Why Do People Say Bad Things About Great Pieces of Art

Artists throughout history have never shied abroad from controversy—in fact, many fifty-fifty endeavor to court infamy. (Need proof? Just look at Banksy, the anonymous street creative person who recently created a work that cocky-destructed the moment it was sold at sale—for a whopping $one.37 million.) While information technology's upwards to critics and historians to contend technique and artistic merit, there are some works of art that shocked nigh people who saw them. From paintings accounted too lewd, too rude or too gory for their fourth dimension to acts of so-called desecration and powerful political statements, these are some of the near controversial artworks ever created.

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one. Michelangelo, "The Terminal Judgement," 1536–1541

Some 25 years later completing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Renaissance polymath Michelangelo returned to the Vatican to work on a fresco that would exist debated for centuries. His depiction of the Second Coming of Christ in "The Terminal Judgement," on which he worked from 1536 to 1541, was met with immediate controversy from the Counter-Reformation Catholic church. Religious officials spoke out against the fresco, for a number of reasons, including the style with which Michelangelo painted Jesus (beardless and in the Archetype manner of pagan mythology). Just nigh shocking of all were the painting'due south 300 figures, mostly male and mostly nude. In a move chosen a fig-foliage entrada, $.25 of material and flora were afterward painted over the offending beefcake, some of which were afterward removed as part of a 20th century restoration.

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ii. Caravaggio, "St. Matthew and the Affections," 1602

Bizarre painter Caravaggio'south life may exist more controversial than whatsoever of his work, given the fact that he died in exile after being accused of murder. Simply his unconventionally humanistic approach to his religious commissions certainly raised eyebrows in his day. In the at present-lost painting "St. Matthew and the Angel," created for the Contarelli Chapel in Rome, Caravaggio flipped convention by using a poor peasant as a model for the saint. But what upset critics the almost were St. Matthew's muddied feet, which illusionistically seemed to jut from a canvas (a recurring visual fob for the artist), and the way the image unsaid him to be illiterate, as though being read to by an angel. The work was ultimately rejected and replaced with "The Inspiration of St. Matthew," a similar, yet more standard, depiction of the scene.

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three. Thomas Eakins, "The Gross Clinic," 1875

This icon of American art was created in anticipation of the nation's centenary, when painter Thomas Eakins was eager to show off both his talent and the scientific advances of Philadelphia'southward Jefferson Medical College. The realist painting puts the viewer in the centre of a surgical amphitheater, where doctor Dr. Samuel Gross lectures students operating on a patient. Only its matter-of-fact delineation of surgery was deemed likewise graphic, and the painting was rejected past the Philadelphia Centenary Exhibition (some blame the physician'due south bloody easily, others fence it was the female figure shielding her eyes that put information technology over the edge). However, a century later, the painting has finally been recognized as one of the great masterpieces of its time on both its creative and scientific merits.

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4. Marcel Duchamp "Fountain," 1917

When iconoclastic Marcel Duchamp anonymously submitted a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt 1917" every bit a "readymade" sculpture to the Society of Independent Artists, a group known to have any artist who could come up with the fee‚ the unthinkable happened: the piece was denied, even though Duchamp himself was a cofounder and board member of the group. Some even wondered if the piece was a hoax, only Dada periodical The Blind Man defended the urinal as art because the creative person chose it. The piece marked a shift from what Duchamp called "retinal," or purely visual, fine art to a more conceptual fashion of expression—sparking a dialogue that continues to this day near what actually constitutes a work of fine art. Though all that remains of the original is a photograph past Alfred Stieglitz (who threw the piece away) taken for the magazine, multiple authorized reproductions from the 1960s are in major collections around the world.

Photo by Ben Blackwell/Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

five. Robert Rauschenberg, "Erased De Kooning," 1953

In some ways, Robert Rauschenberg'southward "Erased De Kooning" presaged Banksy'southward self-destructing painting. But in the case of the 1953 drawing, the creative person decided the original artwork must be important on its ain. "When I just erased my own drawings, it wasn't fine art yet," Rauschenberg told SFMoMA in 1999. So he called upon the most revered modern artist of the 24-hour interval, the mercurial abstruse expressionist Willem de Kooning, who, after some convincing, gave the younger artist a drawing with a mix of grease pencil fine art and charcoal that took Rauschenberg 2 months to erase. It took well-nigh a decade for word of the piece to spread, when it was met with a mix of wonder (Was this a young genius usurping the master?) and disgust (Is it vandalism?). One person not particularly impressed was de Kooning himself, who later on told a reporter he initially found the idea "corny," and who some say resented that such an intimate interaction between artists had been shared with the public.

