MCCHEAM312 Modern Art & Modern Museums | Quizlet

Modernism

FORM

COINED BY GREENBERG

- an influential way of thinking about modern art

-> the narrative of modern art that starts with Manet and follows through until Newman in the 1950's

- An interest in challenging and advancing formal qualities

- Confronting the illusion of painting

- Eventually leads to the disappearance of subject matter

- art needs to purify and orient itself towards flatness (a point to which we will return)

- modernist art attempted to critique social inequality and use art to pave way for an alternative view of society -> but in a formal mean

Modernity

CONTENT

• Giving expression to modern life -> focus on subject matter

How does Manet's bar link modernism and modernity?

• Modern subject matter

• Formally -> declaration of the canvas as a flat surface, challenging notions of illusion

According to Baudelaire, what should modern painters do?

• Modern artists don't just illustrate modernity, but rather show the layers that make modernity tick

• The experience of living in the modern world

Why is Barr's schema problematic?

- formal qualities

-> contributes to the schism between 'conservative' practices and a perceived radicalism by aligning itself with technically 'progressive' practices.

-> Chronological and linear development based on formal qualities

- lack of context

-> evacuates the social and political agendas that often informed the movements identified in favour of a deracinated art.

- exclusive

-> flat, repetitive, non-figurative, ordered and bordered.

-> refuses to see modernism as also a set ideas and beliefs about art which are a diverse, dynamic, ever-changing practice of cultural activity in the twentieth century

-> missing pieces include smaller, niche art movements

-> only includes artists that have contributed to the progressive art movement are included

Why was the Modern Art Museum, NYC, 1936 -> Barr exhibition so significant?

• Exhibited art in isolation

• Specimen, sterile art

• Translation of Barr's schema into the museum

• Revolutionised museumology -> Parisian tradition was abandoned

The White Cube

• Brian O'Doherty 1976

◦ MoMa opens in 1939

◦ White walls and isolated paintings

◦ Isolation from the cultural context

◦ Formalist quality

◦ Separation from the world outside

◦ Forces us to focus on formal qualities

Why is it argued that modernism already stems from enlightenment and romanticism period

• Focus on individualism

• Art as an individual expression

• Rejecting authority (The academy, the rulers, etc)

• Collective taste turns into personal taste

• The cult of individualism and rebelliousness

◦ "If I'm not better at least I'm different" (Rousseau)

◦ Not interested in competing or conforming but honouring one's unique taste

◦ Spirit of rebellion -> spirit of the non-conformative norm

-> Artists that adhere to the status quo are excluded

How does Overbeck's 'Germany and Italy' painting from 1830 show a modernist shift?

• Romantic painting

• The norm is to go to Rome, Italy and paint in classical style

- Italy: Romanesque church/laurel vs Germany: gothic

◦ no longer feel the need to to follow the norm and honour national identity

◦ Early roots of nationalism

• Plurality

How does Edward's explain Paris as the central focus point for the development of modern art?

• modern art developed not in the world's most powerful economy (Britain), but in the places that were most marked by 'uneven and combined development':

◦ places where explosive tensions between traditional rural societies and the changes wrought by capitalism were most acute.

-> edginess

-> 1850 Revolution

• Constant tension/edginess/revolution

◦ An explosive political and social context -> explosive artistic innovations

• Physical reshaping of Paris

◦ Lookout of Paris changes

• More volatility

◦ Dissident subculture in the arts

• The academy was linked to the state

◦ Rebelling artistically was a way to rebel politically

• Attracts foreign, likeminded artists (e.g Picasso)

Critical distance

• Subject matter

-> taking a separated, critical glance at society

• Seen in Courbet's French Realism, and Bougeau would not be seen as having critical distance because of its adherence to the classical norm

Formalism

emphasises line, colour, tone and mass at the expense of the significance of subject matter

-> also called 'internalist' because it views art as self contained and self interested

Formalism, modernism, Modernism, autonomy, internalism

• Interest in the technical, formal qualities at the expense of the subject matter

-> experimentation of form

Disinterested aesthetics

• The experience of beauty is when there is no personal interest in it, such as nature

• If you know nothing about the painting (disinterest) and appreciate it purely for its formal qualities (the aesthetics), for what you see rather than for what it represents, then (Kant would say) it is beautiful

• Barr -> values disinterested aesthetics

Avant garde

• the avant-garde, as it is defined in the Baudelairean sense of an engagement with modernity that requires paintings of modern life to be symbiotically linked to a new means of representing those living through an industrial age.

