WEBVTT

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This is going to sound a bit
like a public service announcement,

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but here goes:

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Show of hands -

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do you or anyone you love

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suffer from an inability
to get contemporary art?

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Anybody here? Yes. Me too.

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Me too. I know.

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You know, I've worked in the art world
for about 10 years now,

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and I currently work
at a company called Artsy, where -

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It's an online platform

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where I try to make art accessible
to anyone who wants to learn more about it

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and maybe start collecting it.

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And, you know, this is something
that I encounter on a daily basis,

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and I'm well aware of the fact

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that a lot of people think
that contemporary art is a sham.

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This is one of my favorite examples
of this sentiment in action.

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This is a scene from the sitcom
"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,"

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and Danny DeVito is playing
this sort of eccentric, artsy collector.

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So he goes around pointing at the art,

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saying, "This is bullshit.
Bullshit. Derivative."

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He comes over and finds a piece he loves:

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"I love it. I want it."

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And the gallerist
sort of leans over to him

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and in this hushed, tasteful voice says,

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"That's the air-conditioner."

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Now, undeterred, he says,
"I want it. It's everything."

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So, I think the takeaway here
is pretty clear, right?

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Either contemporary art is a total sham,

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or you have to be an insider to get it.

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And if you're not an insider,

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you might be made to feel inferior
for not getting it.

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Now, I think that this is really
an unfortunate state of affairs,

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so that's why I wanted to talk
to you today about this,

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because I joke that,
you know, that this is a PSA,

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but I really do believe that art,
especially art of our day,

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is a public good,

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and you deserve more from your art.

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So I'm going to tell you today

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about a few of the historic reasons
for why art today is so inaccessible.

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But I'm also going to give you a few tips

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that I think will help you
better understand

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about 99% of the art that you see.

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Now, before I dive into this, I just want
to start with a few ground rules.

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I'm going to be talking
about modern and contemporary art.

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The difference between
the two of those is really a whole -

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a topic for a whole other talk,

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but when I say modern art,
I basically mean art since 1900.

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When I say contemporary, I'm kind of
talking about art since the 1960s.

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And the other one is that I am going
to be talking about Western art here.

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It does have its own tradition,

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which is different from
what we might call "non-Western art,"

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you know, this umbrella category
of anything that's not the U.S. or Europe.

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But, okay, so let's get started.

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Why don't you get contemporary art?

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I think there are three reasons for this.

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The first is it's the art world.

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Now, the art world
relishes its exclusivity.

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You know, instead
of trying to invite you in

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and helping you engage with the art,

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it sets you up to fail from the beginning.

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You know, music and TV
and podcasts, as we just learned,

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we can enjoy them
on demand - they come to us.

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And, you know, many people have really
deep and meaningful experiences with them.

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So why should contemporary art
be any different?

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Well, I do think that part of this
is a little bit the on-demand model,

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in the sense that with art,

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you have to go out into the world
to experience it.

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You have to go to a museum or a gallery,

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and once you're there,

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you're going to encounter
gallerists and curators,

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and, you know, the art world, in a sense.

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You know, with art, the institutions of it
are front and center,

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and they're often monumental,
like cities upon a hill.

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So you have to get past all of this
before you can actually get to the art.

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You have to literally climb the hill -

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like with the Met here, in New York -

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to get to the art.

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So, let's talk about the art a little bit.

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The British artist Tracey Emin has said,

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"Modern art is merely the means 
by which we terrorize ourselves."

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Art today can be conceptual or cerebral;

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it can be boring and difficult.

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We're going to talk about why this is,

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but before we do,

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I want to get to the third reason
that you don't get contemporary art.

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And this also happens to be the one thing
that's within your control to change.

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It's you.

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It is, in part, your fault.

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But the flip side of that
is that art needs you to be got.

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Right? It needs you, the viewer,
to interpret it and to add meaning to it.

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You might be asking now,
"Okay, so how am I supposed to do that?"

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And to answer this question, we really
need to go back to the beginning;

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we need to go back to a time before art
meant really what it does today.

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Okay. I'm going to ask you
to think right now about artists.

