With modern art, one needs to know the artist and the references she makes through her work. Otherwise it is not easy to understand her work. Art began with representing nature or what was out there. Plato thought nothing good of it since it did not have access to the real world (for him, actually, to the ideal world) and was only a copy of a copy. Every so often, the artist put a little bit more of herself in the works she created. She interpreted the world through her own eyes. In time, the interpretation part became increasingly more important and now I think we got to the point where it is pretty much everything. I feel I have to get to know the artist in order to understand the work. It still reflects the world, of course, but the world is not “objective” any more, it is not the world we all have access to but already an internalized world, with it own rules and happening, its own history and development.
It has gotten personal.
