Modern Art Does Not Exist
Is modern art any good?1 Ah, yes, the age-old question. Well, let me ask: is modern music any good? Modern film? Writing? Cuisine? Ballet?
It is, of course, an incoherent question. Modern music contains both “In My Life” by the Beatles and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” by Brittney Spears.2 Imagine listening to just one before proclaiming a verdict on the state of modern music.
The issue is that there are multiple levels of art, from the most general to the most specific:
The medium
The movement
The artist
The period
The work of art
So, for example, you have painting, then cubism, then Pablo Picasso, then Picasso’s Blue Period, then Meloncholy Woman.
So again, take music. There is no band, no singer, no musician for whom every song is exactly as good as every other song. Even for a band as astoundingly consistent as the Beatles, there is still a very big difference between “Hey Jude” and “Wild Honey Pie”.
And there is also a difference between futurism and abstract expressionism and pop art, between Piet Mondrian and Alma Thomas and Cy Twombly, between Picasso’s Cubism and Picasso’s Blue Period, between a painting Jackson Pollack made in 1945 and a painting Jackson Pollack made in 1946.
Modern art is not good or bad because modern art does not exist. So why do we make this mistake? My best guess is a very depressing one: we make this mistake because most people don’t care about the fine arts. With music, film, writing—the things people are interested in—digging into the weeds to make ever more fine-grained appraisals is fun, so we do just that. With whatever you see in a museum these days, the same process becomes a mind-numbing, tedious, futile chore, so we don’t.
By “modern” I mean everything from early-twentieth-century modernism to mid-twentieth-century postmodernism to whatever it is we’re in today. (I swear to God, if postpostmodernism becomes a thing I’ll tear my eyes out.) By “art” I mean the fine arts: painting, sculpture, whatever else you find in a museum.