Wow. Brooks discovers conceptual art!
5
The art selected reflects the panelists taste, germane to a T Magazine story, to the “who is the wokest of them all” zeitgeist. Ours is the most neo-Victorian and anxiously self-policed era since the 1950’s.
One painter who does get mentioned in the piece, is the great Philip Guston. The panelists should have recalled his famous words from the 60’s: “ To our increasing boredom, artists today are achieving what they set out to do.”
10
Are the huge offensive photos of Trump that run at the top of 8 out of 10 op-eds or editorials ... art?
What is the dark, political-aesthetic message of those who decide that those offensive images are relevant and necessary?
What pathetic, execrable art will those in the future make of the images we must suffer daily?
1
I am pretty confident that we will not find this era's art among the elite ,no matter how much is paid for a stainless steal rabbit.
I am also pretty confident that the average dog would be better at recognizing human emotions than Brooks. Brooks went hiking in the mountains and is lost and can't find his way home.
The universal rule when lost in the mountains is to go down hill Brooks doesn't seem to know that.
4
If politics is the study of power - how it is achieved, maintained, used, and lost - then art has always been political. The earliest artworks - cave paintings, rock carvings, small carved figurines - were often about accessing power over natural forces, but also about power over the social group or community: "Look at how my power to paint/carve/sculpt allows me to communicate with the spirits who will help us!" By the same token, I think that Brooks misapprehends the relationships among art, politics, and emotions. I cannot think of any art piece I have ever seen that is devoid of emotional content. Brooks may or may not recognize and accept the emotions at issue, but they are always there.
3
The thing about art is that real art tries for something new. Any current artist stands on the shoulders of giants. Previous art does not go away, and the statements are there for all and forever. Hence, the current generation tries to explore what has not been covered, or be deemed derivative. So, yes, by the process, art becomes more personal, more experimental because so much has already been done.
We feel what we feel. The fact that there are people who think it’s their place to educate us how we SHOULD feel goes a long ways toward explaining the election of Donald Trump.
5
Brooks writes: "If asked to name the era-defining artists from the 49 years prior to 1970, most of us would come up with world-famous artists: Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, etc."
Questions is, how many of the people who might list these artists have ever experienced their work beyond a piece or two if that.? Without the answer to that question how can we say they created art that mattered to anyone except those interested in art to begin with?
Many of these names were commonly mentioned in popular culture when popular culture was dominated by three television channels. Comedians referenced them. I had heard of Picasso and Pollack for example long before I had ever seen a photograph of their work, much less actually seen the work itself.
And Picasso's most famous work? Guernica. Quite political.
Rivera, Kahlo? Political as well.
3
Good lord- Brooks on art is by far the worst thing I’ve read in the Times recently.
His hackiness is without parallel...
9
@Get honest now
Well, he cannot write about what a superior political philosophy that Conservatism is. (Well, he has, but had to stick to the theoretical, and avoid all connections to the real world.) Or how Trickle Down will work if only the liberals will let it. Or how morally superior every sort of Christianity is.
2
“Who will teach is us to feel?” is a wonderful question! On the surface, it implies feeling bad about erosion after a storm, even if the erosion washed away waste.
In the states of digitally united psychosis, weak beliefs fall easily. Harder to take down are the strong pillars built upon foundations of deception and ignorance.
What we should feel is only natural. When hungry, we know to eat. When bruised and bloodied, we know to mend. When we choose to feel, we educate and guide with enlightenment.
Very much like we choose to eat more whole grains and fewer burgers after learning about the dangers of animal fats, we choose. Naturally, we can choose to be guided by what we feel. What dangerous things do we still consume as a result of ignorance and misguided feelings?
If we nostalgically indulge in blissful mega-burger ignorance too long, we will return to the unhealthy stupor of our previous state having forgotten feelings of peace, wellness, goodness and strength.
Some years ago I recall a NYT Sunday Magazine article on what the average American would like to see in a painting. If memory serves, the composite created by the Times included George Washington crossing the Delaware , George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, lambs, dogs, beautiful vistas...well you get the idea. Not a Picasso or Pollack moment to be seen. I personally prefer art which stimulates both the senses and intellect but do not condemn those who find comfort in a George Washington depiction of any sort. I would suggest to Mr. Brooks, however, that in pursuing his New Age agenda that he not discourage people from at least exposing themselves to art which is challenging lest we devolve into the good old days when Picasso and Pollock were subject to derision.
1
@romac
Hey romac, if you move your eyes about 2 inches across the page, you'll see this:
"America got Trump, how did that work out for you? Put a clown in charge and you will get a circus. This will not end well for Great Britain.."
So, you wanna know what someone said about "Pablo Picasso," well - this:
“The 1913 Armory Show dropped like a bomb on the art establishment, and on America. The Cubists fragmented realty. Picasso took a diabolical pleasure in warping appearances, deforming faces and twisting bodies. The Armory Show was routinely compared to road shows and circuses to stress that cubism and futurism was 'faked' art – a vaudeville performance or a circus sideshow act. Modern art was defined as: 'immorality' – 'insanity' – 'schizophrenia' – 'psychopathy' – 'degenerate.”
So, you wanna know who said that, romac, well - look:
"In The Times..."
Yeah romac, welcome to:
“Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a dystopian 1984, Winston Smith endures a squalid existence in the totalitarian superstate of Oceania under the constant surveillance of the Thought Police – Big Brother.”
Yeah, "1984," romac:)
1
Sad to say but visual art is now essentially a dead medium that lacks any popular engagement and is controlled by critics, political agitators, and phonies.
If you created a list of the 25 greatest movies, novels, or works of popular music of the last 50 years, you would likely get something much closer to what Mr. Brooks is looking for.
7
Republican scoundrels eliminated arts education in schools.
5
CORRECTION: I should have noted in my first Comment that the LOSS OF THE "human particularity" so crucial to art began with abstract work. Thus even the status of "era-defining artists" such as Pollock and Rothko should be questioned.
1
We live in barren times
6
The triumph of PROPAGANDA over thought is a problem.
2
To please, move, and instruct seems to have aged pretty well, but a little instruction goes a long way, no matter the art form.
2
That much for Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. David, here's a challenge. Spend four days without your phone and with only a quarter in your pocket and feel how so many of us live, Then write about what matters to those of us who don't earn what you earn per column at the Times.
2
This witless bit of philistinism is what happens when you write about art using a spreadsheet.
Brooks should stick to his specialty: lukewarm takes on the importance of centrism.
9
Thank you
This view of art reduces it to nothing but a form of self-help, a kind of balm for the soul that will somehow make us feel better. The greatest art is a powerful experience in and of itself. It is about the human struggle to be seen and known. One great example of that is the inexpressibly powerful “The Captive” by Michaelangelo, in which we see the figure of the slave struggling to push his way out of the stone, to emerge as recognizably human. Feelings? They are overrated.
3
Be comforted, sir. Many folks are still buying the works of Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light."
4
OH MAN:
"Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video - installations or words."
What a bunch of "morons," no - seriously, see:
“Critical Studies In Feeble Mindedness. Feeble-mindedness is a leading social problem which insistently claims the attention of all branches of social science. Only the highest grades of mental defectives can learn the three R's effectively. Binet and Simon once classified the grades of feeble-mindedness on this basis and claimed that, roughly, idiots cannot talk, imbeciles cannot read or write, and morons cannot deal with abstractions.” Edgar Doll
Yeah, there is only ONE way to "effect an emotion," and that is through "articulated directed tensions," see:
“Levels of pitch structure, as of other element-structures, can perhaps usefully be conceived as analogically of relative 'distance': the most fundamental as 'background' in an imagined three-dimensional field, the most immediate as 'foreground,' in 'focus' as one regards the structure at close range. The metaphoric conceit of relative focus is helpful in engendering the image of structural 'depth' in this sense, and in conceiving of various 'middlegrounds' coming into increasingly sharp exposure as details 'blur,' and as increasingly comprehensive events are the objects of attention.” Structural Functions In Music – Wallace Berry
Yeah - OH MAN!!!
1
Not everyone has the time or money to go to your favorite art exhibition.
1
Perhaps Brooks could curate an exhibition of "Degenerate Art"?
Certainly not you David. That's for dang sure.
I can paint better than that !
The T magazine list is is thought-provoking, to be sure, but in no way is it representative of the range and variety of contemporary art. This comes as no surprise, since of the three artists tasked with compiling the list, two — 66 percent — are themselves conceptual artists rather than painters, sculptors, photographers, etc. When I read the piece last week I found this choice on the part of T’s editors mystifying; now it is proving consequential as well, as Times readers debate the state of American culture on the basis of a sample that, again, intrigues but at the same time rather grossly distorts.
11
Many political works of art make us feel and more importantly, make us think. They are evocative and provacative. Is David Brooks suggesting that overtly emotional art...ie.realism..somehow does a better job of making us feel? I may not "like" the works David Brooks alludes to--they may even be gimmicky and derivative and ultimately aimed toward the art market rather than the viewer..but please don't suggest that art should be employed for any specific purpose. It was the realist style, after all, overtly "emotional" works, that was often championed by dictatorships.
I read this article aloud to my wife, Mary Barnet, eldest daughter of artists Will Barnet and Mary Sinclair. Mary is a member of the World Poetry Foundation, Editor of Poetrymagazine.com since 1996 and a Member of the World Haiku Association.
She agreed with David's assessment of visual art today but wanted to let readers know Poetry has not abandoned beauty or emotion and still flourishes as meaningful expression of human emotions.
3
@Richard E. Schiff correction, Mary is a member of the World Poetry Society, not Foundation, apologizes to my wife!
The rhetorical question of the title ("Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?") leaves me wondering about the connection between that query and the apparent subject of the column. Maybe there's a clue in the correct statement that "our politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life."
The "post"-modern era is indeed a reaction to the events and effects of modernity--"modernity" being defined as beginning in, say, 1890 or so, and continuing to the present. Our lives have been transformed in such astonishing ways, and the 20th century so violently wrenched body and soul asunder, it's no wonder that the creative spirits who gravitate to artistic expression have also been ravaged.
Who is it who said that after Auschwitz, art is impossible? The post-modern is the cynical, exhausted, outraged, or merely comical response to a world that conducts war on the feeling soul in many ways. Contemporary art embodies the stunned or confused or angry response of the artist, who in properly-conducted world would bring beauty and real humor into our lives.
Who will teach us how to feel--when, just as Rousseau warned, the culture has suborned and violated in so many ways, and made it so difficult for genuine art to find a resting place?
5
If I wanted to gauge the impact of art on the ordinary person, the absolute last people I would want to interview would be artists and art conservators.
Why, for example, can almost everyone identify the shape of a Star Trek starship? They make no real sense as spacecraft, with their spars and engine pods. But as works of art, they tell us a great deal about ourselves.
1
An art exhibit organized by a highbrow lifestyle and culture magazine? Not the most appealing premise, sounds more like a urban fashion photo op. But Mr. Brooks has piqued my interest.
Concerning this column's main question. It is difficult to compare late 20th century art to art of the preceding century. There was dramatic change in the visual arts. Art reflects a culture's values and the late 20th century is all about technological growth. Artistic movements kept pace with this rapid change. I give the Post Modernist movement more credit for expressive content than Mr. Brooks: some content is political, some social commentary, some highly personal. Some work is more inspired and sincere than other work. But all Post Modern art wrestles with our identity during rapid change.
That said, there are interesting shared qualities between post modernist concepts and current Trumpian sentiment: distrust of institutions and skepticism rather than rational thought. Perhaps the intellitectual movement begun over 50 years ago has filtered through popular culture, evolving into middle America value set.
1
"Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. .."
Yes but is this art, really?
It is not. In the absence of imaginative and technical skills, we get the cognitive wheels spinning in overdrive. Looking, ever opportunistically, for that gasp of surprise.
Art has survived, but underground, far away from the main galleries and art schools.
6
As far as contemporary art, we are in a fallow, jejune stage. No one really knows how to address a system that is constituted by digital, the internet, and all images and all music all the time. A philosopher or a prophet must first define the system. Then art will follow, and there will be a renaissance.
In this room full of mirrors of the here and now born of mobile devices, there is little chance of a person having a transcendent aesthetic experience. Facebook and other social media are not only noxious drivel, they present an opportunity cost for a depth experience.
Someone should do a painting entitled, "The Death of the Underground." Because that fact is a major factor in the thick stew of American culture turning into a thin gruel.
2
The problem with the US, and much of Western society, is not that people can't feel but that they can't think (critically). If people thought, they wouldn't vote as President a man who is obviously unsuited for the job — intellectually, ethically and temperamentally. The Trump victory (such as it was) was emotion over thought.
3
In the theatre, economics has played a great role in what Brooks is talking about. It is very rare now that new psychologically realistic plays are being produced. Real playwrights are being diverted to streaming television where they can actually make a living through writing. Which is why some of the best dramatic writing occurs today on TV. The theatre has been left to pander to an increasingly aging population of smug liberals who get together to congratulate themselves on their superior moral and political ideologies. The question of “What does it mean to be human?” Has been replaced by “What does it mean to be a particular human being within a clearly defined category at a particular place and time”. Post-modernism has done away with concepts like universality and truth. But art needs to be both.
2
My guess is that the art nominated by these artists and curators will not be the art of our period most remembered and revered decades and centuries from now.
A similar evolution has occurred in classical, "composed" music over the past century--there has often been a devaluing of the "beautiful" and emotional sides of music in pursuit of "academic," abstract, formal, and even ugly musical expression. (And I acknowledge that many of the horrors of the past century may require musical ugliness to be adequately expressed.)
These trends, I think, are cyclic, because people will always desire the beautiful, the lyrical, and the emotionally moving components of art (as well as, of course, other components).
5
If only an insular group in the art world pays attention to these political art works, how much do they matter? Maybe there’s a good reason nobody outside that solipsistic world has heard of any of it. If a tree falls in the woods.....
3
A fascinating and insightful article. Thank you! I would question though the statement that politics has brutalised our emotional life. It is true that politics, like any form of violence - which is what politics has devolved into in the modern world, a war of ideas and beliefs and convictions - has the capacity to produce this effect. But it only produces this effect because we allow this as individuals, because we do not choose otherwise. We are not powerless here. As individuals we have very little political power, but we do retain the power of choice over what and who we will be. Not necessarily externally, but internally. War always brutalises, even a war of ideas. But we can choose not to engage in this way. If we choose anger we will produce a world of anger. Many will say, how can one NOT be angry in today's world? And that is a very important question. Anger blunts the capacity for understanding, and without understanding there is no possibility for resolution. Yet the question remains. What does one do with the anger and outrage? If we try to stand back a little, the way some works of art would have us do, and just observe the anger or injustice, don't engage with it, something else enters our experience, something deeper and sadder but somehow truer. This is one of the most important roles of art. Not to be political but to allow us to see more truly, without the obscuring effect of emotions like anger which like fear animals feel too...
1
Art is always partly a mirror that reflects the society in which it's made, and partly a direct force leading to social and political change; depending on the particular era, it's more one than the other.
Longing for artists to come up with "beauty" in an age where even the elite pay scant attention to anything other than pop culture is deeply unfair to artists. In the end, every age gets the art it deserves.
4
"People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic."
I have also seen tiny children with no education respond to art -- music and visual -- with a demonstration of pure joy and of course no politics.
"This list fascinated me because it comes at a moment when everything is political — and our politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life."
The list is fascinating but not exactly enticing to me, tho I know I'll look for information about some works listed. Munch's 1893 painting The Scream is exactly how I feel at our current political moment. Van Gogh's Starry Night always summons awe, astonishment, and wonder, and I can almost feel the dampness of intimacy in Cassatt's The Bath.
Over the last few years I've seen several exhibits that I'll never forget: Gee's Bend Quilts and World War 1 American artists. I saw both of these at least five times, and the World War 1 I'd actually gone to see another exhibit showing and just peeked in since I was already there at the Frist. I thought I'd have no interest in a war exhibit. The other was an opening exhibit of contemporary painter James Lavadour. If a work of art or an exhibit rocks your world, it's done its job.
Thank you for this interesting column and your perspective.
3
1. David is right about everything being political. For example, I cannot be the only one wondering whether the alternately incomprehensible and reprehensible Luke P. on 'The Bachelorette' is a Trump supporter.
2. Maybe Republicans were wrong to eliminate so much arts education in public schools?
1
I should have noted in my first Comment that the "human particularity" so crucial to art began with abstract work. Thus even the status of "era-defining artists" such as Pollock and Rothko should be questioned.
I always thought that the most fundamental thing ''art'' was supposed to do was to provoke. That provocation could be intellectual or emotional. It doesn't matter really.
The other thing about art being ''political'' before 50 years ago, is that, just to produce it and be recognized by the ''community'' was perhaps an act that didn't reach the subject. I am talking of course about women, or minorities or the persecuted.
