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Seven Keys to Modern Art
With modern art’s proclivity for self-expression, originality, and the abstract, great works can often seem indecipherable. This book provides the tools to help interpret the seemingly bizarre and often intimidating aspects of modern and contemporary art by exploring twenty works in terms of seven key perspectives: history, biography, aesthetics, experience, theory, criticism, and the market.
Author, artist, and art historian Simon Morley shows how twenty well-known but little-understood works of art can serve as useful gateways not only for understanding each other, but also for appreciating works by the same artists and the wider world of art in general. Morley points to visual and theoretical dimensions of art that are not immediately obvious, reconstructing the perspectives of artists and the context within which works were made. Seven Keys to Modern Art is a liberating approach, offering a highly practical and universally applicable method of art interpretation and appreciation.
Author, artist, and art historian Simon Morley shows how twenty well-known but little-understood works of art can serve as useful gateways not only for understanding each other, but also for appreciating works by the same artists and the wider world of art in general. Morley points to visual and theoretical dimensions of art that are not immediately obvious, reconstructing the perspectives of artists and the context within which works were made. Seven Keys to Modern Art is a liberating approach, offering a highly practical and universally applicable method of art interpretation and appreciation.
- GenresArtNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Published March 12, 2019
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175 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 2, 2022
More fool me for thinking that there might be a solid book about modern art out there. Last time it was two Susie Hodge books, now it's this.
Morley's concept is that any work of modern art can be analyzed through seven approaches which he calls "keys." These are: biographical, aesthetic, historical, experiential, theoretical, skeptical, and market. This is not properly a survey, instead, he names twenty works of art and applies each of the seven keys to each work.
Morley plays fast and loose with the label of "Modern Art," reaching all the way up to 2003 with Doris Salcedo's Untitled, so it's really more about modern and contemporary art together. Some artists are left-field choices, like Lee Ufan and Bill Viola, but maybe Morley has taken some sort of vow never to write about Jeff Koons or something. I don't really have a problem with the works chosen. Some are the choices you would expect for each artist, such as Malevich being represented by The Black Square, Duchamp by The Fountain, and Yayoi Kusama by Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field. Some are weirder choices, like Picasso's Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, a Guitar and Newspaper, and Warhol's Big Electric Chair. But since this is a book proposing a system of analyzing modern art, and not a survey of it from top to tail, we can progress to talking about the system itself.
Let me say outright that Morley's "keys" are already things Art Historians do, it's just that we don't typically divide our writing into such rigid categories in the same chapter. I am not generally speaking opposed to the idea of breaking down a work of art into manageable thematic lenses. I used something similar while teaching introduction to art history, though mine was a four-lens approach adapted from Marilyn Stokstad. If you're teaching, it's helpful to have students categorize the evidence of a painting into different categories (distinguishing between visual analysis and psychological analysis of the artist seems to give undergrads and Freudians some trouble.) But generally speaking, professional art historians and art writers don't do this as a matter of course because it's clunky to read, it's not compelling, the information comes in a silly order, and these categories aren't very solid at all.
Morley suggests that the two limitations of his method are that the keys are not hierarchical and that we cannot see the works in person. I don't think the former matters much and the latter not at all for everyone who remembers that they are in fact reading a book. They are certainly not my main gripes by any means.
I think the major limitation is that the keys are clunky and their deployment leaves a lot to be desired. The theoretical key cannot decide if it wants to be the theories that the artist employed during their lifetime or the things that started to be written about them twenty years after they were dead. In the case of the former, it keeps butting up against the historical key. This overlap would not be a problem in normal art historical scholarship where the "keys" are blended into a compelling narrative or argument, but because these chapters are so rigidly divided into the different keys, the point becomes scattered over multiple sections, introduced out of logical order, repeated, and muddled. Other irritating overlaps I noticed were between aesthetic and historical, aesthetic and experiential, biographical and historical, and biographical and market. Some of the keys are significantly weaker than others, in particular I think the experiential key starts out with grand promises to explore the physiological responses to artwork but does so weakly, and the market key is just auction numbers with weak analysis.