• ideology of progress, the presumption of originality, the elitist hermeticism, the historical exclusivity, the appropriation by the culture industry, and so on (Hal Foster)

• Military term

• Aggressively rejecting the traditional artistic canon and status quo

• Notion of destruction -> leading into the new and the unknown

• The new generation trying to outdo/separate from the older generation

• Artistic rebels

How does Rosenberg describe Paris as a no place?

• Paris was not in France; it was an enchanted island, floating above the world - an international non-place, or supra-place, which more than any other had produced the modern mind.

Why do the Pre-Raphealites not fit into the modernist canon?

• The content is innovative, but the language is seen as still very traditional

• Less interest in modernity and the modernist language

• "Fails" to enter the narrative of the avant garde

◦ Doesn't comply with the symbiotic link seen in the avant garde movements between the representation of the modern times both formally and content-wise

What is meant by the spatiality of modern art?

• interest in the non western world

◦ Gerome

-> North African subject matter

◦ Cassatt

-> Japanese technique

What is meant by the temporality of modern art?

• Modernity points to a very specific moment in time

• Gerome's snake charmer

◦ More traditional, static, timeless...

◦ Romanticising the 'other'

◦ Escapist interest, alternative to the fast changing world, contrasting modern times

• Cassatt -> modern

◦ Combination of form and content

◦ Depicting a contemporary scene with Japanese technique

How does The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama show spatial interest?

• Content

◦ Civil War in America, took place in the French coast

• Formal qualities

◦ High horizon, sea as relatively flat and seen from an elevated viewpoint, displacement of elements to the edges of the picture -> typical Japanese composition

◦Strangeness through combination of European and Japanese techniques/ playing with depths and flatness

◦ Defy and challenge conventions

How does the Execution of Emperor Maximilian show spatial concern?

• Takes place in Mexico

• French link -> France wanting to control Mexico by placing an Austrian leader in charge who then got killed

Explain why 'primitivism struck roots in the avant-garde, even to the point of displacing the painting of modern life'

• Subject matter

◦ Moving away from the depiction of modern life

◦ E.g Gauguin

-> No longer depicting modernity and urban landscape

-> Moves to Brittany and then to Tahiti

-> Exhaustion of modern life

• Formal qualities

◦ Becomes more static (e.g Seurat)

◦ Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon

-> Late medieval stained glass

-> Formulates an alternative to the artistic tradition

Discuss how Gauguin's Ta Matete (We Shall Not go to Market Today) continues 'the theme of the linked spatial and temporal aspects of modernity'

- The women are not wearing Tahitian clothes, but neither do they seem to be wearing the shapeless coverings that Christian missionaries had got the native women to wear

-> his fashionably dressed Tahitians are disposed after the manner of Nebamun's guests. (Ancient Egyptian inspiration)

-> Europeanised prostitutes, waiting for the sailors. Their ship is what can be seen out to sea in the gap between the bushes.

• Gauguin had been struck by the gap between the myth he had created for himself and the reality of Papete, the French colonial capital of Tahiti.

• Falsifications of colonial reality

◦ Tahiti was already quite modernised because of French colonialism

◦ Is he depicting an ideal alternative reality?

Link between primitivism and futurism

• Primitivism (looking backwards, to the primitive) and Futurism (looking forwards, to the future) are both trying to formulate alternatives to the here and now

◦ Dissatisfaction with modernity -> critical distance

◦ Doing so with very different languages

• Futurism

◦ Machinery, movement, dynamism, technology

• Primitivism

◦ Timelessness, looking into what was, nature, etc

What factors influenced artists to shift from academic lifelikeness and coherent perspectival portrayal to new formal qualities in paintings, around the year of 1900?

