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In Part One of this post I criticized modern art’s ability to communicate. For Part Two my focus is less upon art itself and more on history and the museum system:

The German word museal [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchres of works of art.
-Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno makes me pause and think. Is art dead? Is a work of art dead when it’s brought into a museum? Is all museum art dead?

“They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present.” Or, as I interpret it, dead art looks alive through the efforts of curators and conservators.

As an artist-in-training, I find that this issue completely ignored. So, to bring this idea to the fore, especially in a format understandable by other artists, I created this image, based uponVan Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Straw Hat:

My underlying idea: Historical art works look “alive,” despite being dead. To rectify this discrepancy, art needs to be killed again, even if it requires a violent homicide. This work presents the aftermath of such an event.

This is one of two digital works I created for an art history class last quarter.

For a long time now I’ve been concerned with the relevance of the Fine Arts in today’s society. Do people really care what artists do and think? Is art “dead”?

We artists tend to wrap all of our work in theoretical and critical discourse and quite often it is necessary to have knowledge of these discourses to understand artists’ intentions. (I’m not at all trying to imply that the general public is stupid or that artists are smarter or better.) The same phenomenon occurs in any specialized field of study. For example, anyone could read an article on string theory in a physics journal, but unless we have a deep knowledge of the physics and math discussed, we won’t get the full picture (Lyotard’s term for this is “language games“).

With this first image I’m criticizing abstract art in particular. One of the theoretical rationales for abstract art was to create a form of “universal” communication. By removing letters, words, symbols, signs, and anything culturally specific it wouldn’t matter where you were from or what language you spoke or even how smart you were, you’d be able to understand the image.

However, people didn’t get it, didn’t understand the art the way the artists intended. While the art is fun to look at, there’s not much to talk about in the works themselves.

For this image I used Mark Rothko‘s Untitled (Brown and Grey), 1968:

I overlaid his painting with handicapped symbols and snippets of a statement Rothko made in 1947:

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!

Continue reading in Part 2.