I went to a museum today and it was pretty nice. It was a show of Josef Albers and his color studies in the form of a few large silk screen prints he did in the 1970s. I went with my coworkers and a few things struck me: The first is that wether you’re a pack of freshmen in highschool being begged by your teacher to talk, or you’re a gaggle of well educated, highly skilled, graphic designers and brand strategists on a private tour of a museum: it is like pulling teeth to get people to comment on art in an open setting.
The second world war, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, Freon, leaded gasoline, the unintended consequences of large ideas haunt our world. Nobody sets out to create world-changing unified theories anymore because that same sort of ambition fueled the final solution, and the hole in the ozone layer, and Transformers 4.
What’s stranger than the anxiety to try grand stuff is the museums unwillingness to talk about that. To me, by far the most compelling thing about this exhibit was not the work, exactly, it was what they were attempting to do with the work. It doesn’t really matter that Albers and Kandinsky were totally wrong about the way they thought about color and composition on a psychological level. They were trying some really out there stuff. It’s all very Modern.
Post-Modernism kinda sucks, idk.