• Modernism -> Manet and Degas

◦ Depicting contemporary scene in new formal ways

◦ Reacting to modernity

◦ Colour Patch movement

• Before 19th century

◦ European academic standards dictated by the Academie

◦ Verisimilitude

◦ Illusionistic use of perspective and proportion

• Around 1900

◦ Artists began rejecting the academic standards

Evaluation of the significance of Primitivism

- developments:

• Authenticity of expression

• Rejecting the norms

• Appreciating non-western art

- criticisms

• Colonial framing

• Artists took inspiration from ethnographic museums

• Excluded non Western cultures as being seen as modern

• Non western art only appreciated from western perspective

◦ Seen as liberating and expressive but failed to fully contextualise and understand the nature of non western art

E.g 'Des Demoiselles' by Picasso

◦ Considered a strange and controversial painting

◦ Wasn't even exhibited until the Moma bought it in the 1930's

◦ Cultural appropriation of non-western artefacts

◦ Colonial questions

Criticism of Moma's primitivism exhibition in 1984

• Combining non-western artefacts with primitive artworks

• African masks like only important because they appeared in the western artist's paintings

• The tribal + the modern

• Hierarchy

• Curators decided which Africans sculptures seemed to adhere most to the artworks based on resemblance and affinity

• Decontexualised artefacts

◦ Artists took inspiration from ethnographic museums, which had already stolen and pillaged artworks through colonial means

◦ Exhibitions like the MOMA one reproduce and recreate these narratives without questioning them

In what ways, and for what reasons, did Romanticism and the Avant-garde share common values?

• Escapism

◦ Romantic wanted to go back in time

-> Tradition, religion

◦ Avant garde artists

-> Escape through non-western alternatives

• Decentering art

◦ Marginalisation

◦ How modern art marginalises

◦ Rewriting the histories of modern art

• Avant garde artists were able to creatively misunderstand African carving as powerfully expressive art

◦ Reading its forms in terms of their ideas

How does Woods portray the social role of art? How does this conflict with the western center of Modernism?

• "Art should rise above politics" Matisse

◦ Universal, human values

◦ Impossible? Need for social awareness

• "I want to use my art as a weapon" Rivera

• Wood -> art is inseparable from its political and cultural context

Two variations of cubism

• Formal cubism

◦ D'Avignon, one of the first cubist paintings by Picasso

◦ Artists were isolated from subject matter and only focused on form

• Political cubism

◦ Reflecting modernity

How does Cezanne's 'big tree' reflect cubist formalism,

• Unconventional use of space

• Not traditional impressionism

◦ Using brush strokes to highlight warped space and rejecting verisimilitude

• Not wanting to depict nature in a conventional manner

◦ Create an effect on the spectator

◦ Conventional subject matter -> unconventional forms

Analytical cubism

• Exploding pictorial conventions

◦ Preventing, interrupting and conventional looking

• Merging of form and space

◦ Opening up lines

• Deconstructing observable reality and getting to its most essential elements (cubes)

Synethic Cubism

• Putting together an abstract painting by combining elements

• Constructing observable reality with real world objects

• Collage of objects from the real world

Explain how Picasso's 'glass and bottle' is an example of political synthetic cubism

• Formally interesting -> collage

• Subject matter -> political meaning

◦ Supposed to be seen as the interior of a normal Parisian cafe

▪ Newspapers (politicos turmoil)

▪ Used actual journal articles -> intentionality

▪ Picasso juxtaposed satirical novels on aristocracy with Balkan war reports of a mobilised left wing

▪ Using everyday objects to connect to more people and mocking the exclusivity of fine art

▪ Cafe objects

▪ Blends leisure, politics and modern life altogether

Critique of cubism

• Cubism wasn't direct enough to act as a political challenge and wasn't accessible enough to be understood by the people artists were trying to represent

• His audience was still largely elite, avant garde artists

• Cubism as limiting in political influence

What role did Barr play in shaping the cubist narrative?

• Barr witnessed the censorship of cubist art in Germany and Russia

• Wanted to preserve these works and put together an exhibition of cubism in the MOMA

• Fascist regimes suppressing these artworks did hint towards the political nature of this art

• Barr -> detaching the political nature of these artworks from their formal elements

• Modern art as a victim of politics instead of playing an active role in politics

White Cube phenomenon

• Contemplative spectatorship in controlled conditions

• Curated around isolation

Characteristics of early cubism

• Reflexive meditation on the business of representation

• Confers on the practice of art as a critical role

• Rejection of subject matter and traditional representation is political

-> 'Les Demoiselles' seem as the earliest and most significant cubist piece

Picasso's use of cubism

• Very aware of the social contexts and connecting them to his artworks

• Representing strangeness, unfamiliar and discomfort of the world as artworks to provoke those same sensations in his audiences

◦ More than just formal innovation

Misinterpretations of cubists and avant garde artists like Mondrian

• Hard won independent art not so much a retreat from the world as a lever for changing it

◦ Abstraction is often seen as a disappearance of modernity

◦ In actuality, these works are a direct exchange with the world and with change

• For most interwar avant garde artists, the achievement of an autonomous art was not necessarily defined by the white cube notion

• Mondrian's studio living space vs white cube

◦ In the white cube, art is separate from life

◦ In his studio, his art seems to be an extension of his life

Three ways of interpreting abstraction

• Pure form? [technique]

• A self conscious critique of representational convention? [content]

• Or something more? (Social change/intervention) [function]

-> how does the art engage with the outside world? Is there critical distance?

