Abstract Art: "A Recurrent Push for the Temporarily Meaningless"

There is more than a little truth in the cliche that the average abstract painting could be reproduced by randomly spraying a canvas with paint, or by taking some hyperactive child's fingerpainting and attaching a self-conscious, pretentiously worded artist's statement: abstract art is often the worst kind of art, simply because artists can't be content to let the work speak for itself. It's art at its worst: overmarketed to pseudointelligentsia.

That said, it is true that abstract paintings can be beautiful and moving, which should be the end goal of all art. That they don't necessarily say anything doesn't mean they don't speak to something more primal and beauty hungry within us. Still, where does it end, past the posturing and the random firing of neurons? Kirk Varnedoe, a professor of art history at Princeton, wrote this, a complete dismissal of the end goal philosophy of abstract art:

Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful ... than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless: that is, things that are found not often in exotic realms but rather on the edges of banality, familiarity, and the man-made world. It is the production of forms of order that are not recognizable as order, but vehicles of feeling that appear utterly dumb. Abstract art is a symbolic game, and it is akin to all human games: You have to get into it, risk and all, and this takes a certain act of faith. But what kind of faith? Not faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith. A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing, a faith in our ignorance, a faith in our being confounded and dumbfounded, a faith fertile with possible meaning and growth.

I'm not sure I agree entirely, but it's a wonderful and strongly worded argument against many of the argued aims of abstract art.

A Shared Culture of Private Visions [Chronicle.com]