this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://www.reddit.com/r/modernart/comments/1bpaiae/shoot_um_moma_what_is_this/

Rothko's Untitled. I don't like abstract expressionism but he's probably the technical height of it from how much work actually went into that.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In 1958, Mark Rothko was offered his first-ever commission—a series of murals to be placed in New York’s famed Four Seasons restaurant, for which he would have been paid $35,000. Known as the Seagram Murals because they were to appear in the historic Seagram Building, the paintings he created are rendered in dark red tones, with barely visible orangeish forms that appear to hover over dark red backgrounds. Eventually, however, the commission fell through when Rothko and his wife dined at the restaurant and found himself disgusted with the prices of the dishes on offer. “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he once said.

That was pretty based at the very least. $35,000 in 1958 is like $375,000 in today's money, for reference.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

“Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he once said.

Wait, I'm not quite sure if I quite get what he's trying to say? Did he mean to say that rich porkies that eat at pretentious fancy restaurants would be so stupid and tasteless that they would never look up from their overpriced food to enjoy the nice paintings on restaurant walls, or that he doesn't want any ultra-rich porkies to see his art? Or a combination of both? The first reason doesn't seem to make complete sense to me; isn't one of the benefits of being mega-rich off of countless exploited workers that sometimes (and in any case, much more often than the exploited workers) you choose to spend your nearly endless free time learning to appreciate fine art? Is he saying bad taste in food is directly correlated with bad taste in visual art? Did he just hate tasteless rich people, or rich people in general?

Actually, this makes me wonder what abstract expressionists as a movement thought about the relationship between their art and their rich patrons, and whether their art reflected this in any way. I mean, was Rothko's disgust here the exception, or a widely held sentiment among his peers? The topic seems to me to be unavoidable to anyone with half a working or artistic brain; especially if, as I assume, most artists begin as starving students/apprentices/newcomers and later in their career get offered insane sums of money for their work.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So from what I can gather, I'm pretty sure he simply didn't know what The Four Seasons was beforehand. Then he went there and saw it was a bourgeois restaurant for rich businessmen and took his paintings back and refunded the money.

Within the context that he was a self described anarchist (in opposition to the USSR, but still leftist). His family were migrants from Tsarist Russia and he did graduate from Yale on a scholarship.

I think the fact that the pieces he made were donated to galleries helps reinforce the idea that he didn't like bourgeoisie but didn't really have a materialist understanding of why.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Wow, I didn't know Rothko was a self-professed anarchist. I guess that and the fact that he later donated the pieces to galleries indicate that his guiding principle was egalitarianism (everyone should be able to enjoy art, not just rich assholes) rather than elitism (only people with real taste would appreciate my genius). A really nice sentiment, but possibly a bit idealist (now rich assholes in charge of the Tate Modern get to benefit from and control public access to his art).