This is going to sound a bit like a public service announcement,
but here it goes:
Show of hands -
do you or anyone you love
suffer from an inability to get contemporary art?
Anybody here? Yes. Me too.
Me too. I know.
You know, I've worked in the art world for about 10 years now,
and I currently work at a company called Artsy, where -
It's an online platform
where I try to make art accessible to anyone who wants to learn more about it
and maybe start collecting it.
And, you know, this is something that I encounter on a daily basis,
and I'm well aware of the fact
that a lot of people think that contemporary art is a sham.
This is one of my favorite examples of this sentiment in action.
This is a scene from the sitcom "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,"
and Danny DeVito is playing this sort of eccentric, artsy collector.
So he goes around pointing at the art,
saying, "This is bullshit. Bullshit. Derivative."
He comes over and finds a piece he loves:
"I love it. I want it."
And the gallerist sort of leans over to him
and in this hushed, tasteful voice says,
"That's the air-conditioner."
Now, undeterred, he says, "I want it. It's everything."
So, I think the takeaway here is pretty clear, right?
Either contemporary art is a total sham,
or you have to be an insider to get it.
And if you're not an insider,
you might be made to feel inferior for not getting it.
Now, I think that this is really an unfortunate state of affairs,
so that's why I wanted to talk to you today about this,
because I joke that, you know, that this is a PSA,
but I really do believe that art, especially art of our day,
is a public good,
and you deserve more from your art.
So I'm going to tell you today
about a few of the historic reasons for why art today is so inaccessible.
But I'm also going to give you a few tips
that I think will help you better understand
about 99% of the art that you see.
Now, before I dive into this, I just want to start with a few ground rules.
I'm going to be talking about modern and contemporary art.
The difference between the two of those is really a whole -
a topic for a whole other talk,
but when I say modern art, I basically mean art since 1900.
When I say contemporary, I'm kind of talking about art since the 1960s.
And the other one is that I am going to be talking about Western art here.
It does have its own tradition,
which is different from what we might call "non-Western art,"
you know, this umbrella category of anything that's not the U.S. or Europe.
But, okay, so let's get started.
Why don't you get contemporary art?
I think there are three reasons for this.
The first is it's the art world.
Now, the art world relishes its exclusivity.
You know, instead of trying to invite you in
and helping you engage with the art,
it sets you up to fail from the beginning.
You know, music and TV and podcasts, as we just learned,
we can enjoy them on demand - they come to us.
And, you know, many people have really deep and meaningful experiences with them.
So why should contemporary art be any different?
Well, I do think that part of this is a little bit the on-demand model,
in the sense that with art,
you have to go out into the world to experience it.
You have to go to a museum or a gallery,
and once you're there,
you're going to encounter gallerists and curators,
and, you know, the art world, in a sense.
You know, with art, the institutions of it are front and center,
and they're often monumental, like cities upon a hill.
So you have to get past all of this before you can actually get to the art.
You have to literally climb the hill -
like with the Met here, in New York -
to get to the art.
So, let's talk about the art a little bit.
The British artist Tracey Emin has said,
"Modern art is merely the means by which we terrorize ourselves."
Art today can be conceptual or cerebral;
it can be boring and difficult.
We're going to talk about why this is,
but before we do,
I want to get to the third reason that you don't get contemporary art.
And this also happens to be the one thing that's within your control to change.
It's you.
It is, in part, your fault.
But the flip side of that is that art needs you to be got.
Right? It needs you, the viewer, to interpret it and to add meaning to it.
You might be asking now, "Okay, so how am I supposed to do that?"
And to answer this question, we really need to go back to the beginning;
we need to go back to a time before art meant really what it does today.
Okay. I'm going to ask you to think right now about artists.
Think about some of the traits you might associate with them.
Right, I think a lot of us will think they might be creative or original.
They might even be genius.
They're probably also difficult and passionate about what they do.
They act as if the normal rules of society didn't apply to them.
Well, we only have to go back about 250 years
to encounter an entirely different conception
of what it means to be an artist.
We can actually see this change happening, right before our eyes,
when we compare two encyclopedias from the 18th century.
So, right here we're looking at Ephraim Chambers' Table of Knowledge
from 1728.
And over here, where he's mapped out all of sort of human achievement,
under what we would normally consider the arts,
we see two totally different groupings.
We see one for architecture, sculpture and manufacturing,
and those are grouped under the mechanical arts.
Now, in a separate category,
we have painting and perspective under optics.
So, in other words, this idea of like a unified artist,
a unified set of fine arts
doesn't yet exist.
Now, if we fast forward a mere 23 years, to 1751,
we're looking at Diderot's "Encyclopédie" here.