Considering that everything in this world seems to be more and more subjective, it stands to reason that there will always be some that try and bend the artist, the matter, the meaning, or whatever to some ''political'' statement.
Just take in the art and enjoy. Fairly simple.
1
I think the list described in this article says more about current art critque than about current art.
Beautiful, evocative art is still being created. It's just not what is fashionable amongst the art critics. The article even points out that most of the artists aren't known to the general public. If they're unknown, they're certainly not teach us how to feel, regardless of the subject matter.
3
Anger is boring. Just boring.
Also, many of the pieces seem intent on teaching me something, based on the mistaken assumption that I don't already know. That's boring, too.
Then there are other contemporary artists, Cindy Sherman is one (of many) who comes to mind, who's work has a layered nuance of meanings and even permits my own interpretations beyond the artist's intentions. The artist has a relationship with the piece and I have a relationship with the piece, and somewhere in between, like a Venn diagram, there is human contact.
O, joy!
Perhaps if Mr. Brooks traveled to Philadelphia, he might have mentioned a few other older artists – many revolutionary in their day and considered traditional now. Among the older Philadelphia artists are Thomas Eakins (revolutionary in his day), Mary Cassatt. N.C. Wyeth, Daniel Garber, John Sloan (a member of the Ashcan 8 that painted the underside of NY), Dox Thrash, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
He might travel to the Barnes Foundation (his collection was also considered revolutionary in its day).
Some of our newer wonderful artists include Bill Scott, Joseph Barrett, Celia Reisman, and the artists at Art Sanctuary Philadelphia.
Or since he did mention Alexander Calder and he is enamored of family and religion, he might like to know that Calder’s grandfather did the statue of William Penn atop City Hall, his father did the statues in Logan Circle, and Calder has a mobile called The Ghost in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So, some refer to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (the city’s main avenue) as the Avenue of the Father, the Son, and the Unholy Ghost.
What inspires changes with time and with each viewer. T Magazine speaks for many - but doesn't speak for everyone.
1
Interesting, David. Heidegger posits the "field of being" that we are born into as including understanding, language and "mood" which I take to mean "feeling" - in my experience color itself, as well as shape, is "emotional" - & one of O'Keefe's "black rocks" is "political".
I prefer Jackson Pollocks' response when asked what he paints: "I paint paint." To be a great artist isn't the same thing as having the gifts of a philosopher, theologian, epic author. This isn't to say that some can't create artistic responses to the Great Questions, but it's not their forte, and by demanding it we inevitably turn them into some version of Socialist Realists.
2
The largest, deep black, all words capitalized title, Who Will Teach Us to Feel is a jarring question, such a title presuming it will be answered in the article, however, we are all born feeling, just as we did in the womb when touch first began developing and the Big Bell rang loud when I read, “Only a few [pieces] explore relationships and emotional connection.” Yes, emotional connections, now fraying as we increasingly live through our smart(?!) phones...and thank you, David; there is a lot to feel through your writing.....
Well, every one who fails to understand contemporary art and some who recommend Jackson Pollock--do you not know that for many his work was scribbling like a five year old, and Picasso was criticized for his muiltple faces and so forth? Having not yet read all the responses--do you, David, and others not know that Marcel Duchamp is prpbably the most signifcant artist of the 20th Century and his work this, very day, isr eagrded more highly thana Picasso. I am, now, a post-painterly politcal artist, and I hve been so, not totally, for the last 60 years. elliottbarowitz.com
1
I think David wants art that is educative in a comforting, more or less hopeful way. Art as cultural mirror makes him very uncomfortable, even fearful. He writes “one of the things art has traditionally done is educate the emotions,” suggesting this art fails in that respect, and, yet, his appraisal is not dispassionate. He is troubled by the works he’s viewed. Hasn’t art traditionally educated the emotions by being troublesome, even terrifying? Guernica comes to mind, or Caravaggio’s “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.”
1
At the top of my head, Ensor, Goya, George Grosz and their cohorts who expressed life and death with images of firing squads, concentration camps and more. Even Pollock's energy in his works are full of lashes of frustration and anger. Peter Saul(still working today) and Philip Guston. And it goes on. The difference after the 60's for the most part is the artists' materials becoming evermore industrialized. The direct connection between the artist's hand and its emotion continues to diminish. Videos, commercial art applications, heaps of our discards, deliberate repetition. It can leave me dislocated. I guess that's the point. But I do miss the plasciticity of the artist's mind and hand. There's always beauty inherent in all these works. There's always political yearnings and criticism expressed in all these works because that is human.
2
In his list of pre-1970's visual artists, Brooks missed the one who had, by far, the most influence on the zeitgeist: Andy Warhol. Along with the Beatles, Warhol changed cultural attitudes and lowered the boundaries between "fine art" and popular art.
This legitimizing of popular culture among taste-makers is one of the main reasons why the post-1970's fine artists are as unknown to the general public as they are--in the public mind, they have been crowded out by pop culture, a significant portion of which is no longer looked down upon as intellectually uninteresting. The influence of Warhol/Beatles is such that our culture now venerates some artists (musical examples are Chuck Berry and New Orleans' Professor Longhair) who were considered trivial and lowbrow when they were creating their most important work.
Is this a good thing? I don't think so, because in the public mind it tends to devalue artists, like conservatory-trained "modern classical" composers, who use hard-won technique to incorporate a level of aesthetic meaning and structure in their work that operates on a different level from pop.
(Again, I use a musical example because it's what I know best, but I expect that there are analogies in the other arts too.)
1
Mr. Brooks also sounds so befuddled that he is hard to read. Art has ALWAYS been provocative and political -- whether it is theater, written works of literature, visual arts... Art is often conceptual -- it is a visual depiction of an idea or concept and makes a statement. Because artists have always depended upon patronage, they have also always been political -- supporting or subverting messages related to their situation.
For a slightly different experiment, look at the art you have in your house, what your friends have in their houses, what your co-workers have at their desk. Does it fall on one side or the other of 1970?
Not sure if I should include what your friends, neighbors and co-workers wear on their t-shirts.
2
It is easier to be adamant, certain and self-righteous when focused on ideology, social justice, identity politics. The latter includes white supremacists, xenophobes, nativists, pro-lifers, militant gun owners and extreme radicals of every identity category. This is not to make any equivalence, just that many of us embrace a fierce 'political' stance while unable to think about the "granular" aspects of psychological/interpersonal reality.
Some attribute this depleted capacity to our reliance on screened devices, texting and limited face to face encounters.
Art -including much theater- has also dodged the burden of grappling with the nuances of individual experience. Character-driven plays are seen as old fashioned; only long form TV seems to require that we care about a person vs get shocked by plot lines.
Marxists claimed their ideas are the true science of human society. Capitalists claim there is no society without markets. Evangelists assure us Jesus will come in the End Times. Outrage can be like Googling- fast & furious. Populist leaders now exploit our reductionism.
2
"There almost seems to be a taboo now against capturing states like joy, temptation, gratitude, exaltation, betrayal, forgiveness and longing."
That's because humans are lost in ignorance and they suffer.
I think Brooks has hit upon the reason why the left's tactics of using a pure morality as a political weapon might backfire; anyone with a decent grip of psychology knows that people, whatever their ideology, dislike being labelled as evil. It doesn't win votes or elections- though many Trump voters are lost, for now and surely more remediable than Trump himself
1
Anger dominates our politics. It also dominates today's art.
1
Brooks doesn't remember his history. There was a time when our society valued art even though there was no obvious return on investment. It understood that symphonies, operas, theaters, poetry, painting, photography, and on and on needed to be supported because these were always markers of a healthy and vibrant civilization. The government used to fund these means of expression for the betterment of all, until Republicans in the 80s objected and politicized it. Brooks should look back to that time to understand how an ignorant Republican view twisted and warped sensibilities, and altered a community.
But Brooks should look back further and understand why people create art and how it was being created. There is a deep connection between artist and patron which has changed over the millennia. Art is expensive to create in not energy but also through training and honing craft. We are now in an era when the patron could be anyone and art is something largely coming from the individual wanting to be heard using their own resources.
The Gulf War, income inequality, scapegoating immigrants, etc - the individual witnesses abuses and uses their art to express their outrage and frustration as our society largely grows coarser. In the week in which the President of the United States uses his bully pulpit to preach his racist ideology, you are asking why art, in your eyes, is becoming more political?!? Don't return to being shocked and innocently wonder how it got that way.
1
In his last column Brooks stated that a principal way Donald Trump demonstrates his hate for America is by promoting nostalgia: “to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past.” And yet - here is Brooks being nostalgic for the art of the past: “in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition.” Apparently, according to the Gospel of Brooks, it’s wrong for Trump to be nostalgic, but for Brooks to wallow in nostalgia – as he is doing here by appealing to nostalgic art – well that’s just fine.
Brooks goes on to say that the truths expressed in art of earlier eras: “are the truths that keep us sane.” But here’s what really keeps us sane – jobs providing food on the table and a roof over our heads, and education and healthcare. These are all things that conservative economic policies have gutted, policies supported by David Brooks. “Politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life” – yes, conservative politics have.
But, says Brooks, if we just had some of the old-time art depicting beauty, it would distract us from the bills we can’t pay. This is the Art-as-Escape school of thought – don’t look at the ugly reality, just distract yourself with the emotionally uplifting.
And it’s true; art has often been used as an escape from reality, to promote the fantastic, to give us false hope – just look at the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
1
Man does not live by bread alone
1
The video, This is America has a shocking but powerful political message, though Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death's montage strategy piles up a universe of emotions.
Often, it's easier to see what's wrong than what's right. What is right to live a decent life, independent of social status, financial status, cultural status, and educational status. We transcend the human-made structures and approach each other through our shared emotions and the aesthetic arts. Let's start there.
Most of the (little) government money going to the arts is funneled through academic institutions, which have abandoned their previous mission to educate in order to train the next generation of tech workers. Add to this the sophistries and overreaching of the social sciences, that uses a utilitarian aesthetic and you get an idea of how this sad state of affairs has come about. Another important point, that I think Brooks fails to mention is that art depends on an audience. The art of any particular period is a reflection of the society that responded to it. Art is like the canary in the cage in a mineshaft. When it dies, it’s a sign to get out quick. Perhaps the creators of such pieces as Brooks aren’t really artists, but just identify as such.
Whoa! You totally underestimate Kara Walker. Thank God T Magazine included her! Hers is probably the most significant work listed. Clearly you didn't go to the exhibit in Brooklyn. :(
1
David Brooks is oddly detached from our national collapse and, here, at least, is bemused by commercial artists' adoration of self.
On the Titanic, he would have tsk-tsked smudges on the captain's dinner jacket.
In the Weimar Republic, he would have avoided noticing the crudities reaching further and further into daily life.
Sadly (and I speak as one who has read the Times for more than a half century), he fits nicely into the Times's posture of whistling and looking the other way.
1
Another fascinating article, thanks.
In considering the political content of this list, there are a couple of factors worth keeping in mind. Firstly, the choices represent the views and priorities of the particular people asked; as such they do not necessarily reflect the state of the art world overall.
Secondly, the question was not to name the greatest works since 1970, or the most significant, or your favorites; but rather works that 'define the contemporary age'. So the framing of the question itself creates a disposition toward selection of works of a more political nature, which are more naturally tied to the particularities of their time and place. Indeed one could argue that the greatest works of art are precisely those that transcend their own time, not necessarily define it.
So the sort of universal artistic statements whose dearth Mr. Brooks laments may well be out there, they just don't make this list.
2
Some years ago, I was at a fundraiser at a gallery in East Hampton. It featured an artist whose name I have forgotten, but I do remember thinking that I could have done those paintings myself with a caulking gun and some Magic Markers. The paintings were a sort of cross between Grandma Moses' primitive style and road markings. I lifted the frames surreptitiously and saw prices like $65,000 and $37,500 and such like. I concluded I was in the wrong business if that was all it took.
At the height of the event, the artist himself showed up, making a dramatic entry, frowzy-haired and dressed in turquoise and gold pajamas with slippers that I imagined would belong to Aladdin. To my surprise, a whole, buzzing claque of the guests started tittering (the old kind of tittering) and clustered around him, oohing and aahing and complimenting his "deep comprehension" and "consummate relevance." They also jostled to be right next to him when the society page photographer showed up.
The Emperor's New Clothes is a very old story, but very true. Most modern art illustrates that eternal weakness of human nature. The veneer of political justice is just the latest in a long line of devices meant to prop up artist's vanity, moral and/or otherwise. It provides one more opportunity to look down on the unwashed, untutored deplorables who are so dull as to like the paintings of Thomas Kincaid or Currier and Ives, and too narrow fail to see the underlying profundity of a heap of trash.
2
Pssst...Currier&Ives was a printmaking comlany, not a painter.
As always, Brooks has bizarrely selective vision.
Is Mr. Brooks aware that we are living in an age known as Peak Television, in which personal stories of a quality previous unknown are in great abundance, and are being enthusiastically embraced by audiences? It is probably the biggest thing to happen in media in this century. I'm not entirely surprised Brooks hasn't noticed.
Only someone like Brooks would take issue with the fact that great artists tend to notice injustice. They notice, because they feel things with their entire humanity.
1
Myself, I find the political art Brooks describes as self-righteous and self-pitying. I can’t judge whether it is "art" or not, but it is clear that me that these artists have closed off access to all their emotions except what’s needed to express an anger-fueled victimology.
Many people deny their emotions in a similar fashion, and live in a world exclusively of ideas. We call such people ideologues. Blind to their own feelings, they are blind to others' as well. They are thus incapable of empathy for fellow citizens who are also suffering, and can only relate to them on the basis of preconceived ideas, or prejudices. So, they are unable to make common cause with them to fight a common enemy.
That is the dilemma of Democrats, today, who see the white working-class as an enemy, when they were once, and could be again a natural ally in the fight for economic justice.
7
So a list compiled by a group of artists and museum curators leaves you cold. They should have asked a group of people selected at random from across the country for their thoughts. I am sure their ideas would have been more relevant.
2
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that he believed modern art was a conspiracy between artists and rich people to make the middle class feel stupid.
I miss that man.
15
As someone who works with infants and toddlers I can tell you: the only emotions we are born with can be summarized in one word: mine.
We are selfish and grasping right out of the gate. Most of my work consists of teaching relationship and sharing; the things we all need to get along. Empathy must be patiently shown and it ain’t easy.
2
The group most dismissive of this list and anyone that might see this list as something worth discussing are the thousands of artists that struggle to make their work everyday in a world that has thrown most artists away. Artists need to make a living to make art. They need health insurance and they need a place to live and work. Right wing politicians since Reagan have made it their goal to defund the arts. Right wing politicians have made it their goal to make sure those that work in the freelance economy can't afford health insurance. Academic institutions have made it so the job of full time professor that most artists could rely on in the past for income barely exists. Then, we have this list! Who cares!!! Give artists health insurance. Give artists an income and job!!! Give artists fairly priced housing and studios!!! Once artists have those things, you might find a very different kind of list.
3
Just one thing. Who qualifies as an artist?
Who will teach us how to feel? Parents, mostly. I doubt many of us were exposed to art until we were older, maybe in our teens, but we knew how to feel because we felt empathy, sympathy, sometimes anger, disgust, love.
Maybe David Brooks didn't get this, but that doesn't mean most of us didn't. And yes, anger is one of those feelings. "Let’s smash injustice with a sledgehammer" is one of those sentiments art deals with, as well it should. If you don't see more than this, I suggest you're not looking hard enough. Or maybe that's all you want to see.
2
Nothing like taking leftist fringe art and making it seem mainstream and threatening. Most of the "art" museums in the US are full of pastoral scenes and portraits.
2
Much art and many artists have long been in the service of politics. The Russian and Italian avant garde became tools of state propaganda. Leni Riefenstahl produced nauseating propaganda that was also good art. I think a lot of contemporary artists have carried on the idea that good art must be committed to a greater cause. Art as a purely aesthetic pursuit is now viewed with suspicion and easily labeled as "commercial" or "decadent."
2
You have reminded me of the good ole days of "iconography".
There was a time in our "Western Tradition" when religious icons were the only art allowed.
Icons were used to present 'church history', the 'lives of the Saints', parables, and to show the hierarchical structure of society that God demands.
The rich, be them priests or kings went at the top, an army was under them and way at the bottom was the populace - subjects NOT citizens! - and do note that army (Plato's Silvers) that is between the miniscule Golden top level and those hungry serfs/peasants, way down.
Now, why would any society need an army between the top level and the bottom level?
This is a sad column.
Let's hope it's a flash in the pan. Remember, the last great art motif of the Church was that skeleton thing, the rot of the body that Believers were urged to contemplate.
That was because that was all the church had to offer. It had run it's course.
Covenant was becoming Constitution.
The Church which had ruled the world, was being reduced to 103 acres.
And, people were learning how to read.
They didn't need icons any more.
The Enlightenment isn't dead, David.
