Who’s Afraid of Modern Art by Daniel Siedell
Chapter 2, “The Audience” (all quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from the book)
Thought scenario from last week: Take a moment to visualize this scenario: pick a gallery you have visited or viewed art in, imagine yourself there. You walk up to a work of art, look at it, and then…what? What happens? What is supposed to transpire in that moment you are viewing that work of art?
From last week:
“(Martin) Luther calls the human person a ‘rational being with a fabricating heart.’ The painting before which I stand generates these fabrications – ideas, concepts, frameworks that I create in order to tame it, disenchant it, transform it from something radically other, into something prosaically familiar.” p34
Read: Pages 38 & 39 in Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?, reflect on and discuss them.
Questions:
– With Siedell’s position of the art viewer and the artist, where does the role of responsibility lay? What could be some of those responsibilities? Are there shared ones – even over the distance of time and space?
Quote (We turn now to the type of art and its value):
“An abiding criticism of so-called ‘serious’ or ‘fine’ arts, like poetry and painting, is its elitism – only a small coterie of followers, most of them professor types and intellectuals , seem to care. The audience for a painting or a poem is miniscule compared to the audience for a Hollywood movie, Showtime television series, or viral videos…Most popular cultural artifacts that attract or create a large audience do so for a discrete moment, maximizing its opportunity for its fifteen minutes of fame – the song, television show, or YouTube video that ‘everyone’ seems to be talking about lasts for a very short period. And then it is completely forgotten….But what of poems and paintings, those cultural artifacts that never become ‘popular’ in any conceivable sense, that never seem to be at home, to be comfortable with the time?…Poetry and painting seem to find their audience in the future. The best ones do so generation after generation, century after century, creating and then accumulating an audience that can far exceed any audience that a ‘viral’ cultural artifact could achieve.” p39-41
Question: Agree/Disagree? Why?
Quote:
“Poems and paintings that have succeeded in accruing an audience through time have done so because there were contemporary readers and viewers who sensed the significance of the work as a manifestation of some aspect of human experience. And labored diligently to reveal it, most often in the face of ridicule or apathy, with the belief that this poem or that painting was worth passing on to the future. These sensitive and prescient supporters believed that even though this painter or that poet had not found their audience yet, they would in the future. The responsibility of this reader, of that viewer, was to make sure those poems and paintings reached their destined audience, buying them time, as it were. Is it possible to conceive of poems and paintings that have transcended the moment of their making as eschatological, as somehow a foretaste of a future hope, as human work that has a faith in a future?” p42-43
Question: Answer and discuss Siedell’s last question?
