Why Do Some People Hate Abstract Art So?

Comments

January 14, 2007 at 8:06 am

(1) Pete says:

Abstract art can range from simple to complex work and there are effective, inspiring, mediocre and chaotic abstracts too. I think an explanation by the artists of their abstract work is a good thing to have on display next to their work.

January 16, 2007 at 4:15 am

(2) Rosie Williams says:

There may be people who dislike abstract art because they feel threatened by it. However, I don’t think you need to feel threatened by something not to like or appreciate it. Personally, I don’t think someone should have to have a degree to appreciate a piece of art, yet I think a lot of people in the street would find much abstract art confusing and perhaps feel a sense of ignorance because they find it so hard to relate to. I’ve certainly felt that way myself yet I do not consider myself uneducated or unintelligent and it is this that has made me take a critical stance toward abstract art. I’d go so far as to wonder whether modern art has lost its popular appeal through over-intellectualisation engendered by the requirement to contradict old paradigms to the point of nihilism. Perhaps this intellectual underpinning has effected abstract art to the point of losing its aesthetic value (at lest to the general public) to its ultra-subjectivity? To me a painting is its own explanation- but hey, that’s just my subjective opinion

January 17, 2007 at 9:03 pm

(3) Tony Vassallo says:

It’s been asked, if a person fills page after page with words, one after the other, no sentences, no exclamation marks, no paragraphs, no chapters , etc. and takes the pages and has them bound does that make it a book?
If the person that puts paint on canvas has to explain to me what it is then I feel its not art but decor. Creating decor is a legitimate endeavor. In the traditional sense, art is art……decor is decor.

January 18, 2007 at 1:42 am

(4) Bill van Heerden says:

The fact remains that non-representational art is a cop-out. It is an easy and commercial way to ride on the back of the fraud that has become contemporary art. To attribute to it such values as intellectual content or symbolism is optimistic at best. The seeking for appropriate composition, the play of light the balance of form and content and so on, and ultimately the hope of the creation of something beautiful, has no part in non-representational art. That should be the honest attitude, instead of investing daubs and splashes with meaning. Decoration? perhaps. Art? Not according to my definition. But then the critics know best. I leave you with this curmudgeonly but delightful quote from Fred:
..Which shows that painting has nothing to do with beauty but only with sniffishness and social predation among the cerebrally understated with too much money. A Degas on the Upper West Side (I think that’s a good address) is the equivalent of, in a sports bar, a baseball signed by Willy Mays.

January 26, 2007 at 5:05 pm

(5) Danielle Walsh says:

As a college art student, my eye has been trained to recognize the formal elements of composition, value (contrast), color, and line which underlie all works of art, whether representational or not. My appreciation of (good) abstract art has grown as my education has progressed, even though we rarely, if ever study or create abstract works in class. I think that our brains are naturally wired to look at things and try to categorize what we see, and we are sometimes uncomfortable when something is not easily classified as a recognizable object. And who likes to be uncomfortable? With education, that reflex reaction can be shut off, and the mind can be opened to new ways of seeing.

January 27, 2007 at 5:14 pm

(6) Lucien Schaertiu F'teur says:

Art is art no matter how abstract. To me art is woman. Art is man. When painting what might be considered a higly figurative piece to me has elements of abstract when we look close up into it’s inner workings. The elements appear different only in their scale. To think of it, who else is going to look at it? God? – “…whatever god that was” – Ovid Metamorphosis

January 31, 2007 at 1:04 am

(7) Philip Edson says:

As the author of one of the articles I can’t help wondering whether some of the people here actually read or thought about what I wrote. I had a look at some of the work of the artists who have commented here and I that work is very decorative (all art is really) and it would not hold my attention for more than a few seconds. It’s the sort of stuff that’s been done to death and no way would I want it on my lounge wall! Lots of people who don’t have degrees or who are not well educated seem to have no problem relating to my work. All it needs is for them to be a little open minded and to have an imagination. It’s rather sad that some of the people who commented here possess neither quality.

February 20, 2007 at 9:05 am

(8) Curtis Verdun says:

I agree! It is so frustrating to find so many people unwilling to even consider simply viewing and enjoying abstract art. We don’t seem to have the same trouble enjoying “abstract” music. Most of the music we listen to is abstracted, it’s not a copy from nature. It’s fabricated from scratch. Abstract art is the same way. Rather than copying something from nature, a new image is created.