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vi. Yoko Ono, "Cut Piece," 1964 / Marina Abramovic, "Rhythm 0," 1974

As performance art emerged as an artistic do in the postwar years, the art form often pushed toward provocation and even danger. In Yoko Ono'due south "Cut Piece," a 1964 performance, the artist invited the audience to take a pair of scissors and cut off a piece of her article of clothing as she sat motionless and silent. "People were then shocked they did non talk nearly it," she afterward recalled.

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Ten years later, Marina Abramovic unknowingly revisited the concept with "Rhythm 0," in which the creative person provided the audition with 72 objects to exercise what they "desired." Forth with scissors, Abramovic offered a range of tools: a rose, a feather, a whip, a scalpel, a gun, a bullet, a slice of chocolate cake. Over the class of the six-hour performance, the audience became more than and more than violent, with 1 drawing claret from her cervix ("I notwithstanding have the scars," she has said) and some other belongings the gun to her head, igniting a fight even within the gallery ("I was prepare to dice"). The audience broke out in a fight over how far to take things, and the moment the performance concluded, Abramovic recalled, everyone ran abroad to avoid against what had happened. Since and then, Abramovic has been called the godmother of performance art, with her oft-physically-extreme work continuing to polarize viewers and critics alike.

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7. Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party," 1974–79

With her "Dinner Party," Judy Chicago fix out to advocate for the recognition of women throughout history—and ended up making fine art history herself. A circuitous installation with hundreds of components, the piece is an imagined feast featuring 39 women from throughout mythology and history—Sojourner Truth, Sacajawea, and Margaret Sanger among them—each represented at the table with a place setting, almost all of which depict stylized vulvas. With its mix of anatomical imagery and craft techniques, the piece of work was dubbed vulgar and kitschy past critics, and information technology was chop-chop satirized by a counter-exhibition honoring women of "dubious distinction." But despite the detractors, the piece is now seen equally a landmark in feminist art, on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum.

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viii. Maya Lin, "Vietnam Veterans Memorial," completed 1982

Maya Lin was only 21 when she won the commission that would launch her career—and a national debate. Her pattern for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was chosen by a blind jury, who had no idea the winning designer was an compages educatee. While the proposed design fit all the requirements, including the incorporation of 58,000 names of soldiers who never returned from the war, its minimalist, understated class—ii black granite slabs that rise out of the earth in a "V," like a "wound that is airtight and healing," Lin has said—was immediately subject area to political argue by those who felt information technology didn't properly heroize the soldiers it honors. One veteran called the design a "blackness gash of shame," and 27 Republican congressmen wrote to President Ronald Reagan demanding the design non be built. But Lin advocated for her vision, testifying before Congress about the intention behind the work. Ultimately information technology came down to a compromise, when a runner-up entry in the contest featuring three soldiers was added nearby to complete the tribute (a flag and Women's Memorial were also added subsequently). Every bit the altitude from the war has grown, criticism of the memorial has faded.

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9. Ai Weiwei, "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," 1995

Chinese creative person and activist Ai Weiwei is one of art's most provocative figures, and his practice frequently calls into question ideas of value and consumption. In 1995 the artist nodded to Duchamp with "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," a piece he called a "cultural readymade." As the title implies, the work consisted of dropping, and thus destroying, a 2,000-year-quondam ceremonial urn. Not simply did the vessel take considerable monetary value (Ai reportedly paid several hundred thousand dollars for it), only information technology was also a potent symbol of Chinese history. The willful desecration of an celebrated artifact was decried as unethical by some, to which the creative person replied by quoting Mao Zedong, "the merely way of edifice a new world is by destroying the old one." Information technology's an idea Ai returns to, painting a like vessel with the Coca Cola logo or bright processed colors as people fence whether he'south using genuine antiquities or fakes. Either mode, his provocative body of work has inspired other acts of destruction—like when a company to a Miami exhibition of Ai's piece of work smashed a painted vessel in an illegal act of protestation that mirrored the Ai'due south own.

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10. Chris Ofili, "The Holy Virgin Mary," 1996

It's hardly shocking that an exhibition called "Sensation" caused a stir, but that's simply what happened when it opened in London in 1997 with a number of controversial works by the and then-called Immature British Artists: Marcus Harvey's painting of killer Myra Hindley, Damien Hirst's shark-in-formaldehyde sculpture, a installation by Tracey Emin titled "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963–1995)," and Marc Quinn's cocky portrait sculpture made of claret. When the bear witness hit the Brooklyn Museum 2 years later, it was "The Holy Virgin Mary," a Madonna by Chris Ofili that earned the most scorn. The glittering collage contained pornographic magazine clippings and hunks of resin-coated elephant dung, which media outlets erroneously reported was "splattered" across the piece. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to pull the urban center'due south $7 meg grant for the show, calling the exhibition "sick stuff," while religious leaders and celebrities joined the protests on contrary sides. Two decades later, Ofili's controversial painting has earned a place in the arc of fine art history—and in the permanent drove of the Museum of Mod Art.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/most-controversial-art-in-history

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