It's just resting.
Catching its breath.
So, there are 25 boring/bloody/inscrutable pieces of art out there.
You were only looking in one place.
If you are trying to scry from art, go to your local state/county fair and, there, you'll see the future, and, yes, it involves humans..... real live people.
But, likely, no razor cuttings.....
2
Thanks a lot Dave. We know that President Trump has been wagging the media for the last three years, has been waging the DNC since his election...but now you're telling me he's wagging the art world. Sheeesh.
Everything is politics, David, and politics is everything. Have you not heard: "Judge them by their works"? I don't care what story you carry in your mind about God. I don't care what your belief crutch or system is. It is your politics that really shows your character.
The Churches of the Republican Way and their Donald Trump are showing us this - in black and white.
1
Very interesting observation. I wonder about culture creating emotion though. Wouldn't it make more historical sense if emotion created culture?
If that's the case, (culture creating emotion) then how could we express outside the confines of society and politics? It would seem the more concrete the artwork is, the less it's felt. The point is made both ways apparently.
1
Brook's diatribe in the NYT against the tragic and ill starred Abbie Hoffman makes me wonder how he has the gall even to speak about "feelings." While, unlike David, Hoffman might have been a flawed person, he did have the courage to try and stop the despicable Vietnam War, something from which we as a nation have yet to recover. Had his nemesis been a tad older I seriously wonder what he might have done other than to go on, as he so often does, with his flowery Victorian claptrap about feelings, something he fully lacked when it came to besmirching the memory of a, despite his flaws, noble human being who eventually took his own life in no small way due to our failure to stop a needless and counterproductive blood letting, let alone to address the social evils of poverty from which the expense of the war kept us from doing at such a crucial time.
1
"Politics has brutalized the nations's emotional life." Profoundly true and yet perhaps understandable when considering the forces in play - globalism, employment disruption, and identity politics. And yet, one can only live in the era born.
David Brooks has shown excellent insight in the broader message reflected in the artwork since the 70s. I've been troubled in recent years by the state of artistic expression that has been more random shock than illuminating insight. More perspiration than aspiration.
Perhaps a little more humility and gratitude on both a national and personal scale can light our path to more profound emotions.
2
Just like the Saturday morning cartoons in the seventies, I think, on ABC. "We're on our way to the perfect place, Yogi!"
It's a cartoon and people are not cartoon caricatures or stuffed animals.
Life in the cartoon universe is worse than the land of dreams
I think more overtly political post-1970 works still impart an emotional education. They ask the viewer to bring context to the table in a more obvious (often text-based) way than the kinds of pre-1970 works you describe. Instead of the one part process of see work, and empathize with the subject, it seems to me that the works on the list selected by NYT Magazine draw you into a multi-part process that keeps cycling - see work, evaluate your role and feelings about the subject, empathize with the subject, see work in a different way, feel something different about your role, empathize afresh, etc. Could the same process apply to a Vermeer? Sure. But Barbara Kruger prompts your emotional engagement with her work using direct language - it's not choose your own adventure, passive engagement.
1
Spot on, Mr. Brooks. The NY Times piece was an intellectual and aesthetic travesty. Almost everything on offer was long past its sell-by date--Holzer--really?
The art that will actually last beyond, say, next week's Sotheby auction, is mostly by artists (Andrew Wyeth the best example) who have the skill and the vision to say something that goes far, far beyond making a piece of agitprop. That's some comfort--but not much.
2
@richard cheverton I couldn't agree more. I've gone even further, giving good reasons why work like Holzer's shouldn't even be termed "art."
Buy Art.
Who provided intellectual cover for Reagan's Southern Strategy while collecting a big fat paycheck and polluting any medium that would tolerate him? Brooks.
I thought that whole list was pretty dippy, with the exceptions that Brooks mentions. I mean...no Lucian Freud? No Banksy? No Beuys? Neither Kabachov?
That list was, as Brooks noted, sterile and unlovable. And can we PLEASE get over Jeff Koons, who isn’t fit to tie Motherwell’s or Ed Kienholz’ sneakers?
2
You should have also mentioned Michelle Obama’s elegant portrait by Amy Sherald and Barack Obama’s effervescent portrait by Kehinde Wiley.
4
I thought the purpose of art was to make one feel something, even if it was anger or disgust.
I have been aware for sometime that neither could I nor anyone I know can name a living visual artist. But so much current art is, to me, dead on arrival.
Music has been and is the best art created since 1970. You want emotion? It's in the music. Read the book "Never a Dull Moment" by David Hepworth. He discusses just the popular music of 1971. While Warhol was killing art musicians were reviving it.
2
This is largely a question of curation and sponsorship.
Those that choose what will be labelled art, what art is important, and what art is worth, have decided that art today is about delivering certain specific political messages.
If sponsors, buyers, and critics wanted art that seeks for truth, beauty, wonder, and explores the human condition, that is what would be produced by professional artists, as it has in the past. Today's artists have are paid and encouraged to produce advertisements for certain political views and Nihilism. Those who have other forms of art to offer will not be sponsored, and must find their audience beyond the established art world. Their work will not be featured in the NYT.
3
Art and media seems saturated with the business of trying to appeal to emotions. Videos and animation especially, which also require a lot of craftsmanship. Nowadays there are millions of accomplished artists, professional and amateur, on Behance, and everywhere. That is a problem.
As you say nothing can compare to the master craftsmen of the day when the world was still being discovered. Now we are told how to be, but that's another topic. The greatest art medium will always be a painted with a brush (likely in oil) and put on a wall to truly be shared.
Thank you, David Brooks, for astutely critiquing a lamentable cultural trend that I’ve been challenging in writing and speaking for three decades—work that will be collected in a forthcoming book, Bucking the Artworld Tide. But on one point I must disagree somewhat. Genuine art such as a Rembrandt portrait or a Mary Cassatt painting of a mother and child does not teach us a “new emotion.” What it does is powerfully elicit an emotional response to the human values implied in the depiction. It thereby reminds us of things we value deeply in the long term, heightening our consciousness of them. Moreover, it does so directly, through its imagery, without the aid of the verbiage so much spurious “contemporary art” depends on. In that process, the “human particularity” is crucial, as you rightly observe.
3
David Brooks appears puzzled by the fact that household names such as Picasso Georgia O’Keeffe, et. al., have disappeared from today’s artworld. Some of that puzzlement might be cleared away with a reading of the late art critic Arthur Danto’s 1997 book, “After the End of Art,” where Danto claims that with the beginning of Pop Art, the history of art came to an end, and criteria for the making of art ceased to exist. Danto saw that as a good thing as art has evolved from the Renaissance to the present day. Now, you can set your own criteria as an artist, and anything you want to call art becomes art. I believe Danto’s analysis is fairly close to the mark, but unlike him I doubt that it’s a good thing. If everything is art, then nothing is art. Visit most contemporary art exhibits and it becomes clear that he artworld has withered into a closed society where the aesthetic impulse is no longer important, and in fact is often reviled. Only the social/political message pertains. There are exceptions, of course, but the “art industry” strikes me as little more than the proliferation of a bunch of overgrown kids, each playing in his or her own little sandbox. And there are no longer artworld scandals. Members of the art industry have become too unimportant to scandalize the general public.
1
I take Brook's point about a great deal of contemporary art making use of a political vocabulary, but it's ludicrous to suggest the alternative has ever been Art that aims at a "mass audience." None of those he lists did: Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, etc. They all horrified the public, quite deliberately. Horrifying the public has been one of the signs of "Art" since at least the 1880s. Nor is it the least true that Art has invariably subscribed to the notion that "beauty yields larger truths." The notion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" can also be dated and culturally circumscribed. In politically charged times such as ours, with fundamentalisms and racist ideologies in resurgence globally, politics is the human condition, as it was in, say, George Grosz's heyday. Brooks' nostalgia for something that rarely was would reduce Art to a soul-satisfying "vegetable that people must digest before going to bed."
3
A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit the Art Institute of Chicago for the first time since I left Chicago in the late 80s. While walking through the galleries of European paintings it struck me that the modern world probably reached its apex in the late 1800s. At that point there was still the excitement and optimism of discovery as science and Enlightenment ideals began to bear amazing fruits, but we hadn't yet realized the amount of destruction that same science and our lingering primitivism would allow us to inflict on society, the environment, and individuals. By the First World War that optimism was shattered and advancement in some areas seemed inevitably accompanied by decline in others. Now I sense decline has surpassed advancement and we are headed for another dark ages if our species even survives.
1
Well, thanks a lot for brightening my day :)
1
David, as a fellow intellectual, I wish I had known you in college and I would have tried to warn you. An intellectual must be daring and open. Because we use abstruse universal language, we must not judge the world with it, but try to understand it. Every time reality goes into experimentation or confrontation, you become the defender of Moral Values. You throw the weight of decades of education behind nostalgia. Wake up. Embrace this era of confrontation. Its harsh wind is a source of human passion and truth. It is demeaning for intellectuals to become courtiers.
1
There are plenty of us artists out here still doing arcane things like capturing the beauty of the natural world (something I consider political, seeing as how the natural world is in grave danger). There are plenty of us artist painting beautiful portraits and emotional scenes. A lot of us are even quite successful, even managing to make a living from our art. If you want to see it, check Instagram, which has a thriving community of artists who have patrons who can support us directly now, no gallery representation needed.
It is art critics and The Art World that are uninterested in us. But we are here and in my opinion, there are plenty of contemporary artists who have far surpassed the skill of the famous artists of the past, in representation of the world, inner and outer.
2
Mr. Brooks,
Do you think that a list of "representational" artworks proposed by artists or curators is necessarily representational of our age? Or is it possibly more representational of the -kind- of art that gets them press and the "respect" of their academically inclined fellows? I think the bias towards political works on your colleagues' lists might have more to do with the fact that they were asked to "define" our political times, using artworks as the means to do so. Artists who don't show in museums and galleries will be dismissed by establishment friends (who pose, of course, as outsiders and mavericks, like all the rugged individualists who join motorcycle gangs and wear similar uniforms which include their own patches of conformity, ) and I suggest that if you want to experience some of that oceanic feeling that, for you, it seems, isn't available from looking at your friends' lists, you might try looking elsewhere. (To get you in the mood to actually break out of this particular intellectual cocoon, dip into Tom Wolfe's excellent essay "The Painted Word.") An unbiased list of artists who are representational of our age would, in my opinion, begin with the CGI artists and animators who make popular movies, the symphonists who write their soundtracks, the designers of hi-tech devices and their human interfaces and others who aren't usually called artists. I went to the island of Bali. It is stuffed to the gills with art. The Balinese have no word for "Art."
1
David makes a very good column out of the idea his T Magazine colleagues gave him, but the prize in my view belongs to his editor who gave it title "Who Will Teach Us How to Feel? Cultivating feelings that enhance our lives individually and enable us to live together with more appreciation and less hostility is the job of society at large–parents, educators, friends–and not limited to a guild of fine artists.
1
I'm glad Brooks wrote this. The most intense art for me - I'm an artist - evokes the criterion Emily Dickinson (postulated in a letter to "mentor" Thomas Higginson) had for poetry: strong emotional response- hot or cold. So much what passes for art today feels flat, intellectual, not from the heart. That so much of it requires long textual explanation is a clue; I hate that. Tom Wolfe wrote about this. It's almost as if artists think they have to act intellectual to be considered worthy.
1
I have to disagree with Brooks and the nueroscientists here. We all have feelings. We are born with them. Anyone who has had a pet knows that animals have feelings. It's the nature of life itself. Unfortunately, most "civilized" societies teach us to repress our feelings, which causes most of the difficulties we experience in relationships and in life. We are taught to screen out the affective parts of communication for being too intense, too dangerous to family cohesion, or to the relationship. When we repress our feelings, we are not allowing ourselves to be who we really are, and that is very self-destructive.
1
Sherry Turkle, the MIT professor who studies human relationship with machines and robots has noted that as our world becomes more mechanized, we adapt ourselves to the limited range of emotions that are consistent with machines. The problem is not that machines will take over, but that we will allow our own human scope to be narrowed to those which fit best to technology.
2
This Opinion by Brooks captures a sense of the numbing many people feel as expressed by most of the artists selected to define the contemporary age. The divisions of the people in many countries, our frustration in finding solutions and the understandingly powerful protests in Puerto Rico and Hong Kong are testimony to contemporary turmoil and suffering. In our own country we have a president and the Republican Party weaponizing whites against minorities. Let us all reflect on our feelings about society and act to make it better. It was good that Brooks finally shared with us an art work the encompassed the pain, the violence and the love in human terms.
One area of art that you are missing is theater, film and TV...all in a golden age now as it is far more accessible than a static museum exhibit. Or even Shepard Fairey and his downloadable art pieces.
I think the entry of big $ and collectable investments have degraded the impact of art per se.
1
I love Caravaggio and especially "The Sacrifice of Isaac" for this very reason. The biblical story is spare and emotionless, but what the painter does is to show us the human elements of the story: a father intent upon following what he believes to be the voice of God; a boy wondering where the sacrifice is and following his father up the mountain. In the painting, by the time the ram arrives as a scapegoat, the father has to be physically restrained by the angel, and we see the boy, the father's thumb pressing into Isaac's cheek, the angel grasping Abraham's wrist. A folk story leaves all these places of entry, allows all kinds of levels of interpretation, but Caravaggio's masterpiece makes the story human.
I don't mind that there are works of art that are provocative, but what the artist does is to make us look more closely. Thank you for this article.
1
"artworks that define the contemporary age"
I'm not sure it was "a very good idea", as Mr. Brooks says.
I am sure that I am not obliged to consider many of the works "art". I am sure of that.
1
Honest truth is: I Sure Hope Nobody Teaches Us How To Feel.
That there's them, that is, out there, not me, in here. I gone and got me my own feelings. Taken 40 years of hard work, it has.
Very Important People they are, in some circles. Written about in newspapers, sometimes. So sure themselves they think i want a piece of them, or if i don't, will, or if i won't, should.
If i knew how to i'd have just typed CONDESCENDING in this little box.
What bothers me so often about David Brooks is on display here: he tries to make some grand moral argument based on a narrow slice of culture and experience.
I'll pick up on just one of the fallacies of this particular column. Yes, these newer "era-defining" artists are not world-famous, but that is beside the point.
First off, few artists working today are world-famous. They gain fame over the course of their careers, and after they die. The earlier "era-defining" artists that David Brooks points to were not famous (or not as famous) in their lifetimes either. Frida Kahlo didn't start appearing on countless of t-shirts and mugs and posters until after her death.
Second, of course most people would think of world-famous artists as defining earlier eras, because most people don't know non-famous artists.
Third, it's fine if these newer artists don't resonate with you, but that doesn't mean that conceptual art or media art can't resonate with other people, or can't be every bit as emotionally compelling or enlightening as other art.
Brooks himself seems to dismiss Jenny Holzer, but her work is deeply political and emotional at the same time. If he can't see that, or appreciate that other people see that, it may be because he is not using his imagination enough.
2
The state of art today and its fall from what some would call higher aesthetic ideals (I would) is a beacon of the times we live in. It is difficult to disagree with Mr. Brooks on this point. I would add to the argument that the factors contributing to ‘real’ art’s move toward political sledgehammering is as much an economic issue as it is a political one.
On one hand, the excessive volume of information we deal with on a daily basis as changed the way that we view art, simply due to the way we value time in the age of the Internet. As a corollary to Mr. Brooks commentary on pre- and post 1970 artists, the rates of attendance at art museums in those time periods may also be telling. I’d bet that most of the ‘art’ people view is on their phones and is woven into, and thus serving, advertisements - a shallow, cheap and disposable commodity.
On the other hand, given all of the entertainment available today, artists and creatives have more competition for attention (‘eyeballs’) like everyone else. What does it take to cut through the noise and get seen? The people whose names you are hearing about either stumbled into the spotlight through sheer dumb luck... or maybe they know exactly what gets people riled up, and thus talking about them.
The adage “Any publicity is good publicity” has never mattered more in this age to those who rely on it to make a living.
2
Yes. Yes. Yes. Politics is necessary and you can make art out of it, but emotions are also necessary and have informed many brilliant, transformational pieces of art. Mr. Brooks' reports this beautifully and his emotions come through clearly. But, the thing he does that is different than most people who write about art is to report on work by not only white males but women and people of color. Well. Done!
1
James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man makes the point that art must rise above its specific time and place to truly be called 'art'. My feeling is that art does not change anyone's politics or make anyone more active in the pursuit of social justice. Art can, however, change hearts and lead to a deep awareness of the beauty and tragedy at the center of life. When art separates us from each other for whatever perfectly good reason, it becomes propaganda.
2
Maybe our hyper-politicized art is what we get when we fail to train our art students, some of the most emotionally sensitive among us, in the foundational craft of drawing. Leaving such artistic souls without the means of expression that used to be studied in art school, perhaps all they have left is a primal political art scream.