Neoplasticism

• the action of forms and colours

◦ Are not symbols, they refer only to themselves.

-> Semiotics

-> To what extent is he referring to his own ideas/theory through his painting?

-> His theory spans across all of his artworks

◦ Purification of forms and colours

• "A work of art is not a symbol or a complex of symbols, nor is it an illustration accompanying some philosophical argument, but rather an expression - rooted in reality - of what he saw as the ultimate destination of the evolution of all creation." -> their balance shows a utopian society, but the painting doesn't symbolise a utopian society

Neoplasticism -> a new way of making

How do Mondrian's paintings from 1909 - 1915 show Mondrian's progression into abstraction

• In order to reduce his works to the essence of painting (line) , he loses colour

• Needing the titles to understand the abstract versions as representing the sea

• Includes vertical motifs, inspired by the pier

◦ 'Pier in ocean' (1914-15)

◦ 'Composition'

▪ No longer wanting to represent specific visual elements

▪ Titles become more abstract, but his compositions still reference reality

▪ Natural and abstract reality colliding

◦ 1915 composition

▪ Distance between the lines get smaller, creating a sense of distance

The triad of painting

Line, colour, background

What effect does adding colour have on Mondrian's' works in 1916

• 'Seen as a step back'

• Adding colour later made his earlier works seem unfinished

• Colour as an afterthought

• Post impressionistic colour scheme, more painterly

• Makes the canvas more two dimensional

-> gives it a collage feeling

How does Mondrian solve his colour and line issue?

The introduction of the grid, as this connects/holds the line, background and colour together

4 principles of modernist architecture

• Architecture had to represent the zeitgeist

◦ Had to reflect contemporary times and industrialisation, meaning letting go of older traditions and copying past styles

▪ Comparison to someone wearing 17th century fashion stepping into a modern train would be weird

• Commitment to new materials

◦ Steel, concrete

◦ Celebrate their potential

• Social mission

◦ Better housing for ordinary people

◦ Utopian element/Architecture for a new society

• Function over decoration

Corbusier "style is a lie"

A critique of other artists and architects who use style as a language (e.g classical, gothic, etc)

-> these are superficial in nature, like decoration/ornamentation

-> no style meaning not a historical style, that it has its own contemporary essence

What was meant by the moral duty of the modernist architect?

• Decorative facades

◦ Hiding of the true structures of buildings

◦ Repression

▪ A form of dishonesty or illness

• Instead creating skeletal forms

◦ "Healing society"

◦ More democratic forms

How does the grain silo show modernist architect ideals and its significance within the modernist narrative?

• More grounded with the zeitgeist, mass production, industrialisation

• Baroque, gothic, classical architecture as too far removed from the things rooted in modern day

• Construction vs architecture

-> expands our idea of where we find modernist art

What does Benton mean by 'radically new accoutrements for a modern lifestyle' and 'building art is the spatially apprehended will of the ephoch'

The new style of architecture and furniture

-> bringing ideas from the modernist narrative and zeitgeist into everyday life

-> modern living can only be done in a modern environment

-> e.g it would be weird to still be dressing like 1850's and getting on a modern train

Will of the epoch

- the period has its own essence/spirit which manifests itself in the architecture

Structural rationalism

the belief that architecture should be shaped by a proper understanding of materials (especially industrial materials like iron, steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete) which will lead to a style based on the precision, rationality and economy of engineering.

What did Cocteau mean when saying: "Art is a priesthood not a pastime"

• Art should reflect not the personal identity/formal experimentation but the times and commenting on social function

• Engagement with society beyond formal experimentation

• Art that only focuses on formal qualities and experimentation doesn't communicate anything about society, it's just art for art's sake

Il faut etre des sons temps

Baudelaire

What was the aim of Mexican muralism?

