We’re having a go at being cultured today. Lovers of modern arts are a special breed of people. They are able to see things other people can’t.
For instance, the colour blue is just blue to many of us. But to modern art lovers, it is a blue that evokes the artist’s emotions of longing and sadness, you get my drift.
We have a hard time wrapping our heads around the fact that some of these ridiculous modern arts were sold for millions of dollars, the most recent being of a blue painting with a white line in the middle – that went for $43.8 million dollars. And yes, of course it’s on this list.
1. Ad Reinhardt – Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962
This is a painting of a bluish black box that really just looks like a black box. Those who know better say it’s art that is “reductive and symmetrical”. Can’t say we disagree, it’s definitely a simple and evenly shaped black box.
2. Agnes Martin – Morning, 1965
Believe it or not, this painting is supposed to be about happiness and bliss. Apparently Agnes delicately drew this by hand and I guess she was very happy and blissful while at it. We are guessing the art factor lies in the fact that, at first look, this painting paradoxically conjures up memory of algebra classes.
3. Cy Twombly – Untitled VII from Bacchus Series, 2005
Cy Twombly has been called the “master of smudged calligraphy and gorgeous intimations of myth”. I agree with the former, still trying to figure out what the latter means. This is the reason why all parents think their young children are geniuses.
4. Jeff Wall – A View from an Apartment, 2004-5
No, it’s not an actual painting that looks like a photograph that we’ve been mind-blown by recently on Internet. According to the artist, “It is more interesting to depict something in a way that the viewer feels he or she is really seeing, but at the same time suggest that something significant isn’t being seen – that the act of picturing creates an unseen as well as a seen.” Was he talking about the ladies’ knickers?
5. Man Ray – L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920 (remade 1972)
This is a pile of stuff, covered with a fabric, tied with some ropes.
6. Barnett Newman – Onement VI, 1953
Yes, this is the painting that was sold for $43.8 million. According to painters-table.com, “This painting has all the tropes of the ‘Modern’ as it was known; flatness, surface, scale, physicality, abstraction, but they also projected something more, something Modernism had long since ignored or forgotten – a visual confrontation with emptiness”. Confounded? No worries, for you other people out there we think they were trying to say that “less is more”.
7. Sarah Lucas – Chicken Knickers, 1997
This is a picture of a raw chicken placed on top of a female’s pubic area. It is supposed to raise questions about sexuality and female roles. We’ll give it to the artist, it’s a pretty intriguing image though we are not rushing to hang it in the living room.
8. Yves Klein – IKB 79, 1959
According to Tate, “He began making monochromes in 1947, considering them to be a way of rejecting the idea of representation in painting and therefore of attaining creative freedom”. You have to wonder, was he a rebel, or was he just trolling the modern art world?
9. Damien Hirst – With Dead Head, 1991
This is the artist excitingly getting his friend to take a picture of him posing next to a decapitated head during a visit to the morgue. Our best cultured opinion about this image is that it is a cheap attempt at evoking discomfort on the subject of death. Our real opinion? Class A a**hole.
10. Keith Arnatt – Pictures from a Rubbish Tip, 1988
At least the name of this image is honest. It is a picture from the rubbish tip. There’s actually a series of similar images by the artist – of rotten bread, rotten cakes, unidentified globs, chicken carcasses and many more. The artistic value supposedly lies in the colour play by the artist, that it transforms even rubbish to become beautiful. All we can see is salmonella but what do we know?
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