not, like, continuously, obviously, but it's sort of a weirder and more complex question that it might appear, and also I'm coming at it from a weird perspective:

I don't like abstract expressionism that much!

at least not a lot of the big names. Gorky, de Kooning, and even Pollock leave me cold. I come from an illustrative, classical background in drawing, and for a long time abstraction in general was just something I considered obviously a scam.

it's also sort of an odd thing to argue about because the easiest answer is tautological. abstract expressionism has cultural value because it... was valued culturally. it's undeniable that it dramatically shaped the course of art that followed. even if some of that value was propped up by a combination of New York art dealers in the wake of every other major industrial power getting ruined in the second world war making America the dominant economic force, and the CIA using the movement as a propaganda tool, in some sense abstract expressionism is a valuable emergent cultural phenomenon of that moment. I mean, I started thinking about this question again because I've been reading this big book of John Berger essays and there's a piece where he characterizes Pollock as this master of his medium who nevertheless couldn't see a way out of the atomized, ultra-individualist framework of postwar american capitalism, and so created an art form perfectly absent of anything but the action of having painted, a recorded mark that ultimately represented a void so deep it finally killed him! it's not, like, cheery, but it surely has art historical value to explore from that perspective.

there's probably some more positive arguments one could make, though. Berger for instance admires the way that Pollock's process results in a nearly but not completely uniform experience of pattern and rhythm. abstract expressionism helped to take pattern and texture and center them as concerns of the painter. it's possible we'd just keep winding back up at different forms of more ordered abstraction from here (de Stijl and soviet Constructivism both got there on their own after all) but the color field painting of folks like Rothko and Barnett Newman grew out of abstract expressionism's fascination with paint as a thing in itself rather than as representation.

which, hey, maybe that's still something the hypothetical listener is skeptical about. it's sort of hard to make the case for ab ex's cultural value if you also already think the OTHER shit that follows from ab ex suck. in a museum in Pittsburgh, in front of a piece by I think either Helen Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell (what does it say about me that I like a lot of the female abstract expressionists better than the more famous men?), Sarah made an argument for the process and metholodogy to me. it's sorta complicated for me to translate from Sarah's mindset ("also, abstract art is just better, it's nicer to look at" lol) into my own words and perspective, but basically her notion is that we see, in abstract expressionism, a very direct experience of whatever the artist was feeling at that moment, whatever was driving the creative process, unbound to reference. it's an incredibly intimate way of creating and perceiving as an audience.

the art that follows from ab ex bears that mark, that priority. why else would someone spend the time to paint undetectable brushstrokes of slightly different shades of red, on monumental canvases, like the color field painters do, if not as part of a personal meditation on a color and the experience of gazing upon it, which we can share as an audience? and from there, too, you get artists like Jasper Johns who will take a target or an american flag and paint it roughly, texturally, like an abstract expressionist would, and in doing so denaturalize the symbol, meditate on it, reveal a complexity that can't be resolved by the original symbol. or, if you really are still on that classical drawing grind like I am, look at an artist like Maggi Hambling. do we get to Hambling's roiling, rough brushwork and pencil work without Pollock's free engagement with texture for its own sake? every stroke in her artwork feels like she's reaching out to feel the subject. it's breathtaking.

I've come to see abstract expressionist paintings through the eyes of others, I guess, over time. sometimes it's through the eyes of other people I respect who get something profound out of them. other times it's through the eyes of other artists I love, whose work is indebted to the way ab ex blew the doors off what "painting" was or could be. this is the best case I can make for its cultural value, which may just be a very long way of saying: it has cultural value because it was valued, by people, in the culture, and it's worth trying to understand that.

i've always been enamored of abstract art and i don't particularly understand the arguments against it as, like, a "valid" or "culturally valuable" form of art. every single one of these arguments strikes the same tenor to me as "can you BELIEVE that someone put a URINAL on a PEDESTAL and called it ART?!" which, as a perspective, is i think devoid of intellectual curiosity, or a willingness to entertain the possibility that you have not seen nor understood all that can exist under the sun

perhaps uncharitably my love for abstracts comes down to the fact that i can't draw or paint in any classical sense... but i CAN splatter paint everywhere like a lunatic. i did this quite a lot when i was in middle school, using pastels and paints from this big case of art supplies my mom got me for christmas one year to create all sorts of radiant shapes and movements. i did this because i had a feeling inside that words could not express, that i didn't have the technical skills to express on a canvas... but then, i don't think having those skills would've done the trick either.

