Modern art paintings are the best way to portray the unseen on the canvas. It is about the expression of emotions and feelings on and is not what you see at the very first glance. It can have many interpretations when seen through different angles. If you want to know more about modern art, then you can also read “Why is the New Art So Hard to understand”. It is a book written by Theodor Adorno, a German social theorist who shed more highlight on this concept that why Modern art paintings are so hard to understand modern art. Although the book was written in 1931, it is still relevant in today’s era.
How could we lower its difficulty and help visitors enjoy the modern art better? One solution is to allow visitors not to understand the artists’ intentions correctly. Instead, if visitors are allowed to misunderstand artists’ intentions and even disagree with artists’ opinions, if any, they will be relieved to fail.
A great example is the underlined sentence under the modern artwork named The Great Bear by Simon Patternson in 1992. This sentence was added by a curator working at the Tate Liverpool, UK. Indeed, several students stood in front of this artwork and casually discussed to answer the question.
Simon Patterson born 1967 (Born and work UK) / The Great Bear 1992 (Lithograph on paper)
While this appears to be a standard map of the London Underground, the name of each station has been changed. Patterson has swapped the real station names for those of footballers, actors, and other celebrated figures. The image challenges our expectation that we can trust maps and diagrams. Sometimes Patterson seems to be making jokes with his choices. For example, Gary Lineker, who never received a yellow or red card as a football player, sits at the connection between footballers and saints.
What do you think about artists taking and changing existing images?
A similar sentence was found under another artwork (see below). Reading just one more sentence under the artwork made this Tate Modern museum more friendly and more approachable.
Why do you think the artist made this work? What is the ‘it’ you are being asked to stop?
Behaivoral scientists argue that people find information important when it is easy to process (called fluent). Since modern art is difficult, people often avoid and even ignore it. When curators make the modern art easier to process, people will enjoy it.
We propose that people weight fluent, or easy to process, information more heavily than disfluent information when making judgments. Cue fluency was manipulated independent of objective cue validity in three studies, the findings from which support our hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants weighted a consumer review more heavily when it was written in a clear font than in a less clear font. In Experiment 2, participants placed more weight on information when it was in focus than when it was blurry. In Experiment 3, participants placed more weight on financial information from brokerage firms with easy to pronounce names than those with hard to pronounce names. These studies demonstrate that fluency affects cue weighting independent of objective cue validity.