“How boring the art world would be if we faithfully painted only what we see.”
Curtis Verdun

July 23, 2008 at 3:47 pm

(9) Ricardo Carbajal Moss says:

Why I am a Minimal Realist and not a photorealist
By
Ricardo Carbajal-Moss

The reason why I am a Minimal Realist and not a photorealist is simple. I do not like photorealistic paintings. Yes, I use photography to help me in the drawing of the objects I paint. However, I do not only paint what is in the photograph. If I did, I would just end up with a painted photograph.

My paintings begin when I look for and then buy or just get an interesting object. I like old keys, toys, cherries, pencils, boxes, candy peppermint sticks, semi precious stones, paintbrushes, or other such things. Flee markets and old pawnshops are places where I often find what I am looking for. My present interest is old and young cherry tree branches. I usually get these by asking the farmer on whose land I find them if I can have some. This Winter I did take a couple of branches during what I like to call Operation Cherry Branch. I drove to a farm at midnight. I parked the car. I rapidly got out of the car, walked to a cherry tree, and broke off a couple of branches. I threw then into the trunk of the car and drove off as fast as I could. I do not think I will be doing this again. The adrenaline rush is interesting but if a farmer catches me, the consequence will be bad.

Once the object of my interest is mine, I like to hold it, see it in different lights, and keep it in my studio for some time. I then photograph it on a colored background. I work on this photograph on the computer making it high contrast. I change the size and print out the image. I then trace the printout and use this tracing to help with the drawing. I hang the object in front of a canvas that has been prepared with Geso and painted. I do the drawing on the canvas while looking at the original object. The process then is to paint the object in a classical way: from dark to light colors, from large to small areas, from a generalization to specificity, from broad-brush strokes to tiny strokes of paint.

A big difference between a photorealist artist and me is that I do not limit myself by just looking at a photograph for information. I look at the real objects. While I paint, I take liberties with the colors I use. I invent things that I think the composition needs. I eliminate areas that confuse the eye. I use both eyes to see the object I am trying to paint. This way I do not limit myself as do photo realists by just seeing the photograph of their subject. I need both eyes to give myself that extra dimension we see with stereoscopic vision. We see two different images of the same thing if we use both eyes. It is in the brain where we end up interpreting both images. It is on the canvas where I do the same.

I am a Minimal Realist because I think I must to be one. In Minimal Realism, I find a world I need in order to make art. My art is a living experience of the real. I love to paint Minimal Realism because the result is a greater joy to see than a flat colored copy of a mechanically obtained image using a camera.

Want something, look for it, find it, obtain it, see it, compose it, minimize it, interpret it, and finish it, are the things I do to paint Minimal Realism. I enjoy the final painting. Understanding what I did and why I did it prompt me to paint the next work of art.

How can you not understand that this is why I am not in love with abstract art? How can a realist artist see abstract non representational art in galleries and not feel sad for the people who think it art?

July 25, 2008 at 12:11 pm

(10) derekjohn says:

To Tony Vassallo: Re your comments – if a person fills page after page with words, one after the other, no sentences, no exclamation marks, no paragraphs, no chapters , etc. and takes the pages and has them bound does that make it a book? Well frankly, and at the risk of sounding pedantic, I’d say yes it does.
Of course the question of whether I’d choose to read it is another matter and that’s the whole point. There are books considered masterpieces that I wouldn’t want to read either and there are great works of art that I don’t like. The converse is also true.

We pays our money and we makes our choice as the saying goes. Surely there is room for us all to indulge in our individual preferences?

September 30, 2008 at 11:24 am

(11) Ricardo Carbajal Moss says:

The Alchemy of Painting
By Ricardo Carbajal Moss

Long ago alchemists turned base metals into gold. At least this is the myth of the alchemist. Today we can make diamonds in the laboratory. The long ago dream of transmutation is now a reality. Is this alchemy possible in art? I think it is. It is the aspect of art that is not understood by most people who go around calling things art, which surely must be called craft, and not art. I will get to this point later.

