The art that I like is all chosen based on almost undefinable aesthetic characteristics – I like bright colors and solid lines and graphic qualities. A lot of this is perhaps because of my parents, who have a pretty good collection of art and even one print by a friend of theirs that’s actually kind of famous (I have a small one in my house, and by famous I mean that I once saw it up in a First Watch restaurant in Kansas City), and whose collection also, shockingly, trends in the same direction.
Karly bought me a Mondrian print for my birthday which is above the couch, and pretty much encompasses what I like about art (I would also super like this print, thanks for asking). Baxter likes his art even weirder than me, and we both enjoy trips to art museums (as I said to him the other day, the two things we like to do the most are museums and zoos), where we look at the cultural stuff and then hurry to the modern art areas, even though I like the impressionists too (the colors, you see). My bedroom as a child had a poster of Humpty Dumpty and a Van Gogh print, which I think my parents have waiting for me at their house should I ever want to claim it. The Frank Stella print (from his early work – I like the geometric stuff that he does, the Protractor series) I got for Christmas happened as a result of the fight over the one in my parents’ back bedroom that I am still having with my sister (I am greedy and want both). (The title of this post is a Frank Stella quote.)
When Baxter and I go to art galleries, I mostly wander around, noting what I like and then not knowing how to relate to the art, because I can never figure out what it is that I’m supposed to be looking at. Like everything else, I appreciate a good form – I like novels within novels, books with scads of poetry that are supposed to be real but are really written entirely by the author of the novel (so, pretty much, A.S. Byatt), even when I can’t understand the content. I often don’t see the facial expressions that are supposed to be transparent when viewing art, and the fact that Matisse was considered revolutionary and grotesque because his nudes didn’t look like real people doesn’t really make sense to me. Baxter is much better at it – I read all the information, learn the factoids about artists’ lives, read about the medium – but he gets the jokes, and explains them to me.
The thing I find the most interesting about taking an art history class and talking about art in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States is that I have a much lower tolerance for claims that pop culture now involves more selling out than other times in history, because it is totally not true. Trying to make a living as an artist almost always involves selling stuff – Winslow Homer drawing pictures for the front of sheet music seems no different than Isaac Mizrahi’s line for Target. The same distinctions between the maudlin sentimentality adored by the masses and the high art appreciated by the upper classes are drawn, just using different novels and knick-knacks.
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