Am I the only one these days that thinks Modern Art has gotten completely out of hand? Whereas I used to get thrills from the prospect of visiting various “hipper” museums a few years ago, now I just shudder at the thought of being faced with unimaginative, and let’s just say it, perfectly ordinary things.
I was flipping through the Evening Standard’s Metro Life magazine tonight, and was almost appalled at what caught my attention in the Art section. There is one solitary picture of, no exaggeration, a ball of packing tape. Yup. That about sums it up. Sure, this ball was roughly the size of a small room, but with the piece entitled ‘Boulder’, it hardly stirred up overwhelming appreciation.
Hephzibah Anderson of Metro Life wrote, “The Jerwood Platform provides artists with a survey at pivotal moments in their career…Highlights here include ‘Boulder’, a sphere of brown packing tape begun in 1996, and now mow than 1m in diameter.” No doubt that creating this large ball was incredibly taxing for the artist, Elizabeth Price, but gaining recognition for something that resembles an oversized Malteser doesn’t exactly seem fair.
Only a few months ago I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with a friend of mine to see the new display there. I don’t recall the artist, but then I am not inspired to feel guilty about it as his “masterpiece” seemed to be an extremely large canvas dropped in a can of black paint with a barely-there stripe of gray down the side.
Fascinating.
Truth be told, my annoyance with modern art has been surging forward ever since my high school art class did an entire unit on Jackson Pollack. Okay. He’s a genius in the eyes of everyone in the art world. But really…can it be that hard to take a paintbrush and splatter a few different depressing shades of black and white on a canvas?
If this is truly a moneymaking area of art I should be digging my old finger-paints from under my bed and nicking some paper from my printer tray. I’d streak a few lines here, spatter some dots there, and call my agent.
I don’t want to offend, because honestly, I have seen some tremendous work that would be considered Modern. One of my best friends has chosen art as her life passion, and I commend her. But I remain confused as to why Picasso had to suffer through chopping off half his ear, and then waiting for years after his death before he was given recognition, when what seems like an overwhelming number of modern artists are making tank-loads of money through gluing a couple of chairs together or paper-machéing their bum cheeks.
While I am figuring this all out, I think I’ll give the ‘Boulder’ exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery a miss for now and call my friend to see if she’s had any offers for her Duct Tape fashion line.
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