Contemporary Art World -101

Step number one is to look, look, and look some more.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of artists of all sorts making millions of paintings, drawings, and objects that are all vying for your attention.     Learning how to look at art is a life- long  process of self discovery and pleasure, and frankly takes a lot of time and effort  – just as it would take me years to understand what really goes on  a football field.   All I see is a bunch of guys hitting each other but I assume there’s more to it that. (God I hope so). Likewise, one of the defining characteristics of a good piece of art as opposed to a boring mediocre one, is that there is more to it than what you initially see.  Once you learn the language of art – understand how the application of paint, the choice of color, or  the mark- making of pencil on paper tells stories about emotions and ideas that unfold after an initial reaction to a picture, you see that good art can tell stories about  the human condition and our relation to nature and society.

Good art comes in all shapes and styles.  You will find that some art you can relate to emotionally but most pieces of art you will not like.  Please understand that  just because you don’t like it  doesn’t mean it’s bad , that concurrently,  just because you do like it doesn’t mean its’ good.  A person’s visceral reactions to a work is purely a function of their psychology and the process of learning why you like or dislike something tells you as much about yourself, as it does about the art.      I don’t like Surrealism and frankly I think it’s because other people’s dreams bore me.  I have friends that are totally drawn to the strange poetic narrative of a good surrealist artist.  Although I rarely have an emotional attachment to these works, I understand their appeal and value.  And we all understand that some surrealist artists work with subtly and true emotion but that most use the forms of surrealism as a commercial hook and make art that is vacuous and .    To talk about the genre or style or medium of art is purely descriptive – It might be what does or does not appeal to you emotionally about a work of art, but is not in itself a predictor of quality.  There are great blue paintings and crappy ones, great surrealist works, and mostly crappy ones, great landscapes and crappy ones, etc., etc.,