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May 24, 2007
Modernism states that in an art gallery--such as the National Gallery of Australia----works of art must be viewed in a specific way. Lisa P. Schoenberg describes it thus in the Canadian Aesthetics Journal:
appreciation must focus on the work itself, which consists, say, of a set of perceptual properties, rather than on such extraneous matters as the artist’s intentions, the context in which the work was created, or its similarities to and dissimilarities from other works. While we might understand Modernism to require a radical kind of neutrality—the kind with which we approach things that have no significance for us, like the squiggles of a foreign alphabet, or the way neurological patients with visual agnosia look at faces, the kind where we impose no concepts, ideas, or even recognition of prior experience on that which we view—such neutrality is itself counter to the conception of art as a meaning-making activity, one in which we find or impose meanings on the perceptual structures of works by reading them through the distinctly non-neutral eyes of our experience. In urging us to resist this, Modernism is not neutral at all, for it is impressing on us a distinct and, by historical standards, unique set of practices regarding the appreciation of art.
We see the work as if presented in isolation. It presupposes an current all-encompassing conception of art under which the objects in museums come to be viewed as equivalent.
I find the not impositing of anything on the artists’ unique visions a most alienating experience.
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