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Think about some of the traits
you might associate with them.

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Right, I think a lot of us will think
they might be creative or original.

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They might even be genius.

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They're probably also difficult
and passionate about what they do.

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They act as if the normal rules
of society didn't apply to them.

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Well, we only have to go back
about 250 years

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to encounter an entirely
different conception

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of what it means to be an artist.

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We can actually see this change happening,
right before our eyes,

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when we compare two encyclopedias
from the 18th century.

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So, right here we're looking at
Ephraim Chambers' Table of Knowledge

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from 1728.

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And over here, where he's mapped out
all of sort of human achievement,

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under what we would normally
consider the arts,

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we see two totally different groupings.

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We see one for architecture,
sculpture and manufacturing,

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and those are grouped
under the mechanical arts.

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Now, in a separate category,

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we have painting
and perspective under optics.

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So, in other words,
this idea of like a unified artist,

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a unified set of fine arts

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doesn't yet exist.

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Now, if we fast forward
a mere 23 years, to 1751,

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we're looking at
Diderot's "Encyclopédie" here.

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And now, for the first time,

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we have a real grouping of art
as we know it today.

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So music, painting, sculpture,
architecture, engraving -

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these are all grouped together,

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and what's more,

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Diderot grouped them under
the realm of the imagination, right?

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So the imagination,

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it's this like higher realm
of human achievement

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than even memory and reason,

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which were Diderot's other two categories.

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Now, what happens when we elevate the arts

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to this higher transcendent realm
of the imagination?

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It basically becomes a quasi-religion,

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and artists become
these sort of secular priests.

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And, you know, like all religions,

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art starts to develop
its own institutions,

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its own way of thinking,

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its own behaviors,

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and it's own intermediaries -

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these people who can speak
directly to the gods

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and translate for the rest of us laymen.

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So it's these intermediaries
that I'm kind of calling "the art world,"

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And again, just like in religion,
they have their own liturgical language.

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You might recognize this, or you
might have encountered it elsewhere.

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Here's an example:

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"Humanity has aspired to elevation

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and desired to be free from alienation
and subjugation to gravity.

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The physical and existential dialectic,

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which is in a permanent state

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of oscillation between height
and willful falling,

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drives us to explore
the limits of balance."

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So, if you need an interpretation here,

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this is kind of just saying
something about standing up.

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Now, quite recently, two researchers,
Alix Rule and David Levine,

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discovered that this type of language

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has enough unique linguistic traits
to be considered its own dialect:

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It has its own syntax;

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it has its own vocabulary, so it uses
words like "aporia" and "transversal,"

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that none of us use in everyday language.

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Now, you might ask,

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"Why does the art world speak like this?"

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And, you know, in good faith,
there are some historic reasons

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that have to do with theories
on the way that art produces meaning.

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But really, this type of language
is a social marker;

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it designates an inside
and an outside group,

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which means that language like this,

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whether it's in
a press release or an article,

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it's generally not written for you.

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Now, I know this is frustrating, okay.

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I find it frustrating too.

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I don't get this type of language often.

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And the thing that I find
most frustrating about it

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is, actually, the fact
that it's often used

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to cloud what might otherwise be
a very simple work of art.

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And what's unfortunate about this

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is that it makes it easy to dismiss art
that might be simple or that we don't like

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as bullshit.

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So, for example, if I see
the cult horror movie,

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"Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood," -

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it's a - if you haven't seen it,

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it's about some hip-hop performers

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who accidentally unleash a leprechaun
from his magic prison,

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and, you know, if I saw this,

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I would probably feel empowered to say
that I don't like it, right?

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But if someone presented it to me

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as being about the existential plight
of urban youth and the barriers,

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both real and imagined,

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physical and uncanny,

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that problematized their post-capitalist
pursuit of fame and wealth,

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I'm going to call, "Bullshit."

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Again, this is really unfortunate
because what it does

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is it allows us to dismiss art
that we don't like as a sham,

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and it would be preferable

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if you felt empowered to just say
that you don't like this art.

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Because if you don't like it,
it follows that there's art that you like.