3
That is a silly idea that modern art is able to teach anybody anything. It became an agent of wealth creation, period.
1
I'll take a nice landscape with trees, fields and maybe a brook. Those are all the "statements" I need from art.
2
I do have an appreciation for abstraction, symbol, and provocation, but some of the pieces from the NYT list did not transform the ugly into the beautiful ideal. Some of the works looked like pieces glorifying self-absorption, communicating to the audience “you’re a coward and an idiot if you don’t get it and you look away.”
As for sculpture, how about an honorable mention for Richard Serra?
2
What's wrong with smashing injustice with a sledgehammer?
64
@Richard
Nothing wrong with smashing injustice, though the idea that some conceptual installation that will only be seen by a relatively tiny group of cultural elites could ever be the sledgehammer seems to me a bit foolish. Indeed, I can't fathom how any type of media emerging from the world of well-known visual artists, which is so tightly bound to the global 1%, could ever lead to the radical impact on politics that some producers appear to believe they can achieve. Artworks created in pursuit of more traditional goals, such as beauty and emotional connection, are probably equally inconsequential to our politics but at least stand a chance to last and provide enjoyment to generations of people.
23
@Richard Nothing is wrong with smashing injustice with a sledgehammer. Just don't call it art.
20
@Richard Smashing injustice is not necessarily art. Propaganda maybe. Even the better types of propaganda use emotion. These works are more like literal messages.
8
I don’t think it’s just a matter of whether or not a piece of art elicits emotions. Political commentary has always been one kind or reason for creating art, and those pieces often elicit strong emotions. But if most of the art mentioned is of that nature, then much has been left out.
So first I question who has decided that these artists represent define the contemporary art scene; it’s always a subjective judgement. Second, the range of art seems too narrow and should be more inclusive of other kinds of expression. Third, art through the ages has represented humankind’s purest and loftiest emotions and aspirations, concepts of beauty and truth.
The earlier twentieth century artists mentioned strove to express that in their own way. Some of us artists are doing the same, no matter how material, ugly, political or mundane our world seems, so don’t leave us out!
1
This is a wonderful article, however I'm going to quibble with the statement 'Artists have always taken political stands...." Just among the artists you mention from before 1970, I'd be hard-pressed to find the political message in the works of Calder, Rothko, O'Keefe, Pollock, not to mention if we go back further: Leonardo, Renoir, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ingres etc... Some artists have been very political, notably Picasso with Guernica, but until recently the principle pursuit of the arts has been to make a truth felt by imbuing it with beauty. The difference between making a political statement on an electronic billboard in Times Square and Guernica is the aesthetic part of the equation.
97
@Paul S.
I think some of the artists listed as apolitical were/are political -- to specific viewers, at specific times. Take Rothko's desolation, Okeefe's feminism, Pollock's organized chaos, Renoir's and Rembrandt's social commentary, Just looking for meaning in their works while studying their history, and history of the world when they lived, may guide a viewer into some political realm. Over a glass of wine with friends, the art can drum up so much.
23
There isn’t room here to do much more than tell you to go read TJ Clarke and make a couple brief notes, the first of which is that all of those artists are of course political. They just don’t wave a sign and yell at you.
And it’s just weird to argue that Rembrandt and Ingres weren’t political. “Night Watch,” much? Or this:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-france/a/ingres-napoleon-on-his-imperial-throne
For crying out loud, Ingres was TAUGHT by the guy who was more or less the court painter of the Revolution.
And Vermeer? Have you even ever seen the paintings? They’re one long emblematization of life in a liberal, wealthy, tolerant society.
The list goes on. Goya. Van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters,” the Ash Can school in this country, Lange’s photographs....
12
Oh, and as for Alexander Calder...wrong again.
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/calder-mercury-fountain-the-worlds-most-beautiful-yet-deadly-monument/
10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSCtBVexmBQ
Please follow the link above to my wife Cosy Sheridan's song "My Fence and My Neighbor." I know first hand that there is very wonderful art being created by many wonderful artists right now, and during these troubling times, when to the read the papers, or to listen to the news mostly just makes me angry. It is good to cry sometimes!
1
There are “artists” and there are “propagandists”.
2
Actually Mr. Brooks the people need to be taught how to think.
2
Who'd they ask? That determines the answers.
Mr. Brooks: Don't assume you understand all of western culture because a glossy ad-supported magazine run by the newspaper you work for presents something.
It isn't politics that has brutalized the nation's emotional life - it's Trump. This nation has had nearly 250 years of politics, and on few occasions such as the Civil War did it "brutalize the nation's emotional life."
This essay is simply another attempt to gloss over our slide into fascism. But when we look at the "assaults" over the past three years, we may trace them all
not to "politics", but to one man - Trump. He has lied into the thousands of times since then. He has put this nation within one deranged tweet of a nuclear war. He has ordered Hispanic infants and children into internment camps on our soil - children who have committed no crimes. He has told us that the KKK and neo-Nazis are very fine people. And those of us who are brown-skinned Americans understand that his voters would do literally anything - up to and including violence - to get rid of us.
And now he is poised to order deportation without trial -- and any of us might be next. He has ridden the wave of Ionesco's "Rhinocers" to the point that if he told his followers that he is entitled to be this nation's first dictator, they would be thrilled. But why does Brooks not criticize Trump for his ceaseless "performance art" - designed to stoke the flames of hatred in this country?
Brooks attempts to shift blame from where it really lies, by arguing that "politics" is to blame, in his ill-considered criticism of modern art, of all things. Just one more effort to provide cover for "his president".
1
One has the sense that Brooks’ personal taste in the visual arts runs more toward Thomas Kinkade.
1
This is column is typical of the argument that Brooks makes whenever he wishes to prove a certain point whatever that point may be. In this case 'art' and current currents are too political.
He argues that because current curators are choosing these particular artists and pieces - that
A) all current art is too political
B) that there is representative art of art being made or at least accepted by the 'experts'
Rather than acknowledging not that art has changed as much as curators have changed their focus. Hmmm, I wonder why that may be currently?
Could have something to do with the current occupant of the WH, promoting racism, and division, threatening to nuke an entire country if the whim struck him and 'wipe it off the planet, killing 10's of millions of people"?
I wonder, Mr Brooks, is at all possible that the current climate lead to these curators and artists choosing these pieces at this particular time? Should we survive as a nation and a race ( I refer to the 'HUMAN' race if caligula does not cause armageddon ) do you, Mr Brooks think that it is possible that these same curators may choose more optimistic works?
Please, if you want to make grand arguments about the state of art and artists, bring a little perspective ( pun intended ) to it.
Art is not about “feelings”. It is about art. Art takes us out of ourselves by letting us see reality in a new way (this is sometimes called “estrangement”). Mr. Brooks’ idea of art is somewhere between Sunday school and the Soviet Bureau of Art Affairs: both see art as being utilitarian, as teaching us positive lessons of morality, ethics, compassion, class consciousness or what have you. Not surprisingly, neither Sunday schools nor governmental institutions are hotbeds of great art. Many great artists had political beliefs, some of them very unsavory (Picasso a Communist, August Strindberg a Nazi). But if art is used merely as a vehicle for a political ideology, it becomes Agitprop. Art by definition is subversive, anarchic, provocative and disturbing. I don’t know if I agree with the choices presented in the article but if I disagree, it is for reasons totally opposite to Mr.Brooks’.
6
Antonio Damasio has taught us about emotions.
Thank you. This needed to be said.
2
In my experience the strongest art is seditious. Otherwise what’s the point?
3
David Brooks, to his credit, writes about a broader range of topics than any other Times columnist. I understand his response to contemporary art, his dislike for agitprop, and his preference for art that evokes in viewers a sense of emotional connection. Still, while I admire Brooks for painting with a broader palette than other columnists, he ain't no art critic.
2
Well, for those looking for art that invokes emotions -- including joy -- there is Bob Ross with his "happy little clouds" and "rocks with friends." Maybe that is the reason so many know Bob Ross today 20 years after his death, even those born after his death, while I have never heard of the artists Mr. Brooks listed in his column.
For me art done by survivors of great disasters and injustices -- like internees of Japanese WWII interment -- can be very powerful. Also the work of photo journalists, like the "Afghan Girl" by Steve McCurry for National Geographic.
1
These things happen in Art. There are periods where Art makes a big difference in the lives of people and periods where Art becomes decadent and detached. Unfortunately, not just in Fine Art but in the Arts generally we are in a decadent period where most of us aren't interested.Art as commodity, meanwhile, is skyrocketing. It could be that what's happening , or not happening, in our culture has a correlation to what's happening in our political culture. I have been shocked that the trump presidency has not elicited much of an artistic cultural response.I don't necessarily mean political response. What we look at and listen to is basically unchanged. We are in a cultural, consumerist rut.
4
Hi David Brooks,
I have always been struck by your innate sense of some kind of decency, yet coupled with some perceived (on my part) blindness to the real-world experience of those who are not white men. I see by what you write that your heart is in the right place - you are trying hard - kudos for that - and yet, I think, you're not quite getting it.
Some of the art that you refer to that is political; - and I would argue you don't mean political - you just mean angry -is emotional. It is about humanity. Women's voices, those people of colour's voices - have been so historically silenced - their expressions,through art, spell out what it feels likes to be the underclass in a society. Anger will be a part of that.There is nothing more emotional - or full of humanity- than that.
1
Possibly, today's art that captures powerful emotion are the interstitial moments that are temporarily captured online in places like Snapchat.
We'll never know. Art may be more of an interpersonal experience that doesn't reach a broad audience, or make broad statements—much less hang in a gallery or museum somewhere.
Everybody has a frame-of-reference (FoR) developed through their lifetimes, ranging from interpersonal relationships to cultural perceptions and beliefs. FoR change as populations, technology, commerce, local and world events unfold. Even just a few decades ago, the world was much different; no modern social media or electronic gadgets to monopolize our time, diving under school desks into the fetal position to "protect" ourselves from an atomic explosion, no jet airliners, no air conditioning in cars, and so much more.
Art expresses the FoR as seen and felt by the artist, just as David Brooks' columns reflect his own FoR that is a compendium of his life's experiences and observations up to the point at which he writes them. And, yes, good writing is an art, painting pictures for readers, and the artist, over which to muse. An artist's FoR, just as the readers' FoR, can change, reflecting deeply emotional events. Nominally a conservative writer, David Brooks current views toward many current Republicans are generically very different from his views about the Republican Party from even a decade ago. Given that the artists and art viewers of today are socially and culturally so different from just a couple decades ago, the fact that "of the 25 works they chose, very few are paintings and sculptures" shouldn't be at all surprising. Every day, the world reflects less of our times and more of theirs, including art and its messages. And that's OK.
David's observations are accurate. In this "post modern" era the point for many artists isn't just not to educate the viewers emotions, but to consciously ignore them. The only thing important is the emotions of the artist, not the audience.
While volumes have been written about the new emotional range evoked by this trend, a closer review reveals that it relies on increasingly abstract layers that obscure rather than reveal the depths of our feelings.
We have never needed to be "taught how to feel.' Art has always had a way of evoking what was always there.
Sadly the political message of so much post modern art is that our politics aren't to be found in our relations with one another, but only in our relations with the abstract ideas of the artist.
We are alone in the world, alone with our feeling and just plain alone. But politics, real politics is always about our connections and our relationships, not our isolation.
What Brooks describes is happening profoundly in MFA programs and literary journals/prizes. If it ain't woke, don't print it.
Not necessarily bad writing always but political propaganda nonetheless, which makes much of it dull: protagonists without genuine fault and secondary characters like cardboard cutouts of oppression and ignorance. In other words, like no one in real life.
2
I don't know. Art seems to have become so introspective as to have become irrelevant. Nothing I have seen dione in the last 25 years can begin to compare to the 54th Massachusetts tableux on State Street and the NGA. Or Diana ther Huntress in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Or a tiny female nude done 2500 years ago in Greece which can be seen at the Penn Anthropology/Archeology Museum.
Or Guernica or just about any French Impressionist. Or Dutch maritime Art.
Doubtless somebody will tell
1
"Art" ceased being "art" decades ago. People who spray paint buildings are called "graffiti artists" when they are simply vandals. Is a photo of a woman's back into which stick figures have been carved art? A statement of protest, yes. Art, no. To me, art is created by someone with talent. A painter, a sculptor. I have been to the Whitney, MOMA, and other museums exhibiting modern art. Still not a fan of modern art but I recognize the creators as artists.
The fact that this group of curators and "artists" ignored art in their selections shows the disconnect between regular people and the so-called "art world."
As usual, Brooks extrapolates a Big Concept from the wrong source material. Art is fine. The list is bad. It says nothing about the state of art today, just the state of New York Times art critics (which is, apparently, more dire than I could have imagined).
It's not that the artwork selected is bad art: it's that the selection process steered the panel away from selecting more prominent and influential artists, either because they thought someone else would pick them, or because they wanted to demonstrate insider cred. They even discuss some of their whiffs in the article. No Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe. No land art at all (so no James Turrell or Andy Goldsworthy). No Basquiat or Banksy. No Marina Abramovic. No Nam Jun Paik or Matthew Barney. I'm just picking artists that are influential and also much more likely to be recognizable to the public.
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I like this essay, but then I like art that connects with me in ways that transcend the political. The great insight of Second Wave Feminism - that all personal interaction is political - is profound. To ignore it is a fundamental mistake. Even so, to reduce art to in-your-face political confrontation is narrow and limiting. Such art connects only with those who share the world view of the artist. Some artists may have nothing more and nothing less than their political message to communicate to the rest of the world, but their political approach is not the measure of artistic merit or value.
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We were at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain in June and saw the Jenny Holzer works. I felt anger and frustration. I wanted to not think about our democracy, our President and all the painful feelings I have had since 2016.
The contrast of this beautiful structure and this artwork was unnerving. These feelings stayed with me through the rest of the day and even reading this article stirred up the whole range of emotions. I didn't want words ,I wanted pictures. When I see Picasso's Guernica I experience the horror, the sadness, the anger that happened in this town. That is MY emotional response to this painting. With Holzer's she is forcing HER feelings onto me rather than letting those feelings emerge. She takes my freedom to feel what comes naturally away, whereas Picasso's does not.
What I realize is that her art was much more personal because this was happening in MY country. It tapped into my sense of helplessness and hopelessness that I keep fighting against.
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I think feelings, just like anything, can be cultivated. But I also think they are innate embodied realities. Feeling well, to me, is a matter of feeling your feelings. Suppressing feelings results in emotional problems, on my account. This may not hold for all people.
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Fabulous article. In a direct parallel, the same thing is happening in various other art forms. Even journalism: somehow, unless you are taking a strong political stand (along party lines...), current culture says its not worthwhile. Art becomes a substitute for people bickering or engaging in political debate. Where did we go wrong?
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Perhaps the classic phrase should be recast as "I don't know much about art, but I know when something *called* art makes me feel like an outsider ".
Certainly there has been a thread of the political/editorial historically running through art in more and less obvious ways. But the more traditional notion of art as, or engineered to elicit, an aesthetic experience, strives for the universal. It invites all in, rather than partitioning the world into those who would agree with, and those who would reject, the image in question. I think that is the gist of David's piece.
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After reviewing the selecting works, my quick take (which is all the world has time for today) is that there is a difference between art as "creations to be experienced" and "political statements to be decoded". And, not that either form is superior to the other, but I understand David's reaction to the T-mag's selection of more political works.
With political oriented works, for example Jenny Holzer's "Truisms", as a viewer you get a feeling that the artist is making a specific statement, and whether you agree or disagree with the statement radically impacts your experience. The "work" leaves the subjective and lives solely in the objective world of right or wrong, no room for interpretation or discourse.
Whereas, when an artist creates a work to be experienced (see Nelson Makamo's paintings of South African children), it implies that the artist is not forcing the viewer to see the work exactly as the artist demands, which gives the viewer freedom to experience and interpret the work in their own words. It lives in the subjective world, more open to various emotions of the human experience, and each viewer contributes a new interpretation to be explored.
Brooks is not inaccurate to say that political work is more about the artist encoding a specific statement, that's what defines the genre. It's just not shocking that the NYT has favored this type of work for it's top 25 defining works post-1970.
2
I don't know how all of these conceptual artists could teach me how to feel..maybe the last one you mention, the video montage with the images of the African-American experience.
But those are things I already know and see in the world, some of which are cliché.
What I do notice, however, is that these artists (or those who admire and purchase their work) have informed MFA and BFA programs which seem to have lost the ability to instruct the fundamentals of drawing, painting, rendering of human form with one's own human hands.
