There’s no reason not to

I give the sculptor credit for deconstructing everybody.
* * *
I got my BS in 1974 and remember similar works displayed in the college art gallery, and I wondered, “Where’s the Art?”
At the time, I had not heard about deconstruction, post-modernism, “critical theory” and their ilk (STEM major), and PC was not yet a “thing” — I wonder if the art world was in advance of the political wave or surfing it?

John Dough: I saw something similar in 1974. A 2×8 painted blue and displayed leaning against a white museum wall. The title:

There’s no reason not to

I give the sculptor credit for deconstructing everybody.

om: Mixed.

Modern art, at least into the seventies, wasn’t necessarily stupid or insincere. I still see much of it as heroic. The 20th century was such a dislocation for everything that focusing on beauty while confronted with automobiles, relativity, world wars, nuclear weapons, television, computers and moonshots seemed inadequate.

I take that point. Artists like Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Klee, Magritte, Dali, Miro, Pollock, Rothko, Johns, Rauschenberg and even Warhol strike me as essential. I find much of their work, however cock-eyed, beautiful without pursuing that quality directly.

But at some point, the avant-garde spirals into itself and self-destructs or is co-opted by commercial and political concerns. Which is what we have seen.

What I find unforgivable is that current artists are simply recycling modern art tropes within criminally unexamined postmodern assumptions.

https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/02/04/interactive-art-solution-pelt-ivanka-trump-with-crumbs/

But there may be some truth in it? Or just a whole lot of ugly?

om: A friend recommended the exercise of browsing through a book on contemporary art and looking for the word, “beauty.”

One is not surprised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN9iJCZ5Il8

And stick to the end of the video he gives an example of a really good Modern Artist.