As it turns out, a lot of the information is found on the MoMA website from NYC, and this stood out to me:
Challenging the notion that art must realistically depict the world, some artists experimented with the expressive use of color, non-traditional materials, and new techniques and mediums. Among these new mediums was photography, whose invention in 1839 offered radical possibilities for depicting and interpreting the world. MoMA collects work made after 1880, when the atmosphere was ripe for avant-garde artists to take their work in new, surprising, and modern directions.This is the essence of modern art. That it doesn't have to follow traditional notions that art must depict the world as is, but instead can be whatever the artist wants to create. Hence, it really lets imagination take flight, and that's why I like modern art better than traditional art in a way. It can express freedom and convey emotions, it can be counterculture and make a statement about society.
I took a look through Van Gogh's The Starry Night reading and interpretation, and I gained such newfound appreciation for it. I've seen the painting before multiple times, both in person and online, but did not understand the inspiration and meaning of the art until now. Now I understand why he painted it with such thick paint and turmoil of brushstrokes. I didn't even notice the steeple and village houses in the middle ground, or the mountains in the distance. I also didn't realise that the tree in the foreground is a cypress tree, which depicts a connection between Earth and Sky (and thus connects the living and the dead; cypress trees also signify death and are commonly found in graveyards).
Van Gogh once wrote, “Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.”
That’s so beautiful, right? I’d like to see life and death the way he saw it, expressed through his painting.
It's also interesting that so many famous artists struggle with mental instability. It's almost like the expression of madness makes their art great; or perhaps it's the pursuit of artistic creativity that drives them mad. I recently read a book by Esme Wang called "The Collected Schizophrenias", and it dove into her life of living with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. It was very enlightening, and helped me gain perspective and truly feel for what it means to struggle with madness. I can understand the helplessness and lack of control over what our brains think or do, and the struggle with what people deemed as normalcy vs insanity. As I read more books like that, it also helps me gain context in interpreting modern art - I now have deeper appreciation for these artists' works.
Now that I've learned a few things about modern art pieces, I no longer think of modern art is arbitrary or facetious, or "easy to make". I remember my first encounter with modern art - I saw a painting in LA's MOMA 9 years ago, and it just had a blue circle, yellow triangle, and red square on a white canvas. I thought "what, this can be put up in a famous museum?? I could paint that".
Instead of taking such work lightly, I'm going to strive to look deeper into the art (and perhaps look inward?), to feel a connection with the artist, and to appreciate the emotions evoked inside me. Not everything needs to be interpreted, or to be understood directly.
