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True Art Is Incomprehensible
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If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!
Whenever one sees a fictional piece of modern art on TV, it will be profound, or at least proclaimed profound by an expert.
It will also either be utterly banal and vulgar, like a toilet mounted in concrete, or resemble nothing that could exist outside of Lovecraftian Fiction. It may take the form of a childish scribble, or an inhuman monstrosity of twisted metal, but the effect is the same ◊. The viewer is reassured that they are looking at Real Art. The artist has not sold out to our bourgeois corporate materialistic traditionalist oppressive hierarchical heartless soulless philistine overlords. Bold, innovative art naturally justifies a seven-figure price tag, even if it's unclear what's being innovated, and why.
In a comedy, expect a more cynical character to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Don't expect anybody to listen. Also expect that if someone happens to leave something mundane and innocuous lying around in the proximity of any kind of art installation, it'll immediately attract a flock of pretentious 'art'-lovers raving about how deep and meaningful it is. Artists and art-patrons who appreciate this kind of art tend to be depicted as pretentious, snobby hipster poseurs, who look down their noses at anyone who doesn't 'get it' and are usually, ironically, not nearly as smart as they like to think themselves as being.
Sadly, this is also a case of Truth In Television, as the obscenely long " Real Life" section indicates. Certain consumers of 20th-century art don't value a piece unless it's opaque, subversive, and requires four years of study to comprehend. For that matter, in the eyes of some, an Art Film is not an Art Film unless it's too surreal to be related to in any other context. This attitude would be harmless, if it didn't seep into the minds of importance-seeking writers and artists who substitute obfuscation for technical skill, and lead audiences to view any recent representational work as kitschy, unimaginative, or an unnecessary duplication of a task more efficiently performed by a camera.
... And we won't even get into the counterculture of comic and webcomic artists who like nothing better than to use their new medium for lobbing a heavy-handed Take That at the art teachers who tried and obviously failed to discourage their comic work thanks to this trope. Of course, True Art Sticks It To The Man anyway, so it (usually) balances out.
Of course, sometimes the Emperor really does have clothes. There's no faster way to establish a character as a philistine than to have them refer to Guernica as a set of inane scribbles, or improvisational jazz as "impudent noise." And then there's the third perspective: it's all True Art, from the soup cans to the Mona Lisa, but it isn't necessarily good art.
The classic debate concerning this trope is encapsulated in the exchange between Damien Hirst and his critics concerning " The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living": the critics said that they could have done that, and Hirst responded "But you didn't, did you?" Of course, you could also saw your own foot off, but you don't - because that would be stupid.
If the character creating the art is a Mad Artist, then prepare for a severe retribution if you don't "get it".
It's been suggested that the original point of incomprehensible art was to spark thought but has been lost as incomprehensibility came into vogue. In essence abstract art was killed by its own success.
It's also important to keep in mind that, while a lot of what's labeled Incomprehensibility-For-Its-Own-Sake is indeed that, a lot is more a case of Your Intellect May Vary. In other words, just because you don't get it, doesn't mean it fits this trope.
See also: True Art Is Angsty, Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory, Mind Screw, What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic, Viewers Are Geniuses, Design Students Orgasm, Word Salad Lyrics.
Examples
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Anime
- Hayate No Gotoku parodies this like so much else. Nagi is convinced that her manga is a masterpiece, but the only other person who can understand it is her friend Isumi. Everybody else just feels very confused after reading it. Or even just hearing her describe it.
- That may be less due to True Art Is Incomprehensible, and more due to the fact that she's a terrible writer and just doesn't realize it... Specifically, her manga is more or less Sailor Moon meets Fist Of The North Star, with the main character being a female, muscle-bound version of Ken in a Sailorfuku.
- Don't forget what happens when Isumi herself tries writing a manga. Behold, and be amazed. Naturally, Nagi immediately declares it a work of genius.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena fits this the more it goes on, and the movie in its entirety is a definite example.
- Melody Of Oblivion thrives on this trope, to the point where you start wondering how much is really happening and how much is just symbolic. Are they singing karaoke, or are they all getting killed on flying motorcycles in space? You tell me.
- Not surprisingly, Melody Of Oblivion was written by the same guy who wrote Utena, Enokido Youji (aka "the other man behind Utena who never gets any recognition").
- I can't believe no one's added Evangelion yet. Seriously, who here actually understood the movie?
- The Movie was rather straightforward. If you didn't understand it, rewatch it and pay attention to the dialogue, rather than the visuals. The TV ending, however... I got nothing.
- The TV ending is basically just a happier, less visual version of the movie. Granted, the TV ending catches everyone by surprise but once you recover and watch it again, it's pretty damn awesome in its own right.
- Also, after applying All There In The Manual, it makes perfect sense. Although why the relevant information wasn't included in the show itself is something of a mystery.
- They wanted to get the feel across, rather than the technical side- and let's face it, there's no question that the last two episodes feel like the end of something. If they'd had more time, more money, and hadn't pissed off their sponsors, they probably would have included the necessary info to make it make sense.
- You guys are full of it.
- Serial Experiments Lain. (That is, if you're not willing to spend 2 hours on Wikipedia reading about Schumann Waves and the collective unconscious.)
- Boogiepop Phantom.
- It becomes a lot clearer once you read the first novel, or the manga.
- And it's actually almost completely followable if you've read the prequel novel, Boogiepop At Dawn, as well.
- Parodied in GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class. Noda, who's already in her own little world, declares "You don't need drawing techniques for modern art, you just need taste." This is proven when a solid black rectangle drawn in pencil is able to be viewed as "art" by everybody except for Namiko.
- Partially subverted in that the black blob actually functions as a reverse canvas.
- Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg is a surreal piece with minimal dialogue, and tons of semi-Christian symbolism. It's essentially about a little girl who carries around a big egg that she hopes will hatch some day, and a young man she meets, who isn't so sure that's going to happen.
- The first half of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is CLAMP's mind. The second half, however, is their mind narrating their own acid trip.
- Hidamari Sketch, also in an arts class setting, cannot avoid this. When the tenants decided to draw their renditions of a bunny as an introduction, Hiro and Yuno just couldn't comprehend Miyako's work...
Comic Books
- Some of Alan Moore's work can fall into this, if he's allowed to go all out. Most notably Promethea, although the ending of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier has a bit of this going on as well.
- One might say that ALL of Alan Moore's work has at least a foot in this trope. Even fairly straightforward works like Watchmen or V For Vendetta have a good number of cryptic passages.
- Similarly, Grant Morrison has a tendency to assume that the more incomprehensible something is, the better it is. The final issue of Final Crisis received many complaints of this nature (although admittedly, at least some of this was down to the Crisis Crossover nature of the story and the fact that it was necessary to read the related tie-ins - and have a working knowledge of the Silver Age of comic books - to know what the heck was going on).
- Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron is a perfect example of this. Between a mutated fish girl, cops whose hobby is beating the shit out of people and then carving smiley faces in their feet, a dog with no head and no other orifices, a cult leader who is constantly naked for no real reason, a young girl who makes snuff films and "What's the frequency Kenneth?" it is a wonder that anyone made heads or tails of it.
- The Nemi strips parodied this rather mercilessly, in which the titular character is about to paint a landscape, but before she can begin a pigeon takes a shit on her canvas. An "art lover" immediately runs up to her, visibly impressed. She protests, quite surprised, that it's just a piece of pigeon excrement on a canvas - which only amazes him and several others further.
- In his last, unfinished comic book Tintin and (the?) Alph-Art, Herge wanted Tintin to deal with the modern art business. The Alph-Art mentioned is a new style which depicts nothing but big letters. And Captain Haddock was even supposed to become a fan of it.
Fables
- This can't be a new concept, as it seems that The Emperors New Clothes directly parodies it. Anyone who can't see it is deemed a fool, when there's really nothing there.
Film
- Parodied in the film L.A. Story: Steve Martin's character jokingly gives an erotic artistic analysis of a painting, mentioning that it depicts a man, a woman and a puppy (among other things). When the camera pulls back, the painting is revealed to be a red rectangle.
- The entirety of the movie Art School Confidential. The realist artist is flunking out, everyone else's art looks like something you'd see on a drug trip, and the guy with the highest mark hasn't taken an art class in his life.
- See also the 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That.
- And then an LA Art Critic called the paintings in the film "lousy".
- The movie Doe is quite possibly the defining example of pretentious student art films. Warning: Link Not Safe For Work.
- The film adaptation of Ghost World: The art film ("Mirror. Father. Mirror.") that Enid's teacher shows to the class as an example of her work is hilariously awful, whilst the actual, looks-like-a-person drawings Enid creates are lumped in with the boy who traces his favourite video game characters in felt-tip pen. Then they're passed over for another girl's wire coathanger sculpture. Daniel Clowes may have had some issues to work out, it seems.
- Don't forget the tampon-in-a-teacup "found art" that is lauded as being genius.
- Eraserhead is so famously incomprehensible that David Lynch encourages people to come up with their own interpretations. If there is any Official Meaning, he's not going to tell us what it is anytime soon. The plus side is that when made fun of, it's usually more affectionately treated.
- In fact, much of Lynch's work is fairly confusing. Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway...
- Wait, you found Blue Velvet confusing? Seriously?
- To say nothing of the fact that he promoted his Inland Empire by sitting outside a building holding a cow on a leash.
- Judging by a few choice quotes, Lynch himself doesn't even pretend to make sense, or rather, to have to make sense. Apparently, concrete meaning destroys the mystery and is too dependent on life itself making consistent sense. "It's better not to know..."
- The Rebel AKA Call Me Genius stars Tony Hancock as a struggling artist called Tony Hancock who tries to ingratiate himself with pretentious critics by painting incomprehensible abstracts. The critics see through the ruse and reject his work. When another artist imitates Hancock's style the critics love it. (Hancock and his writers had previously used basically the same plot in a Hancocks Half Hour radio episode using poetry instead of painting.)
- The Cremaster Cycle is essentially five movies in a row of "a self-enclosed aesthetic system ... that explore processes of creation. The cycle unfolds not just cinematically, but also through the photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, that covers the testis. And the worst part is, it doesn't even work as porn. The full series was released in a limited series of 20 sets of DVDs, sold each for at least $100,000, and will not be made available on mass-market DVD, as hard to believe as that might be.
- This music video by Fischerspooner. Also an example of What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome.
- All those stop-motion Tool videos. To be fair they do have some hooks and tunes but what's with those plasticine stick men?
- Andy Warhol. The guy taped hours and hours of absolutely nothing happening.
- And when a critic called him on it, sniping that his films were nothing but "a camera focused on Taylor Mead's ass for two hours", Warhol promptly produced a two-hour opus entitled... wait for it... Taylor Mead's Ass.
- Crispin Glover of Back To The Future fame wrote, directed and starred in a film aptly-titled What Is It?. The film is about... well, who knows, but it includes porn stars, actors with Down syndrome, the image of a nude Shirley Temple, a snail voiced by Fairuza Balk and swastikas. Glover's justification for all this basically amounts to True Art Is Offensive. You can see a trailer here.
- John Boorman's Zardoz fits this trope so perfectly even Boorman himself admits he has no idea what he was thinking at various points. Or, probably, ingesting.
- Semi-subverted in Short Circuit 2; after escaping from an attempt to sell him and landing in an open-air modern art gallery, he's mistaken for an exhibit by a high-class couple apparently well-versed in this trope. The subversion comes when they dismiss him as a bad and ugly attempt at "True Art", spending not even 5 minutes studying him before moving on to something more appealing.
- The transformation sequences in the live-action 2007 Transformers movie combine this with the Rule Of Cool: The sheer complexity makes the transformation practically impossible to track even with freeze-frame.
- This article argues that the absolute... Bigness of Revenge of the Fallen qualifies it as an Art film.
- E. Elias Merhige's Begotten epitomizes this trope. You can see it here
- Vase De Noces, also called Wedding Trough, One Man and his Pig and, informally, The Pig Fucking Movie; by Thierry Zeno. A farmer who may be the last man on earth living on a farm in what may be a post-apocalyptic wasteland falls in love with his sow, has sex with it, and it gives birth to a litter of half-pig, half-human mutants. The farmer tries to raise them as civilized human children, but can't, so he hangs them. The sow, when she finds them, drowns herself; and the farmer goes insane, makes tea out of his feces and urine, and then hangs himself. This is randomly interspersed with shots of the farmer slotting dolls' heads onto the heads of doves and collecting pieces of vegetables in jars for no apparent reason. So Yeah...
- The recent long-awaited official DVD release of the film supposedly comes with a documentary in which Thierry and Dominique Garny (the man who plays the farmer) explain the meaning of all of this. If anyone has by any chance seen said documentary; feel free to say here what the explanation is. I personally wouldn't mind knowing myself...
- One could argue that No Country For Old Men was this trope. Particularly Anton Chigur, whose backstory, although he kills at least a 8 people in the film's duration, is never told (although this troper suspects severe OCD/Schizophrenia). Also that ending .
- ''2001: A Space Oddysey''. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, if anyone came out of the theater understanding everything that had happened, the fimmakers failed at their job.
Literature
- Shakespeare's plays had remarkably simple plots. However scholars delve so deeply into these plots that the academic explanations for such plots as girl and boy love each other so much they commit suicide, sound crazier than your average scientology sermon.
- Who could forget Jabberwocky by Lewis Carrol?
- The vorpal blade went snicker snack.
- Incomprehensible intentionally to teach how you don't need to know word meanings to understand verbs, adjectives, and nouns.
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, features, among other things, a word that ostensibly represents a stone wall being knocked over by a lightning strike. It once was voted the 77th best novel in English of all time, which prompts the question, "It qualified as being in English?" At one point in the 1990s a revised and updated edition of Finnegans Wake was released, with an announcement that numerous typographical errors had been identified and corrected. One commentator quipped, "Typos in Finnegans Wake? How can they tell?"
- Rather suspiciously, the man who claimed this (the same man who owned the copyright) waited until his copyright was almost running out before he announced this. That the updated edition would remain in his ownership for the rest of a modern copyright period must be pure coincidence, right?
- For those who are disappointed at the word's disappearance from the page header, it is:
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!
