how do people still get away with painting a canvas just one color?

it's not the same thing.

isn't it just product placement for pantone?

and i consider rothko to be different. there is more to a lot of his paintings than just this.

My reaction on reading the thread title: "How do people still get away with the same kind of sneering at modern art after almost a century of it?" The full question is a bit better than that, I admit.

I am thinking no - they amount to the same thing really. Would anyone suggest otherwise?

http://www.rustoleum.com/
Wow!!

as for the sound correlation... i think that basinski and fennesz and oval are very bad examples of relevant artists here. there are so many colors in their music. particularly in fennesz to these ears, but that's just a personal preference.

something more relevant might be to listen to a sine wave for a fixed amount of time. not altering. i am talking mostly about things that completely lack texture. a painting that plays with texture and physicality/viscosity/smoothness and color is different from what i'm talking about (though, admittedly, still not something i find i like often).

the particular painting that made me start this thread was a 9 x 9 canvas painted baby pink by a young artist hanging in a gallery show (called pink) and selling for $9k.

And yet there are so many textures possible in a monochromatic painting.

Dia:Beacon has several of these sorts of paintings in its permanent collection, and although many of them were painted in the 1950s and 60s, they still proudly hang in those main spaces, and are "justified" by accompanying laminated cards, written by someone who appears to be verging on psychosis. I'm going to quote at length here. My question is, how do people get away with writing like this??

Occupied from the outset with ways of letting paint engage with its surface, Ryman has continuously sought to activate the painted surface, often subtly, while simultaneously approaching the support as if it were the proscenium of a stage. Unlike Untitled (Orange Painting) (1955–59), which he considers his first mature painting, his works typically use white paint, because of its neutrality as a color, and more often than not they are square in format. The exclusion of other hues, and the equalizing of all sides of the support, minimize distraction from the paint as an area warranting the full attention of the viewer. ...

Varese Wall, like Vector, also exhibits the fine line between a painting and its background wall. Here, in fact, the painting—its title a reference to the walls leading to the villa of Count Panza di Buomo in Varese, Italy—is also a wall of sorts. This painting-cum-wall creates a dialectic with the wall of its given exhibition space, a wall that presumably is painted but is not in any sense a painting. With his introduction of metal fasteners that visibly hold his paintings to their walls, in 1976, Ryman overtly acknowledged the symbiosis between a painting and its supporting wall. Varese Wall furthermore remains ever freshly painted, as does any "real" exhibition wall, since the artist gives it another coat of vinyl acetate whenever it is installed anew.

Vector and Varese Wall anticipate later works of Ryman's in that they verge on obliterating the distinction between the thematic aspect of painting and a painting as a physical object, but never quite do—in fact, this is a distinction they insist upon. These works fully express the idea that the relationship of paint to support, though born of material practicality, is ultimately grounded in the ideational capacity of painting to be about its own activity. Ryman's paintings detail different possibilities for the application of paint. For him, painting remains an ongoing reflection on itself, and in his work it becomes ever more mindful of its differentiation from, yet necessary, attachment to a wall.

-- Anne Rorimer

if anyone would like to broaden the conversation to include this sort of thing that's fine, i just want to detach myself from criticizing that style so broadly.

i think that the problem with so many different works of art is rarely with the art itself, but with the reception it receives by the art press/establisment/gallery hangers on/groupies, etc.
there is a certain amount of hucksterism which i like in art. this just crosses over the line because i feel embarassed for the people who buy it hook line and sinker. i realize this sounds incredibly pompous, but sorry, i can't help it.

xp., ryan, it was hanging on the south-most wall almost directly across from the vagina construction workers (ha! context).
as a sidenote, my friend jeff h4stings had a piece in the show. his was the sculpture out front with the soil in the glass boxes. what did you think of that? i was there on saturday too. i was the guy who was a little bit less than the cuban heckling everyone.

surely this applies to 'pop music', cinema etc. in the same way?

I thought that ground was covered above where firstworldman conceded that something like a Rothko, where there is texture to be studied, is different from what he's talking about.

I'm kind of surprised at some of the responses here. I think he's being reasonable and I've asked similar questions myself in the past, not seeking to sneer at modern art but to understand it. I think, at least in some cases, that it's about the context/setting in which the art is presented more than anything internal to the piece itself.

yiiikes massive xpost

looking at the website, i guess the opening was on saturday night, which explains why i didn't see all of these works, as i was there saturday morning. i did see your friend cleaning up the outside patio area though.

