Tales from the Modern Art Museum

            I remember once talking to a friend who was in film school. He told me a story that never fails to cheer me up when I remember it. The story was that he had procrastinated on a short film project until the day before it was due. As he was riding the El home he remembered the project and became filled with dread and panic at his impending failure. Thinking quickly and desperately, he pulled his hand-held camera out of his backpack and started recording out the window. Upon getting back to his apartment, he downloaded the footage onto his laptop. It was about an hour before he threw his hands up in a proverbial ‘fuckit’, and put the raw footage through a filter that made the window and everything outside of it in black and white, while the interior of the train remained in color. Bitterly, he submitted the film the next day for his class to review.

The class sat, enraptured.

One student thought that it tragically portrayed the solipsism of modern life. Another found it to be a subtle critique on the technological revolution’s crippling effect on the working class. A third opined that it showcased the ways in which Americans turn the suffering of the underclass into an abstraction.

            He ended up getting an A on the project.

            Last year, during a family gathering in New York City for my aunt’s 50^th birthday, we decided to take a trip to the Museum of Modern Art. I ran that story through my mind over and over for the two hours I was there. It helped me keep my sanity. Whilst there, I bore witness to hanging bags of sand (which I was later relieved resembled scrotums by intention, and not just in my scrotum-obsessed mind) placed as serious art. I saw hordes of horn rimmed hipsters contemplating the existential meaning of a blank off-white canvas that was hung with the reverence of a Modigliani. By the time that I stumbled upon a pile of dirt that had artfully been thrown into a corner, I had to fight every impulse in my body not to kick it across the room and see if anyone would notice. As I left that dark and godless place, I prayed that some wonderfully diligent janitor might one day find employment there.

            A person more cynical than myself might claim that such works are not art. But such an argument is foolish. It bogs one down in a semantics battle over the definition of art. It also raises the valid question of who gets to determine what constitutes art. The masses? Well, the masses utterly ignored Van Gogh’s work during his lifetime. The academics and critics? You mean the same academics and critics who once decried D.H. Lawrence’s masterpieces as pornographic trash? And so it cannot be said with any fairness that a blank canvas or a pile of dirt is not art.

            What can be said is that such it is vapid, shallow, empty art. Shit, in other words.

            But surely I’m just not deep enough to understand. With a smug sense of satisfaction at the befuddled rubes’ negative reactions, modern art types will take joy in the criticism they recieve. As James Franco said in response to the critics of his art exhibition (pieces of which included close-ups of penises urinating and anuses defacating),

“They don't try to think outside of their pop-culture commentaries. It's so easy to criticize contemporary art from the outside: 'Douglas Gordon slowed down Psycho so it's 24-hours long? That's easy! I can do that.' That's how the morons in the blogosphere try to critique my work. But the great thing about it is, is that their critiques are part of my work. I like that they are confused.

            It’s not that all the hipsters who champion such art are merely pretending to like it—although some are, obviously. If I had broken out of my solipsistic irritation at the Museum of Modern Art and had asked one of the people beside me what they thought the blank canvas piece meant, I’m sure they would have had an intelligent, and maybe even insightful, interpretation—just as my friend’s classmates had made insightful and interesting interpretations of his meaningless, slapped together film.

But what they fail to realize is that that insight and meaning has nothing at all to do with the art itself. It could be found in anything. Right now I am looking at a reddish stain on my white drywall. But don’t you see? It is the red, vibrant, organic passion of that which is truly human and vital inside of us fighting off the surrounding seas of modern culture’s repressive homogony.

            Hey, lookit me! I just found meaning in that goddamn stain.

            That does not make the stain art. William Blake once wrote about man’s ability to see the world in a grain of sand. What he meant was not that the world existed within the grain of sand, but that it existed within man. This ability to find meaning—or if you will, beauty—in that which is mundane and inconsequential and meaningless is something that is innate within all of us. Of course, so is the ability to pretentiously blow smoke out your ass. Regardless of which ability we are truly employing in such excercises, what the modern artists who peddle such cryptic tripe are doing is pretentiously and talentlessly cashing in on the abilities of the observer. All art—from Fellini’s 8 1/2 to Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Cezanne’s The Card Players—depend on our critical and emotional abilities, but they bring something to the table themselves. They guide our existing intellects and emotions to new and uncharted waters. An artist who hangs a blank canvas or piles dirt in a corner does no such thing. He is a fraud on the level of a personal trainer who tells you to do some pushups while he reads a magazine. And, of course, the reaction is the same.

“I could’ve stayed home and done this myself for free”.