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There is a lovely book that I highly recommend that was published in 2017 called The Lost Words..it is a collaboration between the author Robert MacFarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris...in 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary cut 40 common usage words and replaced them with 40 newer words...the former 40 were all words of the natural world, like ACORN...the new 40 included CUT AND PASTE and the other 39 were also technology based...the book is so very special and I don’t know either of the creators so this isn’t an ad...I live part of my year in Austin TX, where we have some of the oldest live oak trees in the country...those trees don’t spring up out of thin air, they grow from acorns, so the omission of that word stuns me...I get that language and culture are living mediums that grow and change to reflect the current world, but finding a large acorn on the ground, carrying it in my pocket all day and placing it on my bedside table has a deeper level of meaning than cut and paste ever will...I am thankful for Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and Carolee Schneeman and the many artists who bravely use their medium to bring awareness to unknown or unjust situations...but I also want my breath to be taken away by something so much deeper that it takes me years to even understand...a Rothko or the cave paintings at Lascaux or Chauvet do that for me...work that can do both is my ideal...Christine Sun Kim’s drawings at the current Whitney Biennial come to my mind...
5
I found this list unbelievably presumptuous. Whereas I could not stop feeling after seeing Pavarotti, the Ron Howard docu. Re the list I asked my niece who is a curator and a critic of contemporary art--was I missing something?
Her response: Yes, the premise is spurious, and you can tell the participants are wary. They have picked some master(mistress)pieces. Their selection is extremely fashionable in that it involves a lot of protest and emotive work, and yet they don't speak about the works in a very interesting way. I find this mash-up of hit-parade and roundtable interview makes for laborious reading. Great Women Artists, a book I contributed 22 texts to, is coming out in the Autumn. It covers the work of 400 artists who happen to be women, and who have been neglected by those who establish the canon. But even so, the idea of picking a number, making long- and then short lists of artists and making a book or an article about them is really limiting.
3
I read the article Brooks links to after reading his column and I was surprised to find how many of the works listed were emotionally affecting to me. Now I'm left wondering who it was that taught David Brooks how to feel, and whether they should have their teaching license revoked.
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I read your column this morning without the "feeling" of right or wrong, a feeling to judge. Thank you for your opinion. It has nothing to do with my opinion of the same exhibit. I might view that art and be emotionally moved by something in it totally removed from politics. That's what makes it art! Some of the captious replies seem to want to make your opinion more than just an opinion. Art is personal. People want to make it dogma.
1
Art reflects the values and mood of the times, as well as leaps ahead and often beats those times on the head. That art and politics have meshed so intimately is a mixed blessing: art should critique the culture. But how much it becomes politics rather than reflects it -- that's complex. And sometimes defeats aesthetics.
My reaction to the 25 works was despair and despondency. Exactly the same reaction as an artist friend of mine. And not surprisingly, we feel the same way about the politics of our time, as well as about the times in general.
But we don't feel that way about each other. Or our spouses. Or our children. Or most of our neighbors or the grocery store clerk.
The 25 works definitely evoke feeling. And they display how our society is broken, dysfunctional, divisive, and bewildered. That's not even politics. That's an emotional mental breakdown.
3
The art discussed was selected by your colleagues. Perhaps it represents their political lens, not the art produced since 1970. It sounds to me as if their selections were very biased.
1
Art expresses the moment of the artist. All these pieces say to me that we are living in a dreadful time. The emotions are fear and loathing. Mary Cassatt might very well be painting a mother holding out empty arms toward a cage in which her child is confined. Or a painting like the famous 1930's Lange photograph of an Appalachian mother silent and stoic, and her hungry children at her feet.
2
Art that comes the inner life of which Mr Brooks speaks comes from introspection and time to just sit and be with ones self. The speed of our civilization, the media and now the internet has taken that away from us. Or perhaps it is mor appropriate to say that as individuals we have forsaken our own inner lives for the sake of external spuperficial reaction.
2
I think the art chosen does not fit nicely into David’s small bubble of experience, so he has a problem relating. People are justifiably fearful right now. David is not. He is safe. We are idly and passively watching as innocent people are interned, including the innocent young, as systems are deliberately destroyed. Politics has real implications for real people. Art speaks to those who are impacted.
1
The shutterbug second Vermeer's camera-obscura had rendered captured light to better frame what we saw 350yrs ago, architecture had again subsumed what wrests control of our artful dodge on wanton desires. And now that cyberspace supplants even photography, architecture becomes all the more paramount on artfully reversing what's otherwise mere particle/wave-collapsed coherence unto pixels. Which, in my 500yrs-after-Leonardo's-death opinion, render the following grand slam as our most emotionally-endearing entanglements with our more likely coexistence w/ quantum's multiverse:
1) Frank Gehry's BILBAO;
2) Christo's GATES;
3) SANAA's "River"; and
4) Diller/Scofidio's HIGH LINE.
1
Some might think Mr Brooks is channeling Lincoln Steffens, who was known for his ability to bait people into talking about the nature of art? The comments indicate the bait has been taken.
But they’re all wrong. He’s not talking about the nature of art, but the use to which art is being put. And we artists have into it—hook, line, and sinker.
Who will teach us how to feel? Art was once a celebration of life and nature. The internet has taught us how to avoid nature and avoid ourselves. Our art now often reflects that loss.
3
Thanks to Mr. Brooks for writing about this disappointing take on the last 25 years of art. I read the article because my teenage daughter loves art, and I hoped we could enjoy it together. But there was nothing about visual art in the article. It was all about ideology. Art, even the most important art of an era, does not have to be ideological. I thought we put that behind us with the death of Soviet socialist realism.
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What you are seeing is the victory of the purveyors of art over the makers of art. The victory of the curator over the artist. The victory of the technical over skillful.
When the term 'art' is applied to everything, from machine carved caricatures of people to the cutting edge brilliance of 80's feminism, who is to say what is good.
Video is the most accessible technique for picture making and mood setting. All done with a screen/camera and a keyboard. It is also the most removed from the hand/eye dexterity that was the artistic measure of excellence in the past.
Very few people, other than practitioners, know how to practice, to any degree of excellence, the traditional techniques of fine art picture making with oil paint and watercolor, so they are unable to comment with authority on them thus the glut of video and media base techniques. The technique can make anyone an artist.
What has happened to traditional artistic values over the life time of the Boomers is repeating itself as the state of the USA under Trump.
People like what they like and money buys anything.
2
Contemporary art doesn’t appeal to the masses, but I would argue that art, great art, never did. It only does so now that time has passed and certain works have become integrated into the consciousness of many people. Certainly, many works by Picasso have a political message, like Guernica.
It is a great mistake to look at contemporary art thought the prism of the past. No one really knows what the greater public will think of many of the works Mr. Brooks lists here. Many will fade into obscurity, and a few may survive, but not for the same reasons that art of the past has survived. Art just is isn’t like that.
I disagree that art can or does teach emotions. A Mary Cassatt painting, wonderful though it is, neither expresses a new emotion nor provides instruction on how to feel. I--and every other parent in the world--would feel exactly the same about our children had we never seen her work. Art can certainly touch our emotions, and the best art often does.
Today's era-defining art is music and film (including television), not painting and sculpture.
It is perhaps easier to make an analogy with music. There is music that makes me sing, music that makes me dance, music that makes me reflect, music that makes me cry, music that makes me rebel. And different types of music have dominated a period of history, such as renaissance, classical, jazz, swing, and rock. So it is with ‘art’. This age contains a large contingent of Hip Hop music, and something similar in the world of art. How long will it last?
Who will teach us (Americans) how to feel? Feelings need to be taught to people? It's not enough that people have to be taught to think, they must be taught how to feel as well? Nobody exists who does not need to be taught how to think and feel? We must submit to being taught how to think and feel or be considered without worthwhile thought and feeling or even a bad influence on the rest of society?
I've given up on myself being considered worthwhile in not just American society but any society. Life's just this perpetual trial and I can understand why people believe in conspiracies of mind meddling whether emanating from intelligence agencies or UFOs or A.I. The message to humanity is that you are not naturally made right, you must be altered to have the correct thoughts and feelings. It's like being a convict in front of a parole board, where you're closely studied to see if you've been changed by your prison sentence, whether you now have the correct thoughts, feelings and countenance, and if you haven't actually committed a crime in the first place to get yourself in this situation, you had better fabricate yourself one, or better, every crime that can be imagined, so that you can be sure of having perfectly altered your thoughts and feelings to what the parole board wants of you, so you can secure your release from prison.
I guess to be sure of being perfectly taught correct thought and feeling accuse yourself of everything, and what's left over is salvation.
4
Who were the artists and museum curators gathered by T- magazine? How did T-magazine choose them to pass judgement on all the art of the past 50 years? I don't tend to read T-magazine because it strikes me as more of a style or fashion newspaper addendum than a piece of scholarship.
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@Larry Figdill
Just look at the article about the most influential pieces of art of the past 25 years. It's all explained... and there were just four people making the choices, I believe. It is perplexing for sure, worth contemplating, and requires time to digest -- not sure why Brooks did not mention Jenny Holzer, Lynda Bengalis whom I believe were among the chosen and are known. Definitely important -- but there is so much art out there.. so perhaps like this Whitney Biennial limited -- more so now that major pieces are not on display. (The Times critic did an excellent review of that show.)
One might also want to reflect on how the politics of the moment affect the artists and the curators/critics and realize (this seems tohave been the premise) that the undercurrents have been there now for close to 40 years IMO -- the time frame in the article is 50 -- Vietnam, sexual revolution, women's liberation, Nixon (who is beginning to look like a saint), oost-assassination of political leaders, Russian missile crisis, Cuban revolution, mini-skirts -- lots of emotion to process -- maybe too much. Certainly politics affect us all... and with th current Congressional budget - it seems there will be a "compromise" [capitulation without protest -- consent!!] We have Mueller today? tomorrow? The joy of revisiting the moon landing -- tainted then by Vietnam now by fear of the future- climate change, possible MORE war, and worst resignation akin to he emotion depression.
4
Well said, Mr. Brooks: "This list fascinated me because it comes at a moment when everything is political — and our politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life." At the moment, a very long moment, Americans and to some extent all human beings are all living in Trump world, where everything revolves around what Trump does and says. It's as if the Trump Brand has jumped from hotels and golf courses and wine and steaks to every facet of existence, and intellectually and emotionally we're all the poorer for it.
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@H. Scott Butler
Happy to agree. The visual Arts have a cathartic influence
on everyone. Major museums have created special experiences for the disabled, Alzheimers patients, children with Autism and refugees, to name a few.
Political statements in Art may satisfy the artist and needs for provocation. But, give me a Monet, a Sergeant, a Michelangelo any day. We all need a respite from the fray and can respond to 'just a painting.'
9
Brooks writes: "Among these 25 pieces, 20 are impersonal and only five allow you to see what life is like for another human being, including works by Nan Goldin and Judy Chicago." There was never better proof that Brooks cannot recognize "what life is like for another human being" unless that life looks exactly like his own. Brooks fails to see emotion, feeling, etcetera in these works of art simply because they do not speak to HIS feelings and sentiments. Anyone who has viewed these works knows that they elicit emotional as well as intellectual responses, that they challenge the viewer, and that they push the bounds of art itself. Viewers can rise to that challenge and try to expand their own vision, emotional range, and aesthetic sensibilities in order to see in these artworks the emotions and experiences of other humans, or they can choose, like Brooks, to grumble that art nowadays "doesn't speak to ME." Well, there are more people in the world than Brooks, more experiences and viewpoints in the world than that of conservative right wing males, and I and many others are happy to see these voices and visions get a place in the art world.
For what it's worth: conservative intellectuals and art critics have poo-pooed every art movement of the past hundred years. As Roland Barthes suggested, real art is always just beyond the bounds of orthodoxy. Since conservatives cling to orthodoxy, perhaps art isn't their cup of tea.
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@Tyler Williams
I am an old white guy, an actor, and Shakespeare lover, Van Gogh fanatic and daily classical music listener...I frequently have your response to Brook's writings. But I must admit that these modern artistic expressions do leave me cold. I suppose because, like Brooks, I'm looking for comfort, solace in art. Anger frightens me (why I hate trump and the GOP). I know, I need to have courage, determination and resist...I wish modern art helped me. I feel lost.
111
@Tyler Williams,Please read his new book, which will answer your questions about his motivations. Seems the world just sits by and waits to pounce on anybody who has the slightest difference of perceptions, even on art.
13
@Tyler Williams
Barthes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes
Speaking on "real art" ... not quite.
Barthes work emphasized language, literature and communication. Instability was, for him, a fact of life.
The stable definitions of terms and stable referents, like "real art", were impossible for him and his generation in French thought more than forty years ago.
Times change and philosophies of art change with them.
4
Interesting in that one must wonder what humanity is approaching. If art reflects society there must be a developing ferment. Oppression and injustice might be causing a bubbling up soon to burst forth, and we have no idea what is coming.
1
Art can create or it can destroy. The atomization of our culture is very far along. The smashing effects of modern art reflect this alienation. Family? Gone. Community? Sterilized. Art has been in a destructive phase since the 1960s. Where does it lead? When does the wheel turn?
30
@c smith Art does not create the living culture, it reflects it. We should take this vision to heart and be warned. Rats when they are overcrowded and stressed eat their young. What a picture for a modern Mary Cassatt.
8
@c smith
Not at all. There is some very impressive work out there. I like Damian Hirst, e.g.
People initially hated Impressionism -- cats' tongue lickings-- my fav description of some of Monet's brushstrokes.
From the Renaissance some of us are trying to come to terms with Mannerism -- reception theory -- there was the counter-reformation deciding what was appropriate for church art and music.
Those charming and often odd hybrid creatures on the capitals of Romanesque churches were criticized by St. Bernard. (What do they mean??)
2
Some people see beauty within horror, some people see outrage in the mundane. But not everyone. Like beauty, art is in the eye of the beholder.
Out here in the provinces we don't really care so much what a tiny group of insiders decree the most important works nor what David Brooks thinks is the true purpose of art. Art flows from the human spirit at all times in all places. We can all appreciate art that resonates for us personally and we can all express ourselves through making it. Both the list and Brooks' commentary are elitist and reductive. Excuse me, I'm off to the studio now.
164
@JS But is it art or craft?
2
This is ridiculous. To complain that art is being affected by the politics of the time is.....simply baffling. Maybe the reason "artworks that define the contemporary age " have such political overtones is because the politics of the time are so over whelming and being an expressive medium, art is reflecting that. And this tired attempt at defining what is and what isn't art. It's pretty staggering and I'm honestly at a loss for words.
Not to mention - it is not like the pre-1970 artists that the author chose didn't have political statements in their art.
Picaso has created so many paintings with political messages: "The 1945 painting "Charnel House," which forms the centerpiece of the Liverpool exhibition, depicts passive victims of state violence: a Spanish republican family murdered in their kitchen by the Fascist dictatorship. Like "Guernica," it is a cubist tangle of shapes - a far cry from Moscow's insistence on realist art praising the struggle for a communist utopia."
source - https://www.dw.com/en/picasso-maintained-political-fervor-though-communists-rejected-his-art/a-5690207-0
Not all artists are recognized in their time, the point is the expression. If that expression attains widespread fame, that is a bonus.
47
So "art" reached its zenith in 1970 - a time which correlates perfectly with Brook's theme that culture is the driver of everything important in all aspects of life. OK, let's stipulate that culture is different now than it was in 1970. We must also concede that culture is different than it was in 1930, 1870, 1776 and in every other generation. Fine, slightly interesting.
But of what prescriptive value is this observation? Does it tell us how to allocate health care, how to collect and spend tax dollars, how to educate our youth, how to treat our fellow citizens with tolerance? Maybe it's precisely because conservatives spend so much time focused on "culture" which is disconnected from governmental policy that they continue to advocate governmental policy that is not based on a clear fact-driven view of the truth of the world today. Art exists and will continue. But the job of government is to run government successfully. Focus on that, conservatives, not some lost culture which wasn't nearly as good as you imagine it was.
1
We are the grandchildren of Duchamp, inheritors of the permissions that he granted so many years ago. We spent them in a good cause, but there is not much left in the account. We are in the baroque phase of conceptual art.
53
I think Brooks conflates two very different things.
The more recent "art" he describes is arguably not art at all. This doesn't mean these things lack value, but they are political messages crafted in various ways - designed to provoke through allusion. I was at one of the very first exhibitions of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and it was powerful craftsmanship with important political meaning - but I was not certain then, nor am I now, that "art" is the right term.
Art is, in my view, the capture of a dimension of human existence that is otherwise elusive; a way into feelings and experiences that defy vocabulary or literal description. A Chopin Nocturne, for example, does that for me without any political overlay or need for rational explanation.
The recent examples of "art" to which Brooks refers are a way of saying something through another medium but they are nonetheless rational, albeit provocative, statements.
And I don't believe "statements" are art.
56
@Barking Doggerel You make good points but it is the art world that conflates these two very different things, not Brooks. Part of me says "who cares how art is defined, it's just a word and I don't own it" but most of me says "if it is merely a vehicle for an idea, or if it is in any other way trivial and lacking in depth or richness", it doesn't deserve to be called "art".