- Joyce's Ulysses is notoriously inaccessible, but deserves a special mention simply for the last chapter: eight sentences, though arguably not real sentences because of the lack of punctuation, spanning well over 50 pages and 4,000 words.
- Parodied in the Discworld novel Thud!: While investigating the theft of a painting from the Ankh-Morpork Art Museum, Fred and Nobby make note of two "modern art" pieces by Daniellarina Pouter: Don't Talk to Me About Mondays, which consists of a pile of rags, and Freedom, which consists of a stake to which Ms. Pouter had been nailed after Lord Vetinari had seen her previous piece. (She was delighted and is planning to nail herself to a wide variety of objects in the near future as a special exhibition.)
- The curator of the museum also dismisses Nobby's suggestion that they label the empty frame that once held the stolen painting Art Theft as "foolish".
- Parodied by CS Lewis in The Pilgrim's Regress. Glugly, a "poet" who has been mute since birth, entertains an audience of jaded aesthetes by making silly poses and nonsense sounds. The onlookers (except for the naive young protagonist) praise her work as highly rational and abstract.
- In one short story, an ordinary man invites a famous vacationing artist to his house. During his stay, the artist convinces him to let him paint his picket fence (And nothing fancy, mind you. Just the same plain ol' white you'd expect a picket fence to be). Days later, his house is being visited by critics from all over the world, and he's being offered large sums of money for his fence.
- One of Judy Blume's Fudge books has Peter and Fudge's little sister accidentally getting into an artist's paint and wandering over his canvas, leaving behind little blue footprints. The artist thinks it looks stunning and wants her to help him make more paintings.
- Modern poetry is Incomprehensible Art's most forbidding fortress:
- T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is disjointed, studded with foreign language phrases and obscure literary allusions, and left. This confusion serves Eliot's points, which, depending on whom you ask, are that True Art Is Ancient, New Media Are Evil, Science Is Bad, nothing makes sense, and/or the modern world is the intellectual and cultural "Waste Land" of the title.
- Eliot did include a big batch of clarifying notes...
- ... which themselves require clarifying commentary...
- ... which may require outside clarification as well.
- Also, many of the works of e.e. cummings, such as "anyone lived in a pretty how town".
- The cover of Nova Express by William Burroughs touts the book as some of the best satire since Johnathan Swift. If you read the book, you're likely to find it more resembles the results of beating a keyboard mercilessly with a cat.
- Anything written by Mark Z. Danielewski. Both House Of Leaves and Only Revolutions are heavily laden with metafictional devices, references, and symbolic imagery. One poster on his forum summed it up quite nicely:
"Though I cannot help but wonder if Mark is really just trying to turn us into apopheniacs here. Leading us to search for — and/or construe — connections which may well be entirely nonexistent. But if that is the case, then at least it's an entertaining form of insanity."
- Gravitys Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It is postmodern literature, but still!
- Anything by Thomas Pynchon is this trope.
- There's a wonderful essay by David Sedaris chronicling his foray into conceptual art, which went hand-in-hand with his speed addiction. At his performance art piece, the only part that got any positive feedback was his own father's heckling of the work, misinterpreted by the audience as being part of the show.
- Then there's Kurt Vonnegut's character Rabo Karabekian. In "Breakfast of Champions" we meet him having painted a painting that consists solely of a green field with two strips of orange, meant to signify one or another Christian saint (I forget which). In "Bluebeard," he is visited by a reporter, who interrogates him as to how he can call what he does art. Karabekian, in a Crowning Moment of Awesome, takes a charcoal to a blank canvas, draws a perfect portrait of the reporter freehand, and says "When you can do that(the portrait), you can do this(the abstract work)
- In the fourth Dexter novel, Dexter and his wife, Rita, visit an art exhibit while in Paris. The Art consists of videos of a woman cutting her own leg off. Dexter finds it mildly interesting though he worries Rita will be distressed. Rita insists on staying and viewing "real" art, all the while refusing to believe the videos, or the displayed leg bone, are real. When the artist hobbles out on one leg and touches the leg bone, Rita faints. The plot of the book also revolves around the antagonist's artistic efforts.
- The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons are pretty hard to figure out what with the time travel and multiple planes of existence and quantum mechanical love. Naturally the Cantos are a tribute to John Keats and fortunately they're enjoyable just as a story.
- Pretty much anything by William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying is a wonderful example, featuring impenetrable stream-of-consciousness writing, a random fixation with bananas, a chapter narrated by a dead character, and an entire chapter that consists of the line "My mother is a fish."
- Though that infamous chapter is not an example of this trope. In context it's very obvious what the character means.
- The first section of The Sound and The Fury is narrated by a 33-year old man-child with a profound mental disability; the novel says it's mental retardation, but some people believe it may be autism. He has no concept of time. He'll slip into a past memory and narrate it as if it's happening right now with no explicit indication that he has begun to narrate a past event other than very subtle clues. It gets even worse with Quentin's section because of his vast intelligence.
- Chuck Palahniuk
- Parodied in Take The Plug Out by Ephraim Kishon (also known as Take the plug out, the kettle's boiling). An art critic is going over to an artist, who has decided to make himself a cup of tea and has plonked the kettle on a stool. The art critic mistakes this for the actual artwork.
Live Action TV
- Spoofed in Reno 911! when the sheriff's department is called to a modern art museum to remove a painting deemed "offensive." The problem, however, is that all the paintings are so abstract, they can't tell which is the one people complained about. They end up taking four armfuls of them, missing the very non-abstract work that was flagged.
- Spoofed in the 1979 Doctor Who serial "City of Death", when the TARDIS materializes inside a Paris art gallery and is mistaken by a pair of art lovers (one of whom is John Cleese in a cameo) for an exhibit. After the pair give an approving post-modern critique which boils down to "it's art because it shouldn't be here, but is", the Doctor and Romana rush into the TARDIS and it dematerializes, further impressing the two art lovers.
- The Chaser's War On Everything constructed a skit where they threw out their old rubbish by disguising it as art in galleries.
- The Red Dwarf episode 'Legion'; Rimmer is attempting to impress the titular Legion — who has created several works that Kryten's connoisseur chip identifies as masterpieces:
Rimmer: [About a small, cubic object on the wall] Now this three-dimensional sculpture in particular is quite exquisite. Its simplicity, its bold, stark lines... pray, what do you call it?
Legion: [Bemused] The light switch.
Rimmer: [Embarrassed] The light switch.
Legion: Yes.
Rimmer: I couldn't buy it off you, then.
Legion: Not really — I need it to turn the lights on and off.
- Played deadly straight in an episode of Law And Order — a talented-but-traditional artist (i.e. one who painted stuff that actually looked like other stuff) couldn't sell his paintings because they weren't in the zeitgeist. He eventually snapped and murdered the patron of a modern artist whose work was not only incomprehensible, but actively misogynistic as well, but was racking in loads of cash because it was 'daring'.
- Brian Topp in Spaced epitomizes this trope, as well as being evidence of True Art Is Angsty. Ironically, for most of the series he's not particularly successful, and when he's not angsty, his work is actually comprehensible. Unfortunately for him, it appears that Wangst is his entire muse; he can't paint unless he's miserable.