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And that means you have an opinion,

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which is one of the first
steps of getting art.

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I'm going to talk a little bit
about that art now.

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So, again, you know,
about 250 years it's been now

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that art has not been about beauty.

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It hasn't been about craftsmanship.

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It's really been about
the imagination - right? -

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if we recall Diderot's groupings.

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And if art is about the imagination,
about ideas, and the idea is primary,

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then it follows that its form
and techniques are secondary.

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Now, there was actually an entire movement
of art - conceptual art - in the 1960s

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that took this premise
to its logical conclusion.

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We see an example here.

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This is Joseph Kosuth's
One and Three Chairs.

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And the work is really asking,

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how do we know what a chair is?

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It seems like a simple question,

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but, you know, Kosuth is wondering,

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is it because we understand
photographic reproductions of a chair?

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Is it because of its physical form?

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Or because of the word "chair,"

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whose definition
we agree upon by convention.

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Now, if we extrapolate out the work,

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it's really asking,
why do things mean what they mean?

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Or as Kosuth has said,

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"Art isn't about colors and forms,
it's about meaning."

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Now, I'm going to guess
that after this explanation,

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most of you get this work.

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But you might not find it
particularly compelling or interesting,

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and I have to say I would
sort of agree with you there.

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You know, I think that the work is -

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the ideas are a little bit too clean,
almost too perfect for me,

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that they become a little boring.

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And contemporary art
doesn't have to be like this.

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You know, in fact, what I often find
most interesting about art

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are not the ideas themselves,
but how they're expressed.

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This "how" is something

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that art historians might call
"strategies" or "modes,"

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if you've ever heard those terms before.

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And it's with these strategies, often,

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that we find some of the most interesting,
creative solutions and great innovations.

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I want to share five of these
strategies with you right now.

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So, artists might just want to create
a new sensory experience,

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simple as that.

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James Turrell, whose work
we see here installed in the Guggenheim,

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he said, "I wanted to create a light

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that was like the light
you see in your dreams."

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That's really what this work is;

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you go in and it is
this revelatory experience of light.

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Simple as that.

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Artists might embed meaning in materials.

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So, in 2014, Kara Walker took over
the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn.

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This was a 130-year-old abandoned factory.

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And she created this monumental sphinx.

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So you might notice here that this sphinx,

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it has what we could call
these traditional "mammy" features,

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so it's very much a stereotypical image
of a black female slave.

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Now, Walker used over 30 tons of sugar
to produce this work.

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So, sugar. What does it mean?

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I mean it connects the work
to its site, of course,

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the Domino Sugar factory,

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but sugar was also
a major driver of the slave trade.

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So Walker is really trying

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to get us to think about
our associations with sugar.

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What it means in our everyday lives,

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what it means in our violent history.

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And then, maybe, how that history relates
to our present day and our own lives.

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Artists sometimes
just want to evoke emotions,

00:13:36.421 --> 00:13:41.172
whether it's joy or maybe nostalgia
for the balloon animals of our youth.

00:13:41.482 --> 00:13:43.683
You know, whatever emotions
exist out there,

00:13:43.683 --> 00:13:46.030
there's a work of art that expresses it.

00:13:46.530 --> 00:13:47.750
[Art About Art]

00:13:47.750 --> 00:13:50.119
Now, this is a little bit
more of a difficult one,

00:13:50.119 --> 00:13:52.081
but artists spend their lives making art;

00:13:52.081 --> 00:13:55.061
they're going to engage with it
and engage with its history.

00:13:55.481 --> 00:13:58.592
This is a work of art by Mark Flood
called "Another Painting."

00:13:58.592 --> 00:14:01.591
Now, imagine that you
are going to an art fair,

00:14:01.591 --> 00:14:04.621
which is where galleries
sell their works of art,

00:14:04.621 --> 00:14:06.971
and you've seen thousands
of works all for sale,

00:14:06.971 --> 00:14:08.011
booth after booth,

00:14:08.011 --> 00:14:09.229
and you finally see this:

00:14:09.229 --> 00:14:11.331
it's like another painting.

