[starship]

That makes very good sense. The problem is, a lot of us have been to modern art museums, where you'd think that next to every piece there would be an explanation as to the X, Y, Z, A & B that you mentioned. But there never is. So why is that?

You must admit, it's not a crazy idea that they are being intentionally opaque because the decision of what art is "great" and what is "crap" is not being chosen out of merit, but by the whims of an insider few. Is it really so hard to believe that the artists who are considered "hot" right now are just better at working over these insiders who pick the winners and losers?

[mturmon]

Some museums will have didactic plaques, or large wall didactics, especially for thematic shows. But for well known artists, or major works, these panels don't make sense. They mean so many things to so different people, that it would be presumptuous to try to pin down a meaning in a few sentences. The panel would leave out more than it could include.

[starship]

Well...then they can get a bigger plaque.

Remember I'm responding to the person above who was saying there was a very straight-forward explanation and way to understand art based on X, Y, Z, A & B. If that explanation is so straight-forward, they can probably fit it in a couple of paragraphs.

Regardless, I think saying "well its reeeeally complicated, so we're just not going to explain ourselves at all" is pretty indefensible.

[mturmon]

The plaques also get in the way of a viewer's own response to the work. Pretty soon people are reading their way through the museum.

Also, for most contemporary art, there is not even a critical consensus about the work. Most artists hate to describe what their work is about. They might say what experience inspired them to make the piece, or the feeling they had when they were making it, if you're lucky and caught an unguarded moment. And there would be as many reactions to the piece as critics who wrote about it. It's a losing game.

It's OK to want it, I'm just mentioning some of the barriers to it ever happening.

[starship]

> Pretty soon people are reading their way through the museum.

Yes. Yes that's exactly what I want to do. I want to spend a day at the museum, and read, i.e. learn, why some things are important and great art, and others aren't.

> for most contemporary art, there is not even a critical consensus about the work.

What? Then how is any decision made as to what art is featured in these exhibits, and what isn't? Remember, for every piece in one of these exhibits, there are 10 artists getting behind on rent who didn't make it in. Someone decides. Who? How?

If you're trying to counter my current argument, which is that this is all arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim, you should be aware that you're actually kind of helping my case here...

[mturmon]

About my motivation: My wife shows her work and curates shows in the LA area. Consequently for the last 20 years I've spent a lot of time in galleries and museums. I was just trying to get across some of the thinking of the curators who decide what to put on the plaques. Not trying to get into an argument, particularly.

About "no critical consensus": Saying there's not consensus about meaning, doesn't mean curators don't know if there's value in the work.

Lots of times people know work is good, they just don't agree on why. It takes time to figure out whether it's a dead end or not, or to see where the artist goes with a line of work.

Here's another one: there's lots of work that is loved by even sophisticated collectors, but unliked by artists. (E.g.: large-scale paintings that "look like art" but are not new.) There's lots of work that is liked by curators, but not by many artists or collectors (e.g., work grounded in complex theories).

"arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim":

The artistic community operates outside your judgement and scorn. Go in expecting to learn something, and maybe you will.

[vacri]

I travelled across the US and visited a lot of modern art galleries on the way (historical art galleries all look the same...). I have no background in art, and I have never been able to figure out those plaques. In the end, I learned to utterly ignore the plaques until I was done observing the piece, and then I'd maybe read the plaque to maybe shed more light. Often the plaque could be misleading.

Two examples here. The first was a plaque describing half a painting as being painted black for whatever reason. Sure, given the painting, if you stood back about 20 meters, it looked black. But from only a few meters, it was clearly a mottled purple and black. How can I trust the interpretation of the curator if they can't even get the colour correct?

The other example was another artist who took a number of photos of beachgoers, in such a way that most of them had a single person and a vast expanse of sand or water. The blurbs said 'exploring the loneliness blah blah'. Only problem was, the people in the photos were clearly enjoying themselves (one photo of a group of people 'looking off behind as if in fear' had the four folks looking back laughing). Add in to this that in my country, having a beach to yourself is bliss. In this case, the curator wasn't wrong - the plaques were describing what the photographer meant to capture. The context was that the photos were taken just after the 9/11 attacks and it was what he was feeling - isolation and loneliness. But I couldn't make those photos match that context.

So, lesson learned: experience art for yourself, then see if the artist or curator has anything which might add to the experience.

[starship]

If the artist intended to express loneliness, but instead gave most people a feeling of "hey look at those happy people on a beach", then that wasn't good art that was ruined by a plaque. It was just bad art.

[ars]

> The plaques also get in the way of a viewer's own response to the work

That might not be a bad thing if the response is: "That's garbage", which is my response to most "art".

[cynicalkane]

So we have to understand the context of modern art, but you're opposed to museums explaining the context of modern art in an accessible way?