- A particularly biting satire appears in the episode 'Art', which features Vulva, Brian's former, more successful (and even more pretentious) collaborator, and his modern drama installation — it's two hours of completely incomprehensible gibberish, featuring lots of shouting, frozen poses, weird music and some guy in glasses jumping about with a vaccum cleaner attached to his belt. Memorable for this exchange:
[Vulva freezes; the audience thinks he's finished and begin to applaud]
Vulva: It's not finished!
[Applause stops; Vulva remains standing still for a few more seconds]
Vulva: It's finished.
[The audience applauds again]
- Spaced featured a lot of this; another example revolves around an installation that Brian has been frantically preparing for. We see the audience's reaction, and they comment approvingly on how he manages to isolate the lonely despair of modern life. Then we see what it is; it's mostly what Brian prepared except with the unintended addition of Brian himself, lying unconscious in a pool of green paint having accidentally knocked himself out when the tin fell from a ladder onto his head.
- This trope is averted, however, when Daisy — inspired by the Vulva example above — tries to do the exact same thing, only with her it involves dressing as a clown and screeching "Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" as loud as she can. It's a dismal failure, no one goes to see it, which prompts Tim to comment in surprise that this modern art thing isn't as easy as it looks.
- Another example is when Brian takes Twist to an exhibit of an artist's white paintings... which turn out to be a number of canvases of varying sizes which are blank white. Brian, obviously, is in awe of them, and Twist "insightfully" declares them to be "samey", to which Brian ecstatically agrees.
- Spoofed in The Prisoner when Number 6 builds a boat, but, before escaping, enters its rearranged components in an art competition as an abstract sculpture called "Freedom". It wins. It's played dead straight, however, in the last episode.
- An episode of Murphy Brown features Murphy betting with Miles she could pass off one of her toddler son Avery's fingerpaints as an abstract art piece (by "self-taught artist A. Veret") to discredit a pair of pretentious art critics she was doing a piece on. One of them immediately starts trashing the "painting" calling it "amateurish" and with no value, only for the other critic to jump in to its defense and they both end up getting into a huge argument. Murphy is about to reveal the ruse when the painting ends up being sold at a very high value to a guy who had not even seen the painting: he assumed it was a very important piece of art due to two prominent art critics arguing about it and Murphy doing a piece about it. Murphy tells the guy it was a child's fingerpainting but the he just tells Murphy she doesn't "get it". Eventually she gives up and goes off to get "A. Veret" some more art supplies.
- Another episode had Eldin (who spent the better part of the series painting an elaborate mural in Murphy's apartment) exhibiting one of his paintings in a museum, but was upset that the patrons were more interested in the unveiling (mistaking it for performance art) than the work itself.
- An episode of the live-action Batman series from the 1960s parodied this, where the Joker entered an art contest. It consisted of artists who would do such things like have a monkey scramble crazily over a piece of paper. In the end, the Joker does all sorts of strokes with an imaginary paint brush and presents a blank canvas to the judges, labeling it "The Dead Fly". A pretty, stupid presenter asks where the fly is, and the Joker says, "Well, it's dead, isn't it?" He wins.
- Unless this was done in multiple episodes, the name of his "painting" was "The Mauve Bat."
- Averted in How I Met Your Mother: Barney intentionally makes a horrendous performance involving him acting like a robot and playing a recorder terribly, and everyone (except for his friends, who were being polite) walks out. Granted, he wanted to show Lily (who performed in a pretentious play at the start of the episode) that you can't fake politeness and compliments if you hate the play, and intentionally based it around everything Lily hates (such as the repeating the word "moist" for half an hour, or spraying her repeatedly with a water gun).
- In a Seinfeld episode, Elaine's love interest is the hospitalized artist Roy, whose work consists entirely of triangles. When he takes a turn for the worse George decides to spend a recent windfall on the triangles, counting on the increase in value that would come with the artist's death. However, his spending so much money on Roy's work inspires him to live again.
- In another episode, George is pressured into buying a piece of art by Jerry's girlfriend, which is just a bunch of squares. "It's a bunch of lines! You're telling me you couldn't paint this?"
- In the same episode (The Letter), Kramer has posed for a portrait for Nina (Jerry's artist girlfriend, played by Catherine Keener). True to the trope, the requisite pretentious and snobby art patron couple decide, after much deliberation (they find the portrait simultaneously "hideous" and "exquisite"), to purchase it from her.
- Done in an episode of Get Smart. Agent Smart goes on a long discussion about a painting that looks like a corner of an empty room with a small black dot on it. He says the painting is an allegory for an individual's sense of insignificance in an indifferent world, pointing to the dot as representing mankind. Then the dot flies off.
- And there's the heap of junk entitled "A Heap Of Junk".
- On an episode of the crime series Monk, the titular character is mocked by a formal art class for his paintings, as they are painted in accordance to his particular compulsions and tics. After an art collector buys one of his paintings, he's seen as brilliant, even going so far as to offer his therapist a painting in exchange for a session. It turns out the "art collector" was just a man who wanted the canvas, as the paint could be washed off for the real target—the canvases were made of the exact same paper they print money on. Counterfeit to the max, '80s style!
- Wickedly parodied on The Red Green Show, when Red offers some simple criteria for viewers to tell if something they see is art or not: If I can do it, it's not art.
- Lampshaded on 227. When Mary is cleaning an art gallery for a friend's opening, she leaves her cleaning products on a tray and forgets about them. When a high-brow critic starts praising a certain art piece, everyone assumes he's talking about a gorgeous painting by Mary's friend. But no! He's extolling the genius of Mary's cleaning tray, and encourages her to produce more "pieces" in that vein. Mary's career as an artiste skyrockets, but when she's interviewed on the Arsenio Hall Show with her mentor, the questions lead her to realize that she's no artist. Telling the pompous critic off, she declares that her friend was the true artist all along.
- Some of the Great Gonzo's acts on The Muppet Show were like this, such as when he smashed up a car with a sledgehammer while the orchestra played "The Anvil Chorus", eating a car tire while tap-dancing "The Blue Danube", or when he tried to disarm a bomb while reciting Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias".
- In the Columbo episode "Playback," Columbo mistakes a ventilator shaft for a piece of modern art while in an art gallery.
- Averted in an episode of New Tricks, in which the team are called in to deal with a case involving art fraud, and are seconded an officer from the Fraud Squad who is an expert on art to help them out. Most of the works that appear are more traditional forms of art, but at one point Brian raises the typical complaint of modern art that it's all just meaningless lines and colours. In response, the art expert — who, in another inversion, is not at all pompous and pretentious but a genuinely likable and friendly young woman who is sincerely passionate about art — puts up an obscurist modern piece on the wall and gives him a few helpful pointers on how he might approach reading it. Once he finds a way to interpret the work on his terms, Brian finds himself quite moved by the painting. The actual forger, however, does raise the "it's all just a game to humour pretentious people" defense once he's been rumbled.
- Played with in Gilmore Girls — Rory is reporting on an art exhibit that has rather bizarre art. She goes to get a drink at a water cooler and girls come up and tell her that the water cooler is their friend's piece of art and that it represents his soul. They were kidding, though.
- This was an arguement some people made with regards to The Sopranos' No Ending. Didn't make it any more pleasant.
