OP turned off reblogs (which is fine) but as a casual contemporary and modern art Appreciator, I wanted to offer a small perspective in support of this post:
for some reason-- maybe it's death of the author approach, maybe it's how readily understandable many visual mediums are, maybe it's being afraid to take up time and space in a museum -- there's sort of a resistance in a lot of people to stopping to read placards about contemporary or modern art.
it's normal to look at titles and author names, but people sort of grab that info and move on. sometimes it's all that's available and that's fine! for a lot of paintings and sculptures you can SEE what it is, and what it's doing, and further understanding of the technique or period is great but not essential. either way it's a painting of a guy, you know? (there's a lot of art history and appreciation this is glossing over, i get that, but stick with me).
but a lot of contemporary and modern art, whether it be installation or sculpture or painting or fiber craft, is GREATLY enhanced by treating the title, the year, and any commentary by the artist as PART of the work. one of my favorites is installation work, which is a modern art a lot of people struggle with or feel like they don't "get." part of it is the experience of walking around or interacting with a use of light and space, and that's not everyone's cup of tea, i get it.
but sometimes, in my experience, the info that takes a piece of art from "ok that's a thing" to "oh" is info on a placard. it doesn't change the experience for everyone! but for some people, it does!
looking at an installation that is, to you, just a room of wood shapes and lightbulbs can look entirely random. but if the title is something like "statements on home v. 5" and then the year and author data notes that they're an immigrant whose childhood took place during a specific period of civil unrest or crisis, and then the little artist note is something like, "this is part of a series of works exploring the tension between solid objects and their interplay with light, and how permanency of a material can constrict but not eliminate the presence of light seen through its absence in shadow," then you can turn and look at the installation again with that in mind.
what does that specific info-- a curated, chosen, intentional amount of data-- do to your perception? are they just wooden blocks and lightbulbs, or are you looking at a concrete exploration of ephemeral sensations, like loss and stability and upheaval and survival? it's not supposed to have answers, necessarily, but it can make you think and feel, just like poetry isn't always saying what means, or like music can MEAN something even without lyrics.
another example is byron kim's ongoing synecdoche:
each of these panels represents an individual human skin tone of a specific person who sat as a model for kim's work. it looks like random squares if you don't know that, and like maybe someone slapped it together or overthought some random shades and called it art. but this started in 1991. it's over thirty years of individual people represented by a color. each of those squares is someone the artist interacted with to capture this one detail about them.
there's this idea that because modern or contemporary art don't immediately make sense or don't immediately appear to have technical excellence ("my kid could paint that") that it's thoughtless or random, like artists just create things dictated solely by Feeling and throwing stuff around. but so often, modern and contemporary art are deeply thoughtful works trying to interact with abstract concepts or experiences that are difficult to capture for an audience in a visual way: what makes you feel small? what is it like to suddenly be seen? what is it like to not know what home looks like? what does it feel like to be surrounded by diversity in real life and see a flattened pastiche in media? why and how does the perspective and intensity of light make us feel uneasy? do you remember what it felt to be a child? do you know what it's like to be a stranger? are you drowning in capitalism and how do we find art in it to survive? how do you preserve a moment in time? how do you represent grief? have you ever felt fake? do you know what it means to be alone? can you live with discomfort? can you live with not knowing, without having explanations? how do you feel, and why?
