Geeks logo

No, You Couldn't Have Made That

The Value of Contemporary Art

By Steve LlanoPublished 5 years ago 6 min read
Like
Walking up on the Guggenheim Museum, 2019, Snapchat Specs video

"I could have made that," is a common refrain overheard or expressed in contemporary art museums around the world. This short sentence expresses a lot at once: disbelief as to what counts as art in the museum, as well as disdain for it. Humor is there, but also clear disparaging of the work of the artists. It's also meant to make us feel better about ourselves, that we are actually accomplishing meaningful things in our lives compared to someone who just throws some blue paint on a canvas and calls it a day.

The sentence is said like a mantra, a refrain. It's nearly a cliche now that you'll hear this in a museum from someone. Whenever I hear it I wonder what is trying to be expressed. What can this phrase tell us about our attitude and relationship to art? And what are we trying to say about ourselves, museums, and art when we say it?

What is communicated to me is a great many things. The first is what I call fear of fear. We see contemporary art; we don't understand why it is there. There's nothing special about it. It looks like a mess, a blue canvas, a table with a bowl on it—whatever it is, we suspect we don't understand it. And we start to feel fear that we are wrong, we are stupid, we are not refined enough, or something like that. This is countered by our minds with a simple projection device: "Why is this here? This isn't art! I could have made this!"

This reaction to seeing something very commonplace or confusing in a space reserved for fine art is everything that makes art matter. You are thrown out of your preconceptions about art, about valuable art, and (most importantly for me) what art means. Meaning is what art is all about— the valorization, destitution, commemoration, or interpretation of meaning. Art has a very special place in our world because it never has a fixed meaning. The art market changes. Pieces and artists fall out of favor, then into favor, then out of favor again. Great master's works are praised, critiqued, reinterpreted, ad nauseum. Contemporary artists are familiar with all of this, and they enter the conversation about meaning with their own works that are meant to mean something about meaning. With few exceptions, art is one of the few places where the discussion that it generates is about itself. Even hyper realistic classic painting—the kind that you don't think you could make—doesn't generate a conversation about fruit bowls, but about representation.

This defensive reaction‚—'I could have made this!' or 'any child could have made this!'—should be thought of as the starting point of the value of art. It is, in rhetorical terms, a begged question: what exactly was made here? What is it? And how and why was it made? By whom? And what did they want? Another way to put it might be: what motivated them to make this? And when we begin to discuss motive we come to the realization that, although we can understand the motives of an artist, we cannot have those motives, our motives are our own. We can then generate an attitude toward the work once we deal with these questions.

Jackson Pollack's paintings in a gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The embrace of our fear of not understanding and not "getting it right" is perhaps why more people stand in front of the wall of text provided by the curator than they do in front of the paintings. If you have a museum nearby I encourage you to sit in a gallery and time how long people spend in front of the explanation versus how much they spend in front of the art. The fear that they "won't get it" means they lower their chances of getting anything at all out of the work on display.

Where does art occur? In the artist's mind? Their workshop? Somewhere in that process? When the critic calls it good? When the museum buys it? When they hang it? These questions are also related to our earlier ones, but they speak to a much larger web of motive. What are our motives for going to the museum? What are the museum's motives? What should we feel and think about that? And in what ratios?

These questions are the power of art. But unfortunately, our society has us believing that technical skill, ability, and unique actions are what are to be valued. I overheard someone in this gallery while I was trying to get the panorama to work say, "I should have been an art major." What does this mean? Does this speaker have doubts about his ability to interpret the paintings? I would say that's the easy answer. It is much more complicated than that. The speaker is expressing doubt that they can interpret the paintings correctly. It must be here in the museum because it represents the culmination, the endpoint, of a technical skill, something unique, something unrepeatable, and failure to understand why is a failure of the viewer.

Education in the United States, and most of the world, celebrates the training of a technical set of abilities above anything else. Instead of teaching us how to negotiate a world of interpretation, we demand people learn job skills, facts, truths, and the like. We think that people are successful in life because they have skills. But what if we thought they were successful because they shared interpretations? What if we thought it was valuable for them to make and share something with us, something they were motivated to make? It is hung on a wall, people come to see it and it hangs there silently.

"What do you think?" someone says. And we can answer, we can think, we can engage. And even if someone says, "I could have made that!" the art is doing what it does for us, what its societal value is.

The contemporary art museum is one of the few places left where we can have a conversation that cannot be shut down with the presence of facts. We can practice making compelling interpretations of what we see, hear, and feel in the gallery. We can listen to one another and decide. We can stand in front of a painting or a photograph and let it motivate us to question and interpret. We can even go home, pick up some paints or pencils, a blank page, and dream. But we cannot make these works. We can only respond.

Our society encourages us to stay out of things, to stay in our lane. This is why the "I could have made that!" response is so unhealthy. It's not an invitation to create art; it's a dismissal of the category of valuable art as a whole. As we investigate a work and how it makes us feel and think, we might be driven to consider the everyday spills, objects, and actions we engage in as art. And when we do, their meaning is up for grabs. What was so fixed in fact and necessity now becomes ephemeral. And this is what the best works of art do for us, all of us.

So no, you couldn't make that. Why not? Why was it made? Who made it? What were the conditions? Your answers to whatever pops into your head are the answers of motive. And attributing motive forms attitudes. Let's work on an attitude toward art that encourages more creation, more practice in interpretation, rather than one that shuts down and closes out the work of art.

art
Like

About the Creator

Steve Llano

Professor of Rhetoric in New York city, writing about rhetoric, politics, and culture.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.