I was browsing an online art gallery last night and scrolled past a few abstract art pieces. One was just a bunch of rectangles in slightly different colours and dimensions. Another one was pretty similar but the shapes were more strange. I’ve always thought that either I needed the proper context to appreciate abstract art or the entire thing is just deceptive hackey bullshit. But if the context is required to appreciate it, then why isn’t that very context the first thing mentioned whenever abstract art is brought up? Anyway hoping someone can shed some light and convert a skeptic
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All art exists in a context because we compare it to all the other art we have encountered. Because of this some art might be a lot more likely to seem meaningful to people heavily invested in the art world, or those who know a lot of art history. One thing to think about is the invention of photography, for hundreds of years the only way to get a very realistic picture of something was to pay an extremely skilled artist to spend hours and hours of their time painting it. Then with one invention you could almost perfectly represent something in a fraction of the time through a simple and repeatable process. What should artists do after this? Maybe asking how perfectly can we represent something with tons of color and light and shadow is just one question that painting can explore. Maybe we ask can we represent something with as few lines and shapes as possible, maybe we just represent using a bare minimum of shapes and colors, maybe we try to represent things that can not edit at all. All of this then contributes to the conversation of art, if we are now using art to ask questions why not ask questions about art itself? Is it art if I just buy something at a store, give it a name and submit that to a gallery as art? You can see that doing this for the past hundred plus years can lead us off in some pretty wild directions, it’s possible some art you saw is part of this broader conversation and the context would have helped you enjoy it, for what it’s worth there is some extremely abstract art that just never worked for me and others that seem to really effectively convey emotions and almost like stories. Couldn’t explain to you why, might not even have a reason.
Context can help in the appreciation of art. The first example you described sounds like it could.be from Mondrian, who has those famous paintings of rectangles in solid colour. At first view sure, it can be confusing and even frustrating why this is considered art. “My kid could do that!” Some would say.
But these works are actually a culmination of his journey in distilling his observations of the surrounding world into increasingly granular and simplified composite parts. Like deconstructing a flower into blocks and shapes that represent the petals, etc.
And these also tie into overall movements in art, surrealism, modernism, postmodernism, where artists move towards certain styles in response to real world developments in culture, politics, war, etc. For instance Mondrian’s work was apparently inspired by Einstein’s atomic theory, which detailed the building blocks of our world at the atomic level.
All that said, I’m not saying you *have* to like an artpiece even if it’s backed by a decades long journey of discovery. Art is subjective and you can like what you like. But often I find it an interesting exercise to internally find out how I feel about a piece of art, then read about what the artist was trying to convey, and then re-evaluate if the piece did or didnt achieve this.
Abstract art is often an exploration that is about the vagueness that you might dislike, and that’s fine. Not everyone likes the same kinds of art.
For example, we can start from a very physically grounded question: how few lines can I use to still evoke the idea of a person? You could imagine the literal thing with just a photograph of a person. But then I can play with it by removing more features, until it’s just some line strokes that I feel satisfied with.
If you take the abstraction process further, you have art that doesn’t necessarily have a clear, unambiguous intent. Maybe I just want to evoke feelings or concepts, and that inherently also means you may not experience it that way. Or maybe I just feel like exploring different colors and brush strokes.
Now, the way art is *presented* and *consumed* is a whole other matter that isn’t just about the art itself. Why do art installations use such insufferable language? Because that’s what’s fashionable in “the art world,” which starts mixing in issues of social class and expectations about who is viewing the art and who the art is for.
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