Before I start in, I want to say, ironically thankful, that the internet has made it possible to find the truth regarding the history of art, albeit one wrapped up in quite a dubious way if examined. In prior days, you could only trust what you were told by the industry reps, or by taking art history classes in college. Both sources are incomplete, skewed, or written by those promoting a specific agenda.
It’s also on the internet that you will also find literal fact contrary to just about everything I’ve already shared with you in PART ONE (link at page bottom), and everything I’ll share with you here in Part Two of this series, and maybe, or maybe not, even what I give you in Part Three (as yet unpublished). My intention is not re-writing history, but to fill in necessary gaps left by the fodder of a Reader’s Digest presentation, and also, not in the least bit, to show you how Modern Art and other periods/eras can be understood from a new perspective. We’ll be looking at the story behind the art story.
Without rambling, and with no visual aides of any kind in this one, I’ll leave it at that.
Trust me, this will be fun!
The Meat of Modern Art – How to Understand the Incomprehensible
There’s a moment every first-time buyer or new collector goes through, a kind of art-world baptism, an “unwelcoming” tradition, a twisted kind of initiation many don’t survive, where you, the new art-lover, art-buyer, collector, or what have you, well, you’ve decided you’d like to buy some art and find yourself in a gallery in front of a painting, one with the right price, one you want to take home with you. You really, really like it and can see yourself spending your life with it, and a gallery person silently slithers up beside you. Looking at the painting with you with their arms crossed importantly, hip slightly tilted painfully, they tilt their head, purse their lips, and say something like, “This is clearly late-period neo-classical, but with a strong contemporary gesture toward post-minimalist genre collapse.”
And suddenly your brain does that old Windows 98 blue-screen crash.
Periods? Genres? Late period neo-what?
So you nod, a pretend, pensive nod, while somewhat mimicking the professional scowl of seriousness on the gallerist’s face, all the while wondering how people can understand a language that wasn’t in any class you ever took in school.
What you’ve walked into is the typical and completely unfriendly word-speak of the art world: a set of terms that pretend precision but actually behave like old motor oil sliding down a wall. These words, these industry terms, have been bent, stretched, retrofitted, and even weaponized for centuries. They’re marketed as clear categories but act more like cheesy, 70’s dim mood lighting, and rarely do they actually help describe what they are referring to.
Its impressed on new art-buyers by the more experienced that these words can help them understand art, but its only meant to be understood in one way; their way, and in a way, they can, and and sometimes do, but right off the bat is example of the gate-keeping that permeates the system. If you don’t understand, you don’t belong. Its no longer requirement that one simply loves the art, you must understand it by definition and label and even pretention. I’ll be showiing you that there’s another way to approach this thing called “modern art.”
If you are actually curious about any given era or genre or what have you, or even art history in broad terms, then yeah, you do need the language. If we had a story that wasn’t made specifically to sell art, it would be easier to understand, so we take the story at hand, look behind the story, and once we put this whole shebang in the broad context of marketing, then you can not only see behind the game, but you’ll be able to navigate this not so elusive world of art. The details won’t matter to you then: you’ll be autonomous, and governing your own affairs.
The truth is simple: these terms weren’t built to clarify art, they were built to manage it. They’re designed to package art, to circulate it, to build levels of legitimacy, false and otherwise, and to keep everyone from talking too deeply or too honestly about things (i.e. art), that don’t want rubber-stamped identities in the first place, though all the while it being stamped anyway. Its a superficial wrapping of the indefinable.
So, let’s wander through this twisted landscape together, while I share with you the most prominent of terms that you’ll hear, and then some. We’ll be taking a good look at the glamorized vocabulary that slithers and spins around our subject, and around the art itself, all the while never to ably or actually touch it.
PERIODS
A “period” sounds like it should be simple. Its a container. It’s a slice of time. Its a segment with clear beginning and end. Or, is it?
You see, the industry pundits never agreed on what size those slices of time should be.
Take the Classical Period. Depending on who’s talking, it can mean the 5th century BCE in Greece… or the entire Greco-Roman world… or 1500 years of civilization spanning from both sides of that 5th century BCE like a club sandwich. A thousand-year difference is the sort of rounding-around error that only the art world get away with using, and all, that is done with an authoritative straight face.
Then there’s Picasso’s Blue Period, a neat little pocket of a few short years. Suddenly a “period” shrinks from a millennium to a mood swing.
So “period” can mean:
• an era of civilization
• a century
• a decade
• an artist’s personal diversion
All defined with the same word.
No wonder new collectors get nausea.
The term has never really clarified anything with continued interference being played by other terms that we’ll be reviewing next. For now, just let the word serve as a frame of reference, so long as it isn’t taken too seriously. Use of the word always best serves the one speaking it.
