Modern Art - A Skeptical View

by  Mani de Li

After eighty years of unchallenged praise for the most idiotic examples of artwork passed off as great masterpieces, its time for a bit of politically incorrect counter jargon along with some serious criticism.

No Skill  No Art

Take a close look at Modern Art and to see what’s really there. Its not really what critics have told you to imagine.

The more widely popular an artist is among the general public , the less he is considered an artist by the Modern Art elite. They believe that the greatest modern painters are only those who satisfy their minority, while those others are just  illustrators  who produced little more than commercial kitsch.

Bouguereau

Cezanne

Picasso

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Its not that ugly

Its not that beautiful

No great improvement

       I believe:

that the great mass of the most revered Modern Art masterpieces really consists of comparatively inferior work.
that the popularity of  Modern Art is primarily dependent a constant stream of talk..
that the majority of works of Modern Art created by its so-called masters are easily imitated and surpassed by a vast population of unrecognized artists who are equal or superior in skill but are destined to remain unknown because they lack proper connections.
that Modern Art is a name game and that great prices are only paid for hyped signatures regardless of quality.
that at some future time, when tastes change, a new consensus will decide what is worthwhile and the whole edifice of Modern Art will be negatively reassessed.

Skill

Although art is certainly more then an exhibition of skills, I believe that all art that has any lasting value rests on a foundation of skills. I believe that anything that lacks this foundation and is presently classed as great art will fail to withstand the test of time. 

To all those who claim that I advocate nothing more than skill I can only say that they are mistaken! I do not advocate any one style of subject matter as necessarily being better than another or favor realism over abstraction. Nor do I believe that art should return to the realism or the subject matter of the past.

I see no merit whatever in work claiming to be great art which anyone with even a modicum of skill can imitate and even forge. I see no merit in work claiming to be first when it exhibits nothing more than flat drips, stripes or schmiers. I regard such work in spite of present day adulation to fall into a category which should be called STUPID ART.

All the paintings on this web site are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes only

Critique by Comparison
Abstract Expressionism and kosher holy water
Artspeak
An Example of Artspeak
Behind the behind
Parody and Laughter as Criticism
Good and Evil
Modern Artists I Like
Some of My Work
Any Comments?
Links 

 

Home Page

 

Before the advent of the Internet this kind of criticism was impossible.

Copyright 1997-2006 Mani de Li
2006-01-30
Modern Art, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Pollock, de Kooning, Johns, Rothko, Miro, Warhol, Cezanne, Kline, Chagall, Dali, Greenberg, Bauhaus, Barnet Newman, Calder, Castelli, Dubuffet, Duchamp, Gorkey, Guston, Kandinsky, Hans Hofmann, Clement Greenberg, Paul Klee, Motherwell