Putting in the work.

I guess it's a sign I'm a hopeless ignoramus that I would like to see evidence of work put into a piece of art. It is called a work of art, after all. 

It's like that test I wrote about back in '17, the test used to determine whether an activity is a sport or a game. It's called the Pancake Test, and its premise is simple: Can you eat a stack of pancakes before playing without noticeable diminishment in your play? If the answer is yes, play is unaffected, it's a game. If play is affected, it's a sport. 

My test is the Booze Test of Art: Could a work have been created as is if the artist had been drunk off his ass at the time he created it? If the answer is yes, then I just can't take it seriously. 

Let's have a look at two famous paintings and see how this checks out. 

First we have The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn:

This famous oil painting, in the collection at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, might not be the sort of thing you'd like over the dining room table, but there's no question that it shows the work. It has a complexity of light and shadow, it shows personality and expression, and it is so stark and realistic as to be an anatomy lesson all on its own. Talk about a "body" of work! There is no way Rembrandt could have done this loaded. You can't even say "Harmenszoon" while loaded!

And then we have Untitled (ca. 1949) by Jackson Pollock, from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art:

And... yeah. I think the only way you could make this was hammered. More than 70 years later and it's still a mess. You may, as many do, cite the passion this this drip-canvas thing, but you can cite the passion in a restraining order as well. Work of creative genius? I'm apparently too much of a bonehead to say; I think Remington's pretty good, and that would get me thrown out of any critics' gathering. (Gawd, next he'll say he likes Thomas Kinkade!) I see a lot of laziness here, though, right down to not even putting in the effort to give it a title. Call it The Rage, call it Monday, call it Mildred, but call it something. We don't even know for sure when it was finished. Rembrandt's painting could have taken as much work as building a house; Pollock's, about as much as opening a lawn chair. 

Say what you will about Koons or even the lowly Kinkade being factory artists, but there's a plain economic reasoning behind this kind of modern art, and that's that it simply does not take that much time or work. Why labor over a canvas for a year and find that no one wants it? Toss off one, move on to the next; maybe the folks who decorate hotels may will them by the bushel. (Although even that's a questionable hope these days.)

I'm not picking on Pollock or his fans with meanness or spite. I'm just saying we instinctively appreciate something that we can tell took a lot of effort, skill, and thought. Most people will be more intrigued with buildings of stone or brick than reinforced concrete. The latter may have provided more shelter for more people in this busy world, and that's great, but which connects to the soul?