A banana in a grocery store is an excellent source of potassium. You go to the grocery store for practical reasons. You evaluate the displayed fruits and vegetables according to how they will benefit your body. You pay money for things that will impact your life and improve it immediately.
A banana taped to a museum wall is a mind game.
You go to the museum for no practical reason at all. The entrance you pay at a museum doesn’t get you anything. Why on earth would you go to such a place?! You go precisely because you feel it’s time for a mind game. You want to have your brain scrambled. Name a piece of art that didn’t have that effect on you!
Correction: Name a piece of MODERN Art that wasn’t a mind game. That’s because art since the middle of the 19th century has engaged the viewer in the literal sense of that word, meaning involve. Meaning you have to think about it, to puzzle it out.
Engaging with Modern Art means identifying your assumptions and expectations. That takes practice.
You don’t even have to go to a museum to practice that, you can do it anywhere, with anything. Right now, for example. Go to your kitchen and look at a banana and at the assumptions you have in your head about its characteristics, like the color yellow.
Becoming aware of your assumptions and expectations is actually easier in a museum than in your kitchen. That’s because in the museum the objects are already taken out of their normal, habitual context. A banana taped to a museum wall is a mind game if you stare down your assumptions about what’s supposed to be on museum walls and what art is supposed to be.
If you think museums should show this…
and this…
and this…
…you’re also being asked to play mind games. You may think that ancient images are more real and therefore not mind games. But that’s because we tend to be in awe of very old objects, whether coins, pottery, murals, inscriptions, monuments or paintings. Even in their own day, they already were mind games.
Actually, you don’t have to think about anything. But what’s the fun in that?
I recommend this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/arts/design/banana-art-guggenheim.html
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 