I've not actually read this but I've flicked through it a few times. it purports to be a defence of modern art by showing how seemingly simple art pieces could not have been produced by a child but it utterly fails at this. every piece of art has a section answering the question "could a child have done this" and for like half she's like "yeah of course they could but it wouldn't be with the same intentions as the artist" which is hilarious to me in how unconvincing it is. for the other half its clearly technically sophisticated so it's a pointless question anyway. this doesn't mean I think the art is bad! just if you're writing a book with a very particular framing it's pretty embarrassing to fail to make a good argument on your terms. "any child could slash a knife across the canvas but they wouldn't do it for the same reasons as the artist" mentioning what the artist "aimed to explore" and saying what an artwork "conveys" based on nothing about the artwork itself... it's just a stupendous failure to understand why people feel alienated by this kind of art. I dunno. just needed to say something about it

I was visiting the Guggenheim in Venice over the Christmas break; on holidays I tend to make over-emotional decisions about all kinds of things, so it makes sense that at that wonderful building I wanted to buy a book. I chose this one, because it was cheap, and promised easy reading.

So Hodge had to do literally nothing to keep me on team Modernist. I like modern and postmodern art; I have some grasp of what 20th century artists were/are trying to do. The book is nicely laid out: nice reproduction of an art work; brief artist's bio; discussion of the work; discussion of influences/d; random fact; and explanation of why your five year could not, in fact, have done that. This makes for repetitive reading, but it's a small format coffee-table book, so that's fine.

And yet Hodge's book is so bad that she managed to convince me that that much modern art is an even bigger sham than your old auntie Joanna Banal believes it is.

Her tactic for each work is the same: admit that a five year old has the skills needed to produce a work, but deny that the five year old has the conceptual capacity needed to properly contextualize it; or suggest that the five year old cannot think the deep thoughts needed to motivate the creation of the work in the first place. Genuinely random example: Giovanni Anselmo's "Untitled (structure that eats salad)." Yes, she says, a five year old could squish a lettuce between two bricks, but

"they would not be scrutinizing so many elements at the same time, including the impermanence of substances and life, and natural and manufactured materials. Anselmo was working on many levels as he explored our place in the world, looking at infinity, vulnerability, power, culture and nature, all the time considering how philosophies, science and everyday experience can be investigated and expressed through art."

I ask you, dear review reader, to ignore the horrific prose, and the conceptual confusion one must be in to use the word 'substances' as if it excluded natural and manufactured materials. Instead, just know that every explanation in this book is essentially the same: there is a conceptual component to this artwork that a five year old could not understand. This is a problem.

i) It doesn't matter what Anselmo was 'scrutinizing' (apparently in Hodge's world artists do not 'think about' anything). The *viewer's reaction* links the art object to thoughts about infinity etc... So a five year old's combination of bricks and lettuce can bring up those ideas as well, *provided they are really there*.

ii) According to Hodge, every work in this book is either 'scrutinizing' a highly abstract noun (e.g., the impermanence of substances) or (from the following page, on Warhol) compelling "viewers to consider what makes something 'art' and why artworks are so revered." But if every piece of modern art is doing one or both of those things, there is nothing about any given piece of modern art that is particularly interesting. Any piece of garbage can make us scrutinize infinity or art institutions, provided we're genuinely interested in doing so. Given that, all modern art is the same, and you don't actually have to look at it.

iii) So Hodge's argument, despite herself, is that there is no connection between any given art object and the ideas it is supposed to embody. Modern art is a sham.

Now luckily I have a few thoughts on this matter, and do not believe that modern art is a sham. Much good modern art exists: those objects are technical feats (insert your favorite figurative painter here), or respond to some specific, concrete noun (e.g., Kienholz's satires on aspects of modern America), or allow for a less cognitive experience (e.g., the beeswax room at Washington D.C.'s Phillips Collection), which can then be thought about productively.

But if you actually gave this book to someone in the hope that they would start thinking that modern art is worthwhile... well, it wouldn't work. Because this book suggests that modern artists are all slightly silly men and women who want to have big thoughts about Big Stuff, but can't actually find a way to put that into a material form (as e.g., Martin Creed), or pigs creating investment opportunities (as e.g., Damien Hirst). And Hodge treats those charlatans no differently from genuinely interesting artists.