And now, for the first time,
we have a real grouping of art as we know it today.
So music, painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving -
these are all grouped together,
and what's more,
Diderot grouped them under the realm of the imagination, right?
So the imagination,
it's this like higher realm of human achievement
than even memory and reason,
which were Diderot's other two categories.
Now, what happens when we elevate the arts
to this higher transcendent realm of the imagination?
It basically becomes a quasi-religion,
and artists become these sort of secular priests.
And, you know, like all religions,
art starts to develop its own institutions,
its own way of thinking,
its own behaviors,
and it's own intermediaries -
Right, these people who can speak directly to the gods
and translate for the rest of us laymen.
So it's these intermediaries that I'm kind of calling "the art world,"
And again, just like in religion, they have their own liturgical language.
You might recognize this, or you might have encountered it elsewhere.
Here's an example:
"Humanity has aspired to elevation
and desired to be free from alienation and subjugation to gravity.
The physical and existential dialectic,
which is in a permanent state
of oscillation between height and willful falling,
drives us to explore the limits of balance."
So, if you need an interpretation here,
this is kind of just saying something about standing up.
Now, quite recently, two researchers, Alix Rule and David Levine,
discovered that this type of language
has enough unique linguistic traits to be considered its own dialect:
It has its own syntax;
it has its own vocabulary, so it uses words like "aporia" and "transversal,"
that none of us use in everyday language.
Now, you might ask,
"Why does the art world speak like this?"
And, you know, in good faith, there are some historic reasons
that have to do with theories on the way that art produces meaning.
But really, this type of language is a social marker;
it designates an inside and an outside group,
which means that language like this,
whether it's in a press release or an article,
it's generally not written for you.
Now, I know this is frustrating, okay.
I find it frustrating too.
I don't get this type of language often.
And the thing that I find most frustrating about it
is, actually, the fact that it's often used
to cloud what might otherwise be a very simple work of art.
And what's unfortunate about this
is that it makes it easy to dismiss art that might be simple or that we don't like
as bullshit.
So, for example, if I see the cult horror movie,
"Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood," -
it's a - if you haven't seen it,
it's about some hip-hop performers
who accidentally unleash a leprechaun from his magic prison,
and, you know, if I saw this,
I would probably feel empowered to say that I don't like it, right?
But if someone presented it to me
as being about the existential plight of urban youth and the barriers,
both real and imagined,
physical and uncanny,
that problematized their post-capitalist pursuit of fame and wealth,
I'm going to call, "Bullshit."
Again, this is really unfortunate because what it does
is it allows us to dismiss art that we don't like as a sham,
and it would be preferable
if you felt empowered to just say that you don't like this art.
Because if you don't like it, it follows that there's art that you like.
And that means you have an opinion,
which is one of the first steps of getting art.
I'm going to talk a little bit about that art now.
So, again, you know, about 250 years it's been now
that art has not been about beauty.
It hasn't been about craftsmanship.
It's really been about the imagination - right? -
if we recall Diderot's groupings.
And if art is about the imagination, about ideas, and the idea is primary,
then it follows that its form and techniques are secondary.
Now, there was actually an entire movement of art - conceptual art - in the 1960s
that took this premise to its logical conclusion.
We see an example here.
This is Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs.
And the work is really asking,
how do we know what a chair is?
It seems like a simple question,
but, you know, Kosuth is wondering,
is it because we understand photographic reproductions of a chair?
Is it because of its physical form?
Or because of the word "chair,"
whose definition we agree upon by convention.
Now, if we extrapolate out the work,
it's really asking, why do things mean what they mean?
Or as Kosuth has said,
"Art isn't about colors and forms, it's about meaning."
Now, I'm going to guess that after this explanation,
most of you get this work.
But you might not find it particularly compelling or interesting,
and I have to say I would sort of agree with you there.
You know, I think that the work is -
the ideas are a little bit too clean, almost too perfect for me,
that they become a little boring.
And contemporary art doesn't have to be like this.
You know, in fact, what I often find most interesting about art
are not the ideas themselves, but how they're expressed.
This "how" is something
that art historians might call "strategies" or "modes,"
if you've ever heard those terms before.
And it's with these strategies, often,
that we find some of the most interesting, creative solutions and great innovations.
I want to share five of these strategies with you right now.
So, artists might just want to create a new sensory experience,
simple as that.
James Turrell, whose work we see here installed in the Guggenheim,
he said, "I wanted to create a light
that was like the light you see in your dreams."
That's really what this work is;
you go in and it is this revelatory experience of light.
Simple as that.
Artists might embed meaning in materials.
