This Is Modern Art / 1 of 6 / I Am a Genius / 1999

some sexy models now it's men with earrings and converted warehouse studios in the East End this one's doing photo realism style that was invented 35 years ago in New York and died out soon after what's he doing again for let's go on prowling moodily through this modern art studio of nowadays interpreting the signs of the big no the first two letters of nowadays no to genius no to beauty no to art where you can tell what's happening here's a modern artist who's made some paintings of words to go with a sculpture of a full-stop she's gonna be showing both Tate Gallery Modern Art today is full of words and full of sounds this slightly menacing horror music sound like soundtrack for a modern art program is actually some modern art being made by this artist who's also just had a show hey look it's a painting by me I painted it at art school it's cosmic apart and now it's gonna be me talking I wonder I'm gonna say why is it when we think of modern art the art of today but we don't think of this anymore a genius artists in this studio drawing a nude woman with charcoal what happened to make that idea of art an old hat idea this is my studio in Derbyshire Street in Bethnal Green I share it with a load of other artists who also never draw the model and you mostly have never seen a nude woman in an artist's studio outside of Hollywood films about van Gogh or Michelangelo at this moment they're upstairs or along the corridor testing out every activity Under the Sun except life drawing to see if it could be art at another moment behind a cloud of sexy girl was smoked in a studio along the great dark corridor of time is a real genius with a big pen the biggest pen of all the pen of Pablo drawing a face war bad Picasso said peace good that was the 1950s the time when I was born when Picasso was a communist because it was a time when modern art really stood for something and a scribble and a line and a few dots by Picasso could seem to sum up everything nobody laughed at his solution to world conflict but they did sometimes cry about his drawing why a child of six could do it royal academicians cried I hated Picasso and everything knew they wanted everything to be old again but now it's the 90s I'm in my forties it's a whole different world today modern art is a real pig a pig sawn in half with the chainsaw and suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde or it's a photo of a blankly staring post feminist woman of the 90s or a tenth by another woman artist embroidered with the names of everyone she's ever slept with or the London Tube map but with all the names of the station's changed to nonsense footballers instead of Jubilee line stops philosophers instead of the circle line so that's modern art now and what I'm going to be doing over the next six weeks this modern art series called this is modern art and a kind of I run it doubtful way because no one knows what modern art really is it's traveling through time looking at the modern art of the past and back again to the modern art of today to see what the past has to say about the present and what the present has to say about the past this is what the inside of my head looks like like a Museum of Modern Art of the mine there's some abstract expressionism later I'm going to be looking at three giant turning points in the history of modern art all coming out of this place the real Museum of Modern Art in New York huge white magnificent anyone who's ever been there will know the sheer confidence of the display the scale of it the feeling of authority and credibility that it has New Yorkers go around with that model of Modern Art in their heads more or less not the ones on crack of course because Americans want this kind of art it answers a need what is this need exactly modern art is a mixture of snob culture and amazing open-mindedness back Andy Warhol modern art is a system but one that's always changing Warhol stands for one of its big changes later on we're going to be meeting him plus two more geniuses move the parameters of Modern Art this is the first one big cigar of modernity the castle this is Picasso's the Demoiselles Avenue lady misil davon yo is the picture at the beginning of all modern art books it's the picture that started cubism hardly a picture at all it's a monster picture a parody of a picture painted in one way and then half painted over in a different way without caring if the seams show five ugly angry glaring prostitutes in a brothel with their armpits showing and they're blank indifferent dead faces staring out or the primitive doglike African mask faces from the eyebrows out to the folds of the curtains everything irritates everything else everything is spiky and jostling as if it's the painting not the women glaring out like an ugly angry shocking exciting art joke when I first saw this picture in a book at about age 17 I didn't think this is cubism I thought this is modern art the hard stuff Sara Lucas defiant woman of the nineties icon of young British art up against the wall defiantly redefining what it means to be modern this abject wretched stocking monster called bunny which Lucas made in 1997 is the sister of Lady Michelle Davin or only seventy years younger than them Picasso with somebody identify with I mean just in terms of the amount of sex