have you ever scribbled while listening to a song that you really vibe with? have you ever tried to map that song with scribbles, trying to mimic its ups and downs, to visually represent what the song feels like? i used to do this often, and what i remember most is that, in the moment, i felt so convinced that yes, i had captured an essence of the music on paper... only to look at it again outside the context of the song and feel nothing. you just can't translate a feeling from one medium to another. all you can do is gesture at it through yourself, like a light-refracting crystal.

i wonder, if you practiced this for months, on many songs across many genres, then put your favorite 20 scribbles on a gallery wall, would that be art? what could be said of them as a series, what could be felt of them by total strangers with no access to the music you listened to in the drawing? i may feel that the pieces failed to capture what i set out to capture, but that in itself is a long-standing form of art practice. what of monet's many light studies of the rouen chapel? what of georgia o'keeffe's doors? a failure, in art, to capture a pure emotion yet succeeds in capturing a distilled emotion-- not the one you set out to capture, perhaps, but the one driving the urge to capture it in the first place. is the repetitive act of trying and failing to communicate your intentions not a profoundly, universally human experience?

when i look at abstracts from the 30s, 40s, 50s, i find myself awestruck at their audacity. a screaming, bleeding, undeniable presence. burnt plastics and inches of cresting paint waves, shapes without form, colors beyond description. while there is so much to feel in witnessing an abstract, i don't think you can properly appreciate what they represent without some knowledge of the contemporary history to which they were culturally relevant. in an era of unimaginably upscaled warfare and militantly mechanic fascism, coups and murdered revolutionaries, many classically trained artists found themselves at a loss working within the confines valued most by a deeply conservative bourgeois establishment in the art world. it is an incalculable act of historic illiteracy to describe the abstracts of this era as "just throwing paint around," as the kind of thing your kid could do. these were artists trained to make the art that conservatives love to call "real art," yet they chose to do something entirely separate. this is intimately connected to the rise & fall of modernism, in that a deeper ascendant truth was sought after, as though if only we could see this truth then all of man's troubles could be solved. this failed, because of course it failed, thus presaging the cynical nihilism undergirding much of postmodernism.

but these pieces, like my hypothetical scribbles, by no means failed to communicate a primal distillate of emotional truth. if you allow yourself to stand in silence and be enveloped by an abstract, to imagine that the brush is in your hands, you can almost feel the artist's breath on the back of your neck. i was lucky enough to visit the gugenheim in venice in my last year of college when i did a summer abroad, which houses an entire room of jackson pollock paintings. what struck me most in lingering there was the sheer variety of moods and tones in his work. they are not homogeneous, but in fact wildly different depending on the era.

how many arbitrary choices can one make over the course of a lifetime before they resolve into a pattern of intention?

i don't particularly love a lot of modern art post-warhol, because as always the movement was captured and reincorporated, the protestation against the art world thus becoming the art world. now modern art is dominated by minimalist shapes and monolithic readymades whose accompanying mission statements are, let's be real, pretty fucking hilarious in context. i can't tell you how many times i've gone to a museum and seen a weird hanging blob and thought, oh, that's neat, then read the statement which is like "this piece is titled TRUTH IN SHADOWS which reveals the and reflects the human desire to escape reality, as well as the fluctuating nature of identity in the era of social media." yeah ok man whatever you say lol lmao

i think a lot of abstract art hate comes from a misapprehension that corporate-friendly nondescript abstracts whose meanings are a cloud hovering miles away from the piece itself are essentially the same in nature as early modern and post-modern art. what's fascinating is that i've always felt the difference, even when i knew nothing of the history. there is art that resonates, and art that does not-- and art created for a profit, for an art market in an arms race to discover ever more obfuscated layers of dissociative wordcloud non-meaning, is dripping with absence. it confronts you with its refusal to say anything as it demands you to search it for meaning. a loud voice, saying nothing: the epitome of our austere, neoliberal world.

a good abstract is a reservoir of emotion that can be felt by anyone, if you just take the time to feel it. its meaning is not relegated to a statement off in the corner, but lives on in history. you will know its "cultural value" by the scar it cleaves in your psyche. you will know its "cultural value" by the simple fact that we are still, sixty to one hundred years later, getting into heated debates over their merit. they make us uncomfortable, uneasy; they upset the classical strictures that inform our understanding of art to this day.

abstract expressionism is a reminder that Art is alive, and it has teeth, and it doesn't give a damn whether you like it or not.