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uglybabyjesus · 3 months ago

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ugly baby jesus and how i enjoy art as a person who doesn't know very much about art

an opinion/think piece by me

I am, by no means, an art historian. Nor am I anyone with a particular special interest in art. My deepest knowledge comes from one drawing class I took in uni and one art history class that I did my best to pass but like retained 0 information from.

I hear a lot that art can be inaccessible to many, that it's a very secluded and shrouded medium with lots of barriers to those who want to study it and that it is rife with classism and barriers to those who don't grow up in an environment exposed to it.

When it comes to self learning about art, there's a lot of specialist vocabulary and very heavy literature involved that is not easy to get into if you don't already have that base and it can very easily dry up any desire to delve deeper into the world of art.

Something offered as a way to combat this is to ‘experience’ art, to ‘go see it in person’.

I think this is another unintentional barrier as well. It doesn't take into account geographical and financial barriers to art, distance from museums and galleries, cultural centers, ticket prices and gas costs.

And even if you can make it to a museum, it seems nowadays, all everyone does is take pictures with the art to show they were there without any attempt to understand the art, without taking a moment to see, to analyze, to feel.

This other idea of accessibility in art has made it a landmark, a background, rather than something that was once intended to elicit some reaction or feeling from a person. Furthermore, even once you are in the museum, you are still hit by the academic barrier from before; a double whammy, as they say.

Some museums make a conscious, well done effort to educate visitors to the contents of their collections, but others have minimal information or the ‘standard’ information, and to someone who isn’t knowledgeable in art, like me, it basically means nothing.

And this stretches across all time periods and mediums of art in my experience.

From modern and contemporary art to historical and ancient art, you stand there with the thought, like, ‘what the fuck was this all for?’

This is, in my opinion, how you end up with trends of people who stand in front of paintings they think they can do, and then you find out later that the whole piece was actually a huge fuck you to someone else and is part of a sereies of paintings that form a gossipy dialogue or displays and incredibly difficult technique or an invention of a brand new innovative paint pigment that is gonna change the art world.

But like how is one to learn all this?

I, for one, don't have the time or the mental energy to go around reading art text books in my free time; I have better things to do.

But I am incredibly lucky now to live in a city with significantly more museums than I ever grew up near and with loads of art galleries as well.

And I enjoy going to museums, I love the atmosphere, I love seeing things that I dont get to see rampant in everyday life anymore, I love standing in front of paintings trying to figure out what the fuck its all supposed to mean.

But it wasn't always like this, and there is such a pretentious atmosphere sometimes when you go to art museums that you're already expected to know things, especially when you go to historical art museums.

I’m very lucky that I don't have this geographical barrier any more, and that the financial barrier doesn't always affect me as well.

But even when you go to ‘experience’ art, it's not fun when it has no meaning to you.

So how did I start to find joy in art museums despite my art illiteracy?

Why, through our lord and savior ugly infant baby jesus christ, of course.

One of the first things I had to teach myself was to unlearn what it meant to go to a museum.

To make it no longer about what famous painter who’s painting I actually don't give a shit about being on display to finding the things that would be in the museum I did enjoy.

I had to change my mentality from getting my money’s worth of seeing and understanding absolutely everything to deciding that what made the experience worth my money is the joy I would get from the paintings and experiences I actually found delight in.

I started moving through museums in a completely different way.

Instead of focusing and trying to stare at and understand every. single. painting. in. the. entire. museum.

I started only stopping at the paintings that drew my eye and attention. If it didn't catch my interest, then it didn't catch my interest.

Who cares if some really famous dead guy painted it, he's dead and I personally don't give a shit about that type of painting.

I started taking note of what entertained me in the paintings I stopped at, and the types of different joy I felt at them. What about them made the experience worth it to me.

Things I love in paintings or art, or trends of art I stop and look at:

Ugly baby jesus

Beautiful women

Paintings by women

Portraits with lots of dimension

Statues

Cool armor

Things I avoid in paintings and usually skip:

Crusty old men

Really wide landscapes

Crusty young men

Still lives of food

I put ugly baby jesus at the top of my art list for things I love, because that was the thing that really had me noticing and forming my own opinions on art and what I love about my experience when I go see it.

I love how ugly it is. Its silly, it makes me laugh.

As someone who grew up staunchly Catholic and has since left the church, it offers a relief from the seriousness of god and jesus in my childhood.

And also, where there’s baby jesus, there’s usually Mary and 95% of the time, shes a fucking milf.

And coming from an asexual lesbian, that's saying something.

But it also gave me something worth taking photos of without worry of other people being there, and when my friends ask me what I did on vacation or over the weekend, and I whip out my ugly baby jesus photos, its a good time, its a hilarious time, and it garners significantly more interest and conversation than just ‘I saw famous painting by famous dead man’ and the ‘oh cool i heard it was nice’ responses.

Ugly baby jesus gets everyone fascinated.

Why is his neck like that? Why is he a 40 year old man but also a baby at the same time? Why does he have 8 pack abs but also like 10 layers of chubby leg rolls at the same time?

Unhinged conversations arise. Bonding ensues.

Sometimes, when my friends have the chance to travel and go to museums, they'll come back and their stories to me are about seeing an ugly baby jesus.

And so the gospel of our lord and savior ugly infant baby jesus is spread.

It's not a perfect way to get into art. And like it is very euro-centric. (another boundary for others, but this brings me to my next point).

But for me, this is something I can commonly find around me in my environment now, and it gives me space to poke fun at something and bond over it with friends a build a community around it, a space for discourse and humor (the cult of ugly baby jesus is accepting new members btw).

But no matter where you are, unless I guess you are where I grew up (secret location with only half a museum that is about how one really old building in the town used to be a post office), it might be worth to check out what art is around you, what things you like or dont, and if the people who made it are dead (or if you really dont give a fuck about dissing people’s art in front of them) what you can make fun of it.

This is how I enjoy art right now.

Who knows, it might change, I might take a huge swerve into serious academic art history or like decide to inhale a shitload of art documentaries or something, but that won't diminish the time I spend now enjoying art in a way that makes me happy.

And sometimes that means walking into a museum and immediately beelining it to the ugliest medieval painting of baby jesus (or sometimes to the most famous piece there to get a picture of it, cause its still really cool to say I was there, its okay to be like everyone else sometimes too).

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