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Tom Moody Fudge Factor 2002

Fudge Factor, 2002, ink on paper, linen tape, 35 1/2" X 27" (this recent piece of mine--done in MSPaintbrush with a lot of overprinting and collaging--has been flipped and rotated for easier browser viewing--sorry if the file loads a bit slowly).

I was talking to an artist in her 40s about abstract art, and she was saying that the next generation doesn't get it--that abstraction's a historical curiosity at this point, because it's not seen as having content. Or that the content issues discussed from the 1940s to the 1980s with respect to it (existentialism, phenomonology, Freudian psychology, semiotics) mean nothing to younger artists.

Yet earlier I was talking to an artist in his 20s who is interested in rave videos and psychedelia. That's abstraction, isn't it? Presumably most of the isms I just mentioned could be applied to the orgiastic, visionary, opting-out-of-politics-as-usual spirit of the music underground. The part of abstraction that younger artists aren't talking about, and no decent artist of any age should be talking about, is the idea that a work's formal qualities are ends in themselves. That's a historical, Greenberg-era aberration. And as for anyone who thinks art has to have a neatly extractable soundbite message to be meaningful, you need to get a life.

- tom moody 2-07-2003 7:05 pm [link] [7 comments]