For the second blog post I went to the Whitney Museum of American Arts. When I first arrived there I was surprised at how much people there were, but after going in I had to admit it was pretty nice. At first I thought who would pay 20 dollar for this, but thankfully I was able to go in for free with Baruch ID. When I finally went inside the first exhibit that was there was the History of Protest, and it was interesting because the artworks were very different from the type of protest that we see in history class. The artworks did not feature a group of people protesting holding up pickets, and not many of them had any texts. They were much more explicit and blunt about the whole thing, with many abstract expressions used to convey what violence really was as to show why it should be stopped. There were also civil rights movement artworks that featured posters and texts that were used to protest other types of violence in the United States, not just war, for example there was a flag that said “A man was lynched by police yesterday”. Then there were typical artworks that didn’t really interest me in any way, paintings depicting America in the 20th century and other modern abstract arts. What was especially interesting was the abundance of how many colored canvases there were, I mean literally just empty, single or two colored canvases, and I couldn’t help but feel that I can’t really understand modern arts, despite the many arguments in defense for it. A friend that accompanied me to the museum thought there was more to it than just a white canvas to one of the exhibits and thought that there were texts behind the white canvas but there was no such thing. Really disappointing.