12
I am a simple person. Much “art”, whether photo or paint, music, written/spoken, dance or real life doesn’t intensely affect me.
On occasion, I have been strongly touched. Seeing the Guernica in NYC, watching the “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night”, attending the March on Washington, seeing the Tetons come in to view driving on a mountain road, observing the birth of a baby,
reading “More than Human”, etc.
But most experiences are not primarily emotional ones for me. I wonder if I am an outlier or simply an “ordinary” (old) human.
well said. Thank you.
Oh ffs, David Brooks. Stop making sweeping generalizations from isolated temporal examples. You should know better.
You cannot draw broad conclusions from ART created "in a moment" by comparing them with ARTISTS that history has deemed representative of an era.
Only decades from now will we know what art and what artists are generally accepted as representative of our time.
5
Art isn't allegorical it's tautegorical. Your craft, writing, is mostly about using allegory and relation between your mind and others' minds. Art is the direct experience and as such invites us to feel. It does not teach us how to feel. Dead art, artifacts, may show us how art functions in society, but real art isn't functional that way. Your whole sense of the use of art is tainted and corrupted by your success as a word smith and you haven't a clue about art.
36
@Max And Max
Oh, art taught me how to feel. Not sure what "dead art" is, but if it is "old art," the best of it is alive and well and teaching, giving pleasure today.
9
@judith
No it didn't. Feelings are first. If art taught you how to feel then the feelings are sentiments, not experiences. If you do are, then you know what I mean. If you think you get feelings by looking at art, you are confusing the experience of art with the experience of thinking about art. For art to be art it has to be direct, not allegorical. Brooks is using art to illustrate a decline in the capacity of humans to have a direct connection with the metaphors in the art market. Art is like religion after Luther displaced the middleman of the Church. That's where the individual can encounter their own conscience: not be emulating other people's.
8
@Max And Max
If pornography is art, then maybe it can be an active agent in teaching feelings to people who might otherwise not know those feelings existed within them, but it only teaches the awareness of the feeling, not the how-to-feel. To say that art teaches feelings is to make all art into pornography that is a manipulative force and an influence. That's what propaganda is, not art.
3
I do not live in Brooks world. They say you can't shake a tree without a poet, photographer, painter, philosopher falling out. Your art says nothing about you that you don't say about yourself. Around these parts a neon Elvis on black velvet may tell the world of your exquisite taste than a 7 million dollar metal rabbit from a well respected NY art dealer.
1
An over-generalization.
Poor David Brooks! He doesn't get out much and has not idea what is happening in the art world. He bases his lament on choices made by two curators and three artists. The sample size is meaningless!
1
Spot on examples of how the Left wrecks all it touches.
3
@O'Brien and once again, a discussion provides someone the opportunity to stereotype and demean a swath of people unknown to him and he jumps on it. Maybe this is the polluted stream from whence much artistic angst springs.
2
Nonartist Brooks attempts to make sense of nonsensical article by elitists about “art.” Hint it isn’t art and it isn’t good. The contemporary art scene has devolved into expressions of politically correct subjects without aesthetic value by approved identities.
4
The autumn of our centuries-old culture has passed into winter. But spring will come (if we don’t annihilate ourselves first). Read Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence.”
1
Art is of value to a culture only insofar as it has meaning in our lives.
…….George de Forest Brush
1
Your party....The ?P, FreedomP, TP, GOP has never supported teaching us how to feel. Washington Post would assign you ten "Pinocchios" for this edition of "The Reasonable Conservative".
Conservative Republicans Propose Eliminating Arts And Culture Funding 2011
Patrick J. Buchanan, who railed against the National Endowment for the Arts during his run for president in 1992.
House Republicans voted to abolish it at one point — the agency changed the way it operated. The endowment abolished grants to individual artists, whose work could be provocative — and labeled offensive by some conservatives The New York Times
At first blush it’s like a dream come true for conservatives: Donald J. Trump has become the first president to formally propose eliminating federal programs for the arts and humanities, which have long been in the cross hairs of Republicans, and the threat is all the more real because the party also controls Congress 2017 NYT
Wake up American people! ('we so nice' gambits will come faster now: election season is nigh!)
And its such little money we're talking about.
4
How cute to see Brooks mention Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as two of the most important artists pre-1970, and then proceed to cast aspersion on the more recent art scene where, he says, politics is suffocating personal feelings and emotions.
I have the feeling and emotion that Brooks knows very little about contemporary art (Jeff Koon's "Ilona on Top"? Please, spare me) and art in general.
Most likely Brooks turned to art only recently, hoping to find an escape from the daily nightmares induced by the Ugliest American, and instead found that art was looking back at him reminding him starkly and uncompromisingly of the odious realities he tries to chase away from his mind.
10
Leonard Cohen, Who by Fire, released 1974.
1
You are over thinking this. Art is supposed to transcend us to a place of non thinking. You cannot attach meaning to it, since it is supposed to be stop us from thinking and bring us directly to a place where we simply sense it.
3
Only paintings? Seems a bit retro. The new landscape of 'art' is interactive, cinematic, game-inspired story telling. Why should a flat piece of canvas be the only way to tell a story?
6
The Georgia OKeefes and Jackson Pollocks and Andy Warhols and Picassos were innovators who helped create new forms. That's where their monetary value comes from.
At this point everything has been done before. The art world today is pretty much an elitist social club for rich folks. Kind of like the whole famous for being famous syndrome. If someone want to pay a million dollars for a painting that shreds itself or a piece of graffiti broken off a brick wall that's that their prerogative... But they look like elitist fools to most people.
What is artistic is in the eye of the beholder and you will find thousands of pieces of art at any local folk art festival. Some for only a few dollars. Personal art made with integrity bought by people who like it, not because it makes them feel trendy and cool.
8
The music critic Robert Christgau has said that he didn't get hip-hop at first because he only took the sonic part—he didn't understand the larger culture and the importance of what is now a globally dominant genre (and with Kendrick Lamar, also lauded by the Pulitzer).
Similarly, I understand Mr. Brooks' position, but he doesn't understand that he is like Christgau. Mr. Brooks, I'd suggest you read Maggie Nelson's "The Argonauts" which includes excellent art criticism of many of these artists and the context you would need to understand why works such as these are so important.
Or, read Thomas Wolfe's "The Painted Word" and see how Wolfe put forward this Op-Ed's critique in a more nuanced way, 45 years ago...
1
It's hard for thinking, feeling and reflective folks not to be politically active when the planet and its inhabitants have been treated as centers of wealth extraction and nothing else for the past 40 or so years. The mere mention of the common good provokes derisive monikers of socialist, communist or the dreaded atheist. Without limits on greedy, avaricious power, the world will end up a lifeless slab, unrecognizable from its former verdant glory, quite like the soulless constructs Mr. Brooks decries in his essay. Maybe the artists are trying to tell us something.
7
For me, art is irrelevant in the time of individual computers and the wild spaces of the internet. What is traditional art is dominated by the rich who invest in nonsense, as it seems to be good investment material.
Go to a good website like Vimeo, or Youtube, and wander about, and look at all the stunning creations that combine emotion with color and motion and yes, feeling. There, our feelings are embraced and acknowledged, and one doesn't have to visit the Whitney to have the experience.
Don't shrink art down Mr. Brooks, it is doing fine.
Hugh
3
Who is 'us'? What is 'beautiful' art? Who ' teaches 'art appreciation' ?
AFRICOBRA aka the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists has presented an African American visual art aesthetic context and perspective over the last 50 years.
AACM aka Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has presented an African American misical art aesthetic context and perspective over the last 50 years.
African art and music is not like European art and music. Much like the Impressionists and Surrealists human artistic conventions, fads and styles come and go across ethnic sectarian cultural history time and space.
3
I’m sick to death of politics being interjected in an extreme way into everything from art, to books to movies. I don’t know if I am alone in that. But when I want entertainment I reject these things that are being pushed on me. I don’t need or want a political agenda interjected into everything. As it is, I am reading my news now not watching it. I am tired of all the vitriol and most of it seems to be coming from the Left these days. Yes, Trump too, and he seems to be their excuse. But wasn’t it Michelle Obama, who said “They go low, we go high”? But some have gone so low that they have nowhere to go but up. There is something wrong when in a free country, you can’t express a moderate, middle of the road kind of opinion without being attacked for it, sometimes by both sides. So keep producing art that is hitting me over the head with politics, and I will continue to seek out something kinder and less political.
3
Thank you for that, it is truly sticking your head in the lion's lair Mr Brooks! Yes, I agree that Contemporary Art has mostly removed any vestige of emotion from the experience of Art. In few other places is an emotional response more absent. Imagine trying to hear The Rolling Stones as an intellectual exercise or, as just a message of personal bias? How about reading Haruki Murakami
without any sense of joy or fantasy? And though she doesn't dance anymore, how about watching a youtube of Carolyn Carson dance, and not feel the wonder of a human body? The list is long; James Brown, John Coltrane, Monk, Fred Astaire, all for pure joy? For pathos; Mahler, Debussy or Raval? Or, Aretha Franklin mixing soul and politics when she sings Amazing Grace?
The Contemporary Art world, for better or worse has its roots in Duchamp. Ever since, we have been prisoners to Ethnologists and social messengers who believe that Art is to make us think, not feel. There is nothing wrong with thinking but it is not feeling anymore than an apple is a pear though they are both fruit. Personally, I like what they used to say: If you want to send a message, use Western Union.
But because you use the terms Truth and Beauty, it is mindful to remember the poetic wisdom of John Keats would said in the last lines of Ode to a Nightingale:
Beauty is truth
and truth, beauty.
That is all yes need to know on earth,
and all ye need to know.
Sort of...
3
As is typical for many Americans, David Brooks doesnt get abstraction. Americans tend to need a picture, or representation or illustration (a la Norman Rockwell) of something in order to “get it”. Anything beyond literally crafted depictions of everyday life is too abstract for most Americans to validate. This is not the same in other countries, such as Europe or the Arabic world, where there is a much higher tolerance for abstraction.
Art isnt about beauty, and its also not about giving the masses what they want (as someone alluded to, thats what Hollywood is for), but it is indexical of difference, and that difference in consciousness is expressed in the artists response to the world through form. Art is practice, not objects to be displayed and sold. Politics, and social relations, are form, and can be responded to with form. The materials of that form dont have to be paint or stone, but can come from the everyday, such as language, spatial arrangement, or vernacular materials like LED screens (this also strikes me as uncharacteristically ignorant for David Brooks — most MFA programs havent done traditional studio work for a long time). If David Brooks were writing this 140 years ago, Im sure he would be similarly ignorant about Vincent van Gogh.
6
Thanks for reminding us if the cultural value of art, David. It's so satisfying to be in the depths of something meaningful.
Arts educators will tell you that the vast majority of Americans, when placed in front of a prize Rothko, Pollock, Kahlo, or Picasso, will scratch their heads, and say, quizzically, if not derisively, that they or their child could have painted it.
They don't see emotion, sense or relate at all to that stuff.
But a survey of artists published in T magazine has provoked the amateur critic in our pundit so badly that the veins are bulging out of the neck of his writing, and at last, he must say what he thinks of post modernism.
For those of you who are holding your breath: he doesn't like it at all. He can't buy it, hang it on his wall, or even enjoy it.
That not art!
We need many more tender Mary Cassatts!
But the cowardice here is that this writing won't admit the truth.
It is not that he doesn't like the fact that this new work is political, but he doesn't like the politics.
Nobody ever meant for him to.
6
David asks who who will teach us how to feel?
I think as always what he means is who will teach us to feel like him?
6
But see the work of Jordan Casteel, New York artist, who paints friends and neighbors. I just saw a show of her work in Denver, "Returning the gaze." Very moving -- and deeply rooted in humanistic traditions. Some impressive "political" painters such as Leon Golub and Carlos Alonso (cf the recent exhibit of his work at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires) paint in the direct tradition of Goya. See also the dramatic exhibit of Hyman Bloom, "Matters of Life and Death," at the Boston MFA.
1
@Sunspot Thanks for sharing these artists. Made my morning to look at their works.
@Kathy Drago And you just made mine! Art is all about sharing --
If you choose conceptual artists, you’re going to get conceptual selections. It’s called an input-output problem.
8
This is what happens when you ask people from inside a very insular world what they think is important. Art, unlike literature, does not really get aired and tested in the public sphere. So few people actually see most artworks — they have no way to ponder them.
Personally I would nominate some photographic images by the press as some of the most influential artworks since 1970 — how about the image of the man in front of the tank in Tianamen Square? It affected people all over the world because it was both an amazing composition, and multiple emotions of fear, determination and bravery could be easily felt, and then the political context.
15
I am no philosopher, but i can observe that artists live in their own time, as do the critics and the curators. These artists lived and live in a time of major social change and cultural upheaval and they had some new, experimental tools with which to work. Their art fulfilled many of the purposes of art, including reminding us of the difficult truths of human experience. Some of the other purposes of art — windows into transcendence; arousal of emotions that all of us do share even when we don’t share particular experience; and reminders of the wonders of the world around us, including the wonder of artistic insight and technique — are being achieved as well. Think of the “official” portrait of Michelle Obama, for example. Several years ago, I was in a low place in my life. Staring out the window, Dostoevsky’s quote, “beauty will save the world” came to mind and would not leave for days. Not knowing what else to do with the urgency this quote was creating in me, I decided to volunteer at the Detroit Institute of Arts. What a good choice that turned out to be. There I am surrounded by beauty— not just the works of art on display, but the beauty of the people visiting the museum who find the works lovely, moving, confusing, breathtaking, silly, and inspiring. I recommend it.
11
Great art can be personal and political. Lose human charisma or charisma of humanness in either art or politics, and you only win the partisans.
1
I saw Ms. Holzer’s exhibits in the Guggenheim Bilbao, and when I reviewed them for others I said, “Definitely go, but don’t go inside the building, because Mr. Gehry’s building is fantastic, but the art inside isn’t worth the price of admission” (though the cafeteria was pretty good). The largest of Ms. Holzer’s exhibits was all text. The lines of text were written on sheets of paper and hung on the wall as though someone had found Ms. Holzer’s journal, tore out all the pages, translated them into a few languages, and hung them up in neat phalanx from floor to ceiling. The text was a stream-of-consciousness invective about social injustice, with an emphasis on sexism. I thought, “Who goes to an art museum to read a lot of text?” After about fifteen minutes, I’d had enough. I said to my companion, “I’ll read the book some time when I need an attitude adjustment...or a slogan to put on a placard at a demonstration,” and she agreed. I was straining my eyes trying to read the pages that were hung high up on the wall, a problem I never had with the paintings of El Greco. Down the street, there were better exhibits in the Bilbao Museum of Fine Art, mainly by unknown artists from every epoch, arranged by theme, which was interesting, and the museum was free after four o’clock.
3
Interesting how Mr. Brooks' view of politics is referenced in the subtitle, "When art shrinks to the size of politics." Perhaps we can understand the phenomenon he discusses from the other angle. Perhaps politics is expanding to address not only living conditions, but lived experience, much as art does. And, thus when both art and politics diversify, they converge and do so on topics and themes outside what were the conventional concerns of each.
4
There's full list of emojis on the Unicode Consortium website.
5
American/European culture has become a culture of elites. Very few people except for other artists, academics and a small number of art world hanger-ons are Interested in the art Brooks writes about. Very few people except for other poets and academics now read poetry. Very few people except for other theologians and academics now read theology. Very few people except for other philosophers and academics now read philosophy. There is no reason to see why any of this will change.
For better or worse, the average person in America and Europe in the future won’t be “taught how to feel” by the cultural elites.
17
Americans themselves have stopped trying.
My parents, children of poor -- Depression-era poor -- immigrants, loved listening to classical music: Mom, Puccini and Verdi; Dad, Brahms and Dvorak.
They read books. They watched documentaries on TV. Mom was a moderate Republican; Dad, an Independent. They weren't liberals but liberal-minded.
They took me to museums.
Americans today are deliberately turning themselves into grunt-creatures, scornful of anything extra-animal.
Some "elites" in the music and art worlds are way too self-consciously precious to do anybody any good.
But other so-called elites -- those a great swath of Americans call elites -- they haven't changed. They simply are mindful and appreciative of the great cultural heritage our American -- shall we call them deplorables, of all political stripes and identities? -- have rejected.
9
My thoughts are similar, but then we really live in a time of mass media and mass education. So perhaps more people are reading poetry than ever before. Or, as with mass production, perhaps the quality has diminished. And then there is the opening-up of the arts, so to speak, to allow what was previously in acceptable. Maybe the arts have been taken over by this more than the political themes.
1
Two things help make that possible. The small television screen practically attached at the wrist and big media. I see my geezer friends sharing mindlessness on social platforms. But none of it replaces a good old telephone call to someone or lunch with friends. The same must have been true when telephone took over letter writing. The fact that all of these so called street political artists dominate the milieu shouts the class warfare that lies ahead in the aftermath of the boomer generation.
