I don't like Tàpies

A la memòria de Salvador Puig Antich, Antoni Tàpies, 1974

The Museum of Modern Art of Tarragona has organized an exhibition in homage to Antoni Tàpies, who passed a year ago, and I love contemporary art but I have never ever liked Tàpies. I am no ashamed to say it: there are contemporary art artists I don't like or even artworks I would never name as that. But don't get alarmed, it is not a crime, even if for years they tried to make us see it like that, in contemporary art is not about all or nothing, to love it or hate it. Contemporary art is about being critic, to judge and comment.

Some days ago I did a little experiment with a friend of mine who “doesn't like” contemporary art and so I took him to a very very contemporary art display. Before going inside I asked him what he expected from a work to consider it as art and the answer was clear: beauty, technique and being able to understand it. Soon his nightmare began: white canvas with only two lines, amorphous gum sculptures, projections of single images with nonrhythmic music... but my idea soon started to work out and I saw him standing in front of a painting which technique he liked, later another one he thought was beautiful enough and finally in the last room of the display my friend understood the message of an artwork. Maybe that wasn't the same message the author had in mind, but it was a message, the one my friend was able to find out. Step by step and with some effort my dear friend had a first agreement with contemporary art and I am sure in future displays he will be able to find more and more artworks with the features he required for an artwork, and even maybe he'll find an artwork with all the three features.

So that's exactly what the contemporary art is about: to watch the artworks with a critic opinion or even a meaning that only it's valuable four ourselves. Artists don't do “closed circles” as in Renaissance when they painted with a certain canon of beauty, a precise technique and a series of iconographic images to teach us the only true meaning of the artwork. In contemporary art we could talk about “open circles” where everything is possible, where there's is no canon of beauty because that's a subjective quality, technique can easily be the result of artist's experimentation and the artwork's meaning is not complete until the viewer interacts with it being critic and judge. All this variability implies we don't need to like or understand everything. I have found some artworks I didn't like because I wasn't able to understand it; works of the mature period of an author in which he talks about feelings linked to elderly and therefore I am too young to completely get the meaning of what he is expressing. In the same way after a few years in some artworks I have re-discovered new values I wasn't able to see when I was younger. As contemporary art isn't complete until the interaction with the viewer, the final result and meaning of the artwork will always depend on the age of the viewer and its cultural background.

Finally, if you have really tried to understand contemporary art with an open mind, if you have made an effort to complete the artworks' meaning but still you don't see what's up, let's say out loud: “I don't like contemporary art!”. Once you have tried to understand it to not like contemporary art is as permissible as to though Romanesque art is boring or Baroque too burdensome. In the art's world deny contemporary art seems to be as punished as saying that Quixote is heavy duty; and it shouldn't be like that because if, as we have said, it is a subjective art it is totally normal that not everyone sees it in the same way. But if you are going to admit you don't like contemporary art just do it right, with your own arguments and values. No more topics like “even a child could do that” or “you can do this only when you are already a famous artist”. If we are brave enough to say we don't like it we have to be also brave to admit maybe it is because we don't have the necessary tools or knowledge to appreciate it properly. Meanwhile I still don't like Antoni Tapies' art.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert