I mean, why not? Since learning that a lot of “fine art” is just a tax scam/money laundering thing, the idea that a random splash of paint on a canvas is actually art and not just part of a scam doesn’t really fit.
This would actually be art.
I actively like a lot of abstract art. But yeah, I definitely could have done some of this. Jackson Pollock comes to mind. Give me a CIA payroll and a handle of whiskey and I, too, could randomly splash a series of paints at a canvas and go drop it off at an art museum.
Just look at this, this is trash art. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it, Pollock is the most popular whipping boy of the abstract art scene specifically because this is garbage. Life Magazine looked at this and posted an article asking “Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States?”
No, he’s fucking not, just look at that. Art is subjective to the viewer, of course, and art that I like may be art that you don’t like. But come on. There is no subject, whatsoever. There is no meaning. There is no color balance. There is no clever use of space. There is no subliminal message behind the apparent chaos of the artwork.
Compare this with, for example, the works of František Kupka, such as Complexe.
This is still recognizable as abstract art (or more accurately, not recognizable as anything else); but it has a clear direction of composition. I’d hang this on my wall, I wouldn’t see this in a museum and dare think “I could make this”.
A Pollock, though? My dog can make a better Pollock than Pollock did, by dipping her tail in a series of colors.
The only purpose of art is to make people feel some shit and then examine that shit they’re feeling, and feel more shit after. Pollock make people feel some shit. Even you, a hater, feel something because of his work. What’s that if not a mark of a great artist.
I prefer the Pollock
I always appreciate when a fellow art lover shits on Jackson Pollock. He’s so overrated it makes me want to carry a small copy of his paintings with me, so whenever I meet someone with low self-esteem, I can whip one of them out and tell them “If Pollock can become a celebrated artist, then you can do that thing you’re afraid of”.
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I like Pollack. I feel what he’s doing and I am moved by it. Many people do. Do you think we’re all just a bunch of rubes?
When I see Pollock’s work, I see that he was wrestling with paint itself. It’s an act of control and play. He skirts up to the edge of that dance and feels deeply. I can feel that precision that daring of fighting gravity, of letting paint leap off his brush and land with intent and recklessness. The act of creation is physical. It’s intensity is emotional and visceral.
Comparing him to Kupka misses the point. Don’t get me wrong, his work is amazing, but they have completely different approaches to abstraction, trying to do completely different things. Kupka was exploring color relationships and spiritual geometry. Pollock was mapping human energy and gesture onto canvas.
This isn’t about whether anyone could drip paint - it’s about whether they could make those drips carry the weight of human experience. Maybe your dog can. Maybe I’ll look at it and be compel and feel something, maybe all this shit is made up in my head. Maybe I only feel it because some said “It’s a Pollack” with just enough reverence that my tiny brain just followed. But I think Pollock’s paintings work because they pull me into that that urgency, playful energy he was working with. I feel the motion, the decisions, the whole physical dance he was doing. He was trying to break free from artistic convention entirely, to bypass conscious control and tap into something more primal and immediate. He was excising demons and he was able to put that on a canvas.
Maybe you’ve been fortunate enough to not have to battle your demons. But I haven’t been. And works like this inspire me to continue. When I stand in front of one of his paintings, I feel that reaching - the way he’s grasping for something beyond rational thought. For something that psychically and spiritually liberated. There’s something raw and unfiltered there that bypasses my thinking brain and hits me somewhere deeper. I feel the energy, the emotion, the trace of human movement suspended in time, but also this sense of someone diving headfirst into their own unconscious and coming back with something wild and alive. Something hopeful.
Maybe you see all this and it means nothing to you. Maybe you don’t and don’t care. All that’s fine. But for me, I see it. I feel it. I value it. And I’m not a rube. And I hope you see my humanity.
Thanks for this. At the beginning of the comment,
Do you think we’re all just a bunch of rubes?
My answer was, well kinda, yeah. By the end of it my opinion has changed.
I do still think that this is appreciated more as a performance piece than a painting, if that makes sense. You appreciate the action behind what produced this piece, and maybe by extension the piece itself but the meaning lies in the artist’s actions off the canvas. I do still think that yeah this is a pretty trash painting in as much as we define a painting. But you’ve given me a new perspective on it that I had not in fact considered before. I’m no stranger to wrestling demons but I never connected that to Pollock’s pieces before. I’m still not sure that I do, but I can understand and appreciate why you would.