1
The debate over what is, or isn't, art, is not new. Whether defined by a brush, a chisel, a musical instrument or words, artists of all stripes have, since time immemorial, used their medium-of-choice to convey their sentiments about and views of this or that.
Nor are we at risk, as Mr. Brooks implicitly posits, of being unable to appreciate art for its own sake. All artists represent the world as they observe it, and it is the disparate approaches to conveying their own varying realities that have always introduced those perspectives to observers of their work. In some cases, it is precisely because of their implicit or explicit message that observers flock to experience them.
No one needs to teach us how to feel. We can do that on our own. It is part of being human, and of being conditioned by the environment as we experience it. Suggesting that art has universally shrunk to the size of politics may be fodder for a column, but in writing it, perhaps Mr. Brooks should consider that he, himself, is an artist, albeit with words, conveying his reality to others while also instructing us how we should feel.
That may not be politics, per se, but in his own way, by writing this column and others, Brooks is shrinking his own art to the "size of politics." And as long as there are columnists around to share their views of the world and events around us, they will, intentionally it seems, be attempting to teach and convince us of their realities, whether we need it or not.
4
This has everything to do with the the way art criticism, along with just about everything else, is being taught in our universities. I'm afraid it's all about identity politics. And I say this as a liberal, but also as an old school artist who is interested in exploring plastic formalism, not making obvious political statements. The great artists of the modern period were political, but it didn't define their art.
When I was in art school, the teachers' favorite artists were Cezanne and Bonnard or maybe Mondrian and Klee and Miro. Who begat Pollock and DeKooning. Clement Greenberg would be rolling over in his grave.
(There is also the corrupting influence of big investment money and the emergence of the artist entrepreneur, but that is another discussion entirely)
23
This is an extremely interesting an important piece, thank you David Brooks. It shows me that not merely have our politics been depleted, impoverished, our humanity has also withered. If not even our art can provide the humanity which we so miss in politics, then where have we landed?
11
I am a self taught artist (not a hobby) and I struggle sometimes with the statement, "describe your work, what inspired you". No offense to holders of an MFA, but I call this MFA talk. I paint in a photorealism style, so there is some interpretation to be had, but not much. Mr.Brooks actually gave me some ideas as to how I can embellish the description of my work, without sounding like a faux philosopher. Thank you.
7
How did Brooks experience the artworks?
On his computer screen.
That defines the Contemporary Columnist.
Also, Brooks makes too much of the list. His colleagues say bout the group of curators and artist who met:
"It’s important to emphasize that no consensus emerged from the meeting. Rather, this list of works is merely what has been culled from the conversation, each chosen because it appeared on a panelist’s original submission of 10 (in two instances, two different works by the same artist were nominated, which were considered jointly). The below is not definitive, nor is it comprehensive. Had this meeting happened on a different day, with a different group, the results would have been different. "
7
For me, any discussion of art usually brings to mind the early nineties furor over the shuttlecocks of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on the lawn of our local art museum, the Nelson. If art’s purpose is to stir passion, those shuttlecocks surely served that purpose. I was then, and still am, in firmly in the pro-shuttlecock camp. The sense of whimsy I feel every time I drive by the Nelson always brightens my day. But there are no doubt others for whom those same shuttlecocks fan a still-smoldering sense of outrage at what they see as desecration of that neoclassical lawn. Arguments about art have much in common with contests to capture eels bare-handed.
1
I have a small painting on my living room wall that I look at every day. It is a pastel of a drifted log on the bank of a small river at dusk. The artist told me that when he was in art school in the 70’s, all the other students wanted to be in the studio creating a political or intellectual statement. He only wanted to be painting outdoors. It was his way of “being in the universe and knowing I am there.” Somehow I feel part of that when I look at that painting. His work will never turn the head of the art world, but it has brought a lot of joy to my life.
35
This “just provoke” superficial type of art is also much quicker from start to finish. Something with more foundation and effort takes time and inward focus complete. We live in a time of “Facebook or instagram me me me”. And when fancy art schools charge over $50k per year before room Andy board, then we create clubs that connect “artists” of the wealthy families with their wealthy curator friends. Then we serve it/ push it onto the world as art.
13
Current art seems shrill and self-congratulatory. I remember a piece shown at the new Whitney, a pile of candy that in its daily diminishment symbolized the decreasing of an AIDS sufferer's weight.
And I have watched my relatives one by one dwindle to skeletons because of their fatal cancers.
Sorry, a pile of candy is not art. It is a type of propaganda.
I prefer not to be harassed or preached at. Or bludgeoned.
Give me a large Constable or Sargent, or Manet, or any artist whose mastery of technique suggests many years of hard learning, whose sensibilities reflect some appreciation of the world's beauty, or anger at its desecration, whose lyricism in whatever form it takes is uplifting or energizing -- rather than a political splat, which is in effect a self-conscious attempt to show how clever the artist is or to show how awful we are.
I find a trip to the Met's galleries and not, say, to the Whitney's, suits better.
31
@B.
"I prefer not to be harassed or preached at. Or bludgeoned."
Who doesn't? Some, of course, aren't able to avoid it when they visit a museum or walk down the street. The issue is that you seem to believe art, artists, and institutions should cater to your tastes and point of view--that is, what does and does not count to you as being harassed or preached at.
Have you ever been to an art museum? What do you think those centuries of Christian (mostly Catholic) artwork is but "preaching"? To those who are not of that tradition it is unmistakable.
What is the significance of all of those ever more technically adept portraits of affluent benefactors which include markers of their wealth if it is not propaganda in support of their position in society? Are they ever portrayed in anything but flattering terms?
What is elided from a work of art, its framing so to speak, is part of the art. Every time we take a photo and crop out what we don't want others to see before it is posted, we are doing the same. That some artists chose to focus on what others crop out, to continue the metaphor, does not erase the work of other artists. But, it does bring into relief the unexamined assumptions (held by some) of what art is "supposed" to be and do.
To take one provocative example, what, precisely, is your opinion of Guernica, 1937? Not especially beautiful by some standards, and explicitly political.
8
I said I appreciated artistry whether it celebrates beauty or deplores its destruction. Guernica does the latter, and I have seen it.
Just as I have visited museums in Europe and here and looked at Christian art.
None of those works is a pile of candy.
Sorry.
3
@B.
Since you re-direct by focusing on the "pile of candy". How, precisely, does said pile bludgeon you? What is it preaching? How does it harass any more than Geurnica?
I am not a fan of the kind of installation art you mention, but I can understand the project and can put it in its art historical context. Art is and does many things, like cuisine. That I don't like them all doesn't make the ones I dislike unsavory.
An honest piece of writing by David Brooks, this does not deny the importance of politics or the agony inherent in systemic violent injustice. Nor, do I think does he only acknowledge these aspects of collective experience in order to give them short shrift.
Many of the most rewarding and satisfying human emotions are associated with what we have struggled to achieve as and in a realm of privacy though that realm is fuzzily defined around “the individual”, “the family”, or some restricted version of “community”. Of course some of the most propulsive, revulsive, and horrific emotional experiences are also found in the intimacies and dependencies of childhood, domestic relationships, and intense affinities.
It may be that the intellectual, cultural, and emotional currents that shake and shape the art world are trying to tell us something about the ways we try to cordon off the private from the public. Perhaps if we could build a public sphere that is more committed to justice and decency for all (instead of disproportionately inflicting death, injury, penury, and desperation on select groups while a tiny few rake in the profits) the art world will turn to different ways of exploring human relationships to our ongoing creation.
I am thankful to David Brooks for his, sometimes awkward (of course!) but consistently courageous and honest attempts to understand - and, by struggling, to help us all understand such complexities, abstractions, and contradictions (which matter).
5
I remember being required to visit the campus art gallery for a college class. On display, in pride of place, was a collection of junk. This pile of junk had to be carefully arranged in the same order every time it was put on display at a new museum. I no longer remember the name of the artist or what he or she claimed the pile of junk represented. Had it been up to me, I would have called for a janitor to cart it away. Many years later, I taught a community college humanities class and taught a unit on the arts. I required my students, among other things, to research art movements and great works of art and artists and to write a brief paper describing the art work and why it moved them. Not one of the students felt moved by any of the works on this list or by the pile of trash I was required to view in my own humanities class. I Imagine that they are appreciated by a vanishingly small audience.
20
@Bookworm8571
Joseph Beuys - possibly .. a chair holding a triangular blob of lard. Sweepings from a protest parade somewhere in a huge terrarium. Pieces reminiscent of a badly managed building site.... and yet …
Art can thrill, soothe, inspire (that one I think is crucial-hence most influential), help one understand the world differently. Beuys' work-- and I don't know why he didn't make the list-- possibly too mainstream already -- for me in the end was inspiring. Memento mori (remember you will die: cherish life!) everywhere. PS the first sensation was th shock of the new... and then the aha moment. Exhale.
@Auntie Mame It would have been an artist whose work was on display at the University of North Dakota art gallery sometime in the early 90s. I imagine he was a conceptual artist of some notoriety, or so my professor said. I vaguely remember another artist of that ilk whose work of art was an unmade bed containing bloodstained sheets and possibly candy wrappers. I did not find it moving — just pretentious and annoying. However, I did require my own students to visit an art gallery or art show of some type for the humanities class I taught.
Music isn't art?
My selections of art that defines the contemporary age since 1970 includes (mostly) music.
4
@JMMAlso, cinema!
1
Art is often expressive of the times in which it is made. Since we live in one of the most politicized eras of history it isn't surprising that so much nationally recognized art is political. Yet viewing most regional and local art shows, which I do frequently, doesn't offer the same experience. Beauty and joy are often celebrated and the political is much less common. The curators of art have much more influence at the national level, and I think they are often driven, for whatever reasons, by political agendas.
11
Because, David, this is the age of anger. The very few, aided by your party here in the US and similar parties elsewhere around the world, have concentrated the wealth into a tiny crust of individuals, leaving the rest of the world’s population in the dirt. Am I a socialist or communist? No- those systems end up producing the same result with a prettier underlying philosophy. But we can all take a look at the few countries that do not have such an unequal distribution and use similar policies to achieve a more just country.
10
Art is a very subjective undertaking. Even in subjective undertakings the art needs to be exposed to more people before it can be truly judged. I am not of the Art World, but I know what appeals to me, what makes me think. Isn't this what all art is really about?
1
David's book report on an article from T Magazine is a fascinating work of art. It contains a summary of other people's ideas without blurring them with anything original. Masterful.
10
@Mike So sharp and witty. Great comment. A+ from the prof.
1
I'd prefer we learn how to think. We feel enough politically as is.
21
This has been going on for years. I applied for several New York Foundation for the Arts grants in the 1990's. I paint in a traditional style, but unconventional subject matter, with a work sometimes requiring several hundred hours. Maybe that counts for nothing, and apparently it did to the judges because there wasn't one grant given that didn't reference the Armenian Genocide, AIDS, Civil Rights, or the grievances of some marginalized group. All the artists chosen had some political ax to grind and none seemed to have any technical skills to speak of. Their output was uniformly ugly and shoddy.
Art schools do not teach the rudiments any longer and whereas for centuries it was master instructing pupil, now its the blind leading the blind. The market itself does not reward skill or technique and the requirements placed upon an artists who's "made it", are to churn out pieces at an impossible rate. Even were they talented, the demands are on quality are unsustainable. This is all coupled with a completely atrophied aesthetic sense in the public inaugurated by the modernists. Initially, they made valid statements about things like form following function, but that quickly devolved into an excuse for cheaply manufactured, unimaginatively designed objects, reflected daily in the ads of this paper. Now people mistake a lack of ornament as modernism wheres its really a veiled confession by the artist or designer that they can't draw.
121
The fact that Jeff Koon’s ‘Rabbit’ sculpture recently sold for $91M is all we need to know to understand ART of the present day. Another hoax, among many, perpetrated against an apparently willing segment of society.
13
@stan continople: $100 million steel rabbit, anyone?
9
The phrase, ‘… artworks that define the contemporary age’ is misleading when you consider that truly great art, regardless of who creates it, who appreciates it or when it was produced, is timeless. Ditto for the aphorism, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ Regardless of who said it first, Sigmund or Groucho, the word ‘sometimes’ is as important as the word ‘cigar’ since it reflects the culture of its age and therefore should also be considered timeless. When it comes to art, who's really right and who's really wrong?
1
A very great, yet completely unknown artist, once said to me:
"The Purpose of Art is to Open the Heart"
11
This notion that art should be on a micro, individual level to make a human connection has never been universally held. There are times when the micro, the individual level, gets ground up by larger currents and phenomena. The 1930s were like that, and a good deal of the art tried to capture that grinding-up phenomenon.
I think we're in one of those periods now, and have been since 9/11. Terrorism, war, wild gambling and speculation, economic trouble, political extremism, cruelty... it's really happening, and it's tearing us up. Art focused on the purely personal seems very 90s to me now, from an era before the cataclysm and therefore not entirely real.
5
DAVID BROOKS Writes a highly-erudite, abstruse and obtuse piece, whose qualities are defined by the content and meaning of the art that arouses puzzlement. Among many of the oeuvres, there is no sense of Alice in Wonderland, where things become curiouser and curiouser; not even when the Mad Queen shouts, Off with their heads! A combination of mirror cells and spindle cells are what we depend upon, significantly, to give us a sense of consciousness, as well as an unconscious experience of how the body is functioning at any point in time. With the progressive myelination, the neurons become ensheathed with with insulation that transforms how information is conveyed within the brain. All of which impinges upon the process of attachment to others, through a physiological realization of our selves. When external stimuli and events do not correspond to our sense of attachment to others, their meaning is incomprehensible. In his book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, by Bruce Perry, neurodevelopmental psychiatrist describes how extreme disruption of attachment results in not understanding the external world. Oscar Wilde gets at the crux of the matter when he asks, Does Art imitate Life more than Life imitates Art? The answer is both. Still, when art imitates neither life nor vice versa, the result is the incomprehensibility of the neurological input. We do not recognize any attachment to the symbolology we cannot construct coherent meaning. Love, truly, is the Answer!
1
@John Jones great comment! Would love to read more by you. The only thing I think you left out, in terms of “crux of the matter,” is perhaps a universal basic income would help everything.
1
@John Jones
Oh please! Leave neuropsychology out of it. It is only about the brain, and that is not at all the same thing as the mind. There is an unbridgeable gap between the two—just as there is an unbridgeable gap between a carved wooden doll and a living boy named Pinocchio. We all know that the latter is a fantasy. The idea that neuropsychology would be about the mind is a variation on the same fantasy. We should give it up already.
1
@John Jones
And by the way, Oscar Wilde does not ASK whether art imitates life more than the other way. He categorically states that life imitates art more than the other way. That is his whole point. Missed by a mile here.
4
The artists and curators who were asked to select artworks which define an era were given a very subjective task-it is their opinion only.These works are not what museums are spending big money on for display and they are not the works that the very wealthy choose for their multi-million dollar purchases. Ask Christie’s and Sotheby’s for a list of the artwork which brought the highest prices in the recent auctions.These works of art may not define an era but they are what people find valuable and in that way they also define what is valuable and will be shown in museums.
4
In trying to get a handle on this it occurs to me that I could take a picture of a house overrun by kudzu, publish it under the title “tribal narratives,” and call it art.
But it’s still an implicit analogy, and accordingly should be analyzed as such in context to determine whether I’ve said something useful about the intersection of postmodernist narrative design, culture, human nature, and western politics today.
That seems like a different skill set than trying to figure out or be open to the sense and significance of a painting or sculpture, or of a play or movie.
I do remember a photo accompanying NYT coverage of a 2016 Trump campaign rally. I think the rally was held at a high school in Ohio and the picture showed a thirtyish guy under a hall light near the athletic trophy case. It brought to my mind Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, updated for our time and place. I’d have been interested to hear what people who know how to talk intelligibly about art had to say about the intersection of that guy’s life and the fact that Donald Trump was running for president.
1
@Jack A house overrun by kudzu is a pretty good representation of the US at this point.
2
Think we humans are destroying our emotional and artistic centers which in the past were the motivational forces to create artwork that hit the soul via facial expressions, color, and posing. Paintings and art have always served to remind us the intensity and fragile nature of life.
4
It would behoove us to remember that art of the past such as that created by the Impressionists or Picasso was not immediately embraced by the contemporary culture. Time and familiarity was required for understanding, appreciation, and acceptance.
12
Let us hope that mature and humor-loving adults serve as role models as children and young adults enlarge and refine their feelings, experiences, and choices.
Feelings are not taught, and I worry about the idea behind the title.
3
I looked at the same list. My reaction was different.
Not one of the works was something that I would want to own or display in my home. Very few would I seek out in a museum.