Imagine a music composer walking to a river and taking in sounds of rushing water. Bird songs accompany the sounds of wind blowing through tree leaves. Our composer is aware of the sound that nature provides during his walk. His footsteps keep a rhythm he can alter. The walk to the river has provided our composer with a group of sounds he can later recall and recreate altering, expanding, doubling, or whatever he wants to do to his memory of the walk. He can sit down at his piano and begin to create a musical composition based on his walk He brings to his creation his talent and his ability to bend, distort, enhance, and manipulate what he has in his mind and create music that he will call ‘A Walk To a River’. Has our composer done something magic? Has he used alchemy to turn something into something else? Has he found gold at the end of his work? The answer to these questions is yes. His mind altered the perceptions that stimulated his imagination to create. He is the alchemist working the magic. The man performing this alchemy is the vehicle that first received the stimulation from out of him. The man was then able to let the memory of the experience come through his body and out his hands as he tried this and that combination of sounds on a piano. Harmony, rhythm, beat, and all his tools as a musician help him put together a musical composition that he made possible using his abilities and talents. He is a musical alchemist. He did not use a tape recorder to later play back his experience. He did not use a camera to photograph the sights at the river and later see the photographs in order to remember the visual images hoping to be stimulated to enhance his musical piece. He used his mind to remember the world from which he took what he needed and discarded what was superfluous. He permitted the walk to the river to alter him as a person and with his rendering of that experience; he is now able to give us the final production with his music.

Now let us think of a painter having a similar experience. Is a painter able to match the musician? Is a painter able to be stimulated by outside influences that create in him a desire to recreate the experience? Is a painter as strong an alchemist as a musician? The answer is yes and let me tell you why. When a painter sees something that caches his eye, he remembers the information as did out musician. The light falling on the objects the painter sees comes into his eyes and is transformed into data the mind can read. Light penetrates the painter taking color, shape, tone, intensity sharpness, warmth, distance, perspective, and all elements that the eye can and does let into the painter’s mind. In the painter’s mind the painter then alchemically, doubles, enhances, tones down, intensifies, colors, diminishes, expands, and all other changes the painter is endowed with in his craft to recompose his experience that came to him from the outside. He magically lets this information come through him by using his hands at the easel. Line, mass, color, tone, shading, highlighting, glassing, scumbelling, scratching, varnishing, and all a painter knows how to do come to the painter’s aid in order to let the painter become the alchemist and allow him the ability to change base metal into gold. If you know anything about alchemy, you know that the change takes place in the alchemist. Our musician and our painter have found a way to change something into something else. The truth is that the musician and the painter have changed themselves. They are now the gold they sought. The music as well as the painting are nothing more than a byproduct of the real transmutation that took place when the information taken in by our artists went through the artists and came out as creations we all can now sit back and enjoy.

Now I want to come back to the difference between an art and a craft. Our musician and painter have one thing in common. That is the alchemical change that took place in the artist. A sculptor, a dancer, an architect, a writer, a painter, and a musician all have the ability to become an alchemist because the information went into them and out of them changing then and having as an alchemist experience a byproduct that we can call art. All other people who think they can make art without this change in them are craft makers. To work on a computer, to use a tape recorder or now a CD burner, to use a camera, to drip paint from a stick, to smear paint on a canvas with no objectivity in mind, to apply paint on a naked person and have this person role around on a canvas, to shoot paintballs at a white wall, to mark private of community property with graffiti, to fill a tank with eater and place a dead shark in it, to place a crucifix in a jar full of urine and then photograph it are all crafts and not art.

If the artist does change himself while creating art and if time does honor this creator at least one hundred years after the artist has died, and if the byproduct of the artist’s alchemical process is relevant to the artist’s time and the next generation’s time that honors the art, then the creator and the created byproduct are artist and art with a capital a. So let the other artisans do their work for we do need them and the works they make. We need both Art and art.

March 1, 2009 at 12:33 am

(12) Jack Thorton says:

Realism art is the only art. Especially Photorealism. When people see something that looks like something, is something, and looks more like the thing than a photo can, they are in awe. They see the skill of the artist and wonder how a human could come so close to God. Abstract whines that we are just coping the world around us or a photo, but they never seem to be able to see that the world is beautiful. Realists just show others what beauty they have seen.

Abstract? Random doodles. They ignore the beauty and awe that the world holds, and wonder why the awe realism holds for the public is not shared with them.

I’m only seventeen, but I know what people like, and I know the world I live in is better than any random brushstroke on canvas.

April 22, 2009 at 8:51 pm

(13) Marie says:

ok just because people dont like abstract “art” dosent mean we are threatened by it! Maybe some people dont like it because its random strokes and shapes on paper and is only for people who can really paint and draw!