00:14:11.961 --> 00:14:13.300
Here's Niki de Saint Phalle.

00:14:13.300 --> 00:14:17.840
In the 1960s, she started shooting
her canvasses with a gun.

00:14:17.840 --> 00:14:21.593
So this is this great act of nihilism;

00:14:21.593 --> 00:14:24.041
this literally taking aim

00:14:24.041 --> 00:14:27.919
at the medium that has dominated art
for the past 500 years.

00:14:29.569 --> 00:14:31.980
Artists also expand possibilities,

00:14:31.980 --> 00:14:36.452
moving beyond just the normal mediums
of art and the normal spaces of art.

00:14:36.452 --> 00:14:40.531
So Robert Smithson's
Sprial Jetty, from 1970 -

00:14:40.531 --> 00:14:46.410
it's a man-made land mass that juts out
1500 feet into the Great Salt Lake.

00:14:46.410 --> 00:14:47.480
So Smithson, here,

00:14:47.480 --> 00:14:52.320
is literally making the earth itself
his medium and his museum.

00:14:52.320 --> 00:14:57.822
Or here we see Azuma Makoto,
who teamed up with JP Aerospace

00:14:57.822 --> 00:15:01.870
to blast bonsais out
into earth's stratosphere -

00:15:01.870 --> 00:15:03.812
91,000 feet -

00:15:03.812 --> 00:15:05.422
and filmed them with GoPros.

00:15:05.422 --> 00:15:09.440
So, these artists are showing that,
literally, art could be about anything,

00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:13.071
and it can be experienced anywhere,

00:15:13.071 --> 00:15:15.613
whether on earth or even beyond.

00:15:17.243 --> 00:15:19.320
This brings us to you.

00:15:19.320 --> 00:15:21.919
So, I bet you're asking at this point,

00:15:21.919 --> 00:15:24.241
how are you going
to start experiencing this art?

00:15:24.241 --> 00:15:26.743
Well, I think a really good
first place to start

00:15:26.743 --> 00:15:30.512
is that we saw now
that art can be about anything,

00:15:30.512 --> 00:15:33.242
which means that, chances are,

00:15:33.242 --> 00:15:35.191
there's a work of art out there

00:15:35.191 --> 00:15:37.631
that's relevant to something
that you care about

00:15:37.631 --> 00:15:40.222
or that's relevant to your own life.

00:15:40.222 --> 00:15:43.882
Whether you're interested
in topics of gender and identity,

00:15:43.882 --> 00:15:47.474
or maybe politics and
the Black Lives Matter movement,

00:15:47.474 --> 00:15:49.199
maybe technology

00:15:49.199 --> 00:15:53.873
or maybe just a fun and interesting
new way of interacting with people.

00:15:55.573 --> 00:15:57.490
This is one of my favorite works.

00:15:57.490 --> 00:16:01.870
It's by the collective
Electronic Disturbance Theater,

00:16:01.870 --> 00:16:04.670
and it's called
the Transborder Immigrant Tool.

00:16:05.030 --> 00:16:08.909
Now, this artwork actually consisted
of a series of burner phones

00:16:08.909 --> 00:16:11.901
that were handed out
to undocumented immigrants

00:16:11.901 --> 00:16:15.282
crossing the Mexican border
into Southern California.

00:16:15.282 --> 00:16:17.761
And the phones contained GPS units

00:16:17.761 --> 00:16:21.901
that could lead them to water
in the Southern California desert.

00:16:21.901 --> 00:16:24.972
Now, the phones
also included poetry, right?

00:16:24.972 --> 00:16:26.810
Because they're works of art.

00:16:26.810 --> 00:16:32.270
And because these phones were being used
to aid undocumented immigrants,

00:16:32.270 --> 00:16:36.420
this group came under investigation
by the FBI cyber crimes unit,

00:16:36.420 --> 00:16:37.921
and during an interrogation,

00:16:37.921 --> 00:16:41.632
the FBI asked them, you know,
why was there poetry on the phones.

00:16:41.632 --> 00:16:44.003
"Is this poetry encrypted?"

