For the last semester, I have been writing for the Arts and Entertainment desk of the Spectrum. In truth, this has worked out fairly well for me, for two reasons. The first of which is that I have a passion for writing, the second of which is that I have a passion for music. By all accounts this should be a blissful union. However, it could have been pointed out to me that the arts desk encompassed more than reviewing rad music, because upon close inspection, it has become clear to me that I know little to nothing about art. But I wonder after the last art opening I attended if the artists might know less than me.
When I was a little girl, my mother used to take me to the Everson Museum in Syracuse. I can remember looking at the huge sculptures in wonder and I was genuinely excited to be around art. When I stayed in Paris, I spend countless hours at museums, exploring Rodin, Monet and Cezanne. One would think that since I got the opportunity to report on art this year, I would be thrilled. One would be wrong.
I found myself at the Senior Thesis opening last week, staring at some sort of installation art piece, and thinking to myself, "This looks like a kitchen from some cheap Cheektowaga apartment. How is this art?"
I have no doubt in my mind that in some way it was art, and I can nearly guarantee that the artist could have given me a lengthy explanation about its meaning, rambling on about the secrets to life that the kitchen symbolizes. Perhaps life's secrets were hidden just past the garbage can, next to the disposal.
Yet my uneducated eye completely missed the point, and after about 15 minutes of pondering, I searched for a clean cutting board and a sharp knife with which I could slice my wrists.
Needless to say my experience at Senior Thesis was a baffling one, but I am curious as to the reason. Was it because I am an uninformed viewer? Or was it because the art that I viewed was not art at all, as much as it was a jarbled mess of vegetable peels, eggshells and wordy explanations?
So, I have to ask myself, who are the artists making these installation pieces for? because I can promise you it is not the average viewer. The answer seems to be that artists are creating art for other artists. Using the rhetoric of post-modernism, Dadaism, and ready-made art, the artists alienates his or her main audience: the public.
In a society of people who claim to be rallying against elitism, contemporary artists seem to be perpetuating a system that they abhor. Art like this alienates viewers, making them unresponsive to future projects, because they feel unintelligent and uneducated.
And so groping for words, I stood at the Senior Thesis opening, wishing I knew what I was looking at, and desperately trying to converse with the artists who created the works. As I listened to the words that came out of my mouth, it seemed that they poured from a faucet that I could not shut off.
"I can certainly see the desire and the yearning," I told one artist. The desire? The yearning? What was I talking about? I was trying to be one of them. And I was failing miserably.
And so, dejected and artless, I decided that my career would be better spent writing about things I can understand - Give me music any day, it doesn't make me feel stupid.
Thinking back to the Everson and Paris, I wonder if those artists had a list of meanings they assigned to their work, which I missed in my zeal to enjoy art. Maybe I failed as a viewer, as I searched for aesthetically pleasing art, and passed over art that required too much work.
Or maybe, just maybe, what I took away from the pieces at the Louvre and the Everson, as simple, uneducated and purely based on beauty as they were, were equally, if not more important than any feeling an artist can tell me to feel.