ERAS
If a period is meant to represent art as it relates to other art, to define that art, then an “era” is just a big pile of folders strewn across the floor, their contents spilling out with all certainty dissolved if one were to actually look. This looking will reveal back stories, anecdotes, and much more than just names or titles.
Eras tend to feel huge: the Renaissance Era, the Baroque Era, the Impressionist Era, the Modern Era (where Modern Art fits), etc. They’re broad, sweeping centuries, with much more movement than the story would have us notice. These eras have often been retrofitted after the fact by those who wanted cleaner timelines, those who would to homogenize. Eras pretend to be objective, but they’re just shorthand, abbreviated notes. Their edges are vague, their transitions messy, and their duration, well… arbitrary. Eras are meant to stress importance, and are cropped images of broad and far-reaching truths. They are highlights, headlines of the remarkable that trim away the all important peripheral activity, like not including women of the French Impressionist movement (yeah, an era can be a movement) in the “official” story.
*The “Modern Era” is especially elastic, an era that we may or may not be living in today. It sometimes it starts in 1850, sometimes around 1900, sometimes with the Impressionists, sometimes with abstraction, and sometimes just meaning anything that you saw at the art fair you went to last weekend. Its beginning vaguely corresponds to the start of the industrialized era. However, the Modern Era also contains the Post-Modern era, and an as yet undetermined Post-Post Modern era, so as such could be called the Modernist Movement, the Post-modern movement, and the Post-Post Modern movement, which are all part of the Modern Era.
For the art industry, eras serve as macro-myths. They’re the big umbrella terms under which more specific labels can nestle comfortably and behave themselves. They give the importants and institutions a sense of cosmic order, even when the story beneath is more like an unsortable, tangled drawer full of old cables, screws, keys, and dead batteries, a few old pasta noodles, and some really tasty gems.
Notice we now have periods becoming eras, and eras becoming movements, and some other weird, indistinguishable shit, quite a solid foundation for understanding art, eh?.
MOVEMENTS
The first thing we should find under the umbrella of eras is movements. With movements, we have that term that is interchangeable with eras, Its intended to be a subset, something smaller than an era as discussed. Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Pop, Op, etc.,: These are all movements that have occurred within our modern era, though not all of them. Strangely enough, movements can also be genres.
Let’s take a look at a few “movements.”
- Romanticism? A term coined after the Romantics were dead.
- Realism? Well, that was an insult that got repurposed.
- Impressionism? a bitter, journalistic snark.
- Cubism? A critics shorthand applied to the incomprehensible.
- Surrealism? Mostly retrofitted for pop-star, hero-worship marketing
- Abstract Expressionism? A Cold-War CIA PR money project done to exhibit American superiority and overlaid on chosen artists and their artwork.
Movements rarely start as movements.
They start as scattered experiments, overlapping friendships, personal obsessions, and the push-and-pull of artists and their desires while responding to a simple need to express themselves. Movements have transitional periods of time as they appear following other movements as a response to that prior movement. Movements don’t suddenly appear as is suggested by the story-tellers.
Once something shows itself as happening, someone slaps a movement label on the whole mess and and then they call it a day. This is always after art would do what art does.
Movements exist to create narrative coherence. To turn the chaos of human creativity into something that can be told and sold as a story. They’re crafted, poorly, really: they’re myths designed for textbooks and brochures and they work because there is no other story to consider. They function as neon-signs to the local peanut-gallery clubhouse.
“I collect pieces from the early modernist movement.”
“She was a late-phase practitioner of the op-art movement.”
It sounds meaningful, though typically isn’t, but it does help the work sell.
STYLES
If periods and movements pretend to be time constrained, styles cry out to be noticed, valid in their own right, but styles are just as slippery as our other inherited terms, because any style can become:
• a period
• a movement
• a genre
• a category
• a niche
• a trend
Take “Classical” again — it can be a style (harmonious, balanced, idealized),
it can be a period (e.g. ancient Greece), or it can be a movement (consider Neo-Classicism, which was actually a reaction to a style that was retroactively made into a movement before being labeled a period).
See how quickly the mask slips around?
“Impressionism” today is considered a style, but it began as a period, and then a full movement, and finally crowned as an Era. Our art-language is an unrestricted beast that moves about as its commanded. “Gothic” is a style but also an era. “Baroque” is a style that became an era. “Minimalism” is a style, and a movement, and an ethos.
For new collectors, styles can feel like walking on oceans filled with Jello: what, for a moment, seems like a clear description, rapidly degrades into a huge grab-bag of exceptions, footnotes, and contradictions. Ambiguity is a built-in feature that we’re to ignore if we’re to preserve our sanity.
