Art marketed to the masses

Every year, major art galleries all around the world attract the masses, but why is it that a Van Gogh exhibition will be filled with people, yet the majority of us don’t listen to Schoenberg or read Gertrude Stein at home?

The reason for the comparative popularity of modern visual art compared to other modernist art forms is two fold. The first reason is that whilst music, poetry and films are temporal, a painting is spatial. This is important because it means that it requires less effort on the part of the beholder to take it in. Though we can look at a painting for a long time and find things in it, essentially the way we experience art is instantaneous. It is easier to digest a Rothko canvas than to slowly work ones way through a Vorticist poem.

The other reason modernist art attracts more attention than its counterparts is that modernist art is commercial art. Other art forms have popular alternatives that are easier to take in, more readily available, and are constantly being produced. Consider cinema for example. We don’t constantly watch the same films over and over at the cinema in the way that artists are exhibited again and again.

Music is an interesting example. Commercial music is far more popular than modernist music even though the experience of listening is passive. Listening out for the formal qualities of music does how-ever require concentration. With art, the formal qualities are simply there. One can-not avoid them.

Because a modernist painting is taken in instantly and it has no ‘easy’ commercial alternative, it can be marketed to the masses in a way that other art forms aren’t, and is thus more popular amongst the general public.