Artwork should speak for itself

I’ve come to a little bit of an internal crossroads.

I’ve always been a huge fan of art that is accessible and comprehensible, so I’m ashamed that I’ve been appreciating art more after learning about it.

I believe that a picture should stand alone with no captions necessary, and it shouldn’t matter why or how the artists made it. Cursory looks at art are fine by me: If it doesn’t speak to you, then you have every right to move on.

Yet works that I would have passed over, I’m suddenly taking a second look at, and it is because of increased study rather than personal interest.

I’m taking a drawing class this quarter, and when everyone draws the same still life, you really see the choices involved in making a piece look stylized, making it look like your own work.

We also had to make nonrepresentational drawings. They couldn’t look like anything ““ no flowers, no people, no symbols. The focus was on composition. When you’re focused on drawing something in particular you can get caught up in the minute details and forget to look at the big picture. But when you are just drawing blotches and lines, all you can think about is the big picture and how each line relates to the others.

So now that I know that someone did in fact think for a great long time about a painting of a blue square, I feel a bit bad dismissing it. Yet at the same time, I still feel like I’m missing the point of it. This isn’t to say that suddenly I appreciate stacks of broken televisions, but at least the thought process behind those stacks is more clear. I know that it took effort, yet it still looks like nothing, so the internal battle rages.

Further complicating my struggle to appreciate art is the insertion of a human behind the work ““ the discovery of the life of the artist. In my art class, we watched a documentary on Andy Warhol and learned all about his struggles to be taken seriously as a fine artist. For 10 years in New York, he was a very successful commercial artist making pictures for advertisements and stores. But as for gallery displays, no one would touch him. He had similar problems in his personal life during this period as well.

His breakthrough came when he completely threw away conventions and popular styles of the day and did his Campbell’s soup can pictures. None of them sold, but at least they were displayed in a gallery.

It was a bit disappointing though that it took a documentary for me to become fascinated with his art. I’d always liked the Marilyn portraits, and I thought the soup cans were highly original. But once I knew that they were part of a long struggle, I wanted to go out and buy a shirt with Marilyn on it and maybe a poster of soup cans for the kitchen. But I didn’t want to buy it just because of my understanding of the artist: Did the pictures themselves speak to me or was it the struggle of the artist?

While obviously, the more in-depth one explores any topic, the more interesting information one will find. But art is supposed to be fascinating in itself. I love that I know more about Warhol, but I’m upset that I didn’t get this reaction from images of the work themselves.

If the art is shown to an academic crowd, a crowd who knows all about composition and silk screen techniques, then a work is already appreciated for its difficulty.

But if it is poorly executed, the academics can be crueler for the same reasons. Visual art isn’t the only thing this is true for. Musicians appreciate the intricacies of a symphony more than the average concertgoer, but those experts shouldn’t be the only ones moved.

This isn’t to say that art doesn’t merit closer study; it is just that knowing all this information affects how a work is viewed, and I’m not sure I’m for that.

If you like Amy Winehouse because she’s a tortured artist, e-mail Crocker at [email protected].