Before you can say why most art seems boring, you need to say what "boring" means.
There are three basic kinds of boredom.
Boredom is often associated with experiences that make us anxious. It's boring to wait for 45 minutes in a doctor's office, while sitting on a moving train for the same length of time can seem like an interval of freedom--an opportunity to read or daydream. Boredom is also associated with unfamiliarity. As another answer points out, it can be boring listening to people speak a foreign language. You feel like you ought to understand what they're saying, but you don't. (This leads back to anxiety-as-boredom.) Paradoxically, boredom can also result from excessive familiarity: when you hear or see the same thing over and over, you get frustrated by the lack of novelty.
Art can fall prey to all three kinds of boredom.
Some people are bored by the Old Masters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because the Met seems like a temple dedicated to wealth and privilege, and they feel excluded. Conversely, some people are bored by the contemporary art at PS 1, because it's so relentlessly hip and disdainful of bourgeois values.
Some people are bored by Baroque altarpieces or Chinese scroll paintings, because their formal qualities are complicated and their symbolism is obscure. They are the visual equivalents of foreign languages. Once you achieve even a basic understanding, there's a big payoff, but it requires a lot of work--more than looking at, say, Michelangelo or Matisse.
Finally, there's a vast quantity of second- or third-rate art that is boring if you know the first-rate art it derives from. A lot of modern art, or instance, is really just a riff on Matisse or Picasso. It's like listening to top-40 radio, where most of the songs are re-makes of other, better songs. They're OK as background music but boring (indeed irritating) if you pay attention.
Far from it being your fault -- either by virtue of having never seen art, or having never seen the *right* art, or simply not caring about art, or recognizing art when you see it -- it's definitely the fault of the art.
Let's backtrack and establish first that the answer to your question depends on your understanding of the terms "art" and "boredom." Because I guarantee that you like some kind of art: you watch flickering images on screens just like the rest of us, you wear clothes, you hear sounds thumping through headphones. In fact, life without art rapidly becomes, well, boring.
If you do not subscribe to the above, hippy-dippy, "art is everywhere" view, and what you really mean by "art" is "Things you go to see in a white cube or a factory/loft space in a metropolitan area; things also which you cannot possibly hope to purchase for yourself," then art's being boring is a matter of what you intend to do with the art. What is it for?
And "What is art for?" is a terrific question. It's arguably the whole reason anyone enacts any kind of art-making. At least in the postwar period. And for further background, I'd follow Postmodernism
At this point I can see a couple sources of boredom for you, dear reader. First, listening to anyone drop into the mise-en-abime of self-regard is hugely boring. Imagine a plumber's first response to someone's asking him about his craft were: "Well, I try to engage the question 'What is plumbing for? What is the perplex of terms by which we construct "plumbing"?'" Postmodernism is boring, in a way that Mughal painting and the Bayeux tapestry and Uccello'sBattle of San Romano are not. What the nature of that difference is is best reserved for a different question.
The more pertinent boredom arguably is the boredom of thwarted consumption. You can't take this stuff home with you. Either it would take the GDP of Cameroon to buy it, or it's "site-specific," "participatory," or still more boring "relational," and its whole purpose is to exist for a time, in a place, be documented for the artist's resume, and then cease to exist. Coming to this stuff is like being a day late for a raging kegger. There's crap smeared everywhere, empty bottles of Cuervo, half-finished bottles of Tab growing mold, mysterious lipstick writing on mirrors, and it all looks like it was amazing for one night only, and nobody invited you.
It turns out that disaffection/apathy is a terrific response to this kind of grade-school playground exclusivity. You're bored because the art is pointedly not asking you for anything. The art had a great time the other night, sorry you couldn't make it. It wouldn't fit in your house anyway.
This is a fatally-flawed way for art to behave in the world. A better version of your question might be, "Why is art so assholish?"
There are three basic kinds of boredom.
Boredom is often associated with experiences that make us anxious. It's boring to wait for 45 minutes in a doctor's office, while sitting on a moving train for the same length of time can seem like an interval of freedom--an opportunity to read or daydream. Boredom is also associated with unfamiliarity. As another answer points out, it can be boring listening to people speak a foreign language. You feel like you ought to understand what they're saying, but you don't. (This leads back to anxiety-as-boredom.) Paradoxically, boredom can also result from excessive familiarity: when you hear or see the same thing over and over, you get frustrated by the lack of novelty.
Art can fall prey to all three kinds of boredom.
Some people are bored by the Old Masters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because the Met seems like a temple dedicated to wealth and privilege, and they feel excluded. Conversely, some people are bored by the contemporary art at PS 1, because it's so relentlessly hip and disdainful of bourgeois values.
Some people are bored by Baroque altarpieces or Chinese scroll paintings, because their formal qualities are complicated and their symbolism is obscure. They are the visual equivalents of foreign languages. Once you achieve even a basic understanding, there's a big payoff, but it requires a lot of work--more than looking at, say, Michelangelo or Matisse.
Finally, there's a vast quantity of second- or third-rate art that is boring if you know the first-rate art it derives from. A lot of modern art, or instance, is really just a riff on Matisse or Picasso. It's like listening to top-40 radio, where most of the songs are re-makes of other, better songs. They're OK as background music but boring (indeed irritating) if you pay attention.
Far from it being your fault -- either by virtue of having never seen art, or having never seen the *right* art, or simply not caring about art, or recognizing art when you see it -- it's definitely the fault of the art.
Let's backtrack and establish first that the answer to your question depends on your understanding of the terms "art" and "boredom." Because I guarantee that you like some kind of art: you watch flickering images on screens just like the rest of us, you wear clothes, you hear sounds thumping through headphones. In fact, life without art rapidly becomes, well, boring.
If you do not subscribe to the above, hippy-dippy, "art is everywhere" view, and what you really mean by "art" is "Things you go to see in a white cube or a factory/loft space in a metropolitan area; things also which you cannot possibly hope to purchase for yourself," then art's being boring is a matter of what you intend to do with the art. What is it for?
And "What is art for?" is a terrific question. It's arguably the whole reason anyone enacts any kind of art-making. At least in the postwar period. And for further background, I'd follow Postmodernism
At this point I can see a couple sources of boredom for you, dear reader. First, listening to anyone drop into the mise-en-abime of self-regard is hugely boring. Imagine a plumber's first response to someone's asking him about his craft were: "Well, I try to engage the question 'What is plumbing for? What is the perplex of terms by which we construct "plumbing"?'" Postmodernism is boring, in a way that Mughal painting and the Bayeux tapestry and Uccello'sBattle of San Romano are not. What the nature of that difference is is best reserved for a different question.
The more pertinent boredom arguably is the boredom of thwarted consumption. You can't take this stuff home with you. Either it would take the GDP of Cameroon to buy it, or it's "site-specific," "participatory," or still more boring "relational," and its whole purpose is to exist for a time, in a place, be documented for the artist's resume, and then cease to exist. Coming to this stuff is like being a day late for a raging kegger. There's crap smeared everywhere, empty bottles of Cuervo, half-finished bottles of Tab growing mold, mysterious lipstick writing on mirrors, and it all looks like it was amazing for one night only, and nobody invited you.
It turns out that disaffection/apathy is a terrific response to this kind of grade-school playground exclusivity. You're bored because the art is pointedly not asking you for anything. The art had a great time the other night, sorry you couldn't make it. It wouldn't fit in your house anyway.
This is a fatally-flawed way for art to behave in the world. A better version of your question might be, "Why is art so assholish?"
0 comments:
Post a Comment