Curmudgeonly Thoughts on Contemporary Art at MOMA

We were at the Museum of Modern Art over the weekend and saw many beautiful things. My son is an extremely knowledgeable artist and lover of the art of the 15^th through 19^th centuries but has never appreciated or tried to appreciate work from about 1900 on. He’s a curmudgeon. So it was an educational trip for him, and a journey into fond memories for me, since I lived in New York forty years ago and frequented MOMA. 

The museum’s permanent collection is now organized into eras. The fifth floor, if I remember correctly, is 1880 through 1940, roughly impressionism through expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and early abstract art; the fourth is 1940 through 1970, and includes both abstract expressionists like Pollack and Kandinsky, and Pop Art, Warhol, Lichtenstein, etc.; and the second floor is 1970 through the present. The other floors house special exhibitions, but we had decided that, with limited time available, we would just go to the main collection floors.

It pains me to say this – I still love the earlier modern art; the great works by Cezanne, Matisse, Monet, Braque, Dali, Delaunay, and especially the Picassos, like the one shown above. Monumental, grand, beautiful... all the things you want in art at the highest levels. I also appreciate and sometimes like works of the middle period, the Pollacks, Warhols, Lichtensteins. I at least get what they’re trying to do. They feel like a step down in terms of ambition -- they aren't striving enough for what I would call the "sincere sublime." But I think I get that they're trying to do something that means something to their souls. And on both floors I saw some new things by artists I had never heard of, but which struck me immediately as very beautiful indeed: a painting by Frantisek Kupka called “Mme. Kupka Among the Verticals”;

and a painting by an Indian artist named Vasudeo Gaitonde.

Really great stuff. 

But the “works” on the contemporary floor… wow. Put bluntly, they were offensively and insultingly ridiculous. It was as if they were challenging me, saying something like “I dare you to be so unhip that you think this isn’t art,” or, “if you think this isn’t art, you’re just stupid.” It was as if the whole point of the "art" was to elicit outrage from people like me so the artist and his cronies could chortle and call me a Philistine, a boob, a Babbitt, and feel superior and smug. 

That's just laziness. I’m patently not stupid; I'm almost certainly better educated, better read, and have broader life experience than most of the “artists” represented on the contemporary floor at MOMA. And, what's worse... I'm an art patron, a lover of museums... I'm the exact "demographic" they should be trying to reach. So try a different argument, why don't you? Something that is more persuasive… not just “epater le bourgeoisie.” Maybe try explaining what you’re doing and why it’s beautiful to a reasonable mind with a reasonable eye. And if you can’t explain why it’s beautiful, maybe the reason is that it's not. But then what is it that you’re doing? 

Art can and should be intellectually challenging and beautiful at the same time. But the things that I saw – what looked like giant turds of molten metal, a mesh of rope, a papier mache dinosaur head with antlers mounted on a wooden structure – were neither. They weren’t beautiful and they weren’t saying anything smart that a grownup sensibility needs to consider. They seemed instead like childish tantrums. They are the equivalent of children’s fingerpainting: only their own parents should feel obliged to praise them.