The Massive Continuity of Ducks

prismatic-bell:

logicallyyours:
orevet:
earlgraytay:
hymneminium:
Art snobs complain that using a different kind of paint “forever destroyed” the painting
Wikipedia hosts it as a 2-kilobyte SVG
okay, I don’t even fucking like modern art that much, but you’re just plain wrong here. you don’t know how much you don’t know.
trying to capture a painting through photography is kind of a fools’ errand. especially a huge painting like Who’s Afraid Of Red, Yellow, and Blue. The things that make a painting like this impressive just do not photograph well. Furthermore, the things that made this particular painting impressive are impossible to see without seeing it in real life. (which, tragically, is no longer possible. fuck art vandals.)
let me give you an example with a more accessible painting. Let’s look at Van Gogh’s Wheat Field With Crows, one of his final paintings. It’s widely considered to be a masterpiece.
Here’s Wikipedia’s png/svg image of it:
looks kinda flat, right? kinda meh? not particularly impressive? but look at this close-up image:
you see how the brushstrokes build on each other? how every stroke gives the painting more texture, almost like a wafer-thin sculpture?
now imagine the entire thing with a subtle glow, a shimmer that moves as you walk past the painting, capturing the light of a wheat field with scattering crows right before a storm. because of the way paint works, most paintings have a subtle shimmer to them. oil paintings have more of a shimmer, because they’re varnished. acrylics, like Who’s Afraid, have less, but it’s still there. and that shimmer is impossible to photograph without making the image itself illegible. it just looks like glare.
and this is true of every painting. any photo you see of a painting is the flattest, deadest possible version of that painting. you can’t see the way the artist pushed the paint to give it texture. you can’t see the shimmer. you can’t see the light reflected on the ground beneath. you can’t move around and get a look at the different angles, or feel dwarfed by the immensity of a canvas that’s two feet taller than you that just screams RED.
from what little I understand, the Who’s Afraid paintings are mostly an exercise in technique. the entire point was getting the paint to have as smooth of a texture as possible.
which, uh, have you worked with acrylics? i have. let me tell you, acrylic paint wants to look like chicken scratch. getting it to look smooth is real fuckin’ hard. painting over it? fucks with the texture. varnishing it? fucks with the texture bad, and makes it look oily and glowy in a way it wasn’t supposed to. it takes that subtle sheen and makes it look slick.
what happened to this painting is the equivalent of someone putting 80s blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick on the Mona Lisa. you can’t get it off. you can’t reverse it. the painting is destroyed, whether you like it or not.
the level of proud ignorance and anti-intellectualism you are showing here is, uh. it’s on par with a made up guy saying “why are there so many different programming languages? can’t you just write everything in assembly? that seems like it’d be easier.” it’s honestly kinda sickening.
like I said- I don’t even like most modern art, it really doesn’t do it for me. but you don’t have to be an art snob to know why this is a bad thing, or to care about it.
here’s a great video that elaborates further on the history of this particular painting and also why hatred for modern art and fascism are intimately entangled
(OP has since clarified they were more making fun of Wikipedia displaying the painting as a vector, which flattens color, and that their original post was badly worded, and even if they didn’t I’m not saying anyone who makes ‘modern art is dumb’ jokes is a fascist. but it’s necessary to point out where this irratiinal hatred comes from.)
As a student of art, let me tell you that not liking a particular artist or period of art is okay, but insulting it just because it isn’t your thing is not okay. Human expression is the heart of our existence.
I once had to unfriend someone I cared about because every time I posted something from Rothko, she would make snide comments, even after I dm’d her and asked her not to.
Her objection was that his stuff is “just boxes” and anyone can do that. But no, they can’t. The depth and complexity of how he painted immerses you in a field of color. Furthermore, each paining of his is an experiment in how that color makes you feel. For instance, this one i find calming:
While this one fills me with dread:
These paintings are big enough that if you stand two feet away, they fill your field of vision. The photographs don’t do them justice, but you get the point.
I’ve never seen the “Who’s afraid” paintings, but I second everything that @earlgraytay wrote.
I’ve said before of modern art that it’s not my thing but it’s someone’s thing and therefore should exist, but there’s something else I want to bring up in relation to the idea that art looks different on a computer screen:

I do not remember why I love La Vie.

That probably sounds hella cryptic or weird, but. When I was eleven, my mom took me to the Cleveland Art Museum, and I saw La Vie in person. I literally stopped dead in the middle of walking and gasped. Eventually she had to prod me to keep moving. I, a kid with badly-medicated ADHD who’d just skipped right by one of Monet’s Water Lilies pieces like it wasn’t there, stopped and stared at this painting for a good five or ten minutes.

Here it is. Or rather, here it isn’t.
I don’t remember what looked so different about it in person. That was over 20 years ago. But I remember that this? This would never have made me stop dead so quickly someone ran into me from behind. This–sorry, Picasso–is almost boring. This is not La Vie. Not the way it really looks. Someday I want to go back to the Cleveland Art Museum just to see it again (and maybe to actually pay attention to Water Lilies this time). Just to remember what it’s actually like.

Now I have seen modern art in person and not liked it. But @earlgraytay is so extremely right that really, truly, many of these pieces you do indeed have to see in person to genuinely say whether you like them or not. I’m not saying you can’t get an impression from digital images or prints. Certainly you can. I’m absolutely enchanted by The Persistence of Memory and often call it my favorite painting, and I’ve never seen it in person. (I want to. Someday, someday.) But do I actually know what it looks like? I mean, kind of, but not really.

Before you say a piece of modern art is downright stupid, see if you can find a local gallery and check out some of their art. Even if you come away still saying “this isn’t for me,” it may give you an idea of why people paint this stuff in the first place, and enrichment is good for the soul.

historyisntboring:

sixteenseveredhands:
2,300-Year-Old Plush Bird from the Altai Mountains of Siberia (c.400-300 BCE): this artifact was crafted with a felt body and reindeer-fur stuffing, all of which remains intact
This stuffed bird was sealed in the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that sits just beneath the barrows provides an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produce a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in preservation.
This is just one of the many well-preserved artifacts that have been found at Pazyryk. These artifacts are attributed to the Scythian/Altaic cultures.
Since I was desperate for a source I decided to find it myself. It’s real, it’s an artifact from the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and it was also displayed in the British Museum during a temporary exhibition about the Scythians in 2017.