Strictly Critical Video: One Hour Looking at a Jackson Pollock Painting at MoMA
With this week’s video, our two critics embark in a new direction: the hourlong single-work review.
Over the course of a full hour at the Museum of Modern Art, they discuss Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950, one of the “official masterpieces of American art” by “the first American artist to affect world art” (as they put it).
Why do Gopnik and Viveros-Fauné spend an entire hour discussing a single work? Because that is what art deserves. Consider that people spend weeks, even months, with a novel; hours with a movie or a play; and countless hours playing video games.
But when it comes to visual art, the treatment—the time devoted to a viewing—can approximate the length of a drive-by shooting or a turn on the catwalk. Too often people literally take a spin around the room of a gallery or a museum and then dine out on the experience—”We saw Pollock!” They say. “And Judd and Albers and Soutine!”