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APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART
Contemporary art: is it okay to ‘hate’ it? What does that even mean?
It means you’re coming at it all wrong!
People talk about not ‘getting’ contemporary art — meaning not ‘understanding’ it — as if it were housed in some sort of insider code and, worse still, accompanied by an insider joke which, if you were in on it, would say ‘haha fooled you, you stupid fucking sucker — invoice enclosed for $100 million from Jeff Koons’.
Maybe this is understandable but it’s also faintly alarming, as the ‘contemporary’ bit in contemporary art has been with us since the late 19th century! Can the art world really have been playing a con trick of this magnitude for 150 years?
So what’s going on?
It could just be about personal taste. Now the truth is that, for many people, ‘art’ — meaning skilful crafting — is all and only about personal taste. People develop their visual preferences in exactly the same way as they develop their tastes for food — you learn to refine your sense of what is good to eat and what it should taste like from experience over time, and even thought there is a heavily subjective element in food tasting, there is also a system in place to test the evolution of your sense of taste against that of…
