[grmarcil]

Make a point of frequently going to art museums and sculpture gardens. Read the placards and learn to recognize certain artists, spend time looking at the pieces that grab your attention and think about them. Don't feel like you have to enjoy every piece. This will build your appreciation/understanding for two reasons:

1) Like all things, art depends on context. A piece is often in conversation with other works by the same artist, contemporaries, predecessors, or historical events.

2) Sculpture in particular depends on scale, perspective, and physical detail. You'll never get to appreciate these qualities through a photograph - you have to be there in person and walk around the sculpture. Look at it from different distances, different angles.

[ashark]

Yeah, maybe I just need to look at more of it, though the required travel to do so makes that much more difficult than with most other art forms aside from architecture. Maybe that's part of the appeal of state- and country-spanning "conversations" of this sort? Most people are simply priced out of traveling enough to appreciate it? Meanwhile traditional sculpture relies on more general aesthetic principals and references other more-accessible media sufficiently that you don't need to see tons of it to get at least some of the point or intended sense of a given piece.

This kinda junk-drawer-looking abstract sculpture stuff hits me the same way the heavier, growlier kinds of heavy metal do, in that I can never tell whether I'm supposed to be laughing with it, laughing at it, laughing with it at some target of ridicule of which I am unaware, or not laughing at all, but they don't seem like they could be anything other than some form of comedy, even though their fans rarely act like it's the sort of low-brow fart-joke-adjacent thing it appears to be/sounds like to me, and which I don't mind in moderation but wears thin with me pretty quickly. Probably I just haven't been exposed to enough of it.