#my credentials are fuck you mind your buisness

[trashratsaws]

Something I've been finding quite irritating about the lack of media and culture literacy we're seeing - because of course the least educated people speak the loudest I fear - is that it's almost forced me to become an advocate for art I don't particularly enjoy. I don't enjoy modern or contemporary art. I don't like it, I think it's overblown, and I think a lot of modern/contemporary movements are juvenile, underdeveloped, and crude. I will also defend modern and contemporary art until I die from white tiktok women who claim that they could make better art from the comfort of their upper middle class couches because apparently despite pretending to be cultured by going to the museums where modern art is housed and proclaiming to their thousands of followers that they have done so - which was a choice, by the way, they could have really gone to any museum that served their one-note tastes all the better - they simply cannot be bothered to do any sort of research or reading on what the modern/contemporary art actually means, how it was created, the backgrounds of the artists who create it, etc., or even to read the plaque next to the piece while they stand next to it making their videos about how lifeless and uninteresting they find it.

There is a huge difference between disliking something because you understand it vs. because you don't. Please for the love of god, if you're going to loudly dislike something, please be the person who dislikes it because you understand it, and spare me the trouble of trying to shout just as loudly that, well, yes, Jackson Pollock was the worst, but please leave his genre alone because you sound like quite the toad when you speak.

Anyway I lied before, so here are some avant-garde movements/artists/pieces I really like/find very interesting to do some more research on for yourself.

the Die Brücke (The Bridge, German expressionist group)

Mexican Muralism (Mexican artistic movement post-revolution of 1910)

Brasilia (failed Brazilian capital city with some crazy architecture. Also utopianism in general)

Neo-Dadaism/Post-modernism (generally cheekier movement than the abstract expressionists who took their work and mission far too seriously)

Marjorie Strider (woman pop artist who critiqued a lot of sexism in the art world with her work. See also The Girlies Exhibition)

Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Betye Saar

One and Three Chairs and Conceptual Art (this is the one people like to complain the most about)

Yayoi Kusama (particularly Narcissus Garden. Very good stuff)

Felix Gonzales-Torres (if you don't already know him. Tell me you can look at Perfect Lovers without crying)

Rhythm 0 (imo the single most impactful, raw, gut-wrenching work Marina Abramovic ever produced. Performance art. Devastating)

Shigeko Kubota (Vagina Painting. almost a direct fuck-you to Pollock's macho vibe)

Earth Art (exactly what it sounds like - work that relies on nature. The Lightning Field is on my bucket list)