in his work I suppose that's subject or event the way they would transform say fruit or even just lines that on break up a face in a certain way so that you can see a penis and your something like that and like where he turns a pair of handlebars into a pair of horns I'd say come very close to the kind of transformation I'm using little real objects to stamp something else dumb things transforming in the mind this sculpture is a 1990s tone of jokey contempt nevertheless it's a work that comes at the end of an art timeline that begins with Lady Michelle Devon young it's art that would be impossible without Picasso it laughs at the cult of the macho but it respects the thing that the sex myth of Picasso really stands for Picasso's cult of change of Perpetual renewal my mind he's kind of stands for only artists who manage to carry on changing and um rather than just kind of reiterating their own work and the freshest work being when they were younger so that's one of the things I've really admired I'm I find Picasso very moving not disconnected from my world but part of it what does he stand for he stands for ceaseless creativity not caring not being snobbish having his own sister never being polite on the other hand he also stands for a kind of atrophying of the restless modern-art mind where whenever his name is mentioned tasteful music starts up and we stop thinking the Picasso Museum in Paris it's not an unfamiliar sight on television and a presenter waddling about it waving his arms around it's not unknown either so how do you make this old art subject new well for one thing you can knowledge that we live in a world where artists like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas are our stars and where cubism is no more important than any other ISM and no ism is all that important and consequently for different people with different interests there are a lot of different Picasso's there's the genius andy is that no one could be here with the energy of this art are not feeling was a genius of some kind but there's also the absurd decadent rich person who could buy a chateau for the price of a drawing and the old macho outdated sex monster obsessively fixated on the image of the artist alone in the studio with a naked female model the woman rendered again and again as a kind of hilarious exploded oddly fide beautifully painted male sex fantasy sex and death Picasso's great themes this is a picture of his friend who committed suicide from unrequited love kassig Amos done when young Picasso hadn't become a genius yet but was just passing already existing styles from Van Gogh to Toulouse Lautrec everyone knows Picasso's blue period informed art world people think it's a bit sentimental everyone else loves it because it's sentimental it's the stuff after they're not sure about the genius stuff when Picasso first painted led Emma's old Evan yo in 1906 when he was only 27 he rolled it up in a corner of the studio because he didn't know what it was even his friends didn't like it Georges Braque said looking at it was like being made to drink petrol but then gradually Picasso and Braque came to acknowledge it as the prototype for cubism it isn't interesting to think about cubism as an ism anymore but it is interesting to think about what it actually did it made the painting more important than the picture it made inventing more important than copying it meant reality could be gutted and boned and put back gather again as something else as art Picasso never made art from nature he just made it out of his head he made it up he held on to reality only to have something to push around the Casa was the first to think cubism was a boring idea almost as soon as he invented it a whole school of academic Cubist's started up they stopped putting the eyes on the side of the head and started putting them in the right place for a while that was his neoclassical period of the 1920s but then he put them in the wrong place again and after that just switch back and forth stylistically all the time from smoothed out to jagged from wildly distorted to calm from angry to funny from ugly to beautiful Picasso the genius lover of many women destroyer of them step her over of their distorted and Cuba fide bodies I don't despise the corny myths of Picasso the ego monster mr. loved pants but I know they're not the art they're just the Hello magazine version and I'm only faux hello I think there's a real Picasso and it's in these real shapes and bodies the bits and pieces that make up this art this is the Picasso system in operation it's here in this museum but it's in our heads to art's new systems of now and mutations of his old system of then here we are on the lovely Riviera looking for the essential Picasso Picasso was always changing when he was in his sixties the new model was Mediterranean Picasso the Mediterranean is timeless classical ancient all about sensuous timeless pleasure only Picasso could mix all this up with aggressive modernity after the war he was given this museum of local culture in Antibes to use as a studio modern art was hated by fascists so it must be good for peace it was thought Picasso became France's official expresser of the new post-war happiness he roamed the building taking down the old official art and replacing it with smiling triangles his paintings here aren't