Art. — Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer

Chan and I went to the Modern yesterday. Saturdays I have my morning drawing group, so we met at the museum afterwards to see the Ed Ruscha retrospective. Ruscha has always been a favorite of mine, but I think I’d only seen a dozen or so of his paintings and drawings before yesterday. This exhibit is comprehensive. It’s beautifully done, crowded but not so crazy you can’t linger and really take it in.

Neither of us had been to the Modern in many years, not since they completely re-built it — does everyone call it MoMA now? Didn’t everyone used to call it the Modern? Somehow I still do — so we wanted to spend some time with the permanent collection. There’s so much there.

In the middle of it, I posted a comment on Facebook about the selfie crowds around a small Dali and also around a series of three Frida Kahlo panels, but ignoring Picasso. Reading it later, I thought my comment sounded like I was judging people’s taste, i.e. saying they had none, or something like that. I wasn’t. I was just struck by how when I was very young I made a beeline to certain paintings there, and now that work is apparently out of fashion. Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali and Van Gogh are so thoroughly integrated into not just our current visual culture but our mythos regarding what art is and what an artist is. It used to be Picasso, didn’t it? And then Monet? It’s hard to compare because media is radically different now, and so the way we relate to images, how they sit in our day to day lives, is different than it was a generation ago. Kahlo and Dali and Van Gogh are undeniably great, important artists, but I think it's interesting which art and artists get branded for tourists and how that changes. There’s no getting around the fact that the art that gets the most attention will always be the art that people can make a pile of money exploiting. It might also be the best art, but that’s barely more than coincidental.

I could look at Kahlo's work all day long, I constantly see new things in the paintings, and new ways to see them. The melting clocks? For me, it gets repetitive. Van Gogh, it's hard to separate the work from the hagiography, and, to be honest, though some of the paintings are gorgeous and moving, he's no Cezanne. I feel like when I was younger, Picasso was the "it" artist. Maybe it's just art and art history students who get misty around Les Demoiselles? I can’t say I’m a fan of Picasso in general. The paintings are technically fascinating, sometimes thrilling, but I don’t have an emotional response to them.

Later I found a gallery of Ellsworth Kelly's notebooks. I was alone in there except for one person who came in briefly but didn't look at anything and left. Ellsworth Kelly was like a god to me when I was young, up there with Rauschenberg and Johns. When I encounter his work in a museum or gallery, I feel a magnetic force, like it’s physically hard to walk away. The question of which art and artists are important is not only a matter of fashion and commerce but it's also utterly subjective in the end.