- The Tom Green Show. Tom secretly takes a self-composed piece of modern art into a museum and places it on an empty space on the wall. Before long, he's vandalizing his own work while a tour group watches. Not long after that, he's fleeing the museum guards.
- An episode of Bones involves a dead artist. The artist's works consists of old cars that have been sent through a scrap yard compactor. His agent even has the work of art that the artist was found in declared art (stalling the case) because it was a piece of art and, more so, the artist had made a comment about eventually merging himself with a piece of his art (i.e., get crushed into one of the cars).
- Played with in an episode of Coronation Street. Toyah Battersby, an art student, tries to pass off her slovenly step-father Les' chair, covered in debris such as empty beer cans and old cigarette stubs, as her art project to her tutor. He tells her about an occasion where he had a student who tried to pass off a pile of bricks as his art project, which the tutor didn't buy, and he failed him. He then asks Toyah to explain how her "project" is anything other than a ratty chair covered in rubbish. She improvises a pretentious explanation about how it represents the British working class, which the tutor doesn't buy, until he sees Les for himself, and agrees it is an accurate representation of him, which causes him to not only give her a high grade, but also recommend her project for an exhibit. Its particularly funny because Toyah literally threw the whole thing together at the last minute using the first things that came to hand, because she had neglected her project until only moments before the tutor turned up at her house.
- Hilariously spoofed in the Malcolm In The Middle episode, "Burning Man". Through an elaborate sequence of events, Malcolm and his entire family (minus Dewey) end up taking a vacation to the Burning Man festival in their RV. While there, Hal sets up the space around the RV as a mini-suburban home (with attached lawn and barbecue). The other Burning Man attendees think he's doing performance art and begin to crowd around to watch him, much to Hal's annoyance.
- Possibly subverted in an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Bad guy Weyoun examines a somewhat abstract painting done by Gul Dukat's daughter Tora Ziyal, but has to ask another character if it's any good because he has no sense of aesthetics.
- Later on we're told why people like Tora's work, she combined the styles of a famous Bajoran artist and Cardassian artist.
- Demonstrated on The Tonight Show, where William Shatner read out Sarah Palin's nonsensical farewell speech as a poem. And it worked.
- An episode of Boy Meets World has the Matthews in an art museum. They see a very stylized statue that doesn't really resemble anything. Normally Book Dumb Eric interprets it as two monkeys fighting over a coconut from their father, and that half a coconut isn't enough for either son. We then see that the title of the statue is "Monkeys with Coconut."
Music
- Animal Collective are big on this, though it could better be described as "True Fun Is Incomprehensible". Most notable example: Avey Tare and his wife Kria Brekkan's album "Pullhair Rubeye", all of which's tracks have been reversed, and some also sped up. Why? Because.
- Tool's actual instrumental work is always at least good and often awesome, but their singer - Maynard James Keenan - is a complete, well, tool. In addition to his lyrics often being exceedingly vague, the band has never printed the lyrics on the actual albums, instead - of course, later - posting them on their website? His justification? "I don't like printing the lyrics because people don't get it."
- Although Metallica has sucked for many years, often they'll comment that their lyrics are meant to be interpreted by the listeners in their own ways, which is another phrase for they came up with something generic with no real meaning in mind to say over guitar tracks.
- Reading the interview for Crack the Skye, I'm starting to think Mastodon is doing this/has been doing this for a while.
- John Cage's "4'33"" - four and a half minutes of silence. He sued an artist who released a track that was a different duration of silence. Successfully sued him.
- Most performances only perform half the required piece; There are supposed to be microphones set up within the audience, and around the area it's being performed - the result is an incredibly amplified ambient sound being performed. A performance of 4'33" in a public park around dusk was... haunting.
- To be completely accurate, "4'33" isn't four and a half minutes of silence. It's four and a half minutes of ambiance.
- Sonic Youth, in what was either an act of homage or sarcasm, once performed a thrash metal cover of 4'33". The piece lasted for twenty seconds.
- John Cage also pioneered use of the "prepared piano" - a piano which has screws and plastic spoons attached to the strings.
- Iannis Xenakis. Musical genius or pretentious bollocks? Your Mileage May Vary.
- Merzbow may be the ultimate expression of this in music. His music mostly consists of the principle of "making an extremely loud noise" (and I mean LOUD - better check in with the ear surgeon before listening), either with guitars or electronic instruments, with no trace of rhythm, beat, certainly no melody, or any kind of structure. It's also High Octane Nightmare Fuel in the extreme.
- The majority of Tori Amos' songs have incomprehensible lyrics. Boys for Pele was even panned by critics, because they couldn't understand what she singing about on the album.
Tabletop Games
- GURPS Aliens features the Purulu race, who, among other quirks, are notorious snobs, fond of decorating their homes with expensive art. Often art they cannot possibly appreciate. Often art they cannot even perceive with the sensory organs they have.
Theatre
- The entire point of Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Three Birds Alighting on a Field. It's a satirical look at the art industry where the first scene is an auctioneer selling a giant piece of blank canvas (entitled "No Illusion") for 1,200,000 Pounds UK.
- Yasmina Reza's play 'Art' (properly spelled in single quotes) revolves around a character who buys a painting that is a canvas painted white (with white lines) and the characters' disagreements over whether it actually qualifies as artwork. The actual play, however, is reasonably straight-forward and doesn't itself invoke the trope.
- Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot — two bums sitting around a tree on a hill, waiting for a man to come, and all the while amusing themselves with Seinfeldian Conversations.
- A famous summary of the play: "Nothing happens, twice."
- This is actually his most comprehensible play. Krapp's Last Tape consists solely of a man listening to half-recorded conversations and eating a banana.
- Passing Strange is all about a young man's pursuit of artistic freedom (among other things), and that pursuit takes him to Berlin in act two, where he joins up with Nowhaus, a collective of artists whose two major beliefs seem to be this and True Art Is Angsty.
- The second half of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George, centers around an artist whose work is quite obscure but very expensive to make, being mostly lasers projected onto the walls or a shapeless statue (depending on your production.) The artist, faced with people trying to (or refusing to try to) understand his work, and the risk of being declared outmoded before his time, eventually decides to screw over other's opinions or current trends, and create.
- Blue Man Group is in part an Affectionate Parody of the modern art scene's tendency towards this (the creators, early on, were actually frustrated that they were being regarded as performance artists because of the genre's reputation for pretention and hype); ironically, it's become far more successful and beloved than most straight practitioners could ever dream.
- It helps that their music is genuinely good, if your tastes run that way.
- Arguably, most early plays written by Tom Stoppard.
- At least, Stoppard has the good graces of being funny while being incomprehensible.
- Cirque Du Soleil shows — especially the earlier, Franco Dragone-directed ones — are so surreal visually and aurally that they often shade into this, though the genuine talent in the individual acts helps balance it out. Dragone's later non-Cirque show Le Reve — A Small Collection of Imperfect Dreams (at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel) is even odder, to the point that it's been in a near-constant state of retooling since its spring 2005 opening due to poor initial response.
- The play Museum is a near-plotless single scene of a museum security guard in the modern art exhibit having to put up with all kinds of weirdos who marvel at the various eyesores on display. It ends when one of the artists comes in, makes a slight change to his work, and leaves without saying a word, after which everyone attacks the artwork and makes off with a piece of it.
