I was watching a very artsy movie the other evening called “The Square” about an Avant-garde Swedish museum that is opening a controversial art display called The Square, a 4×4 square in the cement in front of the museum, outlined by a rope light.
The movie went on to relationships and other bizarre interactions so I stopped watching, but the controversy at the beginning really made me think.
“It’s meant to represent a communal ‘safe space,’ ” the artist explained. “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it, we all share equal rights and obligations.”
I never knew a 4×4 square could be so deep.
Am I missing something here?
An artist can make anything they create mean anything they want. A few sentences of explanation and you may understand it’s a political statement or a state of mind or world of chaos. It’s all up to the artist.
The discussion group in the movie states that they “need to harness social media attention with something other than the uncontroversial and bland artist’s statement.”
The square is nothing more than a 4 x 4 cement square. Another exhibit in the museum was a room with 15(?) piles of something arranged in 5 pile lines.
Why is this considered art?
Most people glance at displays like this and don’t give it a second thought. We don’t understand and don’t feel like understanding.
One of the quotes from the movie is, “If you place an object in a museum does that make this object a piece of art?”
This is still my question about modern art.
If a handful of people get the meaning you assign to your piece, is it still museum-worthy? Will it be remembered and cherished as a reflection of the world at the time?
Does every piece of art have to make sense?
I wonder about it all.
Humoring the Goddess 
Does art need to make sense? Well, how do we broadly define it? My thing is art should speak for itself. If I’m required to read too much then the art isn’t doing it’s job
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I agree. But I also would like Art to be something I can relate to in SOME way… even if it’s only colors or shape. Art doesn’t have to be Rembrandt — but I’d like it to be human.
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case in point… back when I was the royal gallery in Toronto for the Van Gogh exhibit, I decided to wander through the rest of the gallery and came upon a white wall with a black dot on it. Not a wall… a W-A-L-L it was huge, and the dot was merely randomly placed to one side. As I sat on the bench in front of it (but enough of a distance away to allow one to “take it all in” I thought… WTF am I sitting here for? I then imagined that there was someone with a clicker counter laughing like a hyena because they caught another one…
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Oh darlin’ I know what you mean!
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Some kids left a pineapple in a museum then went back to see what happened to it. It was on a pedestal under glass. If piles of stuff on the floor is art then EVERYTHING is art and we don’t really need museums at all. We just need to look at our hampers or the things around us. People can say, or believe, anything. It’s up to individuals to decide what they like, what speaks to them and what art really is. I don’t think there’s a real definition. The pineapple, like the toilet that was art, is just an object. If objects are art, then all objects can be art, like my kitchen chair. If I hang it on the wall and say something about generations, etc., is it art? If I want it to be. But not everyone would believe it, others would pay millions for it, if they thought it would go up in value. I can’t remember her name but when a Van Gogh sold for an amazing amount of money that no one could believe, she said, no one clapped when they brought the artwork out, they clapped at the price. Art is money nowadays. I came out of the Louvre in Paris and fell in love with the love locks on the bridges, which was art to me. Came from the heart, community art (even if destructive to the bridges). I honestly liked it better than what I saw in the museum. LOL It was immediate, loud, there in all it’s emotional glory, with names and ribbons and passion. I love the pictures I took, because the art was alive.
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You have captured everything I wanted to say and feel. I would hope my art comes to more than a box on the floor, though. I guess to each their own!
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Me too.
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💕
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