So, in 2014, Kara Walker took over the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn.
This was a 130-year-old abandoned factory.
And she created this monumental sphinx.
So you might notice here that this sphinx,
it has what we could call these traditional "mammy" features,
so it's very much a stereotypical image of a black female slave.
Now, Walker used over 30 tons of sugar to produce this work.
So, sugar. What does it mean?
I mean it connects the work to its site, of course,
the Domino Sugar factory,
but sugar was also a major driver of the slave trade.
So Walker is really trying
to get us to think about our associations with sugar.
What it means in our everyday lives,
what it means in our violent history.
And then, maybe, how that history relates to our present day and our own lives.
Artists sometimes just want to evoke emotions,
whether it's joy or maybe nostalgia for the balloon animals of our youth.
You know, whatever emotions exist out there,
there's a work of art that expresses it.
[Art About Art]
Now, this is a little bit more of a difficult one,
but artists spend their lives making art;
they're going to engage with it and engage with its history.
This is a work of art by Mark Flood called "Another Painting."
Now, imagine that you are going to an art fair,
which is where galleries sell their works of art,
and you've seen thousands of works all for sale,
booth after booth,
and you finally see this:
it's like another painting.
Here's Niki de Saint Phalle.
In the 1960s, she started shooting her canvasses with a gun.
So this is this great act of nihilism;
this literally taking aim
at the medium that has dominated art for the past 500 years.
Artists also expand possibilities,
moving beyond just the normal mediums of art and the normal spaces of art.
So Robert Smithson's Sprial Jetty, from 1970 -
it's a man-made land mass that juts out 1500 feet into the Great Salt Lake.
So Smithson, here,
is literally making the earth itself his medium and his museum.
Or here we see Azuma Makoto, who teamed up with JP Aerospace
to blast bonsais out into earth's stratosphere -
91,000 feet -
and filmed them with GoPros.
So, these artists are showing that, literally, art could be about anything,
and it can be experienced anywhere,
whether on earth or even beyond.
This brings us to you.
So, I bet you're asking at this point,
how are you going to start experiencing this art?
Well, I think a really good first place to start
is that we saw now that art can be about anything,
which means that, chances are,
there's a work of art out there
that's relevant to something that you care about
or that's relevant to your own life.
Whether you're interested in topics of gender and identity,
or maybe politics and the Black Lives Matter movement,
maybe technology
or maybe just a fun and interesting new way of interacting with people.
This is one of my favorite works.
It's by the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater,
and it's called the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
Now, this artwork actually consisted of a series of burner phones
that were handed out to undocumented immigrants
crossing the Mexican border into Southern California.
And the phones contained GPS units
that could lead them to water in the Southern California desert.
Now, the phones also included poetry, right?
Because they're works of art.
And because these phones were being used to aid undocumented immigrants,
this group came under investigation by the FBI cyber crimes unit,
and during an interrogation,
the FBI asked them, you know, why was there poetry on the phones.
"Is this poetry encrypted?"
And the group's response was,
"Well, isn't all poetry encrypted?"
So, art is a lot like this, right?
It's an encrypted form of meaning.
But there's not just one meaning, right?
There's not the meaning that the FBI expected to find,
some kind of code word;
there's multiple meanings.
And to try to understand this art,
to try to decrypt it, so to speak,
we just need to think about the strategies that I discussed,
right? those five strategies,
and we can use those
to reverse-engineer the questions that you can ask next time you see art.
So first ask yourself,
what do I see here? what am I experiencing?
can I touch the art? can I go into it?
If you're experiencing something new,
it might be enjoyable, it might not be,
but if you can notice that, that might be it,
you might already get the art.
Another thing - what are the materials?
This is Damien Hirst's For the Love of God.
It's a skull that includes 8,000 flawless diamonds.
So what is Hirst trying to say by using this material?
What do I feel? Why?
What is the artist doing that makes me feel that?
And lastly, what does this art say about other art?
Granted, this might be the most difficult question to answer
because it does require some prior knowledge,
but you can, you know,
look at a press release, look at a wall label, try to read about it.
And now that you know a little bit about how this type of language works,
the type of language that you're going to encounter in a press release,
maybe you can translate that into English,
and if you can take one idea from it, that's a great place to start.
Now, I'm going to guess
that for about 99% of the work that you see,
if you ask yourself these questions and you still don't get it,
it might be that what's going on is that you don't like it.
And you know what?
There's probably other people out there who feel the same way,
and that's okay.
You know, I think, by all means,
I want you to go out there and dislike art,
dislike a lot of art
because along the way,
you might actually find art that you like.
Thank you.
(Applause)