Contemporary Art

 

The term contemporary art is usually used to describe the practices and achievements of artists and museums, institutions, galleries displaying their works. In reality, it should qualify this idea: the contemporary art itself starts from 1945. Since 1972, some speak wrongly of contemporary art or of living art marking a split with pluralism.

The contemporary concept is primarily a historical notion. It means simultaneity between two things. So today is what is in the same time as the subject. Contemporary art would be art that is now time for a living speaker. But applied to art, this concept, without losing its historical character, is an aesthetic quality. This character is controversial, since players do not have the necessary perspective to assess the actual works.

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The concept of contemporary art should not only be taken in chronological order, as it is understood that all contemporary productions do not belong to contemporary art. There are new criteria for defining what constitutes contemporary art. The former may be the breaking of past and contemporary art wants to assert its independence against modern art.

Contemporary art has therefore itself necessary biases. It comes in the wake of the modern art and would like to, somehow, end it.

The difficulty for the lay in the fact that modern and contemporary art may be, in common parlance, considered synonymous. This difficulty is compounded because the language of historians, the terms modern and contemporary correspond to specific periods: modern era of the Renaissance to the Revolution, contemporary of the Revolution to today.

Most of the works, when they discuss contemporary art dealing with the period beginning in 1945 and goes up today with the displacement of a media-art scene, from Paris to New York ...

Increasingly often, the term contemporary art is used only for artists still alive and still active or could be which places the beginning of contemporary art in the 1960s with the Pop Art and Fluxes. With these artistic movements that terminated modern art and theory of Clement Greenberg who defined it as the search for specificity of the medium.

Are generally excluded from art forms with the process or issues no longer reflect the trends promoted by the critical contemporary.

Introduction

The advent of photography has influenced many artists from the nineteenth century, such as Degas and helped give birth to the modern art. Art no longer only an important function to represent faithfully the actual photography is better able to do so, art can now try out other forms, breaking the canons of beauty, and propose experiments and new conceptual ideas.

Contemporary art is founded on the experiments of the art modern (early twentieth century), including the desire to take art out of traditional places and institutions. In this sense, art is gradually losing its functionality Representative. Contemporary creation remains a mirror for reality bathed conflicts and takeovers occur as attacks against rationality. The art reflects the crisis of society and remains the place of expression values. The relationship of art history is assessed does not qualitatively or quantitatively, but they lead to a more institutional art: collectors, offices, galleries, museums, etc.) To open a wider public. However, players of modern art in their desire to express their artistic views out institutional frameworks to address the public are related to institutions and their approach was to oppose an ideology (Heartfield to Nazism) or otherwise participate in the spread of political thought.

Despite the end of ideologies imposed in modern art, artists, current resume that legacy for themselves by expressing their strong commitment from the institutions. Notably, when their sensitivity is disturbed.

Today, contemporary art suffered a decline in ideologies of the modern (in the 1960s, then from 1990 with the fall of communism) and is based on new behavior: revival style, mixing artistic, diverse backgrounds, Arts and Technology (to access the power of computers and mathematical software ergonomics), how to approach reality. Technology has always provided tools to art. Today, the artist uses it as a tool for media, and invents new ones. It is based on the historical culture, listed, read, visit, includes looking, specialized, and focused on it than what has been done, it sometimes takes a stand, wants demonstrative or offensive in any case it looks for the media.

 

The Fine Arts in Visual Arts

Contemporary art is founded on the experiments of modern art, and regularly claims the breach opened by Marcel Duchamp, and others who had liberated the art practice of traditional constraints of representation. The postmodernist thought made the most of the problems inherent in contemporary art, freed from ideological (communism and capitalism), but not prevent artists committed to criticize the ideological or political abuse.

The creation of faculties of arts forms a basis for challenging the academic teaching of Fine Arts; materials used outside the scope of the teaching of art, sociology, ethnology, aesthetics and other direct artistic research in step with its recent developments.

Seeking formal Beau successive lines of research new aesthetic, the most radical, conceptual art, minimalism, performance, body art, permanently alter the meaning and perception of art, which sometimes moves in the lane face hermetic to the uninitiated.