particularly well-known but they're the sublime playful side of Picasso these are modest masterpieces of ordinary life the pleasures of the domestic and the everyday to me they're the awesome achievements of modern art full of details of real things real things changed into painting things modernity with Picasso is Picasso's schwate vivre let loose frolic II and funny and feeling good without caring what others think but of course he didn't have to care because a big support system of mythology and market was doing all that for him this was another modern art system that Picasso invented the system of the modern artist as entrepreneur and showman Mediterranean Picasso is Picasso number two in the various mythologies of Picasso Picasso rich guy in his old age lived a magnificent rich bohemian life in the South of France moving from villa to villa filling them up with new creations watching wrestling on the TV having Gary Cooper around to visit his favorite film star he was thought to be the highest-paid man alive called himself a communist but Moscow called him a decadent he didn't care though when he wasn't painting he was out making sculptures that change the language of sculpture forever and ceramics that made him laugh he was full of beans he thought if he never stood still he could live forever that was what drove him but that's one thing modern art can't do this is almost the last picture he ever painted a self-portrait from the year he died it was 1973 Picasso was 92 modern art wasn't just Picasso anymore it had been taken over by New York what a picture Picasso is always dead for us it's part of his myth he died he stared death in the face before he went he was trepidatious guilty but all the lives it stepped on and destroyed on his path to genius New York started taking over modern art in the Second World War by the 1950s the job was complete Picasso is still producing but not progressing it was thought in New York progress was the big thing now but who could be the sign of progress who could be as big as Picasso but have the necessary newness Jackson Pollock artist of the abstract rip doomed forever to be a cliche what do we see when we see a Jackson Pollock we see what Pollock stands for Jackson Pollock stands for freedom self-expression and being American and for a particular American financial success story we see money building up this painting autumn rhythm failed to sell at all when it was first shown in 1950 even though the asking price was only twelve hundred dollars after Paulette died it was offered by a dealer to the Museum of Modern Art for $8,000 and they were appalled at the price then it was offered again for 30,000 and they didn't even reply to the letter eventually the Metropolitan Museum bought it for 20,000 a trustee said a painting this big must be worth something 20 years later in the mid 70s the combined value of all Pollock's works in public and private collections was estimated to be 50 million dollars because he was a giant of American art what else do we see we see the whole tragedy of Pollock's life towards the end of it he couldn't paint at all he was a depressed alcoholic he was violent he used to punch people if they punched him back which they often did he used to cry he had terrible in security he thought he was a phony and a sellout but the papers saw him as a macho primitive hard man the tough guy who said I don't paint nature I am nature but what are we seeing just the look of it the sheer feminine beauty of whatever it is the image or the rhythm its containment cross all those yards the energy and facility and delicacy the pain the way it sits on the surface of the canvas but sinks in at the same time the way it's flat and spacial at the same time all that ease and grace the illusion of something that's been made on instinct alone what a weird mix of elements makes up our idea of what Jackson Pollock is the romantic myth of the tortured artist I like it because I'm a bit romantic myself I started coming to New York a lot in the early 80s drawn by the allure of the hip the hip up-to-date cutting-edge art that was being churned out here all the time then but often found myself secretly yearning for the old stuff the abstract expressionist stuff the Abstract Expressionists moment was the 1950s it was an existential moment it was all deep anguished pained late-night soul-searching there was a life of woozi Busey semi intellectual or intermittently intellectual existential loneliness this is the cedar tavern New York's famous bar where Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists used to come and drink in the 1950s actually it's not the cedar but a remake put up after the original tavern burnt down in 1963 to this day people still come here in search of the abstract expressionist myth expecting to find it steaming off the tables perhaps come out and fight the Abstract Expressionists used to growl at each other when they met here they'd rip the doors off the hinges Jackson Pollock actually did that one night they punch each other and insult each other and say I'm more sincere than you or I'm more authentic than you or I'm more existentially tortured than you or I've had all your women which was one famous insult that the art critic Clement Greenberg was supposed to have hurled at the painter Willem de Kooning in a drunken brawl