- The Rock Garden consists of a mother telling her son about the saltine-and-marshmallow treats she used to make when she was a kid, her father, and her father's cats. Then her husband comes home, she serves him a drink, and she leaves. The husband then goes on at great length about various chores he and the son can do in the future—painting the fence, rearranging the rocks in the rock garden, redoing the irrigation, and spraying the trees in the orchard. Then the son, apropos of absolutely nothing, starts telling the father incredibly graphically what he enjoys doing while having sex. The director's notes of the production claims the play isn't about anything, and we'd would have to agree, and follow up with the question: why was it produced?
- In the Sam Shepard play Action, the four main characters sit around a table and eat turkey and drink coffee. One of the characters periodically breaks several chairs. Another suddenly starts tap dancing. A living fish suddenly appears out of a bucket of water that has been on the stage for several minutes and then one character proceeds to clean it. The End. Turns out the four characters are actually survivors of some kind of apocalyptic holocaust and are simply crazy. But the audience never gets the benefit of this information.
- Parodied in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, in which Konstantin presents a play starring his girlfriend as some kind of god, or representation of life, or the universe, or something, dramatically intoning about all kinds of random crap on a blank stage while surrounded by special effects like sparklers thrown in front of her and the smell of sulfur being released. His mother heckles it mercilessly. Later Konstantin tries to apply the same thing in real life by giving his girlfriend a seagull he's killed as some kind of love symbol. Naturally, she's just weirded out and left open to another writer's attentions.
- The ending (and parts of the opening) of the Who's rock opera Tommy certainly qualifies. Is it an allegory? Is he dead? Is he lying in his house having the crap kicked out of him? Is he still blind, deaf and dumb? Who knows?
- However, this applies less to the stage version, which ends in a much more realistic manner than the original album or the movie. Of course, there are still quite a few incomprehensible moments in the show.
- Gertrude Stein and e.e. cummings, though already named in the "modern poetry" category, didn't leave the theatre alone either. Respectively, they wrote the libretto for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts and the experimental play him; neither has any describable plot. To quote from the former: "Let Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy let Lucy Lucy Lily Lily Lily Lily Lily let Lily Lucy Lucy let Lily. Let Lucy Lily."
- The Gas Heart by Dada playwright and poet Tristan Tzara, whose characters are the features of the human face, who repeat nonsensical phrases over and over or question each other to no ends. Tzara describes the play as "the only and greatest three-act hoax of the century; it will satisfy only industrialized imbeciles who believe in the existence of men of genius."
Video Games
- In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, if the player becomes the leader of the Fighters' Guild, former member Modryn Oreyn tells them that he now spends his time painting. If you decide to break into his house after this, you'll find that his "masterpiece" is little more than a pair of stick figures. Don't believe me? See for yourself.◊
- In Final Fantasy Tactics A 2, in one of the Bonga Bugle newspapers, it says that the Head Editor took 1000 photographs during the mission, but left the lens cap on. The newspaper goes on to say "'Night: a study in 1000 images' rocks art world".
- Subverted in The World Ends With You. Sho Minamimoto piles up a bunch of trash heaps and often acts as if they're all masterpieces. However, similar to Dada himself, it wasn't supposed to be real art, but rather a mockery of the concept of art which fits in with his view that there's no such thing as beauty in the world.
- Killer7. If anyone you know claims to understand this game, they. Are. WRONG!
- Same goes for No More Heroes. Most of the game is a pretty straightforward deconstruction and parody of anti-heroes and people in both Japan and America who idolize the other country's culture without quite getting it. Then there's the ending and everything stops even making the small amount of sense it did in the rest of the game . . .
- Anyone who claims they can make heads or tails out of Vagrant Story is a lying bastard.
- The only part that one cannot make heads or tails out of in that game is whether Ashley killed his own family or killed another person's family and started thinking it was his own. The overall plot is rather simple as it is Sydney's massive Xanatos Gambit to make sure Ashley inherits the power of darkness, not power-hungry Guildenstern or Rosencrantz.
- Braid.
- Passage has been described as being "incredibly poignant" and a prime example of how video games can be art.
- Some people call Shadow of the Colossus this. We must find these people, and hurt them.
- To be fair, the author removes much of the plot to try to keep it mysterious and open to interpretation. Not technically incomprehensable, because there's no "right answer", but working on a similar level.
Webcomics
Web Original
Western Animation
Real Life
- Dave Barry writes about a piece of modern art being removed because it looked like a pile of junk and somebody forgot to put up a plaque stating that it was indeed art, and not a pile of junk. Take That.
- This is a depressingly common occurrence. One city in Germany had to institute a training course to teach its public sanitation workers how to tell its publicly funded series of industrialist "found object" art installations from their legitimate prey.
- Go to any gallery of modern art, and marvel at the mental contortions of critics as they attempt to explain the fundamentally inexplicable.
- Jackson Pollock splattered and dripped paint over found objects (read: loose change and assorted junk) onto giant canvasses laid on the floor, creating work that was tactile, daring, new, and striking. It's also absolutely incomprehensible on any rational level, and, for a bonus level of inaccessibility, loses its impact when photographed and presented in an art book. After too many people tried looking for meaning within Pollock's drip works, he started just numbering them. Ironically, there is a universal meaning in some of the paintings: they end up portraying fractal-like patterns.
- Pollock has stated himself that he always had a very solid idea of how his paintings were to appear. Which colors were to appear in which areas, where colors to be layered and in which order, the degree and depth to the splattering and so forth. Abstract yes, totally random, no.
- Of course, any sufficiently repetitive layering of simple shapes, whether random or ordered, will produce a "fractal-like pattern", since that's essentially what fractals are. Splatter enough layers of anything and you'll end up with fractals. Finding fractal patterns in Pollock's work is no more amazing than finding fractal patterns in a professional house-painter's well-used coveralls.
- Which is completely missing the point. The existence of mathematics does not make finding order in apparent chaos any less profound.
- Mark Rothko's work generally featured blocks of solid color on huge canvases. He suggested standing eighteen inches away to fully appreciate the "spiritual" experience. The weird thing is, it works for some people.
- Yves Klein was all about radically reducing painting to its most minimalistic expression. And by minimalistic painting, he means just lathering blue paint on the canvas. These solid-colored canvasses are on display at Georges Pompidou center in Paris.
- Avant-garde pianist John Cage's composition, 4:33, consists of complete silence. It is usually presented as a pianist sitting at a piano, not touching the keys, but has also been present as a orchestra sitting holding, but not playing their instruments. The result is a focus on different ambiance of sound.
- In 2002, British composer Mike Batt was sued for plagiarism by the John Cage estate for including "A One Minute Silence," a "song" composed of one minute of silence, on an album for his classical rock band The Planets. He was forced to settle out of court for an undisclosed six-figure sum, which he paid to the John Cage Trust.
- The crucial evidence in the case was that Batt credited the piece "Batt/Cage". Anyone considering doing something similar can safely use "Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man" by Alphonse Allais, as it is in the public domain. In fact, according to Cage, 4'33" does not consist of silence, but rather whatever background noise there happens to be during the performance.
