By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
I was recently looking at a piece of art by Jean-Michel Basquiat that a friend shared on social media, and I did the thing you should never do; I looked at the comments.
There wasn’t a lot of criticism, or really any – this particular friend is the artsy type and so are all of our mutual friends. But there was the one inevitable “What the heck is it?” comment.
The piece, entitled “Eyes and Eggs” is very clearly a man, holding a frying pan with two eggs. The man, wearing a fry cook hat and a work uniform with the name “Joe’ emblazoned over the left breast, stares directly at the viewer with wide, red-rimmed eyes.
There is no question as to what it is, as there might be if it was a person’s first introduction to, say, the paintings of Jackson Pollock or other abstract expressionist.
In such instances, these questions aren’t really questions. They’re really comments on what they see as simplicity or lack of sophistication in the work.
And when I see them, I’m reminded of a comic from the artist Matthew Inman, best known for his web comic series the Oatmeal.
Inman’s work has garnered many comments about its childlike simplicity over the years.
Never one to take himself too seriously, he shared a photo-realistic drawing of a man holding a duck he completed as a student in 1998. Next to that he shared an image from 15 years later, in his signature and immediately recognizable style. Next to that, an imagined version of the further devolution of his work, featuring a series of round scribbles and sophomoric graffiti – but still identifiable as a duck, if only in relation to the preceding pieces.
What Inman does with this cartoon is genius, for one because it immediately takes the wind out of the sails of any critic. (Hard to make fun of a man who does it himself before you get the chance to.) But also because it displays an important rule of all art; you have to know the rules before you can understand how to effectively break them.
Or, as the famed cubist Pablo Picasso was once quoted as saying, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
And it isn’t just visual art. Music, particularly jazz, often gets painted with this same brush – if you’ll pardon the analogy. Folks who aren’t familiar with, or fans of, the style often express the sentiment that it just sounds like “a bunch of noise.”
Anyone, they think, could jump up there and blow random notes on a saxophone or beat on a piano. The truth, though, is that you really need to understand the bones of a song before you can improvise over top of that. If you don’t, it really is going to sound bad, and it won’t look or feel nearly as effortless.
Making it look simple, and easy, really is the hard part. Something we should all keep in mind next time we want to be armchair art critics.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
