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danandphil tiktok

Jacob Geller dissected the intersection of Fascism and modern art in 2020, sadly before the AI art boom, and goes into better detail than I can about how abstraction is a threat to fascist ideals. I also want to draw attention to possibly my favorite commentary on modernism.

Comic by Ad Reinhardt, an abstract painter, who's made multiple comics about art and perception.

Back before cameras, paintings were just recording reality, and that's why painters tried to be as realistic as they could, and only paint things that could exist in the world around them--objects, and people, and animals. Sometimes they did paint things from their imagination, but only to illustrate stories, like stories from their religion.

Then, cameras came along, and painters were free to paint things cameras couldn't see--things like the artist's feelings, or ideas, or thoughts, or lots of things. Some artists tried to see if they could paint from every angle at once, and we call that Cubism. Some artists tried to paint very quickly, as quickly as they could, so they could capture one single moment of the daylight, or their impression of a moment, with all the feelings light gives, and that's why we call them Impressionists. Some artists were more interested in the process of painting, like Mr Rothko; or in finding the most intense versions of a colour, like Mr Klein. Some were more interested in the spaces between things, like Mr Mondrian. But art, after cameras, could suddenly SAY something, say something by itself! And art, as it turns out, has a lot to say!

"I can do that too! I can do that!" You can, little friend! We all can!

My little cousin didn't get mad looking at modern art; she was excited, and asked her parents if she could have fancy grown-up paints, because she didn't know Art could be something she could do, could be something about expressing her feelings and ideas. This is a child who can't yet write very well, and not nearly as fast or as well as she speaks, so you have to understand something clicked for her, that she could express the complex human things inside herself with colour and shapes and images, instead of struggling to learn how to spell "melancholy" or "excited" or conjugate verbs to a degree that could encompass it.

Because words take TIME to master as an art form--I should know, I've been practising using them to express MY ideas and feelings artistically for 36-and-a-half years! Paint, however, doesn't require such mastery in order to begin expressing the artist; certainly it helps to know skills, but it isn't as required as it is with words. You can just scream and yell with paint, you can experiment more purely with images than with sounds, which after all are regimented into languages before we can begin to use them at all, let alone for the art words make.

I feel the line I always heard in response was "but you didn't" with a vague idea that it is so smart, so elevated, so beyond normal people skill as to say the idea that anyone could have done that is the sign of being an idiot.