importance has far exceeded the artistic value or even the idea value.
However, among these fried works, the least necessary attribute is aesthetics .

Personal appreciation of works of art is actually a difficult thing to cultivate. It does not mean that there is a fixed measure of taste or aesthetics, but refers to the individual's cognitive ability and judgment on the symbolic expression of works of art. This is also a dilemma of modern art: things that do not require appreciation and are called "art" at the same time have a wider audience; on the contrary, some works with depth are more likely to be overwhelmed by the torrent of hype before they can be understood.

More than a decade ago, there was an "artist" who sold his own awesome plugs in cans. In fact, the meaning he wants to express may be similar to that of Marcel Duxiang in the early days, satirizing modern art. But at the same time irony, he himself is fueling it. In the end, there must be more people who understand this kind of work as the same form of modern art, rather than anti-modern art. To blindly delete the higher forms that cover disgusting connotations is to delete art itself from the universal core of art.

 The cover image is a 1964 reproduction of Du Xiang's "The Fountain" (1917).