GENRES
Genre sounds like a clean term. Portraits are a genre, landscapes are a genre, still-lifes are genre, abstractions are genre. Nice, simple categories, until we want to differentiate them from styles, and yeah, specialties. Surf art is genre, bar-scenes are genre, ballet dancers are genre, horses and sailboats are genre, but, any of these can also be specialties.
- A portrait can also be conceptual.
- Surf art can be surreal.
- A still life can be expressionist.
- An abstraction can be a landscape.
- A drawing can be a painting, and a painting a drawing..
The art world treats genre as a temporary label, a place to park a work until someone decides where it really belongs.
Genres don’t define the work, they manage it, and really they’re just another nice, removable post-it stuck on a folder in a filing system.
A BIT OF THE REST
Schools (which aren’t actual schools, except when they are).
Aesthetics (which aren’t really styles, but could be).
Traditions (which aren’t periods, but sound like them).
Tendencies (which aren’t movements, but they move anyway).
Waves (which aren’t eras, and they move, too).
Currents (which obviously move, but they have to be stopped to name them).
Modes (which aren’t genres, or movements, or waves, or applicable in any sense).
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Every time the existing vocabulary gets too cramped, critics invent new names, new labels, new fascinations (relegating old terms as passé, to be replaced with, as an example, Contemporary Art). How they squeezed that one out, but it seems to come from the Duchamp school of ready-made art. But, the term was bought and sold, like the Brooklyn Bridge, a Club sandwich, or a shyster’s back-lot used car.
Eras, genres, periods: dealers amplify these terms. Institutions adopt these terms. The peanut-gallery members parrot these terms, and the terms stick to the pot until wash-day comes along. Most of this is of no useful concern, but its there if you like, nonetheless.
And the mask shifts again.
THE CONFUSION ISN’T AN ACCIDENT — IT’S A FEATURE
New art-buyers often assume the confusion is caused by their inexperience, but the confusion works for the industry. The use of its language creates an elitist, impenetrable shell,
and its subsequent ambiguity creates a space where:
• one hesitates to question
• the experts appear indispensable
• dealers can guide you with authority
• collectors feel grateful for interpretation of that ambiguity
• the conversation stays safely abstract while being presented as concrete
• the product remains desirable
• It reeks of exclusivity
Face it, the art industry needs you to believe that loving a piece of art isn’t enough (though I think I say that enough, eh?), and in fact, they say, there are much more important things to consider than love when it comes to buying art.
The art industry’s vocabulary isn’t designed to describe art, it’s designed to manage it.
An “experienced” art-afficionado has learned to accept by rote, and would never ask “Wait, why is a 1500-year time span called a style sometimes and a movement other times?” Its those questions that will let you see past the mask.
So, experienced people nod. They agree to not question, without question. They accept the fog, they live in it, they relish it. They become fluent in using words that don’t mean what they seem to mean, and none of them, well, they take no notice of it..
PROPER CLOSURE
With part one in this series, I gave you the starch, the complex carbs of those important potatoes, the structure of the industry. With this part, part two, the meat part, I give you the proteins, the fuel that drives the machine. With this, you’ve gotten all you need to know about that slippery slope of muddy ground that we stand upon when gazing at a piece of art.
What I’m saying can be summed up with the following:
• You don’t need to master the facade.
• You don’t need to fear the vocabulary.
• You don’t need to pretend you understand.
That’s all old-school shopping-at-gallery rules.
Today, you only need to please yourself. You’re smart, you’re sophisticated, you know what you like. You can simply respond to the work. It is, after all, about you and the art. Its not about the rest of this drivel.
You can now ask yourself better, more pertinent questions:
“What do I see here?”
“Why does it make me feel this way?”
“Why can’t I stop looking at it?”
And, you can, if you like, go ahead and learn that industry terminology, a little or a lot, and use it as it serves you as the most basic frame of reference, all the while knowing art actually exists OUTSIDE of all this pomp-and-ceremony.
With or without all that mess, art happens. If you ask me, art is fascinating. Its a natural, necessary thing that only humans can enjoy.
Its like good food, only it lasts longer.
That’s everything you need to know, right there, but you can forget it all too, because there’s a part of the art world that is unaffected by all that garbage, there’s a world of art, a universe of art that exists beyond the machine, and in that universe, that world, you don’t need to know their story to love art, and you can understand it your way.
Next up, we’ll deal with present moment, with our current “metamodern era,” that may, or may not, be an extension of the whole Modern Era thing, or if it will acquire a name that divorces itself from that “modern” paradigm. With part three, my final part in this series of critical prose (these three essays), I’ll be welcoming you to era that might have begun a quarter century ago, one that has already had three name changes, with none of those names, in the not so humble opinion of the author, being suited well-enough to do the job. For now, lets call it metamodernism, and like few other eras or movements, this one comes with its own (currently under construction) manifesto and its own non-industrial ethos.
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