like many of these myths it turned out to be only partly true as Greenberg later revealed there was only one of de Kooning's women he liked and that was de Kooning's wife Elaine de Kooning but in all this macho comedy there was tragedy and there was pay fuss and that was what was going on in Jackson Pollock's head it was a very angry person a very unhappy person he'd be very subdued running the sober but when he had when he got drunk found the aggression would come out and he would be very very difficult very aggressive when he going to the seat of I'd say you [ __ ] [ __ ] you think you're painters you don't know what anything is self-destructiveness was overwhelming Pollock Sartre was a mystery art of pure abstraction there was nothing in it except art it made sense to him as a natural development from the Picasso system but he found the process of getting it over to the public by playing up to the media mad making it resulted in a Polock who was alienated from himself nowadays we find it normal for modern art to be in the papers a lot and for the stories about it to be all exaggeration and rubbish from outright jeering to accolade overdrive but that was all new in Pollock's time his escape from art world hysteria was his home here in East Hampton three hours drive from Manhattan he lived here with his wife the artist Lee Krasner every week he went into New York to see his analyst to hang around with artists and critics and then he came back here to paint and to worry worried about who he was and what his status was why was he so popular anyway he was thought to be a wild painter he painted on the floor because he was wild he used cheap household paints because it was rough and tough in fact he used quite expensive household paints because they got the effect he wanted he got the paint out of the tins onto the canvas in big sweeping loops using sticks are old dried-up hardened brushes but he didn't just get it all on there at once he worked in stages building up an image it isn't wild art it's deliberate sophisticated art it's good art but there is wildness in it and that's why it's great art spontaneity chance ugliness are all definitely in there making something new something graceful and delicate and odd which even today we can't quite pin down however blase we think we are about the myth of Jackson Pollock you this is the real Pollock really painting but it's also the mythic Pollock painting for the camera like Picasso playing to the camera Picasso is at ease with being a showman but Pollock wasn't perhaps because it was the wrong show thing I always think it's odd how delicate everything looks here one tough it all is by the time this film was made Pollock's dream of art had started to turn into a nightmare nothing was real everything was constructed around him I don't think that he had a terribly large ego but he performed a lot in order to get attention he wasn't an intellectual he was he was charming and attractive but very shy actually not a big ladies man that only really dominated him you know he was submissive and she was aggressive she was aggressive in all her relationships but he had this old barn for a studio but Lee had to work upstairs in a small room you're her painting that's true but that was her choice I mean she was thought that Jackson was a great painter a great artist and she devoted herself to that proposition what Lee did she decided that if he had some success that he would have more confidence and he wouldn't get into these terrible depressions and drinking and so on and I think it started out well when they moved here and it really worked out very well for a while she cultivated everyone who could be helpful to him the worldly way and rather isolated him from his real friends and I think that was a mistake as artificial as it is I think this famous film is the most touching film ever of an artist working was a very unnatural self-conscious awkward process to make it but every image of Pollock is full of tenderness he agreed to paint on glass so the camera could be literally within a picture developing Pollock had been on the wagon for two years but he was driven back to drink by the pressure of making this film at the end of the last day of shooting he knocked back tumblers of whiskey and started shoving the film maker and snappeth you're a phony he shouted I'm not a phony you're a phony but the fact is that the film was a lie in his drunken rage with mammoth [ __ ] was expressing a real anxiety he really couldn't work anymore it reached a point where his ideas were just dried up by the mid fifties Pollock had had exhibitions in New York and all over Europe his art was argued about by the most powerful critics in America it'd been on the cover of Life magazine he was world famous and yet he didn't know where to go he said he'd been in life but all he knew about was death he didn't know what was happening to him he was disoriented he was in despair he told Lee to think of his eraser bility his violence his drinking as a storm that it would soon blow over and then on the night of the 11th of August 1956 it did Lee was in Europe [ __ ] was in a car with Ruth Kligman his lover and Edith Metzker Ruth's friend it was an Oldsmobile it just got an exchange for two small paintings Pollock was driving and he was drunk he was driving at 80 miles an hour