A blank white canvas is positioned on the wall in front of you. You are completely decked out in a black formal dress, and your hair is styled to perfection. As you look closer at the canvas you realize that it isn’t completely blank after all. A single black dot occupies the top left hand corner of the piece. Since you are attending a modern art showing, you decide to follow everyone else’s example and tilt your head from side to side while holding your hands behind your back. After an obscene amount of time looking at it, you decide that you have exhausted your inner artist’s eye and decide to move on, wondering why that woman next to you is wiping her eyes and sniffling.
Sometimes it seems like the modern art community is all playing a big joke on those of us who have no artistic talent at all. Modern art painters can throw anything in front of us, tell us it is art, and wait for us to throw money at them. Because of the extremely limited amount of art knowledge that some of us posess, we would happily follow anything that the professionals say. While there are a lotof modern art paintings that are absolutely amazing, there are also a large amount that make us question what the age of the artist was, and whether it took the artist longer than five minutes to paint it. When you see a piece of art that looks like it could have been painted by your extremely hyper two-year old neighbor that you sometimes babysit, it makes you wonder. Despite all of the new modern art that is appearing, we need to continue to know and love some of the old artistic classics. Sometimes it is possible to get so swept away in everything new that is coming out that we forget about all of the amazing other pieces of art that are slowly fading into the background.
People spend a lot of time looking at pieces at modern art shows. Several hours can be spent at these art shows, while if non-artistic people were to go to a modern art show, they could make it through the whole thing in roughly five minutes. It is only possible to look at a piece of art for so long.
It’s times like this that artists like Van Gogh and Monet are sorely missed. The paintings that they were able to create are timeless and have continued to be popular for a very long time. Even today, one of Van Gogh’s original paintings is worth millions and millions of dollars. In order to help remember these artistic legends, art classes in schools cover them and their works of art. This is a great way to embrace modern art while still remembering all of the other works of art that have been completed.
While modern art is most of the time absolutely beautiful, and we should embrace it and recognize its beauty, it is also very important to make sure that the old artists who have been revered for centuries aren’t forgotten about.