why i like modern art, part i*

i'd like to start this discussion with some insights of my own, but for now, since there are projects and tests waiting for my red pen and it's already after 10, i must do what i've forbidden my students to do - paste in a really long quote with a few of my own thoughts. ben showed me this excerpt from kurt vonnegut jr's breakfast of champions. i'm not really sure what the novel is about at all, but in it, a town buys a piece of modern art for $50,000 from a minimalist painter. it's described thus:

The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was Hawaiian Avacado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O'Hare Paint and varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania.** The vertical stripe [a thin stripe a few inches from the left of edge of the panel] was day-glo orange reflecting tape. This was the most expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old...high school. ...

Midland City was outraged. So was I.

***

I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. ...

Listen:

"What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?" he said to Bonnie MacMahon.

Bonnie MacMahon blew up. This was the first time she had blown up since she had come to work in the cocktail lounge. ... "Oh yeah?" she said. "Oh yeah?"

...

"You don't think much of Mary Alice Miller?" she said. "Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."***

Karabeckian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies standing up. ... "Listen--" ...

"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabeckian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

"I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about the be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well - let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let that five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light."

even taking into account that vonnegut is probably making fun of minimalism and the idea of reducing life to vertical bands of light, i still think this is a beautiful defense of artists who work nonobjectively. and it describes perfectly why i love it: because it strips away everything that is unneeded and presents to you thoughts in pure form. because {most} artists actually think about what they're doing. because art is a process. because it's visual poetry.

maybe someday i'll speak more poetically or at least coherently about this. and perhaps post some of my own work that a five-year-old could do better than. maybe.

*this could be part i of many or part i of i.

**hellertown, consequently, is right outside of allentown, the man's (formerly known as the boy) hometown.

***if i had a dollar for every time i heard this argument, i'd be a very very rich woman.