This past weekend I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York not only to escape the 100-degree heat but also because I wanted to see “Death Is Everywhere,” a Ragnar Kjartansson installation where two sets of twins walk around in a circle singing an endless indie folk song. (It’s more interesting than that sounds.) But while I was trying to find it, I got lost and wound up in an exhibition called Epic Abstraction, which showcased large abstract-expressionist paintings by Rothko, Pollock, Twombly, and the like. The first sentence of the wall text introduction to the show stuck with me: “In the wake of unprecedented destruction and loss of life during World War II, many painters and sculptors working in the 1940s grew to believe that traditional easel painting and figurative sculpture no longer adequately conveyed the human condition.” I took that to mean that the mid-century rise of fascism and its aftermath revealed a world so horrific that artists found it aesthetically unrepresentable. Rather than depict a world that humans have remade to be inescapably violent, ugly, and evil, the artists apparently chose to retreat to abstraction instead and trace the movements of their artistic egos.
Shareable Crime
Shareable Crime
Shareable Crime
This past weekend I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York not only to escape the 100-degree heat but also because I wanted to see “Death Is Everywhere,” a Ragnar Kjartansson installation where two sets of twins walk around in a circle singing an endless indie folk song. (It’s more interesting than that sounds.) But while I was trying to find it, I got lost and wound up in an exhibition called Epic Abstraction, which showcased large abstract-expressionist paintings by Rothko, Pollock, Twombly, and the like. The first sentence of the wall text introduction to the show stuck with me: “In the wake of unprecedented destruction and loss of life during World War II, many painters and sculptors working in the 1940s grew to believe that traditional easel painting and figurative sculpture no longer adequately conveyed the human condition.” I took that to mean that the mid-century rise of fascism and its aftermath revealed a world so horrific that artists found it aesthetically unrepresentable. Rather than depict a world that humans have remade to be inescapably violent, ugly, and evil, the artists apparently chose to retreat to abstraction instead and trace the movements of their artistic egos.