The majority of my irritation comes from the skeptical key. It is a combination of being "Well, actually"d by the insufferable contrarian in your college seminar, dismissed by your "everything is stupid and lame" eye-rolling teenage brother, and canceled by an overzealous and unnuanced Twitter mob. Some of its highlights for me were:
-Complaining that Matisse's art is too ornamental. This is like complaining that a fish swims instead of riding a bicycle.
-Whining that Picasso's collages could be done by anyone. I never want to hear this "my five-year-old could have done that" nonsense ever again.
-Dismissing Duchamp by saying that he allowed institutions the ability to define art, leaving definitions of art depending on the whims of powerful and influential people. Duchamp did many things, but he did not invent the powerful and wealthy defining what is good art and bad art.
-Weirdly critiquing Yayoi Kusama's decision to make art that reflects her mental illness and then also somehow blame it on kids and their damn phones.
-Complaining that Frida Kahlo's work is not adequately appreciated for its revolutionary political sentiments, which is a problem with scholarship, not a problem with Kahlo's work. Also, Morley didn't write about Kahlo's revolutionary politics elsewhere in the chapter and it's a huge point in her scholarship outside of this book, so who is he complaining about? The call is coming from inside the house.
-Claiming that it is a problem that the work made by Xu Bing, a Chinese artist, for a primarily Chinese audience using the Chinese language is invalid because non-Chinese speakers are excluded from it. Give me a break.
The sole good contribution by the skeptic key is the pointing out that Barbara Kruger's anti-commercial slogans have been appropriated for commercial advertisements. This is useful analysis, appropriate to our understanding of the artwork. Otherwise, I think it's mostly complaining that water is wet.
There is competent writing in here, competent history, but I'm not convinced by the method and the skeptical key is less than useless.
Morley's concept is that any work of modern art can be analyzed through seven approaches which he calls "keys." These are: biographical, aesthetic, historical, experiential, theoretical, skeptical, and market. This is not properly a survey, instead, he names twenty works of art and applies each of the seven keys to each work.
Morley plays fast and loose with the label of "Modern Art," reaching all the way up to 2003 with Doris Salcedo's Untitled, so it's really more about modern and contemporary art together. Some artists are left-field choices, like Lee Ufan and Bill Viola, but maybe Morley has taken some sort of vow never to write about Jeff Koons or something. I don't really have a problem with the works chosen. Some are the choices you would expect for each artist, such as Malevich being represented by The Black Square, Duchamp by The Fountain, and Yayoi Kusama by Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field. Some are weirder choices, like Picasso's Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, a Guitar and Newspaper, and Warhol's Big Electric Chair. But since this is a book proposing a system of analyzing modern art, and not a survey of it from top to tail, we can progress to talking about the system itself.
Let me say outright that Morley's "keys" are already things Art Historians do, it's just that we don't typically divide our writing into such rigid categories in the same chapter. I am not generally speaking opposed to the idea of breaking down a work of art into manageable thematic lenses. I used something similar while teaching introduction to art history, though mine was a four-lens approach adapted from Marilyn Stokstad. If you're teaching, it's helpful to have students categorize the evidence of a painting into different categories (distinguishing between visual analysis and psychological analysis of the artist seems to give undergrads and Freudians some trouble.) But generally speaking, professional art historians and art writers don't do this as a matter of course because it's clunky to read, it's not compelling, the information comes in a silly order, and these categories aren't very solid at all.
Morley suggests that the two limitations of his method are that the keys are not hierarchical and that we cannot see the works in person. I don't think the former matters much and the latter not at all for everyone who remembers that they are in fact reading a book. They are certainly not my main gripes by any means.
I think the major limitation is that the keys are clunky and their deployment leaves a lot to be desired. The theoretical key cannot decide if it wants to be the theories that the artist employed during their lifetime or the things that started to be written about them twenty years after they were dead. In the case of the former, it keeps butting up against the historical key. This overlap would not be a problem in normal art historical scholarship where the "keys" are blended into a compelling narrative or argument, but because these chapters are so rigidly divided into the different keys, the point becomes scattered over multiple sections, introduced out of logical order, repeated, and muddled. Other irritating overlaps I noticed were between aesthetic and historical, aesthetic and experiential, biographical and historical, and biographical and market. Some of the keys are significantly weaker than others, in particular I think the experiential key starts out with grand promises to explore the physiological responses to artwork but does so weakly, and the market key is just auction numbers with weak analysis.