There is also no good art without bad art. Even if I don’t think the result was successful, he was trying something new and novel and that has to happen to evolve our art. I don’t much like Picasso’s cubism either, but I can’t deny that it was a bold step in a new direction that then inspired other artists after him. Maybe this is similar.
I still don’t like Pollock much, I think his art really could have been made by anyone, and the only reason we know his name is because of luck and nebulous connections to CIA psy-ops, and every art magazine ceaselessly jerking him off in their articles when he was popular. But maybe I’m wrong. I do appreciate your new perspective on his work. Maybe the fact that it could have been made by anyone is part of the actual message that’s trying to be communicated in these pieces.
I appreciate you taking time to read, consider it, and making space for a different perspective. It was no easy feat writing a vulnerable defense of his work’s effect on me.
This was a beautiful conversation. Thank you both.
I think performance art is how I’ve seen it explained a lot before.
Complexes is giving me a damned headache, so that certainly new.
I saw a little sign at a craft show years ago that I’ll never forget. Plain little wooden plaque on a plain little stand.
“Sure you could make that, but will you?”
I would love to make art in a gallery that anyone could make
Can’t afford to but the drive exists
It would lose the appeal in one sense because i don’t want to insult a nobody. I want to troll the fine art collector community which is half the fun of calling modern art shit.
In another sense though, lifting nobodies up and placing their work on the same level as celeb artists is anti-imperialist AF and I’d go monthly to admire the new one.
i’d go just to DO IT THEN and i’m, uh, it would be best described as outsider art. I can tell which end of the brush goes in the paint most of the time.
Damn, got me beat!
This is a performance art piece I would visit over and over to see how the exhibit changed.
SHOW US WHAT YOU GOT
THE CIA AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
However, for a broad sector of the country’s intellectual elite, Abstract Expressionism represented the triumph of a free culture over totalitarianism because it was based on the absolute freedom of the artist. This is why the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deftly turned these artists into a propagandist weapon that American culture could wield against the Soviets, even subsidizing their work behind their backs. In New York City, the Museum of Modern Art, presided by Nelson Rockefeller, was another resource at the service of the cause, and promoted young American art by purchasing a large number of works and organizing exhibitions that traveled all over the world, such as Twelve Modern American Painters and Sculptors (1953) and The New American Painting (1958), which were shown in most large European cities between 1958 and 1959, as a means to spread the American way of life all around the world.
According to some historians, the CIA also secretly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization promoted by the United States with offices in up to 35 countries. It organized cultural events such as conferences, exhibitions, concerts, and even published over twenty prestigious magazines, including Encounter in UK, Preuve in France, Tempo Presente in Italy, Cuadernos and Mundo Nuevo in Latin America, Quadrant in Australia and Jiyu in Japan.
Abstract Art was a means of promoting political expression above the artwork itself.
You didn’t need to hunt through the bohemian art houses and liberal arts colleges for a Van Gogh or Picasso with your attitude towards the Eastern Block. You could just throw a ton of money at an outspoken critic with a middling talent.
Ayn Rand topping the sales charts with her brainrot literature and David Broder churning out forty years of hack Op-Eds for the WaPo filled similar niches in their own fields.
Now we have NFT art and Superhero movie slop and manufactured Swifty/KPop idols to fill the role. But abstract art was the overhyped “It’s good because we told you so” content of its own generation
People keep telling me “not everything you dislike is a CIA psyop” but every other day I learn something else that sucks is a CIA psyop.
They had their hands in a whole lot of pies. The CIA was the OG Wingnut Welfare Program.
In the modern day, their wings have been clipped. You’re far more likely to get your beak wet off the back of a Miriam Adelson or Peter Thiel pet project. But back in the 60s/70s? Whether you were churning out some Hollywood pro-paramilitary Chuck Norris slop or running China White through a Texas air-force base or funding the trafficking of child prostitutes through a ponzi scheme in Omaha, Nebraska, the CIA was a great place to raise some seed money.
Sigh. Even psy-ops have been privatized.
i think i remember a few "shushushush honey your friends are not a cia psyop"s growing up, but in different terms
some of my friends in school, well, i found out a friend of a friend’s dad was at the ATF writing the stupidest opinions known to man and another friend’s dad was working at the NSA. The dude we knew at the CIA, well it was the cooking school not the spy agency. I kind of feel justified in a lil bit of paranoia.
Say what you will, but it’s not going to stop me from liking a whole lot of abstract art.