[scott_s]

I went to the MOMA recently, and one piece was literally a piece of cardboard with some silver spray paint and a few holes in it. My response was, "I could have done that. There's no art to it." That and many other pieces could have benefitted from an explanation. I see no problem with people "reading their way" through a museum. I did that at the Met, because I was curious about the background to many of the paintings I saw. (Which, by the way, I was in awe of.)

[wazoox]

There is a large branch of modern art, "conceptual art", which is precisely dedicated to making art of anything, just a concept. Typical examples are ordinary objects, sometimes not even transformed (for instance, a water bottle on a column). It can be traced back to the 1917 "ready-mades". There, the art is in the intention of the artist and nothing else. Sometimes you may feel cheated. Sometimes, it's brilliant. That's art. Like for everything else, 90% of it is simply mediocre.

[scott_s]

I expect that whatever shows up in the MOMA to be the 10%. Further, the "intention of the artist" is completely lost if there is no explanation, and the work is shown in a gallery without context. Something has to give.

[sofal]

This is exactly the point where the art starts disappearing up its own butthole, absolved of any and all responsibility to speak for itself ("if you don't appreciate it then you're lacking context") while at the same time completely independent of context by definition.

[wpietri]

I don't believe there's a straightforward way to understand art. Sorry if I misled you. That XYZABC bit is generally the summary of a lot of discussion, with explanations custom-crafted for me.

If you want to understand it, go take an art history class. Then you'll have the attention of somebody whose job it is to explain basic art concepts to you. That's not the job of anybody at a typical gallery or art opening.

[starship]

So to go back to your original post: you get a quick summary from your friend, and that's sufficient to "get" art, but I have to spend three months going to an art history class?

Give me a break.

[starship]

Also, I can't believe the top post for this article is by someone who, a little further down one of the threads, basically said "eh, actually I take it all back".

[wpietri]

I said no such thing. The point of my post is that understanding a lot of art requires context. I gave two examples of the kind of art people here appreciate perfectly well. I also said that contemporary art is often mysterious to me, and described what happens when I go with friends who do have the context. I did not say I fully get the artwork then. What I do have is have some notion of why people appreciate it.

I at no point said, "Gosh, you can understand all art easily after 3 sentences of explanation". Which you should have gotten by analogy; a layman can't get one of the IOCCC entries after a short explanation, and a non-gamer won't really appreciate Upgrade Complete if it's the first game they've ever played. They can get that there's something to get, but they can't possibly fully understand a work in context until they understand the context.

[starship]

This isn't that complicated. From your original post: > If I go with a friend who understands the context, they can explain to me the history

Either your friend's explanation improved your experience at that museum/gallery, in which case I say "Put it on a plaque", or it didn't because our understanding of art can't be improved by any kind of brief explanation and really you need to "take an art history class" as you directed us to do. So which is it?

My conclusion is this: if including any kind of explanation --short, long, anything-- can improve the average person's experience at a museum or gallery, then they should do so. The fact that they don't makes a lot of people skeptical about the entire thing, which is a shame.

[wpietri]

Art is undeniably faddish, and there is definitely a political element; I wouldn't want to deny that.

However, that's sort of like going to a natural history museum and expecting to see the whole ursine evolutionary history and ecology explained next to every bear. There will be a little plaque with the basics, but the typical viewer knows a lot of the basics and is a repeat visitor, so they are expected to learn these things over time.

These days I'm perfectly happy to bring up Wikipedia when at a museum.

[starship]

In the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, they have a tree ring from what might be the oldest tree ever found. Next to that gigantic slice of wood on the wall is...a giant plaque. The plaque describes in detail how measuring the life of a tree from tree rings works, as well as the history behind that particular tree and when it was cut down.

In fact, as I recall, there was such a plaque next to almost every exhibit in the entire museum.

[crasshopper]

Imagine this. You read a novel and really enjoy it, interpreting some facet of the work as X. Later in an interview, the author suggests (or says outright) that the facet was actually Y ≠ X. That facet=Y would worsen the novel for you.

You go back to the novel and reread all relevant passages. You decide that not only is facet=X an internally consistent interpretation within the canonical text, but that facet=Y would lead to a contradiction. (Hey, authors are fallible and don't necessarily imagine non-contradictory worlds.)

So what is the "ontological" status of the interpretation where facet=X and the interpretation where facet=Y? Throw in that possibly either the author's intention isn't easily described in extant words, or that the author had no specific intention regarding `facet`, or otherwise multiple conflicting interpretations can still claim validity. Maybe the authors, artists, musicians are smartest to let audience members enjoy the work for their own personal reasons, without ruining a perfectly fine interpretation some individual takes.

Ahem. 'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.