• make the political system more accessible to 'peasants'

Difference between Picasso's view of modernism and Rivera's

• Picasso

◦ Inward form of expression

◦ Formal innovation

◦ Aesthetic Revolution

◦ Engagement with primitivism

◦ Depoliticised ?

• Rivera

◦ Outward

◦ Collective

◦ Political

◦ National histories

Who were the great three Mexican muralists

Rivera

- art had to have a clear political function

Orozco

- "The language of caricature and the satirical broadsheet"

- reclamation of traditional imagery

Siquieros

- "Art is a weapon that penetrates the eyes and ears... the deepest and subtlest human feelings"

-

How is Mexican muralists and American modernism connected?

• Siquieros organised workshops with the community

• Pollock attended one of these workshops

• Less separated from our idea of modern art than is often assumed

How did Mexican muralists disrupt the status quo as well as the notion of the white cube

• Muralism challenges the traditions of display

• Fixed display piece and has a connection to its location

• Modern art challenges why and how standards were created

• Muralism disrupts the status quo of display

• Public art vs portable art

• Resist commodification and museum curation

• Taking elements from European avant garde revolutionist art

Why did Rockefeller commission ideological, socialist murals?

• Oil company motive

◦ Preventing it from nationalisation

◦ Active in Mexico

◦ Diplomatic motives with Mexican regime in 1930's and 40's

◦ Art as soft power

Why is abstract expressionism a problematic term? Why was it still used regardless?

• Doesn't indicate a style but rather a group of painters and sculptors

• "Disastrous to name ourselves"

-> Finding and creating a narrative of a national, American art to differentiate from European art

Plastic automatism (Motherwell)

• Eliminating the decorative purpose of line

• Line liberated from descriptive functions

• New, more accessible mediums

Greenberg vs Rosenberg's perspectives on modern art/abstraction

• Greenberg

◦ Purification of figuration

◦ Abstraction

◦ Two dimensional

• Rosenberg

◦ Focus on the performance of painting and creating (e.g Pollock)

conceptual art

An American avant-garde art movement of the 1960s that asserted that the "artfulness" of art lay in the artist's idea rather than its final expression.

Happenings

A term coined by American artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s to describe loosely structured performances, whose creators were trying to suggest the aesthetic and dynamic qualities of everyday life; as actions, rather than objects, Happenings incorporate the fourth dimension (time).

Fluxkit

• Objects made by different artists that were meant to be interacted with

• Extend the reach of art beyond the museum

• Mass production of artist's objects

• Emphasis on collaboration

-> Group rather than artists was emphasised

• Challenging traditional understandings of the individual artist as "lone genius"

-> Moving away from the idea that artists operated in isolation and separate, in a bubble

Paradox of photography within conceptual art

• Idea of conceptual art is to reject pictures and image even though they still rely on them to show and fit traditional art spaces and expand accessibility

Significance of the New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 - 1970 in the MET exhibition and the myth it created

• The illusion of the wholeness of American painting

• Creation of a New York school

• Barr's schema is centralised around Paris

-> the MET's exhibition moves and continued the narrative to New York

• Backward looking

How did the McShine exhibition respond to the MET?

• Shows different development even within the same 'movement'

• A radical reframing

• Challenging the usual painting/sculpture as traditional art by instead prioritising information/concept

How is the protocol of engagement different for Rothko vs Barry?

• Rothko

◦ you engage/respond with the formal qualities (colour)

◦ Respond with soul

• Barry

◦ Words, text, information

◦ Is it form or content?

◦ It is what you make of it

◦ 'It is'

-> Formal qualities are less important

◦ Respond with mind

How can Conceptual Art be seen as 'more democratic' than Abstract Expressionism?

• general lack of aesthetic finish was intentional and highly symbolic; it was meant to indicate a break with the methods and meanings of modernist painting and stage Conceptual Art and its cognates as a more democratic, accessible type of artistic practice.

• The sense of 'democracy' as it is being used here refers to the possibility that the production of art is open to all, regardless of one's ability to master the inventory of skills associated with medium-specific art.

Characteristics of minimalism

• 1950's and 60's

• Minimalism was a reaction to the emotionality of abstract expressionism

-> Emphasised simplicity and aimed to remove personal expression and narrative

• Formal qualities

• Non traditional expositions

◦ Viewers were meant to engage with the artwork

◦ Not passive

◦ No reliance on narrative or story of the artwork

• Aim to make art more accessible

• "If you don't like it at first glance then you probably never will"

-> less about the existence of objects, more about how these objects interact with the space and the viewer

-> role of experience

Why was minimalism seen as alienated elitism?

