You know it when you see it.  It’s that Mannequin lying in a fetal position in the hole of a tractor tire.  It’s that giant spoon hanging from the ceiling above a miniature teacup.  It’s that enormous expanse of canvas that’s conspicuously blank save for the word “Death” slashed dramatically in thick black paint.  It’s irreverent, it’s jarring, Modern Art!

            The urge to look upon Modern Art, and scratch your chin with a pensive gaze that seems to infer understanding is universally powerful.  After all, who doesn’t want to be thought of as a member of the cultured class, that tiny slice of the pie sees art in a tiny slice of pie.  But the truth is, each and every one of us, regardless of race, class, or intellectually styled facial hair has looked at the stick figures hanging in the MOMA and thought to ourselves, “Well, if that’s all it takes, I’m in the wrong profession!”¹.

            Before I continue, I should clarify that when I say “Modern Art” what I really mean is “Post-Modern Art”, but I’ve decided not to use the distinction because most people have better things to do with their time than learn useless artistic classifications like “Modern” and “Post-Modern”.  It’s the kind of art that involuntarily contorts your face in the same manner a horrible fart might.  You scrunch your nose, squint your eyes, and pout your lips in an involuntary salute to something that stabs at profundity, but impales stupidity. 

            Modern Art grew into cultural acceptance because it was born of centuries upon centuries of representational art.  That is to say, until the advent of paint splattered wantonly about a canvas, art used to function in much the same manner as a photograph (only decidedly less harsh on double chins).  After years and years, people wanted something new, something different, something that didn’t look so darned life-like!

            At first it was great.  Everybody was relieved that they didn’t have to keep looking at portraits of Dutch guys wearing those weird William Shakespeare Doily-Collars², but no one expected the most respected galleries and museums in the world to display toilets for God’s sake! 

            After a while it became an indication of narrow-mindedness to speak against the Modern style.  It became taboo to reject the taboo.  All across the world at dinner parties varying in language, cuisine, and the treatment of the female gender, people found themselves nodding in affirmation at the mention of an ocean anchor riddled with birdshit on display at the most fashionable gallery in town.  They found themselves singing the praises of a toilet plunger, flipped upside down, and filled to the brim with Cheerios in the city’s most renowned museum.  Everyone became guilty of perpetuating the problem, and now we’ve woken up with a horrible artistic hangover with nothing to cure it but oversized cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup!

            So let this act as a war cry:  We must unite against the reverence of all things hollow!  We must dissent from those voices so keen to praise the faux-artistic!  We must reclaim the art world for what it once was:  relatable, and moving³, if ragingly pretentious!  Then and only then will we be able to walk through the hallways of the MOMA, or traverse the breadth of the Guggenheim and say to ourselves: “Ah thank God!  We’ve gone back to portraits of Dutch guys wearing those William Shakespeare doily-collars!”

 

Yours truly,

Gary Lundy

¹This does not apply to those working in the field of Modern symphonic compositions.

 

 ²Of all the fashion blunders that pepper the books of history, none is so monstrous as the William Shakespeare Doily-Collar.  It serves no functional purpose, save for the catching of small crumbs of food that would have otherwise fallen to the ground, and out of your life anyway.  It looks to be wildly constrictive, and fairly abrasive upon an already itchy area of your body.  And, of course, there’s the question of storage:  Do you hang your Doily-Collars, like life-savers upon a string, or do you fold them, doing your best to maintain the intricate patterns of peaks and valleys in their furls?

            Luckily, most sensible countries let out a collective cry of what the hell are we thinking!?! before the fad sputtered to an abrupt Mannerist end.  But the Dutch seem to have mandated the Doily-Collar as an article of national dress for a period of one hundred or so Baroque years before they finally moved onto the slightly less offensive “Bow-legged Pantaloon” trend.

 

³The era of Modernity is distinctly lacking in this particular quality, Calder’s advent of “Mobiles” notwithstanding. 

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