And I love that the title alone is enough to understand the work, yet the actual piece took more effort to make than just about any other piece of visual art over the last 50 years. It's the irreducibility that draws me to it - it shows that other artists making minimal works are just making pretty pictures rather than putting thought into their pieces.

I was probably unfair above - though I did point out that my reaction was to the title, and the question was more interesting - but the idea that a lot of modern art is 'getting away' with playing some sort of emperor's new clothes trick on these gullible art critics and collectors and gallery owners is at the heart of a lot of the most worthless attacks on the form, and it does get my hackles up a bit. Obviously I am far from agreeing with an awful lot of art experts of whatever kinds, but most of the ones I've talked to and read have been clearly intelligent and insightful people who are in that world because they love the art, and they get a great deal out of it. I actually have very little interest in the straighter monochrome-canvas types myself - very much excepting Ryman from that - so this isn't about my personal favourites being attacked.

Thanks Brian! I must admit it arouses my curiosity that you could deem a work produced under this ethos as your favourite of modern times*

Trying to articulate my own rationale here but finding contradictions here and there (Feel free to ignore as it's just me thrashing it out in my head really)...

For example I'll happily defend Warhol and his prioritising of concept over execution and certainly this protocol has manifested in my own approach over the years...likewise I eventually understood what Pollock was trying to do and was thrilled by what were percieved or implied as the intentions if not always the results...this is not to say that work by Warhol and Pollock can not be understood or evaluated purely on face value and surface reading. Do blank or monochromatic canvasses compromise this process? Are they too dependent on context? Why would that be a pro or con?

I can see the rationale of blank or monochromatic canvasses as sheer provocation devices, mood instillers or as 'mere' portraits. I'd have no real interest in experiencing art like this though. In the same way that I have no real interest in experiencing abstract sound work (be it '4:33', or the aforementioned monotone with minimal if any noticeable modulation) beyond a basic appreciation that it is out there.

But I know 'concept > execution' isn't quite the deal with some of the work discussed here. Friedman's piece for example is presumably a triumph of concept and execution in equal measure - or perhaps the 'execution' is removed altogether? Is there a parallel with '4:33' here at all?

'Concept > execution' (or 'method > subject'?) is surely what distinguishes Art from Design much of the time no? I can see that a blank canvas or a monochrome canvas takes that ideology to it's logical/currently visible conclusion...however it does appear that I am generally anti-reduction and anti-minimalism, in all forms of art, when it comes to my personal taste.

*just because I wonder if this is not something that is deemed as more acceptable or 'forgiven' in art compared to music or other media.

re: your desire to experience the work, the brilliant part of the "1000 Hours..." piece is that there's really no need to experience in person or even to see an image of it. And that's the most important role of conceptual art - to show an alternate path to the object worship that's been the basis of art throughout history.

There are obvious surface/content parallels between "1000 Hours..." and "4:33", but I'm not sure they're conceptual siblings. The point of "4:33" is to refocus on the incidental noises that happen during the performance, noises that the performer doesn't generate. With "1000 Hours of Staring" there's a similar focus on the idea of value in an empty work, but the impressive part of the piece comes from the enormous amount of effort that went into producing it rather than inaction on the part of the performer.

it was a title page and five blank (but numbered) pages.
I turned it in and got five points on it.

):

but does that really warrant celebration as opposed to just acknowledgement? I'm wary of the 'because we can' approach over the 'whether we should', if only just because of how the foundations on which much art is created actually seem so facile sometimes (the self-facilitating chicken/egg-like nature of industries of art, fashion, music, tv...where the media seems to exist purely for the awards show)

but the impressive part of the piece comes from the enormous amount of effort that went into producing it rather than inaction on the part of the performer.

likewise, is this particular 'effort' actually impressive or worthy of actual celebration? it's almost like when Joe Opportune gets into the Guiness Book Of Records for setting the record for 'most peanuts shoved up nose'. there's also the question of authenticity re '1000 Hours...' specifically, akin to the KLF burning a million quid. How important is it that it really was 1000 hours or a million pounds, no more no less. Or how near does it have to be to that to not matter? Or does it not matter at all? I can't see why it should, therefore I can't take a lot of these works that seriously or find much of value to me in them.

Is it perhaps an even greater act of creation if the artist didn't stare at for 1000 hours? He's then creating something in the viewers' mind that never existed.