25
White Painting
(cmoa-collection-images.s3.amazonaws.com)
Jirō Yoshihara, Japanese 1905–1972
1958
Oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art
Totally! Also, I get it, not everyone likes long video essays.
I mostly posted this because of the generally dismissive attitude of some people on the internet towards modern art. It is only logical that while there is good abstract paintings, there are also not so good ones. In the end it is also quite subjective.
In the end, I think art museums and other places that display art could and should do a better job at giving the context for a given piece to understand it. There is this perception that good art is understood regardless of its context, but I don't think that's true. No art is made in a vacuum, and knowing the historical and maybe even personal context to a piece can truly enrich it (as it has done for me with the works of Pollock).
I can understand a piece made by cavemen thousands of years ago without needing any context. Context should make you enjoy the piece even more, or to contrary flip the emotions it made you feel and make you despise it. Art that is only understood via it's context, while a nice gimmick at first, ultimately doom it to become meaningless if that context is ever lost. If the apocalypse come and humanity is destroyed. Hundreds years later, a survivor find the fan given as an exemple in the video above. It is now an ordinary fan among millions of others.