00:16:44.003 --> 00:16:46.161
And the group's response was,

00:16:46.161 --> 00:16:49.061
"Well, isn't all poetry encrypted?"

00:16:50.321 --> 00:16:53.172
So, art is a lot like this, right?

00:16:53.172 --> 00:16:55.741
It's an encrypted form of meaning.

00:16:55.741 --> 00:16:57.750
But there's not just one meaning, right?

00:16:57.750 --> 00:17:00.640
There's not the meaning
that the FBI expected to find,

00:17:00.640 --> 00:17:02.130
some kind of code word;

00:17:02.130 --> 00:17:04.511
there's multiple meanings.

00:17:05.101 --> 00:17:08.011
And to try to understand this art,

00:17:08.011 --> 00:17:10.450
to try to decrypt it, so to speak,

00:17:10.450 --> 00:17:13.362
we just need to think about
the strategies that I discussed,

00:17:13.362 --> 00:17:15.630
right? those five strategies,

00:17:15.630 --> 00:17:16.920
and we can use those

00:17:16.920 --> 00:17:21.271
to reverse-engineer the questions
that you can ask next time you see art.

00:17:21.271 --> 00:17:22.739
So first ask yourself,

00:17:22.739 --> 00:17:25.200
what do I see here?
what am I experiencing?

00:17:25.200 --> 00:17:28.140
can I touch the art? can I go into it?

00:17:28.140 --> 00:17:30.912
If you're experiencing something new,

00:17:30.912 --> 00:17:33.301
it might be enjoyable, it might not be,

00:17:33.301 --> 00:17:35.404
but if you can notice that,
that might be it,

00:17:35.404 --> 00:17:37.512
you might already get the art.

00:17:37.512 --> 00:17:39.769
Another thing - what are the materials?

00:17:39.769 --> 00:17:42.490
This is Damien Hirst's
For the Love of God.

00:17:42.490 --> 00:17:46.120
It's a skull that includes
8,000 flawless diamonds.

00:17:46.120 --> 00:17:50.070
So what is Hirst trying to say
by using this material?

00:17:50.830 --> 00:17:53.560
What do I feel? Why?

00:17:53.560 --> 00:17:56.441
What is the artist doing
that makes me feel that?

00:17:57.131 --> 00:18:01.011
And lastly, what does this art
say about other art?

00:18:01.431 --> 00:18:04.279
Granted, this might be
the most difficult question to answer

00:18:04.279 --> 00:18:07.200
because it does require
some prior knowledge,

00:18:07.200 --> 00:18:08.732
but you can, you know,

00:18:08.732 --> 00:18:13.211
look at a press release, look
at a wall label, try to read about it.

00:18:13.211 --> 00:18:16.960
And now that you know a little bit
about how this type of language works,

00:18:16.960 --> 00:18:20.300
the type of language that you're going
to encounter in a press release,

00:18:20.300 --> 00:18:23.191
maybe you can translate that into English,

00:18:23.191 --> 00:18:27.908
and if you can take one idea from it,
that's a great place to start.

00:18:29.258 --> 00:18:30.671
Now, I'm going to guess

00:18:30.671 --> 00:18:34.380
that for about 99%
of the work that you see,

00:18:34.780 --> 00:18:39.439
if you ask yourself these questions
and you still don't get it,

00:18:39.969 --> 00:18:43.451
it might be that what's going on
is that you don't like it.

00:18:43.451 --> 00:18:44.500
And you know what?

00:18:44.500 --> 00:18:47.900
There's probably other people
out there who feel the same way,

00:18:47.900 --> 00:18:49.680
and that's okay.

00:18:49.680 --> 00:18:51.511
You know, I think, by all means,

00:18:51.511 --> 00:18:55.170
I want you to go out there
and dislike art,

00:18:55.170 --> 00:18:57.352
dislike a lot of art

00:18:57.352 --> 00:18:58.730
because along the way,

00:18:58.730 --> 00:19:01.741
you might actually find art that you like.

00:19:01.741 --> 00:19:03.019
Thank you.

00:19:03.019 --> 00:19:04.331
(Applause)