Gerhard Richter

Tyler Green notes that Richter has a bullfight painting.

Ah, Richter!

For the life of me, I could never figure out why I did not like his paintings. When I took a long look at them, I realized that he is a good painter with some interesting ideas (although I hate using that word in regards to painting, as it has come to imply non-painting ideas. Here I use it only to refer to ways of puting pigment and binder on a substrate), but he did nothing at all for me.

I realized that this is one of those cases where the deficiency in the relationship between the viewer and the painting had to lie in the viewer, sort of like my long indifference to Dexter Gordon, a fine tenorman who I had very little use for other than to appreciate as a great player.

When I realized that there was indeed something to Gordon, I went out and bought a CD of his, on the recommendation of Berrigan Taylor, the proprietor of a fine Jazz record store in Oakland. Gradually I got inside of the melodic inventiveness of Gordon and got to actually like his playing. I will admit that Dexter Gordon still does not have a place on my Desert Island list, but perhaps he should.

So, with that in mind I have been taking long looks at Richter, whenever the chance arose. Like the music of Dexter Gordon, Richter's painting is still not in my list of favorites, but I am finding that I LIKE it more. I have always admired it, but now I actually am starting to enjoy looking at it.

One of the big problems with arts appreciation in our modern age is that too many people cannot accept that something they don't like might be quite good, and that something that they like should be held as a guilty pleasure, depending on a variety of external factors that don't make the work one iota better (you can take my Howard Jones CD when you pry it from my cold dead fingers).

The very notion of learning to like a great piece of art strikes many as absurd. Their tastes, they feel (not think, or at least think too deeply), are a part of their identity, and should be clung to at all costs. Too bad. Arts appreciation should hone our tastes (oh no, Keilholtz is being anti-relativistic again). We should work at conforming our likes and dislikes to what we intelligently discern as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

I am curious as to whether any of my readers have had similar experiences of realizing that a work one disliked was actually good, and went about learning to like it?