On Quality Criteria for Modern Art, Part 1

Yes, yes, modern art. In earlier centuries it was probably a good deal easier to distinguish true masters from those who would have liked to be. Pictorial composition, accuracy of detail, choice of colour and a number of other more or less obvious criteria helped in judging a work.

Today everything is quite different. Many of the formerly valid “iron laws” of the visual arts are not only ignored but deliberately broken, subverted or even turned into their opposite. And the art world likes it. Does that mean that nowadays every artist can do whatever he wants? Whether he has any skill or not? And what is it that he ought to be able to do if he wants to be regarded as a good artist?

Anyone who is genuinely looking for a satisfactory answer to these questions must be aware that he has a very, very rocky road ahead of him. For here the banal but popular saying “easy is different” really does apply for once.

But you can do it, so come to my side and let us tackle it:

The modern art jungle is almost too impenetrable. On the one hand, as a viewer one is often confronted with a work of art that is as unwieldy and inaccessible as a bush full of burrs; on the other hand, one hears and sees about the life and work of certain internationally recognised artists whose main achievement seems to consist in being persecuted in their home country.

People who were born and grew up without a fighting spirit in their genes might now turn round and say: “Forget modern art” – other contemporaries, those blessed with more aggressive potential, tend rather to attack, condemn or ridicule contemporary artistic production as a whole.

A typical example of this is offered to us by one of the most zealous and active members of this species, an American painter named Robert Florczak, apparently now an art teacher at the university in Prague, who sets out his views in the essay “Why Is Modern Art So Bad?”.

Today the silly, the pointless, and the purely offensive are held up as the best of modern art.

It is, however, very unlikely that, with his own backward-looking, saccharine paintings of myths and fairy tales, he will be able to win many supporters of modern art over to his side.

End of part 1. Part 2 next weekend