- Cage regretted the effects of this trope on his career. Artistic conservatives thought he couldn't compose; artistic radicals wanted more 4'33". Both sides ignored that he studied music with Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell and composed hours of real music, with sound and everything. See Hear.
- Barnett Newman's work, the 'The Voice of Fire' was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada for its permanent collection in 1989 at a cost of $1.8 million. The painting consists only of a red stripe on a blue background.
- Often times, descriptions of an abstract work doesn't do it justice. There's a Mark Rothko in the National Gallery of Art that is nothing more a red and brown rectangle. On paper, it sounds like a joke. In person, it's massively impressive. More than seven feet tall and filled with dozens of subtle shades that don't show up well on photographs, it may not have deep meaning, but it's actually pretty cool to look at.
- SFMOMA has an 'installation' consisting of a pile of 18000 blue shirts. A person sits at a table in front of the pile erasing, line by line, copies of the book "International Law Situations". [1]
- One word: Disumbrationism.
- For those who don't feel like reading an external link: after getting mad about his wife's realistic still-lifes meeting a cold reception from an art exhibition jury, Paul Jordan Smith felt like spoofing modern art, so he gave himself a faux-Slavic name, dressed his hair to look like a brooding Emo artist, painted a sloppy, nonsensical picture of a woman holding a banana over her head, made up some pretentious bullshit about "the shattering of the bonds of womanhood", and claimed he was the founder of the Disumbrationist school of art. But much to his surprise, instead of being mocked and laughed at (which was his actual intention), he was actually praised as an innovative artistic genius! Some time later, after his Kayfabe actually started gaining real followers, he eventually revealed his ruse and lectured everyone about the declining tastes of the artistic community.
- Vigorously spoofed by subversive artist Banksy.
- Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics discusses an entertaining aversion to demonstrate the importance of context: An enormous square of canvas with two tiny right triangles at the center of the top and bottom edges. Its name? The Big N, which is in fact precisely what the painting is.
- Dada artist Marcel Duchamp was the man responsible for putting snow shovels, urinals, and bicycle seats in art galleries. And he once penciled a mustache and goatee on a print of the Mona Lisa and called it "L.H.O.O.Q." (which is a pun on a French phrase, "Elle a chaud au cul", that roughly translates as "She has a hot ass.") He'd probably turn over in his grave if he knew about the host of imitators "inspired" by his "readymade art" who didn't get the joke.
- Of course, Dada was meant to be "Anti-art", as the slogan went "Art is dead, long live dada". Just like Dead Baby Comedy is deliberately gross in order to break the Animation Age Ghetto, Dada was deliberate "anti-art" in order to break the Bourgeois Art Ghetto.
- At least Duchamp apparently had a sense of humour, unlike his countless imitators. Taking a urinal, laying it on its back, signing it "R. Mutt" and calling it Fountain cleverly subverts its original function as well as pissing off (no pun intended?) straitlaced critics, not to mention moral campaigners who thought that putting a latrine on display was obscene. Amusingly, it's not even a real urinal, it wouldn't be functional if installed, and in fact, it has many design differences from other urinals produced by the same firm. Like many of the Readymades, Fountain is actually a sculpture of the object it purports to be. Which is just awesome if you get the point of it. Recently, someone was arrested for trying to piss into Fountain. Duchamp would have loved that.
- Duchamp has an entire room devoted to his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Perhaps his wackiest piece is a massive glass panel embedded with various lines, vaguely mechanical forms, geometric shapes, and the image of a chocolate grinder. The title? The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.
- Duchamp's sister accidentally threw one of his readymades into the trash, because it looked like garbage.
- In a controversial example, we have Scott Campbell and his "MisFormers". Aside from the usual "art" and "pretentious crap" camps, we have a third camp in this case... the people who happen to like Transformers and think that this is a terrible thing to do to one's toys.
- And what of John Lennon and Yoko Ono (particularly Ono)? In fact, The Beatles themselves did some of this (like "Revolution 9"), though a lot of it was probably just drugs.
- People were making tape collages long before
Paul John George Ringo Brian Mick composed "Revolution #9", though. Of course, not all of them were including their tape collages as tracks on major studio rock and roll albums.
- In their defense, "Revolution 9" was only released because Ono kept insisting. And most other "musique concrete" music could fall under this trope.
- "Yoko Ono wanted it" is not a defence.
- And let's not forget the wonderful The Simpsons parody. "Number eight. *BELCH* Number eight. *BELCH* Number eight. *BELCH* Number eight. *BELCH*..."
- A similar joke runs in Russia about Kazimir Malevich's "masterpiece" Black Square, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. He painted real pictures as well, but Black Square is the only one most people can name. It's joked that it depicts black people loading coal at night.
- Black Square is actually a black square on a white background. To be fair, the intent wasn't to be incomprehensible, but to appreciate the beauty of geometric shapes (squares and circles usually) and the contrast between the black and white.
- Likewise, Piet Mondrian most famously painted pictures consisting of solid blocks of color and various line, almost always using only white, black, and the primary colors. While non-representational, the point was to enjoy the beauty of color and shape and the interaction between the two.
- This piece. In short: An artist made a sculpture of a man's head set on a plinth for an art show. The sculpture was rejected. The plinth was put on display.
- The "environmental installation" artist Christo. His pieces consist of him wrapping stuff up with cloth. Stuff like the Reichstag.
- Not just that. He also wrapped eleven small islands with 6.5 million square feet of fabric.
- Christo's art is slightly comprehensible: He wants people to feel amazed and happy that these giant things exist.
- Stephen Pastis spoofed this in Pearls Before Swine, with the following (paraphrased) Directors Commentary in a treasury collection:
- Recently, major collector and tastemaker Charles Saatchi, patron of among much else, Tracey Emin's bed and Damien's Hirst's shark apparently shocked the modern art world by buying paintings.
- In an example of artwork that can actually be considered art, most of Salvador Dali's paintings seem to consist of this trope on LSD. It may have helped that he prepared to paint by staying up for days until he was hallucinating and then painted what he saw.
- Like some other artists listed here, Dali's art perhaps cannot be appreciated without seeing it in person. Many of his well-known paintings, such as Hallucinogenic Toreador are absoloutely huge — the canvases are 3m x 4m. When you see it in person, the detail and colors are stunning, regardless of the content. In addition, he painted a tremendous number of very impressive, more realistic paintings. It's just that people remember him for melting watches. (Even with paintings like The Persistence of Time the colors ... they just can't be reproduced.)
- Fun fact: Dalí's inspiration for The Persistence of Time was a half-molten Camembert cheese lying around his house on a hot day. Before that, he was just painting a rather normal landscape.
- A good measure for how many drugs a musical group does is how much they follow this trope.
- Frank Zappa combined this, Dead Baby Comedy, and inane doo-wop, but eschewed drugs.
- Ever listen to The Mars Volta?
- Some people actually like The Mars Volta without liking the weird incomprehensible bits. Fir that matter, it's hardly the only band where retaining your sanity requirs that you ignore the lyrics.
- Clearly you need to listen to Mr. Bungle's Disco Volante, you'll never call The Mars Volta incomprehensible again.
- Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music was 64 minutes and 11 seconds, split across four LP sides, of guitar feedback played at different speeds. Unsurprisingly, Reed said he was stoned to the bejeezus at the time.
- "For the Love of God," a platinum-plated human skull encrusted with diamonds, received this review, all but an admission that the modern art community is a sham based entirely on pretension and brand marketing:
"If anyone but Hirst had made this curious object, we would be struck by its vulgarity. It looks like the kind of thing Asprey or Harrods might sell to credulous visitors from the oil states with unlimited amounts of money to spend, little taste, and no knowledge of art. I can imagine it gracing the drawing room of some African dictator or Colombian drug baron. But not just anyone made it — Hirst did. Knowing this, we look at it in a different way and realise that in the most brutal, direct way possible, For the Love of God questions something about the morality of art and money."
- Ah, Damien Hirst. Also notable for a piece consisting of a dead, fully grown tiger shark floating in a tank of vitrine. Makes...sense...
- Any electronica video. Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, Dan Deacon, you name it.
- Autechre's music itself is pretty, um, difficult sometimes. The NME infamously called the 'Ganz Graf' EP an 'impenetrable curtain of misanthropic noise' and a "festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank." Another quote by NME on Autechre's latest work 'Quaristice': "still waiting on Autechre's feel-good pop crossover album? Don't hold your breath." Put it down more to innate NME journalist bias and the current state of "indie" music than anything.
- Not "any electronica" video. Just a significant portion. For an example of one that doesn't follow this trope (but might seem to at first), try Daft Punk's video for Revolution 909 (incidentally, a song named after the aforementioned Revolution 9 by the Beatles). Basically, Revolution 909 is just supposed to be fun, not pretentious. Also good is their video for Burnin'
- One Daft Punk video that looks like it fits the trope but then subverts it: "Around The World". At first it seems to be people in inexplicable costumes dancing... until you realize they're actually moving in time to the song. Each costume is a different instrument - the babyheads are the bass, the skeletons are the guitar, the mummies are the keyboard, and the robots are the vocals.
- Close, but the mummies are the drums and the girls in the swimsuits are the keyboards
- Ern. Fucking. Malley. There was a poetry magazine called Angry Penguins, and they started getting these poems sent in, supposedly from the late Ern Malley's sister. The people behind Angry Penguins were completely in love with the things, praised them to the rooftops... Turned out they were purposefully random nonsense, written by a couple of guys who felt that the magazine was falling into this trope, and decided to test their theory.
- Comedian Bill Bailey has a short sampler piece called Jean Michel Jarre Is a Fraud set to the tune of "Oxygene Pt4". Just to get across how awesome this is, the only thing it samples is Bailey himself intoning "Jean Michel Jarre is a fraud" into a microphone. Played at various different speeds and pitches.
- Piss Christ. Or anything by Andres Serrano for that matter. His picture "Semen and Blood III"◊ (made by mixing his semen and cow blood) was used for Metallica's Load album. And "Blood and Piss"◊ (made of, yep Exactly What It Says On The Tin) was used for ReLoad.
- Brice Marden. His paintings seem to come in three categories; one color, several colors in a row, and squiggly lines. In real life, they are quite pleasing, but the pictures make them look like paint samples. Here are some of them
- Another excellent true art is incomprehensible artist would be Jonathon Keats. This is a man who once sold his thoughts, tried to get A=A instated as a law in Berkeley, copyrighted his mind (reasoning that his brain was a sculpture he'd made by effort of thinking) and sold future shares in it, made a porn theater for plants (featuring videos of rhododendrons being pollinated), tried to genetically engineer god, and began selling a "Make your own universe" kit. In short, he is utterly awesome.
- The quizzes on the website http://reverent.org/ (such as "Machine translation or Faulkner?", "Mozart or Salieri?", and "Masterpiece of minimalism, or affordable furniture?") explore the question of how well people can recognize True Art and how easily they can be fooled.
- This video.
- Alan Sokal's submission to the journal Social Text is possibly the best example of a Real Life subversion of this trope. Sokal was a physicist who was curious about whether humanities debates were genuinely deep or simply obfuscatory gibberish, and so decided to test it by submitting an intentionally-nonsensical paper to a journal. It was essentially a series of puns, non sequiturs, and blatant lies designed to "prove" that quantum mechanics endorsed a postmodernist worldview, which got accepted and printed. ThatOtherWiki has more.
- The most obvious problem that came out of the whole thing was that Social Text didn't have a peer review process for some reason.
- Jean Baudrillard had several things to say about the Unfortunate Implications of this in his aptly-titled The Conspiracy of Art
- Elephant's Dream is a unique example. There's definitely a story there. No one really knows what it is though...
- Notice, however, that having a story here was actually secondary; it was meant to be a test run of CGI cinema made only with GPL free software.
- The art of Spatialism, founded by Lucio Fontana. What he wanted to do was abandon artist's traditional reliance on the illusion of spatial depth. In other words, slashing canvases.
- Anyone remember the orange gates in Central Park? The ones that followed the paths. It made no sense, they were just there.
- The Daily Show remembers.
"Like all great art, it challenges what we thought we knew about the world. For instance, I used to think $21,000,000 could be used to achieve something noble, like, I don't know, build a hospital wing. But 'The Gates' has forced me to recontextualize my notion of what $21,000,000 can be used for — in this case, redecorating a bike path."
- There was a painting made by Henri Matisse that was accidently upside-down for a whole month before someone noticed the error. Everyone assumed it was part of the painting's appeal.
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◊. The viewer is reassured that they are looking at Real Art. The artist has not sold out to our bourgeois corporate materialistic traditionalist oppressive hierarchical heartless soulless philistine overlords. Bold, innovative art naturally justifies a seven-figure price tag, even if it's unclear what's being innovated, and why.
In a comedy, expect a more cynical character to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Don't expect anybody to listen. Also expect that if someone happens to leave something mundane and innocuous lying around in the proximity of any kind of art installation, it'll immediately attract a flock of pretentious 'art'-lovers raving about how deep and meaningful it is. Artists and art-patrons who appreciate this kind of art tend to be depicted as pretentious, snobby hipster poseurs, who look down their noses at anyone who doesn't 'get it' and are usually, ironically, not nearly as smart as they like to think themselves as being.
Sadly, this is also a case of Truth In Television, as the obscenely long "Real Life" section indicates. Certain consumers of 20th-century art don't value a piece unless it's opaque, subversive, and requires four years of study to comprehend. For that matter, in the eyes of some, an Art Film is not an Art Film unless it's too surreal to be related to in any other context. This attitude would be harmless, if it didn't seep into the minds of importance-seeking writers and artists who substitute obfuscation for technical skill, and lead audiences to view any recent representational work as kitschy, unimaginative, or an unnecessary duplication of a task more efficiently performed by a camera.
... And we won't even get into the counterculture of comic and webcomic artists who like nothing better than to use their new medium for lobbing a heavy-handed Take That at the art teachers who tried and obviously failed to discourage their comic work thanks to this trope. Of course, True Art Sticks It To The Man anyway, so it (usually) balances out.
Of course, sometimes the Emperor really does have clothes. There's no faster way to establish a character as a philistine than to have them refer to Guernica
