The scene I’m about to describe plays out in the sculpture room on the first floor of Kresge Hall, which exists, I promise. Calm down.
In my Basic Sculpture class, we were “critiquing” our first projects. During this entire critique, I just wanted to jump under the band saw and power it up.
The whole experience was quite ridiculous and has made me hate contemporary art with every fiber of my being. We spent several minutes talking about things that weren’t even there!
The teacher would crouch, twist, even stand on his head, all the while saying, “Ah, I can see that here, and here, and you were thinking that the fall of civilization will be predicated by Dick Cheney cross-dressing in Laura Bush’s nightgown on the White House lawn with Saddam Hussein doing the Tootsie Roll. Yes. That makes perfect sense. Amazing.”
Meanwhile, I am standing in the corner watching all of this take place with my jaw hanging so far down, you could probably fit at least five Chipotle burritos inside and still have room for a couple of Whoppers.
Am I the only one who sees the sculpture is made out of duct tape and paper-clips? I pondered if ingesting the vat of plaster, a few gallons will help me to understand better.
I was privileged to witness three hours of pure, concentrated BS on the meaning of these “sculptures.” It made me want to put on my angry eyes.
Nowadays, anything can be art because of modern contexts and ramifications. I will say this now, and will probably burn in hell, (which is cool, because I like the smell of burnt flesh) but contemporary art is for people who can’t do anything. It’s for people who are only capable of slapping this, that, or the other together, and who lack any creativity. You can create a piece of crap and invent a reason for its existence,and you might as well just put on the black turtleneck now, because you’re a genius.
Today an artist labors for months painting an entire canvas black. (“Ahem,” says the artist, “It’s not really black.”) I understand the desire to invent cutting-edge techniques, but when the final piece leaves no meaningful impact on the viewer, what purpose is it serving? What does a 40-feet- by-40-feet black canvas offer?
Contemporary art is like those stupid paint-by-number deals. You can’t mess it up. As long as you’re good at flashing your pearly whites and being suave as hell as you shoot spears of crap out between your teeth, you’re guaranteed to make it big.
What happened to art classes where everything made sense, and reason came before creation, not the other way around? Where discussion was actually pointed and valuable. Where we discussed meaning, dang it, meaning. Where the answer was “I created this as a metaphor for man versus nature.” Not, “Uhh, I just scraped the scum from under my bathroom sink and stuck it together. I don’t know. I thought it looked cool.”
And they all sing in chorus like the dodos once did, “It’s amazing!”
Jasmine Wiggins is a Medill sophomore. She can be reached at [email protected].
