A great example of this for me was that modern art painting that is just a specific shade of purple or violet (I forget the name, might be "shade #456" or something). It would look like total BS on paper, but displayed in the gallery it had this very strange effect, like a black hole, or weird dead zone, a matte presence that was a distinct experience.
This is precisely right. And a great deal of modernist work is just like this... for reasons that may be obvious if you think about them: In a world with ubiquitous photography, the details that don't show up in photos are even more special, and art galleries have the time and space to focus on them.
Those paintings that seem to consist of just one black line on a field of white? They make sense in person. (Hint: Just because it's notionally a field of white doesn't mean it isn't made of seventy-five overlapping layers of slightly different shades of white paint. Just because it's notionally a black line doesn't mean the line is uniform.)
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A great example of this for me was that modern art painting that is just a specific shade of purple or violet (I forget the name, might be "shade #456" or something). It would look like total BS on paper, but displayed in the gallery it had this very strange effect, like a black hole, or weird dead zone, a matte presence that was a distinct experience.
This is precisely right. And a great deal of modernist work is just like this... for reasons that may be obvious if you think about them: In a world with ubiquitous photography, the details that don't show up in photos are even more special, and art galleries have the time and space to focus on them.
Those paintings that seem to consist of just one black line on a field of white? They make sense in person. (Hint: Just because it's notionally a field of white doesn't mean it isn't made of seventy-five overlapping layers of slightly different shades of white paint. Just because it's notionally a black line doesn't mean the line is uniform.)