Polémicas de museo.

Y después de un inciso de realidad, volvemos a la vida:

Me desperté el otro día y recién duchada, en proceso de vestirme, veo este artículo delante de mi poco espabilada cara:


Masterpiece by a reknown artist... or by a 5-year-old child? You'd be the judge.

Total que me lo leo, porque qué me cuesta? me he despertado 40 minutos antes de lo que tendría que haberlo hecho...

Las conclusiones son graciosas, es lo típico de "mi sobrino de 5 años podría haber pintado esto", comparan 2 piezas, y ven si la gente es capaz de reconocer la que ha sido pintada por la mano de un artista y la que ha sido pintada por la mano de un niño (que puede ser artista o tener entrañas de ciclista, no se sabe)
Mostraron obras de grandes artistas y de niños, sin identificar, a estudiosos del arte y gente en general, y vieron las conclusiones.
Por lo visto la gente ESCOGE antes las piezas de los profesionales del arte que el rollo dadá. Y es curioso verdad.
Dicen en el artículo que, como conclusión, sabemos mucho más del arte abstracto de lo que pensamos.
Y aquí dejo la conclusión que me ha parecido de lo más interesante. Creo que me la imprimiré y la llevaré en la cartera, para la próxima vez que tenga que oir algún comentario tonto en alguna muestra de arte.

"If we were to speculate about why and how people can tell the difference our reasoning would be the following:

In abstract expressionist paintings, the appearance of realistic objects is entirely neglected: the style (use of color, space, figures) becomes the content of the piece. The art historian William Chapin Seitz points out that an abstract expressionist’s style is created by the process by which the paint is applied, the formal elements of the composition, and the relationship of the elements (Seitz, 1983). In addition, he comments, “nonobjective painting, like that of the primitive, is built directly of lines, strokes and areas.”

A commonly heard claim is that the works of Abstract Expressionists look much like the scribbles and finger-painting of young children (see the film, My Kid Could Paint That). In addition, people have been deceived into spending lots of money on paintings by a chimp (which are of course non-representational) thinking that the work was by a rising abstract expressionist. But our study shows that people can, in fact, tell the difference between a child’s lines and strokes and those in a work by an abstract expressionist – if the two works are paired side by side. And this is NOT due to recognizing the different materials that a child might use vs. a professional artist, because our images were presented on a computer screen, and it was not possible to determine whether the colors were from cheap poster paints on newsprint or fine oil paints on canvas.

The finding that people were much more likely to talk about seeing intentionality, planning and “mindfulness” in the professional than in the child or animal paintings shows us that people are perceiving, perhaps unconsciously, the difference in the mind of the child/animal vs. the mind of the professional artist.

If you think about it, this makes a great deal of sense. Let’s consider the statement by abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann who said that art is “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak” (Hess, 1952). This statement indicates how much deliberation goes into an abstract painting (clearly considerably more than what a child or chimp would engage in). Mark Rothko’s use of color layering is not random: it is patterned and planned. So are the drips of a Jackson Pollock. Hans Hoffman’s book Search for the Real discusses the “push/pull color theory” where spatial dynamism is created not only by lines and shapes, but also by the interplay of light, color, space and shape. The spatial relationships among all these aspects create visual intrigue, volume and even movement. These tensions create a visual story, or a visual language. In short, as any artist or art historian knows, abstract expressionists were deliberately experimenting with spatial relationships, color tensions and pictorial structure.

By recognizing more planning and intentionality in the professional artworks, participants were able to recognize a “visual language” or artistic “footprint” within the content of the artworks made by professionals (in contrast to the more random markings made by children, apes, and elephants). What we are seeing in this study is that people are, perhaps unconsciously, picking up on this visual genre of art as having a structure, a method. People can pick up on the interplay of space, color and shape that Hoffman describes. People are responding to the fact that there are some images, out of all the images we show them, that have a pattern, expression, a visual language, even an intonation that the other images (child, monkey images) do not. While we might like one style, or “language” better than another, we can see and detect a structured visual language in the professional works. The people in our study saw the deliberations of the artist’s mind."