• Completely separate from the social context

• Critiqued for the art non engaging enough in social matters and the role of artists in society

What did Greenberg comment on minimalism?

• Minimalism was exclusively preoccupied with the boundary between art and non-art

◦ Minimalists too focused on what counts as art

◦ Too intellectual

-> feat of ideation

-> A culmination of ideas rather than an experiential phenomenon

-> Seen as intellectual because of the intellectual game of classifying the works as art or not

• No aesthetic surprise

• Nothing else to explore because the essentials are always going to be the same

Barbora Rose's comment on minimalism

• Minimalist art looks empty/simple on purpose

• Lack of distraction/decorations -> result from intentionality

• The meaning comes from the physical encounter with the viewer

• If you were to treat minimalist works as traditional works of art you would miss the sense of externality of meaning

What does Rosalind Krauss mean with the externality of meaning of minimalist works?

• No internal truth in itself

• The viewer give it its meaning

• Importance of public space

• Private space -> the object itself

• It becomes art when it enters a public space

Why does Fried argue that minimalist art isn't art?

• Incompleteness

◦ It needs something else in order to gain meaning

• Called it literalist art

◦ No illusion whatsoever

• The problem of objecthood

◦ Silent and ignores the audience

• Inexhaustible

◦ Bad for minimalist art but good for other modernist art

◦ Because there is nothing to it, you can never exhaust it because it's empty

How does gestalt apply to minimalism? What are the components of minimalism?

• The object

• The space around the objects

• And the relationship to the viewer

-> "The sum of our parts"

What is meant by the situated experience?

• Minimalism is a situation that revolves around space and interaction

◦ Physical situation

• Its situation in terms of how it is critiqued, defined and perceived

◦ Historical situation

Difference between modernist protocol of engagement vs minimalist protocol

• Modernist protocol

◦ You vs the painting

• Minimalist protocol

◦ You 'in' the painting

How does Warhol embrace mass media and mechanical reproduction?

• Not necessarily framed by politics

• Relationship between mass culture and the spectator

• Absorption of the work of art by the distracted viewer

• Viewing his art like visual mass media

• Embraced mechanical reproduction

◦ Democratised force

◦ "I want to be a machine, and I feel that everything I do and do machine-like. I think everyone should be a machine"

-> Stripping away the ego of the painter

-> Boundaries blurred between artist and worker

Technological sublime

A feeling of awe and wonder at the seemingly miraculous abilities of technology that surpass any individual human's abilities.

• Sublime -> Romanticism

• Feelings of passivity or awe in front of technological power

Greenberg's criticism of pop art

• not being critical enough

◦ going too far to meet the public's gaze

How does Warhol challenge abstract expressionist ideas?

• Warhol removes the expressive aspect of art, emphasise decoration and repetition

◦ Warhol's portraits emphasise how mass culture see the person rather than his personal stance

• Rejecting the idea that art shows anything inherent about the artist

How does the 'orange car crash' vs Rothko's paintings show a different treatment and perspective of similar formal elements

• Warhol is more interested in expressing journalistic and mass media photos and the physicality/repetitiveness of these phenomena rather than the emotional experience of them

Main characteristics of Warhol's art

• His art is a mirror and a confrontation to mass media and consumerism

• Shifted the sublime from nature to technology

• Aimed to bring art closer to everyday consumer culture

• Re-enchantment of the commodity

• More led out of compulsion and interest rather than pure critique

• Tension between the autonomy of the artist and demands of society

• Paved the way for postmodernism

What do pop art, minimal art, and conceptual art all have in common

- Rejects the 'heroicism' and idea of the 'sole genius' of abstract expressionists and the modernist tradition

- different engagement with the viewer and the occupation of space (objects rather than sculpture) -> externality of meaning

- repetitiveness, streamlining

Why were 60's artists so concerned with the idea of the artists as a worker?

- restating art as relevant to society and the industrial/manufacturing shifts happening

-> representing contemporary times through means of production

-> increasing accessibility of the art

What separates Warhol's Brillo boxes to supermarket Brillo boxes

'The theory of art'

-> these objects taking space in an art museums means that the viewer will ask different questions about these objects than they would say in a supermarket context

-> intentions of the artist, curator, etc

-> the museum space gives them the label of art