Finally, she has no sense of humor, and so fails to get anything out of the Anselmo work suggested above anyway.

Avoid this book at all costs, unless you want a good scratching post.

See http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/giovanni-anselmo/untitled-sculpture-that-eats-19... ( )

I come from a place of loving paintings - starting in landscapes but moving into surrealism and abstract - and was gaining an appreciation of architecture but I never understood nor appreciated modern art. I still don't.

In Hodge's treatise of 100 modern art works, she has reduced every piece to approximately a page of banal chatter (each piece warrants two pages: a photograph of the piece is about 1/2 page, then there's useless trivia amounting to the other half or more, then about a page or less of Hodge's freshman analysis of the piece and it's context). In the text, she repeats the same tired, clichéd information we had heard ad nauseam, e.g "Warhol's achievement with this work [Campbell's Soup] was to compel viewers to consider what makes something 'art' and why artworks are so revered." (Pg30) After all, these clichés are repeated on sitcoms at this point. If we haven't been convinced yet, what good will repeating them do?

We need new arguments, and/or more in-depth analysis. Hodge would have been better to reduce the number of pieces discussed and give them a better treatment, perhaps even tying some pieces together. That may have been more convincing, because this book certainly isn't.

This is a good picture book for youths or anyone who just wants 100 small photographs of typically exalted pieces of modern art. Little more. ( )

I come from a place of loving paintings - starting in landscapes but moving into surrealism and abstract - and was gaining an appreciation of architecture but I never understood nor appreciated modern art. I still don't.

In Hodge's treatise of 100 modern art works, she has reduced every piece to approximately a page of banal chatter (each piece warrants two pages: a photograph of the piece is about 1/2 page, then there's useless trivia amounting to the other half or more, then about a page or less of Hodge's freshman analysis of the piece and it's context). In the text, she repeats the same tired, clichéd information we had heard ad nauseam, e.g "Warhol's achievement with this work [Campbell's Soup] was to compel viewers to consider what makes something 'art' and why artworks are so revered." (Pg30) After all, these clichés are repeated on sitcoms at this point. If we haven't been convinced yet, what good will repeating them do?

We need new arguments, and/or more in-depth analysis. Hodge would have been better to reduce the number of pieces discussed and give them a better treatment, perhaps even tying some pieces together. That may have been more convincing, because this book certainly isn't.

This is a good picture book for youths or anyone who just wants 100 small photographs of typically exalted pieces of modern art. Little more. ( )

Just finished reading Susie Hodge’s Why your five years old could not have done that, a book whose purpose is to explain why modern art is not a child’s play by introducing and discussing 100 pieces of art. The book structure is fairly simple, it’s divided in 5 chapters:
Objects & Toys
Expressions & Scribbles
Provocations & Tantrums
Landscapes & Playscapes
People & Monsters

The insight of an artwork is on 2 pages and it has a very schematic structure:

Artwork picture
Why your 5 years old could not have done that paragraph (? symbol)
Techniques and approach of the artist (paintbrush symbol)
Historic and artistic context of the artwork (dot-like symbol)
Specifications and location of the artwork (i symbol)
Additional information (! symbol)
Examples of similar artworks and their artwork (eye-like symbol)

I have really appreciated the methodical approach used, especially the historical and sometimes political information, but the thing I didn’t like was the reasons why children couldn’t have done those pieces of art since the main reasoning was “a child doesn’t have the awareness, the consciousness, has not lived through what the artist has” which is kind of obvious. Bringing up the informative parts the book is complete and very useful, but I would not recommend it as someone’s first art book and some previous knowledge of the subject will assure that the reading is more pleasurable and enjoyable. Some words are very specific of the art field, but they’re used only when necessary since I think that the main target of the book is the general public rather than an art major or an art teacher. Well-written and complete and even though it’s not very convincing about the main purpose (modern art =/= children thing) I would recommend it. ( )