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09/22/2002: random thoughts on poetry and modern art
Not that it is especially relevant to anything, but I noticed that with fine arts I don't really care whether I have a clue what an artwork "means" or "depicts" as long as I like to look at it (or experience it some other way, depending on the art), whereas with literature it's not enough for me to find something beautiful. I mean, both with fine arts and with literature I tend to prefer "modern" stuff, roughly I find most things created after the mid-19th century more interesting than the things before. For example in Paris visiting the Louvre was okay, and there's the Mona Lisa and lots of stuff, but visiting the Musée d'Orsay with all the impressionism was better, and I enjoyed the Pompidou center (the actual name is longer, I forgot it, and I'm too lazy to look it up) even more. In any city I visit I will seek out the modern art museums first, and only when I have time I will visit museums with older things.
I'm not especially knowledgeable about modern art, often I don't know the artists I enjoy before seeing their works, and I don't care beyond looking at something and thinking "wow. beautiful.", like I think my favorite painting in the SF MOMA was one by Clyfford Still and I had never heard about him before and IIRC (unfortunately they didn't have posters or postcards of that one) it was just red with some jagged black and I sat there ten minutes just staring at it. It didn't say, or show, or mean anything in particular to me.
I never really understood the jokes about modern art, because after my first art preference I had as a kid (which was for medieval altar pictures, which I still like), I always liked modern art best, and generally those kinds of modern art that aren't depicting anything realistically best, though I like many styles.
But strangely, with written art it is not enough for me to find the language beautiful. I need to be able to make sense of it, to have it telling me something. Which is why I often have problems with poetry. I'm fine with poetry when it tells me something, when it is about something, for example Alice Walker's poems (it's not a particular preference, I just don't read that much poetry and have read some of hers not too long ago). OTOH, I tried to read Rilke's "Duineser Elegien" today, and for the most part I was just "huh? what is he writing about?" I don't intend to offend any fervent Rilke fans, and true, I got some of the general themes of these poems, like transience, death, love, but when it came down to trying to understand what a sentence was about, I mostly had no idea.
A lot of it sounds really beautiful, I see that, I read some parts aloud just for the sound of them (and on that note I have to say, that whoever buys into the cliché of German sounding ugly has watched too many movies or film documentaries featuring barking military). I particularly like the end of the 8th Elegie. But most of the "Duineser Elegien" just isn't direct enough for me to appreciate, I guess. My primary response was "huh? what is that supposed to mean?"
And I've been wondering if that is similar to why some people don't like modern art which doesn't depict anything; whether that preference works in the same way, just with a different medium.
