Why Does Modern Art Look Like That?

I go to this event every year called Art Basel. It’s the largest art fair in the world. There are thousands of exhibitors, thousands of artists and galleries exhibit there, and much of it is so uninteresting and so outside the realm of what I would call art. I mean, the classic example is, “my five-year-old could do this.”

Art is one of the first expressions of humans, and even earlier hominids. Whether it was a drawing in the sand, or a cave painting, or a carved figure of a pregnant woman, my theory is that the first artistic representations were designed to recreate what occurs in nature as faithfully as the artist could manage.

If you start tracing art back through ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt and the carvings and the mummies and the figureheads and the sphinx, and then take it up through the Middle Ages, my theory is that art probably peaked in the Renaissance, because it was the closest to a true representation of what life was and what you were looking at.

Artists like Da Vinci, Caravaggio, with the use of light and accurate representations of human form and shapes. That was art trying to come as close as possible to the perfect representation of the thing that you were looking at. It wasn’t a straight line, of course. Roman sculpture devolved a bit in the 3rd and 4th centuries, going from the classical realism with detailed musculature and facial features to blockier, flatter, more “lumpy” representations.

But overall?

Everything since then has been trending toward the photograph. The high-resolution photograph is the highest representation of nature as an art form that is not actually nature. It was kind of the invention of the color camera that was the highest point of art, if art was truly humans trying to express what they saw in nature. Once we hit that, then there’s nowhere else to go.

So what happens after that? Now we’re trying to devolve it and dissect it.

In the ensuing years and centuries, art devolved into cubism and pointillism and expressionism and Bauhaus and all the other things. I’m not being precise here because I don’t know all the terms, but the general trend is true: if you follow the logic, art was always seeking photorealism. When it got there, that’s when things got weird.

The first photography arrived in the 1820s, representing the pinnacle of the mountain climb toward true representation of reality. Then art began climbing back down the other side, dissecting reality, trying to find an edge. Trying to go beyond photorealism. That’s when you see things like pointillism emerge. Pointillism is beautiful because it’s what came after photography. It’s still close to true representation, just on the other side of reality and trending toward devolution. But the farther you get, the weirder things get.

What made Jackson Pollock such an innovative painter? He spilled paint and splattered paint on a canvas. He did it in an interesting way, sure, and it took a certain skill, but it’s not the same as Rembrandt. 

And now I get fed every day these images of guys with buckets of multicolored paint hanging in their studio, spinning them like a pendulum across a canvas. What is it about that that is truly art?

It’s almost like once mastery in any field is achieved, the next phase is deconstruction. You see it in visual art, you see it in education, you see it in history, you see it in media. There’s no straightforward heroes anymore. Everything has to be reinterpreted. Everything has to be twisted. Everything has to be broken apart. 

But art started as a way to recreate nature. It started as a way to show what you saw, as accurately as you could show it.

And my theory is that once we perfected that, once we could reproduce reality almost exactly, then the only direction left was to take it apart.