Reddit Reddit reviews The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art--Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall

We found 5 Reddit comments about The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art--Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Arts & Photography
Books
Art History & Criticism
Arts & Photography Criticism
The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art--Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall
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5 Reddit comments about The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art--Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall:

u/lilgreenrosetta · 6 pointsr/photography

> My theory is that it takes someone with a MFA or a MFA candidate to find Eggleston's work as something that's worth hanging on a museum wall. If you've taken any MA classes that involve the history of modern art, Eggleston comes up. And out comes the torrent of words saying why this crap photo of a red ceiling with some white wires isn't as crap as it looks at first glance.

> And they're wrong. It's as simple as that.

Yours is a view that I have heard expressed many times before. Art and the workings of the art world are not things that are readily understood by a layman. And failing to understand it, some people tend to resort to calling the whole thing a conspiracy or a circle jerk; saying it is all "the emperor's new clothes" exactly like you do.

You are basically saying that the people who know a lot about art and have studied it formally for years are wrong, and you are right because you know less about it. Because you haven't been contaminated by the conspiracy of consensus.

I'm afraid it is not as simple as you put it, and your conspiracy theory is for the most part untrue. You just lack the understanding and the frame of reference to appreciate what is really going on. I'm not calling you stupid or anything like that, you just lack a few pieces of the puzzle that you need to put everything together. I have written an article on PetaPixel a while ago that might give you some of the information you're missing.

For a better understanding of modern art and the art world in general, you could also try reading The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. I'm afraid this book is also a standard textbook in art colleges and universities, so if you distrust that world in general you might want to stay away from increasing your knowledge about art at all.

> Aesthetics isn't something that only a trained few can properly interpret.

See there's the first part of your problem. It's not about aesthetics. Aesthetics is not what makes art good or valuable. It is not about who can make the most beautiful painting or photograph. Aesthetics are important, but it is secondary to the meaning of a work and to the place it represents in the canon of art. Once you learn that, things become a lot clearer.

> Sometimes a photo of a red ceiling really isn't anything more than that, or indicative of a higher than normal amount of quality in a photo.

And there's the second part of your problem. You are deconstructing Eggleston's work in a way that blinds you to the bigger picture. If you take the picture of the red ceiling out of context, and place it on flickr between thousands of similar still life photographs, it does indeed become an unremarkable picture. But that's like taking a few words from the third page of the second act of a Shakespeare play and saying they are unremarkable words. Or taking the Cmaj7 and F chords from 'Imagine' and saying they are unremarkable, simple chords that anyone can play. Of course they are, but that doesn't mean 'Imagine' isn't a very good and very important song in the canon of music.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. You have to look at the bigger picture. Eggleston tells us a story and shows us a new way of looking at the world. His photographs are the words he uses to tell that story, and you have to understand what the words mean to appreciate the story he is telling. It is not about pretty pictures.

> At the end of the day, it's just a photo of two drunk people in a bed.

Here too, I think you are looking at it the wrong way. At the end of the day pretty much any photograph is "just a picture of X". The photograph "V-J Day in Times Square" by Alfred Eisenstaedt is just a picture of two people kissing. "Dimanche sur les bords de la Marne" by Henri-Cartier Bresson is just a picture of some people having lunch.

I think Teller's portrait of Eggleston and Rampling is a very exciting picture. It may not be a world class work of art, but as far as fashion/advertising work goes I think it is pretty fantastic. I couldn't care less about the fact that he didn't use any fancy lighting techniques or clever composition. It is not about that. In fact, the direct flash technique and jumbled composition only add to the picture.

I love the picture because it's intimate. It's not a photograph anyone could have just come up and taken. You can't just sit two people down and have them pose like this, a moment like this has to happen. Only very few photographers can do this, and nobody can do it like Teller can. I love that. It's like getting a peek into his world. It hints at a bigger story, an exciting story with fabulous people late at night in a fancy Paris hotel, perhaps drunk, in their own world. This is a world almost everybody secretly wants to be a part of, and this picture makes you feel like you are part of it. As an advertising picture for Marc Jacobs it is bloody fantastic.

Teller's consistent ability to pull this off is what has made him one of the most celebrated and sought-after photographers of the last two decades. Amateur photographers consistently fail to understand what makes his work so brilliant because they're searching for the wrong things in his work. Luckily for mr. Teller, the people who commission fashion photography at the world's leading brands an magazines don't need his work explained to them by anyone.






u/happybadger · 3 pointsr/creepy

Aye! There's a really fantastic book that touches on the shift for a chapter, The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. That point in art history is one of the most radical and blindingly fascinating shifts we've ever undergone culturally.

edit: Actually, $20-40 on Amazon is pretty steep. If you'd like, I could type out the relevant pages.

u/teplin · 3 pointsr/drawing

Go to as many museums as you can and absorb. Be a sponge. It's also helpful to pick up some basic art history books to help propel you into learning about stuff which will open the door of what you didn't realize was even possible to like. Get a little education. Maybe start with The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes - see if that excites you (it sure got me going when I was 18). And draw and draw and draw. Fill sketchbooks. Copy other art you admire.

u/SomeIrishGuy · 2 pointsr/booksuggestions

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes is a classic. He also made a TV documentary series of the same name, which you can find on YouTube.