a car came to a curve in the road a spot Holland knew very well because it was only a few yards from his house but he failed to slow down instead the car sped into a group of oak trees it ran up one of the trees and flipped over Edith Metzger had been in the back hanging onto the safety strap calling out to Pollock to slow down was rammed into the trunk of the car and crushed to death Kligman and Pollock were each thrown from the car Kligerman suffered a fractured pelvis but Pollock collided with a tree headfirst it was too sensitive to criticism that was bad I think he was someone so so he had no skin to protect him you know everything would would get out him and I think that the success was both good and bad because he had gained confidence but it was always exaggerated you know that he was the only painter and all that which still was obviously insecure why do I not care about all the Picasso myths so much but want all the Pollock myths there's so many things already in Picasso's art so few in Jackson Pollock's just a misty space a sublime nothingness we want the sublime but we want it to be attached to something if it's Tanner we want a storm at sea with Pollock we want the car crash we feel we're really getting something then the last big story of Pollock's life its descent into chaos and death welcome back to the modern art tour this is Planet hotdog continent burger the country candy what's this got to do with art or we landed wrong place Coney Island a complete art free zone there aren't any big ideas here just fantastic blow pot mass drops who is responsible for collapsing this stuff into the world of high culture one man Andy do you feel that the public has insulted your art uh no why not uh oh I hadn't thought about it it doesn't bother you at all VIN uh no Andy do you think that pop art has sort of reached the point where it's becoming repetitious now all right yes do you think it should break away from being pop art no are you just going to carry on yes here's Warhol with his icons of modern life modern celebrity modern glamour modern sexiness when I first saw a Warhol like everyone else probably I couldn't see why it was art was a photo show we hear about his great color and he is great at that but what we first see are things objects soup cans or Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy Jackie multiplied by a million its Gideon Liz Taylor why is that heart when Warhol was first becoming famous he was asked what he thought about Abstract Expressionism he just said art is dead did he think he had killed our himself or did it just die on its own we certainly associate his name with a big question mark hanging over it after Marilyn's in 1962 he painted a lot of Elvis Presley's in 1963 he painted double Elvis's and single Elvis's and triple Elvis's this one his 11 Elvis's all different and all the same he painted the whole series very quickly he painted 50 of them in an afternoon but the studio was leaking and they were spoiled slightly so just painted them all again all the things that in the abstract expressionist days were assumed to justify art's difficulty its specialness its sensitivity its unrepeatable 'ti its complexity and depth he was happy to throw away being famous and being recognized he thought were better it's one thing to have that thought and the people he hung out with had thoughts like that all the time because they were stoned or drunk but what Warhol was good at was showing what that thought might actually look like he had always been interested in glamour from the time of seeing movies from Hollywood in the photo play magazines he always thought there was such a great glamor and magic about being a star and I think he directed himself to find out what was glamour you know and how could I put it in a can and then just paint it around actually paint glamour in a room or on a canvas Warhol famously came from the wrong side of the tracks where there wasn't any glamour this is Pittsburgh where Warhol was born in 1928 he lived here with his mother and father who came over from Czechoslovakia and you could hardly speak any English and his two brothers John and Paul it was a simple working-class life Warhol was always ill as a child and read movie magazines in bed and their chocolates I used to go out and buy him move movie star magazines you know different theater magazines which he got three faun doggies to cut out the pictures and then later on he says Paul how can I get some of these movie stars autograph yeah now and I says well I'll write to him you know so I wrote a lot of movie stars and a lot of them responded especially like Shirley temple's she sent them an eight-by-ten photographed Andrew Arjona from Shirley Temple you know he prized that when I talked to Paul I don't feel it's all that different to talking to anyone he doesn't know who Warhol was any more than anyone else because the artificial genius war hole that every one more or less knows is all he knows - I'm calling a Warhol killed off his real self to make room for his art self-made production line art because that was America and made himself into a parody genius because that was art that was bacastow and jetsam Pollock geniuses have expressed themselves Warhol made a new self to fit the new world expressing his new artificial self his brainwashed American consumer