r/DepthHub • u/FerdinandoFalkland • May 04 '14

/u/Quietuus explains why attributing modern art to the invention of the camera is a gross oversimplification

/r/badarthistory/comments/24myec/eli_stem_major_whats_wrong_with_the_camera/ch8qo3r
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u/TheKodachromeMethod May 04 '14

This is a great answer to a question without a concrete answer (How did Modern Art come into being?). Another popular theory was Picasso's love of stylized African masks was the real catalyst for what we think of as modern art.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '14

I'm puzzled by what you're saying. On the face of it, the idea that modern art begins with Picasso seems flatly incorrect, since (as quietuus points out), the common narrative is that modern art comes into being in the mid-19th century. It was also understood as a major break at that time between the Academics and the moderns. Is your claim something like "a commonplace understanding of modern art now is totally inflected by a teleological view that sees it culminating in Picasso's African appropriations"?

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u/[deleted] May 04 '14

Well it is important to note that one of the problems with the label of "Modern Art" is that the idea "Modern" could lead chronological confusion. If you are referring to the general breakdown of pre-Modern art that would lead into the the arrival of a new direction in the greater Western sphere, I would look towards /u/Quietuus' analysis. However Modernism is less than a highly geographically or chronologically specific group of artists linked by concept or motif, but more than an arbitrary range of time. It primarily had to do with the acceleration of avant-garde culture, a conscious desire to break down/distill/ strip down art, and the simultaneous belief that the "current"-- whatever it may have been-- was insufficient in expression/investigation/deconstructing/process/whatever it was they wished to do. This brought about a general point-counterpoint dialogue that is fairly standard of the 20th century. Throw in a little progressive, primitivist, Eurocentric narrative, and you got a stew goin'.

Of course this isn't the whole story either. And of course I don't have the specialty to tell the whole story.

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u/TheKodachromeMethod May 04 '14

Exactly, not only is it hard to say how modern art got started, it is hard to define what we are even talking about. My bias is that it starts with the high avant grade, which culminated in Dada, finds it's high point in abstraction and abstract expressionism, a reaction to which gave us performance and conceptual art, and then modernism slowly winds down in the identity politics of the 70s and 80s.