Art is dead to me, sweetie darling. Postmodernism killed it
There are similarities between appreciating music and appreciating art. You progress through years of intense analysis, working your way through dense textbooks about the various genres, in the case of art, from architecture to sculpture to pointillism and finally you get to the Modernist era where things start to fall apart. In Modernist music, the notes break off, tonality is dead, and the entire concept of coherent structure is rejected. You lose all sense of what you know about composition and find yourself in the “mess” that’s Karlheinz Stockhausen (known for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialisation) and John Cage (a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments).
Concurrently, in the trajectory of visual art you hit a dead end between the pages of your trusty, heavy handbook.
So what do you do? You sign up for additional modules — courses like Visual Arts 101, and Pop Art and Pop Culture. You meander through Postmodernism and try to make sense of it all. You journey through the mind of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Then, you find yourself in London at the Tate Modern, methodically working your way from the Jackson Pollock wing to the glass enclosure where you watch a mechanical pink Vienna sausage dip in and out of a messy can of baked beans. You pretend it’s profound. You try to make sense of the madness. You’re young and educated and philosophical. You stare at a wall of blank Post-Its while sitting on a bench, starving and thirsty but unable to move before you’re sure you’ve mastered the value of nothingness.
Years later, you watch the Absolutely Fabulous box set — the comedic study of the PR surge in the mid-’90s. You get to the
episode titled Death, where Eddie (played by writer of the show Jennifer Saunders) goes through a bit of an art binge in an illfated attempt to be cool. She spends elaborate amounts of money on installation pieces like a rack of hangers. All of them are displayed in her lounge on the day of her dad’s funeral — they frame the open casket. You’re reminded of the uncanny similarity between this satirical scene and Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, also known as: shark preserved in formaldehyde.
It’s not until Eddie’s best friend Patsy (Joanna Lumley) has a tour of the homegallery and stops in front of the coffin to say some of the most important words in pop culture: “Yeah Eddie, but is it art?”
Several years later, when you’re deep into the series, Patsy will deliver some other important lines in pop culture history: “What the hell is the difference between a painting done by a person who wishes to paint like a child, and a child’s painting?” It will start to make sense. There is no difference. Art is dead. But long live everyone who wants to pretend that a canvas painted in one solid colour is worth the same as a small island.
You decide you’re not quite ready to give up. So you visit the galleries on Jan Smuts Avenue in Joburg on First Thursdays — a free public event where urban dwellers are invited to prance around in their hipster bests and visit galleries on foot to experience the cultural wealth of the city.
You like some of the work. The stuff on feminism by Lady Skollie is cool. The narrative photo exhibitions by Sir Zanele Muholi are beautiful. They grab you and draw you in. The eyes of the subjects follow you around like the Mona Lisa. There are a few other servings of the sublime. But most of the works are too “common” for the slaves of the subversive. They prefer the martyrdom of the contemporary artist, cool enough to scatter the canvas with the blood of a goat to represent some bigger truth. They prefer compositions that selfreference — odes to the ego, scatterings of the ephemeral, thin with meaning, yet theoretically justified. These works are sustained by curators and capitalists.
You attend a few First Thursdays where you sip confidently on your flat white. Then, one day, finally, you lean into your age a little bit. Your right to honesty and scepticism — not giving a damn what people think. You admit that you hate it all. You don’t understand it. The onus isn’t on you to understand rubbish. And no, it isn’t art.