#currator

For my portion of contributing to the Tumblr post, I will simply touch on terms/ideas from past chapters to prep for the final.

 So. I would like to ask a question of any artists or curators or museum personnel out there who might see this. or anyone else for that matter who thinks about this stuff. I am interested in understanding more deeply the ideas and concepts that are shaping contemporary art right now. So i am wondering if there are any good critical essays available to read online that discuss the what and the why for of art that is happening now. If there are any main schools of thought or trends that can be defined. 

I know for myself I am very open to almost any ideas or forms that art or artists want to take and invent, but at the same time there are always some things that I like better than others. It seems to me that Art is in a very odd place these days because almost anything goes anymore. Yet what is the value of these anythings that are going? 

Modern art happened. Then Post Modern Art happened, but where are we now? I think we live in an an age of multiplicities at least to the extent that almost every form of past styles is still being made by new people all over the place, yet for galleries and museums especially what is the value and meaning of a lot of the art they are interested in? And why? It also seems to me that the fine arts have lost all relevance to most peoples’ lives except for the people who  are interested in art. 

Some contemporary art is readily accessible to a wide audience like Andy Goldsworthy for example because it possesses a certain inherent beauty and is nature based and clever and these are things that can be more readily apprehended by many people. While on the other hand someone like Paul McCarthy does work that a good many people find offensive. His name comes up on a list of the top 15 living contemporary artists. Yet his career began in the  1960s, so though he is still active it seems he is not as contemporary as some, in some respects. 

I also question how a contemporary artist can be not living, or is Contemporary now assigned to a fixed point in time the way Modern was. 

Contemporary is a vastly encompassing term. Are there more precise names for particular contemporary movements or have we given up labeling things? if there are, what are they and what are they all about? 

 It also seems to me that Art in general has several inherent qualities that it can have. One is excellence of craft the other is content and meaning. For example, you might be familiar with the popular art blog  “thsi is colossal”. http://www.thisiscolossal.com/  

It is worth checking out. The work all has sort of a common thread going through which is cleverness, complexity, craftiness, beauty, but at the same time most of it seems entirely lacking in social commentary of any kind. Whether that is a good or bad thing I can not readily say. My own work tends in that direction and yet I can honestly say to a certain extent that though I marvel at the skill involved and enjoy the sensuous beauty of the work featured there, I also grow weary of it after a while. I have invented my own term for the type of work I see on “this is colossal”. I call it Positive Constructivism.  

But at the same time a lot of work that pushes very hard to be shocking and push boundaries or social conventions also seems ridiculous and often needlessly disgusting. Also I don’t think it does any good. If an artist or anyone for that matter finds fault and hypocrisy with the mores of society, is it enough to just tear things down? Are the failings and short comings of humans licence to debauchery? is there any value in offending people? 

I think beauty is good. I love Art Deco. i love classical architecture Like all those old cathedrals of varying styles and castles and mansions. I love a beautiful home and well maintained gardens and parks. I also understand how even these kinds of things which on the surface seem beautiful can also be viewed as obscene when contrasted with poverty around the world. They can be viewed as imbalanced resource use or decadence. Yet, what are we to do? I value ideas of social progress but it seems that many peoples’ ideas of that want to bring everyone down to some level rather than lifting them up.  

Socialism doesn’t seem to work or if it does when do they start handing out Van Goghs? But i digress. 

I found one person using the term pluralism and diverse individualism to describe what is happening in art today. But that raises the question of whether any of the particular and individual movements are just retreads of old ideas being endlessly imitated or if there are smaller and maybe not dominant movements with defined parameters, philosophies  and names?    

I struggle myself to find words to describe my own art. What I do grew from a long succession of activities and experiences and to me it just seems natural. I don’t have to understand it in an intellectual way. All art is to some extent conceptual but that branch of aesthetic which is called Conceptual Art has more or less a defined set of criteria which has fed into a lot of the work which has happened since its inception. But the advent of Conceptualism was a reaction to Clement Greenberg’s ideas of Formalism. essentially, Greenberg, by seeking to define the direction and meaning of what art is, created a barrier which could be broken. And it was. But then what? Are there any barriers left today or are we living in this completely unhindered space where anything goes? Someone once said to me Art thrives on limitations. I imagine he was quoting that from somewhere though I don’t know where. I suppose I could google it. I love the internet. Well, it seems that it was said by Charles Bernstein. Unless he was quoting someone. 

I think maybe the present age of art in these wide open spaces is like trying to build structure, like a spiders web, in the vast expanse of uncertainty that exists. This attempt to find some point of solidity or stability is like anchoring long thin sticks out into space, one attached to the other with no root to hold it. This creates no defined barriers that can be smashed through but what structure is there is slowly eroded on a thousand tiny fronts as technology and change keep reordering the way we live and interact with one another. Is this good or bad or neither? 

Does art respond to or need a value system upon which to derive its substance? Ethics? Morality? Religion? Or is Art like America? A place where mutually exclusive ideologies can find a framework within which to coexist? Though does not that very framework require some agreed upon rules or standards by which to facilitate this coexistence? I suppose the Anarchists don’t think so but is anybody taking that seriously anymore? Reality is chaos. Art, like religion and philosophy tries to create order out of chaos. Except of course when it makes chaos out of order, but is that kind of art offering anything of value or is just self indulgent nihilism and the product of warped psychology? Can art effect social change? Has it ever? 

So what do you think? What is Art right now? and why? 

Sorry for how long this is. I get to rambling sometimes. 

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