Warhol, Okeeffe, Rivera, Wyeth, or many others I would seek, or display,
Maybe we need to look at the list again.
11
Whatever the merits of David Brooks’s main argument his reference to Lisa Feldman Barrett is misleading. Her belief that emotions are an construct is decidedly not commonly held by neuroscientists, as she would readily admit, though she cites neuroscience studies to bolster her thesis.
The prevailing consensus is that emotions are universal in humans and probably animals as well, as Frans de Waal argues. What culture determines is the way we interpret our emotions. To put this succinctly: our emotions are universal, but the way we feel about them is not. Feelings are culture-bound.
18
David's point about the non-fame of most of these artists is interesting. If few people other than "art elites" have heard of these artists or their most iconic pieces, how widely influential could they truly have been in "defining the contemporary age"? Perhaps it is more accurate to say these works are defining to a limited universe of the leftward-lurching urban art world, but not for the public at large.
In this way, these artists, perhaps inadvertently, may have predicted the political chasm between red and blue states in this country. Certain "elites" consider these works defining of an age, but the rest of the country never saw them and probably wouldn't be moved by them even if they had. This symbolically mirrors their same indifference toward immigrants, the poor, inequality and the rights of others who don't look like them. But one can only look away from the truth for so long, until reality forces them to confront it.
12
Art is not about emotions, it is about money and social status games of the elite.
12
@Plimsol, art dissolves the subject object of viewing it. Rupert Spira, himself a potter artists, describes it best
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4juZiL0cYVg
1
Brooks has a blind spot about politics. Politics is personal. Politics draws the contours of our lives and colors in their possibilities. Three-fourths of married couples share political views because politics reflects our deepest values: whether we tolerate minorities and give them equal rights or not; whether we prefer diplomacy to war; regulate business or not; take care of the sick or not; whether we value civility, education, or science; and whether we value women and girls as people with equal rights or as sex objects and incubators, all subjects apropos to these last decades. It is not clear what Brooks means that political questions are not personal, or what higher truths there might be, or why aesthetically pleasing art captures those higher truths. The art that was chosen to represent these last decades is not necessarily about smashing injustice, but about revealing how injustice feels. It might not be pretty, but I can't imagine a higher, or more important, truth to reveal in art.
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@Sherry
While feelings about politics can be very personal for some, politics only tells us about politics. It does not tell us about the range of human emotions and ideas that are non-political. The problem isn't that there is art that is political; the problem is the absence of art that is non-political. If art is a picture of how humanity views itself and the world, this collection, and perhaps all of curated art today, is lopsided in its emphasis.
2
@Sherry
well said and spot on.
The long roots of our current malaise can be explored through, and seen in, art, and this column is a good start. Identity politics of both the left and right is part of the problem.
The left-wing admonition, "The personal is political" has become a tired, controlling harangue—as can be seen from some of the snarky responses here.
20
I hope curators will read your timely article and take it to heart. I think the trend in "important" art you identify is the reason that gallery attendance in the US has been plummeting; meanwhile art that addresses the personal is alive and well on Instagram where millions follow the thousands of artists from around the world on (many self-taught and with day jobs) who create and post images of their art that speaks to our emotional lives.
11
@spz "gallery attendance in the US has been plummeting; "
Hmmm, I need to line up to get in at the openings of exhibits in NY, not just for the big names, but also for the new discoveries. Something must be going the wrong way in SF. Could it be too much tech?
1
@college prof glad to hear there is lots of interest! people in the art world claim it is going down, that's what I had in mind https://news.artnet.com/market/foot-traffic-galleries-new-york-1318769
Of all the artists listed I have only seen one in real time at a museum. In the 1990s, on whim, a friend and I decided to go see a Mike Kelley exhibit at the LACMA in Los Angeles. I remember it vividly. It was stunning. I understand why he is on this list. To say it was just stuffed animals doesn't do it justice. There was so much to see and feel, truly remarkable -- I'll never forget that day. My friend and I still talk about it.
I also just spent about and hour trying to find the whole video of Arthur Jafa's "Love Is the Message, the Message is Death." I couldn't find and I want it.
The Judy Chicago video clip led me down a Judy Chicago internet wormhole of research.
My point: I think the list picked by T Magazine is stunning. It made me curious. Since it came out a few days ago I have gone back to it, shared the list on group text, and it has spurred some conversation with my friends.
If you want another real time work of art -- read the comments attached to the T Magazine list. The comments, coupled with Brook's semi-triggered "what about relationships" op-ed today, and I think the list did it's job. And the artists did their job.
27
So how do we explain people who say they won’t listen to works by Wagner, for instance, because of his political views? The music is still artistic, emotional, beautiful, n’est ce pas?
16
And now we have an organization that has taken conductor James Levine's recordings out of circulation -- and with them the orchestra and great voices he worked with.
It doesn't matter that an individual chooses not to listen to Wagner or Levine, or read Dickens or Trollope (with their cultural antisemitism), or Twain or Harper Lee -- whose characters' depravity or ignorance is highlighted by their utterances about blacks -- or hear James Levine.
It matters a lot that self-righteous, shallow activists seek to remove these works from our cultural heritage.
And now we have calls to rip the Theodore Roosevelt statue from the entrance of the Museum of Natural History.
Our greatest -- most progressive -- President.
Puny despots with narrow vision, used to political one-notes who echo their bugaboos. Their success will diminish us.
10
This reminds me of an article published in September 2018 in the NYT which asked classical music artists & conductors to name the piece of music that would make a novice fall in love with classical music. Pretty much all the responses were such esoteric and atonal pieces that only a true insider would have even heard about them, let alone actually have heard them. The respondents were probably so used to breathing the rarefied air of their own echo-chamber that even contemplating what a non-professional might appreciate was beyond them.
I believe this is the same phenomenon at play here - just play the insider card.
55
Exactly. Give the answer that perpetuates the image and polishes the persona that you want those ‘in the business’ to associate with you. Branding. Marketing. Those who are not ‘in the business’ don’t matter anyway.
And if I am wrong about this assessment - how would I ever know that?
5
@Nitin B.
I sing in choirs. There's a wealth of choral music that has been composed in the last 50 years which is beautiful, meaningful, and yet accessible. Some of it has a political subtext, some of it doesn't. The problem seems to be with the nature of curation and criticism today. Artists are still capable of exploring the emotional world and the nature of the human condition. Critics only perceive value in the political and the esoteric.
5
@Tom Meadowcroft
BINGO!
Yes, choral music is in something of a golden age right now. And choral singing is among the most common volunteer activities of Americans. and it's something that layfolk (as it were) have exposure with and to. Critics, not so much.
3
Thank you, Mr Brooks, for a thought provoking article. I don't think that some of the criticisms of artistic naivete or favouring establishment viewpoints are merited. I read the piece as noting the importance of portraying and recognising complexity and depth - whatever viewpoint is being favoured - in aesthetics, and in human life generally.
Guernica, cited in the comments, would be a case in point. It was making a powerful political statement, but it makes it through a complex artwork that calls us to think about the bombing of Guernica and its significance at multiple levels. Different symbols within it have both a literal meaning and also a wider resonance within Spanish culture; the emotions depicted include both suffering and the various responses to it; the style itself expresses the disjuncture and fragmentation of war.
Do such complex portrayals still exist? Yes, one suspects they do. I was recently struck by an exhibit of South African contemporary art where artists from a variety of backgrounds portrayed contested spaces within their country. The works were stylistically varied, rich, thought-provoking, and often deeply moving and profoundly human. Perhaps what we should be questioning is less the current artistic output than the priorities of the artistic 'scene' represented by the magazine's choices.
4
Brooks says, "People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic." It is said that to understand everything is to forgive everything, which is much more elegant in the original French. This seems to be that to wonder at the complexity of people is to not render judgement on them but just wonder.
So we wonder that Donald Trump is the President, and that he may well be reelected, but we dont feel the need to judge him immediately. We are just astonished by the complexity of what is happening to us, and we certainly have a lot to wonder at.
Reality is vanishing, obscured by fake news. Perhaps more educated emotions would help trumpsters and squadsters get back to reality. Alexandria seems to have educated emotions, but I am not so sure about Mitch. Or the Donald.
8
The arts, all of them, change as the times change. How they are seen, heard, read or felt also changes.
What makes them great and/or relevant remains a constant.
3
I think David Brooks hits the nail on his head here. We live in a world where the political is considered to be deeper, more significant, and more intellectually personal than the human and the emotional. This is problematic. The political is there as a means of making sure that human life can go well--it is not meant as a replacement for real human life.
If you read film criticism (popular, not necessarily academic), the emphasis all seems to be on the social and political elements of the work instead of the human and emotional elements that make the work tick and determine whether it is a good or bad work. It seems like we have lost touch with our emotions and our concepts that enrich our emotional lives.
There seems to be an inability to articulate the inner emotional life. It is as if many of us don't know how to talk about emotions and human life, so instead we talk about the political, because it is easier.
We don't talk about the tragedy in a work, or the pain, or the betrayal, or the nostalgia, or the longing, or the desire for revenge, or the lust, or the obsession, or the contentment. Instead we talk about the identity politics, or whether the work captures trauma accurately, or whether the work depicts women in an empowering way, or whether the work conveys the depth of lesbian experiences. These things are all good to talk about, they just shouldn't scare the other stuff away. We stand to lose much of the universal, the emotional and the human.
90
@EL
Thank you, EL. I would add that when we don't give people the language to name one's feelings, we also risk becoming intolerant of the feelings of others. I cannot tell you the number of times my undergraduates complain to me that their friends often respond with indifference to their pain or disappointment. Most of the time, they hear: "I don't know what to say," which is probably honest but not particularly compassionate or empathetic. These are the same students who question why we read the classics and then wonder why they are not sensitive to one another. I will keep teaching Austen and Forster for that reason.
19
@EL
Great comment, EL. I once had a chance to be in Paris for a few days and saw the Louvre, D'Orsay, Rodin and Picasso. They were some of the most intensely emotional days of my life. I mostly "graze" when going to
museums. In Paris I stopped and looked and cried. Wish I had more time to be there.
9
@EL On the one hand, you suggest that there's an inability to articulate inner emotional life. On the other, you place "captur[ing] trauma accurately" and "convey[ing] the depth of lesbian experience" as concerns beyond "the emotional and the human." To me they seem like perfect examples of it, and I can only conclude that your concern isn't about "inner emotional life" but instead that you don't recognize the inner emotional lives these works of art represent as being worthy of discussion or expression.
5
Technology is changing art and will continue until we reach oblivion.
Changes will not only be related to video or computer graphics, but we will develop new materials and tools.
Unusual cloud formations are high on my list of aesthetics. (No pun intended). But, can you imagine tools that can induce moisture into the air, and then shape them into special atmospheric formations.
We're still at the beginning stage of human potential. Let's hope we keep our madmen at bay. We don't want to see the colorful glow of radiation above our major cities!
6
One of my favorite paintings is this one: Hide-and-Seek by Pavel Tchelitchew. I first saw it as a young teen at the Museum of Modern Art. My mother took me there. I saw Picasso's "Guernica" there too. Those were, for me, very rich paintings. But I grew up in a different world from some of the artists of today. Art was communication when those paintings were done. And there were controversies about Picasso's work, about Modigliani's work, and others.
What has defined today's America or today's world the most? Consumerism. It drowns out many other concerns people might have. Maybe the real question is not about art and feeling but about where we can share art and feelings. In America a lot of our public spaces are dirty, noisy, and not at all conducive to quiet reflection or conversation. Our lives do not have time in them to contemplate or feel deeply. And for some of us, if we felt, we'd lose control because of how impoverished our lives have become. We work, we do chores, and we work some more. In between that we're expected to buy, buy, and buy.
However, even if there are not as many notable artists as Mr. Brooks would like to see there is art all around us if we look. Watch a bird fly, stand at a lakeshore or a pond's end and notice how the water moves and the reflections change. Listen to the wind as it swirls through the leaves and the change when all that's there are bare branches. Watch how people hold hands. That's art too.
7/23/19 1:00am
13
Politically, Norman Rockwell's art work on his Saturday Evening Post covers captured the hearts of millions of Americans. I am not sure what happened. It was a visual political language that gave us great meaning.
8
@concord63 Unfortunately, what many remember of Rockwell is him at his most anodyne, rather than his searing work against hatred and racism.
2
@concord63,
Orwell once wrote an essay explaining that all art is political, and Norman Rockwell gave us "The Golden Rule: "Do Unto Others as You would have Done Unto You", which now appears invisible to the eye of the beholders.
This American masterpiece has been scarred and damaged; and is in need of restoration on the part of Us All.
5
Mr. Brooks seems to not know much about the history of art, nor about the intersections of artistic style and the economics of art throughout history.
"Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words."
- Isn't a Bach fugue just an intellectual concept expressed through notes?
- Isn't Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" just a political attitude expressed through paint?
"The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded."
- Aren't the works of Dickens political statements that need to be decoded?
- Picasso's "Guernica" isn't beautiful, but it's most certainly a powerful political statement that must be decoded to be appreciated.
"In some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone, and these are the truths that keep us sane."
- This fully discloses Brooks' artistic naivete. In most of the history of Western art, art was produced with the economic support of either the church, the government, or wealthy patrons. Thus, art was only produced, accepted, and preserved if it conformed to the values and power structures of those ruling forces.
But those "larger truths" (as Brooks calls them) aren't the only "truths" of human existence. Now that art has been freed from those restraints, a more complete set of truths can be expressed.
139
@Paul-A Yes, art has always been political. But as David Brooks is getting at, it hasn't been *just* political. Shakespeare's history plays are certainly all about politics, but they are also about individual human beings, deciding how to act. There's a kind of reductionism nowadays that assumes that who we are is defined exclusively by the intersectional social groups to which we belong and by the power or lack of power each of these groups possesses. But where is any recognition of the "human particularity" of which Mr. Brooks speaks?
60
@Paul-A These contemporary "artists" are as mercenary as those hired by the Medicis, selling to the patrons of the galleries. They are just without artistic talent, and the "art" shows it to the point of embarrassing the viewer.
The Medicis' hirelings produced great art. The contemporary ones are only expressing their prejudices, and expecting the rest of us to care.
36
@Jonathan Katz In your opinion they are without artistic talent, but the "beauty" of art is that it creates space for those that agree and those that disagree. And with time opinions, tastes and perspectives change making what was once shunned newly embraced.
As for the Medicis' "hirelings," I am pretty sure that not all them produced great art all of the time nor did every artist succeed in satisfying the taste of their patron. There are many mediocre works by master painters often times produced on their journey to greatness or experimentation.
3
The current political emotions, raw as they are, have a parallel in my lifetime. In the late 60's, like today, people were not much on the fence concerning topics like civil rights and the environment, but the defining issue was Vietnam, and it was pulling the country apart. The divisive issue at present is, of course, Trumpism, and likewise, has few disinterested observers, so it is interesting that also like today, there was a great deal of art with overtly political themes. From "Hair", to Guerilla Theater, the arts were ablaze with rejection of what was then called, The Establishment. We are left to wonder which contemporary art works will be seen to someday define our present. I certainly don't know, but I am willing to posit that it depends upon which reality, Trumpism or its rejection, prevails.
4
There are a couple of historical fallacies here. First, "art" is not synonymous with "beauty." Painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry were dubbed the "beaux (beautiful) arts" by eighteenth-century aristocrats to justify their leisurely contemplation of these industries. The inclusion of landscape architecture and oratory in early lists of the fine arts (as they are known in the English-speaking world) further attests to their aristocratic lineage. There are plenty of horrific images from history that may be beautiful in form but not in subject matter. Second, the equivalent today of the visual images of the past is not "contemporary art" but film, television, Internet content, etc, and any list of the most important artists of the last fifty years would have to place Steven Spielberg at the top.
7
@Ned Hartley
Examples:
All of the depictions of the crucifixion of Christ and all the depictions of the suffering of the saints.
The many versions of the "Massacre of the Innocents"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Innocents
and Goya's "The Disasters of War"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disasters_of_War
1
Maybe the question begged a political answer. There are plenty of post 1970 artists that elevate aesthetics even when political. Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe come to mind.
12
Art doesn't need you to tell Art what Art should be doing. Art is at Art's best when Art does what Art wants.
72
@Jay Why
Signed - Art.
3
Any list of 25 works as "representative" of a period would show similar limitations. There are numerous works of sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, pottery, music, film, drama and so forth which are beautiful, expressive, "representative," moving, explosive . . . Lists are too limiting by far.
26
I just performed Leonard Bernstein's"Mass" from 1971 last night, and I would offer that as a candidate. It does have a political subtext, granted--but then so did The Marriage of Figaro. It is also riveting, great fun, fearless, and beautiful.
37
@veeckasinwreck
Yes, I have seen it in NY and London. Audiences loved it. And of course, it was derided by critics as garbage when it was premiered. Goes to show you.
2