The 5 Insider Secrets to Not Being Cynical in a Modern Art Museum.

Take a trip to the modern art museum in New York and you might hear a few skeptics proclaiming “my son could make that!” Well, could he have? Not exactly, and that’s partially the point of modern art — even if a kid could do it, they didn’t.

Besides that argument, here are 5 more reasons why “my kid could paint that!” only takes us so far when talking about art.

#5: Modern Artists Can Do Traditional Stuff, Too.

One of the most frequent charges is that the modern artist simply cannot muster the appropriate skill to actually create a classic painting, so they’ve gone off in another direction to mask their inability.

But it’s not true — the great majority of all the modernists could really paint extremely well. It was just too difficult to keep going on in that fashion and say anything new or original, hence modernism’s noisy introduction.

#4: No One-Trick Ponies Here.

People who generally say ‘come on, my kid could paint that!’ forget the fact that their kid could probably not paint several different paintings that capture the public imagination and ask serious questions about art, over and over again, along a steadily increasing artistic trajectory.

An artist like Barnett Newman didn’t just paint a few stripes over and over again and call it a day — he grew and developed and held the public’s attention with an artist’s mind. It’s not all just straight draftsmanship.

#3: Modernism Fundamentally Moves Past the Canvas.

I’d be overjoyed if my kid could paint a Pollock. But the whole point of moving past some of the boundaries imposed by the classic method in painting was to start exploring — across all genres of art and culture — what those classic models actually meant.

If you’re not interested in all of that, that’s OK — there are plenty of galleries full of renaissance painting that can make you happy for the rest of your life. But some people are concerned with evolving the standards, established in the 1400s and before, about what real art actually is. Your kid probably isn’t one of these, but many others were.

#2: Artists Aren’t Responsible For The Prices of Their Work.

Most of the time people lose their minds and the more conservative critics emerge when a piece of art is bought with public funds that isn’t a universally agreed-upon masterpiece (basically if it’s not from the Italian renaissance, people will find problems with it).

If the price is particularly high, cultural critics tend to start complaining, and old arguments about the ‘value of art’ get dragged out and beaten about for a few weeks of controversy. But it’s important to remember — artists don’t decide their price. Just because people decided to pay a lot of money for something doesn’t mean the creator thinks it’s worth anything near that amount.

#1: Why Compete With Michaelangelo?

There are new things to discover (or at least there were new things to discover, back when we didn’t have access to everything), so why slave away for years and years trying to imitate ‘La Pieta’ when you can do silk-screened Campbell’s soup cans and start a discussion on art vs. artist that will last until the present day?

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