Some streams, such as new realistic, the free figuration and the trans-avant-garde, as well as some mavericks, however, does not leave the conventional mediums, while radically altering their creative efforts. The breakdown of the types of medium (painting is often neglected in favor of installations, performances or other) and content of works fundamentally changes the network mediation of art in new galleries added contexts d 'new exhibition and the emergence of new mediums of distribution.

In Paris, the Salon "Comparisons" at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris, is from 1954, the meeting point of all exhibitors of these currents, facing in the same space with figurative and abstract painters of painting easel.

 

Contemporary art in an era of globalization

From the 1980s, arts intensive "technology" is emerging, with the video art, aesthetics communication, the art computer and, thereafter, the digital art, the bio-art etc... The list is not exhaustive and is closely following the progress of industrial research

In the 1990s, Western contemporary art has given its "label" for many artists from so-called "developing", almost absent once. The paradigms of globalization and the loss of spatial and temporal cues were valued traditional modes of personal approach, components or biographical, sociological or religious, are valued in the ways of working.

Communication related to the Internet is playing an increasingly important part in the reception and mediation of contemporary art, upstream of the exhibits themselves, which include increasing the state structures of mediation. Changes in the most developed countries (particularly the increasing share of tertiary) have generated a need for more widespread art, which does not make the task of artists, crisis requires more easily for all. Contemporary art, he is often obscure or provocative for the general public are now much more accepted and widespread than before, a flood of work of uneven quality makes it confusing and most often requires a personal investment from the public.

With listings on the Internet, works of contemporary art are also a potential financial windfall, not excluding the effects of fashion at the expense of truly original work.

 

Between the medium and mediation

Following the media conventional (oil paint, blood, bronze, marble, etc..), Contemporary art has been particularly fond of new mediums, even non-psychics. Notably, transient or vocation "in progress" number of works that question the very notion of medium, which often becomes a mere vehicle for mediation rather than a stable support. It joined the mutation carriers of information started in 1980s, which gradually disembody the benefit of logic of "relationship":

  • Mediums "tangible"
  1. Waste concrete
  2. Feces, urine, blood (Shit Artist of Piero Manzoni)
  3. Polystyrene, polyurethane, silicone, plastic, etc.. (expansion of Arman)
  • Mediums "intangible"
  • Environment (including the Land Art, Light James Turrell)
  1. Situations here and now (Collective of sociological art)
  2. Current Projects (work in progress of Roman Opalka)
  3. Experience Press (Fred Forest Space Media)
  • Mediums "technological"
  1. Software Computer
  2. Net.art
  3. Mechanical Systems (Stelarc)
  4. Genes living (bio-art)

Let's add some mediums such as photography becomes "visual artist" (Joel-Peter Witkin), the film, which is "experimental" (series of Cremaster of Matthew Barney), have acquired the status of art in itself, and are now autonomous categories. The concept of multimedia art, widely questioned today, questioning the status of works derived from plants, often mixed performance, as they appeared in the 1950s.

Limitations of the art and babelisation

The instinct of provocative art, if it is far from dead, no longer a sine qua non of creation. In the 1970s, following May 68 and the student revolts in the world, under the provocative art was handed up to date, at least to the general public. The body art and performance have been particularly difficult to the extreme limits of values tolerated by Western societies. The crucifixions animals Hermann Nitsch, the flange Michel Journiac made from his own blood, staged masochistic Gina Pane; always appear as offensive and gratuitous provocation.

The provocative art is rarely free; it lays bare the complex psychic work within a company or group of individual. Fred Forest with its artistic square meter and false advertising in the newspaper Le Monde in its sections of business pages, denouncing speculation the art market by making amalgam parody with the real estate market. Hans Haacke, on the contrary, it should be noted, involved no reluctance to market when he was invited to represent Germany at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale, has broken slabs flag to remember the origin of the foundation flag under the Nazis. Examples abound in this regard and invite the public to try to know the content of works, a priori opaque in many cases. The "good taste" does not exist in contemporary art because the artist has ceased to be a simple executor of works commissioned by a patron, who defined his status before the Renaissance.


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