I mostly want to talk about how paintings look. What is it that makes a painting good? How does it work? In particular, I want to look at how many paintings fail: why do so many preposterous paintings get made? But first we need to figure out what makes a painting good, so let’s start there.
The first thing to understand is that a painting isn’t just an image. It’s a story. Every painting tells a different story, but they all tell stories nonetheless. This makes looking at them rather like reading novels. You have to pay attention and try to understand what the painter is saying–this is not quite as hard as reading novels in foreign languages, since most paintings don’t require you to know what the characters are talking about in order to appreciate the story, but it’s harder than reading Faulkner on vacation.
A visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is a great way to waste an afternoon. If you have never been there, try this experiment: go to the museum’s website and look at the list of paintings on display. Try to determine what they have in common.
I’m not trying to be difficult; I just want you to think about what it is you’re seeing when you see a painting. I’m not trying to get you to see something in the painting that isn’t there. I’m just asking you to see what is there.
This is harder than it might seem. Most people who look at paintings more or less take them at face value. They are admiring, or puzzled, or confused, or bored, but they don’t actually see the painting itself.
I’ve been working on this problem for years, mostly without success. But a recent visit to MoMA gave me an unexpected insight into my own inability to understand modern art, and therefore into why so many people love it so much.
To understand this problem it helps if you know something about me: when I was young I wanted more than anything else in the world to be a painter. My older brother was very good at drawing; he could make exact copies
Modern art is a mirror-pool of the culture that creates it. Every new work of art is a window into the thoughts and feelings of the people who created it, just as any new idea is a window into the thoughts and feelings of the person who thought it up.
The art you see in museums is especially interesting. It’s designed to be seen in a museum; it has to be good enough to deserve being there.
What do we see when we look at that art? We see what we, as members of modern Western society, think and feel about important, difficult things: good and evil, love, death, happiness, meaning. And since all great art reflects in part its creator’s view of the world around him or her, we also learn more about ourselves by looking at this art than by looking at anything else.
Modern art museums have a message for you, which is that if you don’t understand their message, that’s your problem.
The message is conveyed through the layout of the museum, the choice of artworks to display, and the design of the labels. The message is also conveyed through what isn’t there: namely, any attempt to explain why a particular artwork means something to someone.
The layout of modern art museums reinforces their message by reflecting the priorities of modern art. You enter a huge room filled with gigantic paintings and sculptures. Your first impression is of overwhelming size, which conveys power, authority, and importance. And it makes sense that this is how they want you to feel: it reflects their assumption that the museum itself has authority and importance. But to many visitors this effect is disorienting; it makes them feel small and overpowered by the museum. If you are looking at a painting from across a vast room, it looks more important than if you were standing next to it.
And besides making you feel small in front of the artworks, these spaces make them seem small too, because there is so much empty space around them. That makes them look like objects on display in a museum rather than like living parts of a world we inhabit with other
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY has a wonderful collection of some of the most influential artists of our time. These pieces are displayed perfectly and are beautifully lit, which showcases their strong colors and powerful personalities.
I have visited this museum many times. My first visit was on my 15th birthday and it was a gift from my parents for being accepted into Columbia University as a pre-med student. I remember seeing a painting that morning that was so ridiculous that I could not stop laughing at it. The piece is called “Composition
The story of the Armani Exchange logo’s origin is quite interesting. Advertisements typically use logos that are either so abstract that they have little or no meaning, or so simplistic that it is hard to discern any meaning. The logo for Armani Exchange is a rare exception because it is a picture of something familiar and recognizable.
The man in the logo, who’s dressed in the Armani Exchange clothing line, is holding up a tee shirt with the letters A and X on it. The man is standing in front of a building with a huge A on it, which is also found on the back of the shirt. Was there anything more to this company’s logo than just an allusion to their name? Yes, there was. It was actually an inside joke. Their logo was meant to represent their company as being Armani in front and Exchange behind.