The majority of my irritation comes from the skeptical key. It is a combination of being "Well, actually"d by the insufferable contrarian in your college seminar, dismissed by your "everything is stupid and lame" eye-rolling teenage brother, and canceled by an overzealous and unnuanced Twitter mob. Some of its highlights for me were:
-Complaining that Matisse's art is too ornamental. This is like complaining that a fish swims instead of riding a bicycle.
-Whining that Picasso's collages could be done by anyone. I never want to hear this "my five-year-old could have done that" nonsense ever again.
-Dismissing Duchamp by saying that he allowed institutions the ability to define art, leaving definitions of art depending on the whims of powerful and influential people. Duchamp did many things, but he did not invent the powerful and wealthy defining what is good art and bad art.
-Weirdly critiquing Yayoi Kusama's decision to make art that reflects her mental illness and then also somehow blame it on kids and their damn phones.
-Complaining that Frida Kahlo's work is not adequately appreciated for its revolutionary political sentiments, which is a problem with scholarship, not a problem with Kahlo's work. Also, Morley didn't write about Kahlo's revolutionary politics elsewhere in the chapter and it's a huge point in her scholarship outside of this book, so who is he complaining about? The call is coming from inside the house.
-Claiming that it is a problem that the work made by Xu Bing, a Chinese artist, for a primarily Chinese audience using the Chinese language is invalid because non-Chinese speakers are excluded from it. Give me a break.
The sole good contribution by the skeptic key is the pointing out that Barbara Kruger's anti-commercial slogans have been appropriated for commercial advertisements. This is useful analysis, appropriate to our understanding of the artwork. Otherwise, I think it's mostly complaining that water is wet.
There is competent writing in here, competent history, but I'm not convinced by the method and the skeptical key is less than useless.
March 9, 2020
Don’t be confused, the book doesn’t teach how to approach art from the seven advertised perspectives, but provides examples.
It tries to cover a lot in a small package, so we end up just scratching the surface of famous artists’ signature works.
It was a moderately interesting read to me personally. I would want to say that the general audience for the Seven Keys is people new to essays on modern art, but then, every now and then, the author goes into a two-page philosophy grade analysis, not fit for ”beginners”...
Hate to say I wasn’t pleasantly surprised, but can’t say this was a disappointment.
It tries to cover a lot in a small package, so we end up just scratching the surface of famous artists’ signature works.
It was a moderately interesting read to me personally. I would want to say that the general audience for the Seven Keys is people new to essays on modern art, but then, every now and then, the author goes into a two-page philosophy grade analysis, not fit for ”beginners”...
Hate to say I wasn’t pleasantly surprised, but can’t say this was a disappointment.
March 6, 2019
The seven keys are an excellent tool that I will certainly keep in mind in the future when I try to make sense of a piece of modern art. Morley chose twenty significant works of 20th century art and applies his seven keys to each of them. The resulting analysis is profound, multifaceted and critical. I feel like I learned a lot by reading this book!
May 31, 2019
This is a great book. A bit of an unexpected gem that reviews individual specific modern and contemporary artworks from renowned artists from seven different frames of reference. The multiple views approach is refreshing and for each work presents a theoretical and historical context, an audience perspective as well as market perspectives. Its short essay format has meant it was perfect a breakfast table staple book for me over the last few weeks. Highly recommended for those interested in Modern and contemporary art.
September 4, 2019
Morley explains clearly the why and how of various art pieces of the 20th and 21st century. I leave this book with a better understanding of how to approach works from these eras and schools, as well as how to approach and understand contemporary theatre and music.
January 23, 2021
This is very useful to get a better understanding of the artworks that the author comments directly, but it also gives a good framework to analyse different ones.
A good stepping stone to get a better understanding of art, but it's necessary to complement with further readings.
A good stepping stone to get a better understanding of art, but it's necessary to complement with further readings.
March 29, 2021
Great introduction to cataogorising modern art. I've not seen a book organised like this, very refreshing!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews