Robert Hughes and Greenburg (Modernism)

Greenburg's thesis is a very hard one to follow but from it I discerned the following points:

Modernist Painting is:
 - Mostly about the medium you are using.  Instead of trying to represent the world, it focuses on using the paint to create an IDEA of the world.
- The images are flat, it is no longer necessary to create an image that is an exact likeness of the real world.
- It is self-critical, which I take to mean that instead of portraying outward things, it is mostly portraying the artist's feelings or emotions.

Other than that, I understood very little of what he was getting at.

Robert Hughes' documentary tries to illustrate how Modernist Art came into being.  It is believed that it derives from the point in History, after the first and second world wars when everything became purely commercial.  America's economy was booming thanks to the debts that the losers of the wars were asked to pay.  Cars, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Industry,  all these things that were once mere PRODUCTS that ultimately meant nothing in the grand scheme of things became IMPORTANT, and thus people started to believing in NOTHING.

I believe that it was at this point when the artist started looking inward instead of looking outward... or criticizing the outside world and their relation to it.  Pollack focused on the ACT of painting, throwing it about the place as if nothing mattered... Bauhaus was a movement that took that commericialism and made art based on functionality, it pretty much says that ANYONE can have art. Warhol took it to the next level, taking normal, everyday things and mass-producing prints of the items calling them Art and thrusting art in the public's face yelling: "SEE WHAT YOU WILL CONSUME!!!"

Modernism is art for art's sake...  It rejects everything and nothing... it is confusing... and pure chaos, and that is why people love it.