itself he was vividly expressing the world he was the world in all its ordinariness and strangeness he had to keep the new invented self going though he had his own manual which he wrote himself his famous book and he Warhol's philosophy from A to B leaned back again enjoyed it with his student and expect on the coming round one of his aisles and reading extracts from it at any moment this ironic easy-listening soundtrack is anything to go by when you want to be like something it means you really love it when you want to be like a rock you really love that book I love plastic idols what makes a painting beautiful is the way the paint's put on but I don't understand how women put on makeup it gets on your lips and it's so heavy lipstick and makeup and powder and shadow creams and jewelry it's also heavy I have a fantasy about money and walking down the streets and I hear somebody say in a whisper there goes the richest person in the world Andy always said everything more everything is on the surface just look there and you'll see everything that's there he didn't have an intention to be heavy materials wise or to be deep image wise he liked being surface he was audacious and somehow he knew that what he was doing was right on point it was always exactly what needed to be done at that exact time and it was beyond being hip and call even it was genius you Wahl is sometimes thought of as a light and breezy artist sometimes as a rather dark one I think of him as pretty dark even at his lightest and breezy this installation silver pillows from 1966 its walls take on the ultra seriousness of minimalist sculpture of a time but also it's a complete negative couldn't care less comment upon it is pink and yellow cow wallpaper from the same exhibition exhibited here exactly as it was then in a room adjacent to his silver floaty pillows is an up yours too contemporary abstract painting with its abstruse theories of color and flatness Warhol's own paintings go from aggressive pastiche of the nights his version of lovely Impressionism is both gorgeous and sarcastic to stark revelations of the horrible his death and disaster series wall took everything the mass media had to offer as if it was messages from the gods and the gods always have a lot to say about death Warhol himself was a regular churchgoer so it's only right he should feel at home with religions big subject the end with everything he does there's the witty idea often given to him by somebody else as it was in the case of the death and disaster series but also the cleverness and stylishness of the ideas execution like picking the right title and the right scale for this painting called foot and tire just big enough for the foot to be registered beneath the tire at a glance and picking the right news photo car crash for this painting called 5 deaths 5 teenage corpses are leaning on the grass looking out their eyes wide open as if they're feeling fine but in fact they're crushed mangled and covered with blood ambulance disaster the one vehicle you'd think you'd feel safe in and white burning car the repeated news photo image shows the burning car and the driver grotesquely hanging from telegraph pole a casual passerby not just casually passing by and glancing at death but not even bothering to glance with the corresponding blank empty nothingness of the last section of the series can we do a cheese movie all you have to do is say cheese cheese all right go the next book next year's war halt filming Susan Sontag frightening superbrain of the sixties asking her if she wants to be in a movie about cheese just what you're doing Warhol's paintings Warhol's films they're the same they do the same thing it was part of Warhol's genius to realize that could be so can film be art were still asking that question today this is Andy Warhol's first film sleep made in 1963 only a year after he first became famous as a painter just a man sleeping for eight hours Warhol used to go to underground films all the time with the poet John John oh he thought he could make when himself say bought a camera what should he film though Andy and I was sleeping together I was drunk you know like if the hay was about get up to take a piss and there would be Andy who's on speed you know would be looking at me and I would say what are you doing he said watching and then I'd go to sleep and wake up again take another person and then he would sort of was that night for the lack of an idea what he was gonna make his a movie of was he got the idea of and then me sleeping war holeshot hours of footage over different nights then he got into a tangle editing it finally he just picked out the shots that brilliantly emphasized light and shade so the film wouldn't seem too gay to beat censorship laws and he made it eight hours long because that's how long sleep usually lasts to conform to arts structural laws in this film there is the palpable sense of one of the elements of Warhol's genius the way his art foreground sexuality like Picasso's does only of course not like it because Warhol was gay and because I wasn't great energy comes with sex and drugs just magnified him and he understood all that I mean Andy was on speed himself so he only so he could see everything with enormous clarity and then everyone else was on whatever drug of their choice was and they will [ __ ] I mean