Warm Up Pages: Is Art a Waste of Time?

When I was younger—and not even that much younger—I think I truly didn’t understand what art was for.

I’ve always been impatient at museums. My wife and I have a bit where we say. ‘Put on your rollerskates’ before we speed through the collection at any of the many openings we’ve attended. Had a bit, I should say. We haven’t been to a museum in years.

Which is a shame. Because the bit is well and truly dead. I used to be very impatient with fine art as a base concept. Like most things, I do think this was due to a lack of education. Fine art is definitionally open to interpretation, but the way that wound up reaching me was as a series of adults showing me paintings and photographs and bringing me physically to a museum and then just kind of going “…Get it?” The result was that I really didn’t like fine art. I thought it was indulgent and self-congratulatory. A boring waste of time.

I can point directly to the guy that solidified my distaste for modern art. His name is Chris Burden, and he was part of a collection at the Walker about 60s and 70s counterculture art. The collection itself was repellent, I think actively so. Burden’s work, specifically, appeared to be a series of things he just did and then went, “…get it?” In one performance, he was chained to a car which was driven out of a garage, and then driven back in. In another, he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle. In another days-long performance, he went to Kansas City and never showed his face. “Okay,” I said, perhaps aloud, “And?” There was no answer.

Which isn’t exactly true. I couldn’t see an answer, and I couldn’t find one. But there was one. The car thing and the rifle thing are both meditations on the nature of bystanders and the magic circle of performance art. Things that you’re happy to stand back and observe as part of an art performance, but if you saw it in the real world, you would feel compelled to intervene. “…Or would you?” the piece asks. Because they do happen continuously, and no one stops them. The mechanization and imprisonment of the everyday person. Actual, literal gun violence. And the fact that no one saw his face in Kansas City becomes really interesting when you learn that apparently dozens of people worked very hard to make him fail his self-imposed challenge. It turns the whole thing into an adversarial collaboration. Itself a kind of meditation on the nature of participation and what it means to be a spectator. Did the people who trailed him to his hotel room and tried to peek through the windows cross a line? Or did they do exactly what they were supposed to? Would the piece have even existed without them? Much to discuss. I just never had anybody to discuss it with.

One piece that began to change my mind is unfortunately lost in the sludge of the content mill. I heard about it through the YouTube channel Art Assignment, but tragically cannot find the video. The piece in question was a diorama of modest homes made out of dirt. Except they weren’t made of dirt. They were made of tea leaves. And suddenly the whole thing became a tragic metaphor for capitalism. It was about the workers who harvested the tea but would never be able to enjoy it. The homes, literally built on and of the luxury good that was being sold out from under them. Modest and barely livable, while people many times richer than them enjoyed both the fruit of their labor and the value extracted from it.

The one that finally stuck was a tumblr post about an Ad Reinhardt painting. It ruled because the OP had posted a landscape painting side by side with what appeared to be a framed black square, and the sarcastic caption “Look how far art has come.” But some enterprising nerd popped up quickly enough with a reply that I almost remember word for word. “The painting on the left is some kind of landscape. Adequately rendered, but otherwise unremarkable. I couldn’t tell you anything about it. The painting on the right, I recognize instantly.” Put briefly, the painting is not all black, but a series of squares of very, very dark blue or green or purple. The effect is that the viewer, confident that this square must be real black, discovers by comparison that it is not. That comparison both fools the eye and reveals the deception. How many other things, then, have you been confident about only to find that you weren’t seeing it correctly?

It’s tempting to say that what this has done is strengthen my bullshit skills—I am in marketing, after all. I can extract and explicate meaning from anything with my magical ability to lie and believe it. But that’s simply not the case. Because there is meaning there. In everything, there is intention, there is cooperation, there is interpretation, there is always communication. If you’ve said or made something, it is so that someone else can hear or see it. What do you want your audience to see? How did you put things in an order to ensure that they saw it? What might that say about how you see the world? If I didn’t see what you wanted me to, whose fault is that? To believe that art has nothing to offer is not just an existential mistake that misses the point of being alive.

It’s also a boring waste of time.