The life of art is always an experiential record of ways of living. Art in the last hundred years is largely conceptual: a product of incredibly creative ideas. What is considered art is often a shockingly new and original idea, material, media, or method. "Real" art is market driven, commoditized, advertised, controlled by the powerful, protected and distributed by the institution, and sold. Did you know much of the world’s great art is housed in the vast archives of museums with limited display space? The largest museums typically display about 5% of their collection at any time while most priceless masterpieces sit in storage.
And yet the process of making art is a completely open and creative expression for any human to pursue from kindergarten classrooms, to social emotional therapy, to graffiti artists on the streets. It does not necessarily require expensive materials or training. Diversity is the word that best describes the art of the modern era. Today’s artists make even greater use of new techniques and materials to express their ideas, beliefs, and feelings. Art movements of the past have given way to an astonishing array of individual art styles. Expressionism is a style in which the artist seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world. Abstraction moves art into the language of visual ideas. Surrealism seeks to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Dada explores the existential absurdity of our existence. Pop art challenges the traditions of fine art. Minimalism's abstract aesthetic invites viewers to respond to what they see—not what they think a given work of art represents. Conceptualism puts forward the idea of the work, rejecting art as a commodity. Performance art communicates ideas to an audience, while installations bring viewers into an experience. Superrealism brings art back to the technique of reproduction in spite of technology. Earth art, street art, digital art, video art all explore new mediums of expression. Many up-and-coming contemporary artists are stunning the world with their original approach to art. On top of putting their own twists on conventional forms like painting, sculpture, and installation, they’ve also popularized unexpected forms of art, like embroidery, origami, and tattoos, proving the endless possibilities of the all-encompassing genre. New technologies challenge the possible mediums of expression. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organizing principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art does not have one, single objective or point of view. It is unclear, reflective of the world today. It can be contradictory, confusing, and open-ended. It is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality. While these are not exhaustive, notable themes include: identity politics, the body, globalization and migration, technology, contemporary society and culture, time and memory, and institutional and political critique. Post-modern, post-structuralist, feminist, and Marxist theory have played important roles in the development of contemporary theories of art. Art Critic Robert Hughes wrote, ""The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” Art history is all about the search; for the meaning, the narrative, or the date for that one painting you can't remember in your midterm. We've all come across a work of art that initially puzzles us. You look at it and think something along the lines of "this is weird." And don't think you're alone, art historians think this more than they'd like to admit. You look at the label; it gives the date and title but doesn't do anything to help you decipher what you're looking at. It requires time, research, and study to understand and appreciate the artist's intent. Creating and understanding contemporary art requires thought and imagination. It pushes boundaries. 1) What is the power of contemporary art? 2) What do you think about keeping 95% of our art in museum storage? What solutions do you see for public access? 3) How do you feel about art that requires an explanation to understand? 4) Who gets to decide what art is and how is that definition evolving? 5) Which contemporary "isms" are the most important to you? 6) Which contemporary themes are the most important to you? 7) What type of contemporary art would you be most excited to participate in as an artist? What new mediums of art might you imagine experiencing thanks to new technology in your lifetime? 8) What is the power of the individual artist? 9) What is the purpose of contemporary art? 10) Explain the Robert Hughes quote. Please develop your thoughts using 7-10+ sentences in the comments below.
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April 2020
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