it was grow everyone was either straight or gay was was a lot of sexuality and Andy totally when that was the attraction of for him to make movies I mean Andy didn't want to have sex he wanted to watch as we know he was a great lawyer here's [ __ ] made in the same year as sleep another film with a minimal structure its reality but this is all you get it's the same frame for half an hour reality and abstraction coming together pardon my french aha it's a fine balance of elements lost on some people who quite understandably are interested in the title but a bit bored by the film I told Andy once in New York I says I'm going down to see one of your movies you know it's playing and he says look they charge $3 he says you give me the three bucks and let me boot you in a rear-end he says don't waste your time on it so that was the answer that I got but it says some some of the family members were sort of critical about it you know my mother was very deeply in the village and she had faith in it and she brought Andy up halfway to and brought all of us that way I mean on numerous occasions when we're up here and he's getting ready to leave and in hid yell mother I'm getting ready to leave come on in here and and pray with me and he knelt down in front of her altar and in in prayed you know for five or ten minutes and Andy would be on his way warhol's pictures of death how great they look even though they're only silkscreen photos how great he could make that technique be nobody knows what he really thought about death these skulls pop death or death death they were painted ten years after he really did nearly die from an attempted assassination by Valerie Solanas the author of the scum manifesto the Society for cutting up men she came up to Warhol's famous factory studio and shot him one day in 1968 Warhol survived the shooting but for the rest of his life he suffered constant pain from the wounds which went on leaking horribly but then in February 1987 he did die tragically from simple neglect when his private nurse fell asleep following a routine gallbladder operation his tubes just clogged up and he died here we are again in a graveyard morbidly obsessing over modern arts dead dad's Warhol was a genius but it was a new type of genius he was a genius at expressing what it felt like not to be sure what you felt at all it was a great psychologist he observed what drives people and excites them not the people in his pictures and films the icons but the people who wanted to look at them the public he wrote books and made movies and produce records and painted paintings a lot of it wasn't any good but he looked at a wasteland and said this is Modern Art and it was hi its young people's music but back in the now zone again people of the 90s Times Square acting out a fashion me acting modern uh-oh he has sent his man head filled with the past pondering the meaning of modernity is modern always modern does it run out is it something you get out the modern cupboard down and polish or is it always frightening Lee alive Warhol Pollock Picasso they all stand for radical breaks with the past ugliness instead of beauty America instead of Europe irony instead of anguish I am what I am because of them but now they're the past Andy Warhol became part of culture in about 1962 what's happened since then this is millennium modern art Damien Hirst spots in lot 61 the latest media hang out in New York I'm drunk now and jet-lagged from time travel so I'm just talking rubbish but if you ask me what these spots say is that like Andy Warhol's silver pillows we are a form of art of almost unbelievable weightlessness and yet we are quite good how can that be it's bright decorative eye stimulating exciting painting doing all the things a painting should do but it's all done mechanically with a compass and with the colors not even being filled in by Hearst but by an assistant so something is missing there's nothing to tell us what to feel it expresses our culture's anxiety about the role of painting now does it have one God has it come to this from Picasso's fabulous art of domestic life to all of modern are summed up in a restaurant art is dead said Warhol I am nature said Pollock I don't seek I find said Picasso vindaloo says here we are back where we started at my studio a modern art greenhouse where modern art mines are cultivated and nurtured he is an artist painting a psychedelic modern garden this is modern art going on but being different Damien Hirst isn't the last chapter he's just the leader of our present phase of modern art we're geniuses don't really exist but creativity and inventiveness and not being straight and having your own system and not being polite all still do and that's the answer to the thing we were wondering last time we were at my ambiently humming studio we like modern art because we don't know what it is the reason it keeps changing is to make sure we never do this is modern art continues next week Thursday Ken Burns superb series jazz continues with the music taking new directions into the turbulent 60s join us for jazz 9:30 Thursday nights stay with us now for the history of sin George's Chapel

Channel: Ivan Polissky

Views: 415,023

Keywords: This Is Modern Art (TV Program)

Id: ObhNiJaoVow

Length: 49min 45sec (2985 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2011