Honestly, I support the government funding unpopular art. It is a good message to say “yeah, we do have the freedom to create.” As a vaguely abstract mediocre artist, if the CIA wants to fly me to Czechoslovakia to put on an exhibit, I need the greenbacks.
I think so much of the discussion around modern art gets lost in how we often encounter the image. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing has a really good bit (in the first episode?) about how often we encounter the Mona Lisa completely decontexualized, how seeing a small picture in a book doesn’t match the experience of seeing an art work in the context of the museum. (Although tbh, if you do get to see the Mona Lisa you’ll be looking at it from across the room)
I like modern art. If I ever have money my lifelong dream has been to see The Bride Stripped Bare. I was delighted to get to see a replica of Fountain and Winerack. The full breadth of Rothko seems spiritual to me. A local free place even as a few Rauschenberg’s I could spend hours looking at. So much of the conversation around modern art seems to just assume that everyone who says they like it is faking.
I like this article better on the CIA/modern art science connection than the earlier commentor’s. Keep in mind on the other side of the world, Soviet Realism was pretty much mandatory and was also state sponsored.
The Mona Lisa was so underwhelming. Was at the louvre with my friend and she HAD to see the Mona Lisa. The museum was huge and we had so much trouble finding it for some reason. Walking directly up to ancient statues and murals the size of entire walls filled with so much color and detail. We finally found the Mona Lisa and it was like the size of a sheet of printer paper, and there was ropes 20 feet back, like a six flags ride with people just funneling through. What a disappointment.
The Mona Lisa was so underwhelming. Was at the louvre with my friend and she HAD to see the Mona Lisa. The museum was huge and we had so much trouble finding it for some reason. Walking directly up to ancient statues and murals the size of entire walls filled with so much color and detail. We finally found the Mona Lisa and it was like the size of a sheet of printer paper, and there was ropes 20 feet back, like a six flags ride with people just funneling through. What a disappointment.
Or bad art!
I like good art too ofc, but I’m mostly just interested in what people have to say.
I’m just as bad about junk food and soda, but at least the abstract art won’t give me diabetes.
Also, a display that shows how much it’s cost over the years for you to get this gallery space next to the highest offer on the current example of “some rando who also could do this.” If the second number is lower than the first, display a frowny face.
Title the interactive piece “Can I Afford Food This Month?”
Free spot at a gallery? Your terms are acceptable.
”I could paint that” is the most lazy criticism against abstract art.
I think a better version is:
“If this was painted by a random person and not a well known artist no one would like it.”
Which is very often the case with abstract art.I prefer the conspiracy theory criticism that abstract art was propped up by the CIA and used as a tool to break down and corrupt the mind of the viewer, making the viewer more malleable and open to suggestion.
That doesn’t sound like a v good psyop, if that was their aim
Eh, I could do that psyop
This comment is so good I’m quitting the internet for the day
The addition of the reply is some great performance art
I hate modern photography!!!
(Not everyone has seen Pecker, this line is from Pecker.)
Do it repeatedly putting next to no effort into each iteration, so the contraption is throwing up tens of paintings per minute all while booming voice booms ”DO IT THEN, SHIT HEAD” every five seconds or so to a packed exhibit. Could be fun.
that would require a shit ton of paint and a lot of cleaning
Aren’t there already tons of exhibits that engage with audience members to create new works? The only thing this idea is really adding is being rude to them.
Like, I imagine a good 60% or more of the people who are visiting an art museum have some experience painting, have maybe has a couple of classes. You’ll have the occasional arrogant person make the claim and draw a stick figure, and those people may even be more likely to engage with such an exhibit, but I’d guess that roughly half the time someone steps up and makes a painting which is competent, though it may lack the artistic meaning audiences expect from greats. And of course time and materials are important constraints too.
I’m not a visual artist- I’m a musician. I can totally stroll up to a karaoke event or open mic night and handle myself. Most of my friends are visual artists, and they show those skills off when we play Drawful or Pictionary. Some of my friends ARE professional graphic designers, some of them do furry porn commissions, some of my friends run their own businesses where they mostly do other skills but are artistic enough to do a lot of the art themselves instead of paying someone else to.
So I imagine something like this would develop community. Maybe one person comes back once a month to do an ongoing series. Maybe someone makes a character that gets popular and others start to copy it. Maybe people try to re-create famous paintings. Maybe someone starts to make controversial things and the project gets shut down.
Maybe someone starts to make controversial things and the project gets shut down.
I expect this about 12 minutes after it goes up, knowing people.
