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Contemporary Art

The term "contemporary art" is usually used to describe the practices and achievements of artists claiming "a step in the progression of avant-garde ).

Summary

/ / Introduction: The difficulty of definition

The notion of "contemporary" is primarily a historical notion . From this point of view, contemporary art begin from 1945, with the end of the Second World War.

Since 1972, some say (wrongly?) Of "contemporary art" or "living art" marking a split with pluralism movements.

The notion of "contemporary" also means simultaneity between two things. So what is contemporary is at the same time as the subject. Contemporary art is art that would be happening today.
But applied to art, this concept, without losing its historical character, is also an aesthetic quality. This character is controversial, since players do not step back to appreciate the works effectively.
The designation "contemporary art" should not only be taken in the chronological sense, as all contemporary productions do not belong to contemporary art, nor does it claim to contemporary art.

New criteria to define what constitutes contemporary art. One of the first is the transgression vis--vis the past and contemporary art wants to assert its independence not only in relation to the arts called "classical" to "fine art" and its categories (painting, sculpture, etc. .), but also facing the modern art.
Contemporary art has therefore itself needed biases. He enrolled as a result of modern art and would like to, somehow, end it.

For convenience, most of the books, when they discuss contemporary art dealing with the period beginning in 1945 and goes up today with the movement of different-profile arts venues, mostly Westerners until recent years from Paris or London to New York. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rise of China in the same time, the world of contemporary art has ... globalized world, Africa and Latin America is no exception to this trend.

Regularly, the term "contemporary art" is also used for artists still alive and active and can still be saved, which would place the beginning of contemporary art in the 1960s with the Pop Art and Fluxus. With these artistic movements that would end the modern art and theory of Clement Greenberg who defined it as the search for specificity of the medium.

In this constant search for a definition of the contemporary, the art critic and institutions play a leading role. So, are generally excluded from contemporary art "label" art forms whose approach or problems do not reflect trends promoted by critics "contemporary".

Origins of Contemporary Art

The advent of photography has influenced many artists from the nineteenth century , such as Degas and helped give birth to the modern art. Art has only more important function to accurately represent reality, 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.

The foundation for contemporary art experiments of modern art (early twentieth century) and in particular the desire to take art out of traditional places and institutions. In this sense, art is gradually losing its representative function. Contemporary creation remains a mirror to reality bathed conflicts and takeovers qu'occasionnent attacks against rationality. The art reflects the society crisis and remains the locus of expression values. The reports from art to history does not qualitatively or quantitatively are assessed, but they lead to a more institutional art: collectors, corporate offices, galleries, museums, etc.). To open a wider audience. However, actors of modern art in their desire to express their artistic views out institutional frameworks to address the public, remain bound to the institutions and their approach was to oppose an ideology ( Heartfield Nazism) or otherwise participate in the spread of political thought.

Despite the end of ideologies imposed in modern art, contemporary artists return to that legacy for themselves by expressing their strong commitment from the institutions. Especially when their sensitivity is disturbed.

Today, contemporary art suffers the decline of the modern ideologies (in the 1960s, then from 1990 with the fall of communism) and is based on new behavior: new style, mixing artistic, diverse backgrounds, Arts and Technology (access to the power of computers and mathematical software ergonomics), mode of approach to 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 search, 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 art" to art

The foundation for contemporary art experiments in modern art, and regularly claims the breach opened by Marcel Duchamp , and others who had liberated the art practice of traditional constraints of representation.
Postmodernist thought made the most of the problems inherent to contemporary art, freed from ideological ( communism and capitalism ), without preventing the artists involved abuse of criticizing political or ideological.

In France, 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 succession of new aesthetic avenues of research, the most radical, conceptual art , minimalism , performance , body art , alter permanently the meaning and perception of art, which sometimes turns into ways to face hermetic to the uninitiated.

Some flows, such as the new realists , 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 bursting of the types of medium (painting is often neglected in favor of installations, performances, etc.) and content works fundamentally changes the network mediation of art galleries in addition to new contexts of exhibition and the new emergence of new mediums of distribution.

In Paris, the comparisons show , the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris , is from 1954 , the meeting point of all exhibitors of these currents, facing in the same space, figurative and abstract painters paint easel.

Contemporary Art in the Age of Globalization

From the 1980s , arts intensive "technology" are emerging, with video art , the aesthetics of communication, computer art and, subsequently, 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 in the past. The paradigms of globalization and the loss of conventional spatio-temporal patterns have enhanced personal approach, or components biographical, sociological or religious, are valued in the ways of working.

Communication linked to the Internet plays a more important part in the reception and mediation of contemporary art, upstream of exhibitions themselves, incorporating more and more structures of state mediation. Changes in the most developed countries (including the increasing share of tertiary ) have generated a need for more widespread art, which does not make the task of artists, crisis forces more easily provided.

Contemporary art, he is often obscure or challenging to the general public, is now well accepted and more widespread than before, a surge of work of uneven quality makes it confusing and most often requires a personal investment from the public. (See Modern theories of art )

Listed 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

In addition to the mediums conventional ( oil paint , pastel, sanguine, bronze, marble, etc..), contemporary art is particularly fond of new mediums, or even "no medium". Particular vocation or ephemeral "in progress" number of works questioning the very concept of medium, which often becomes a mere vehicle for mediation rather than a stable support. This is consistent with the mutation carriers of information began in the 1980s , which gradually dematerialize in favor of a logic of "relationship":

Let us add that some mediums like photography - which is "visual" ( Joel-Peter Witkin ) - the movie - which is "experimental" (series of Cremaster of Matthew Barney ) - have acquired the status of art in itself (as well as painting, sculpture and music), and are now autonomous categories.
The concept of multimedia art , widely called into question today, questions the status of works derived from plants, often mixed performance, as they appeared in the 1950's.

Limitations of the art "Babelization"

The drive "provocative" art, if it is far from dead, no longer a sine qua non of creativity. In 1970 , after May 1968 student revolts and the world, under the provocative art has been handed up to date, at least to the general public. The body art and performance in particular have undermined 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 provocations free and hurtful.

Provocation in art is rarely free, it lays bare the complex psychic work within a company or a group of individual. Fred Forest with its artistic square meter and false advertising in the newspaper Le Monde in its fields of business pages, denouncing speculation the art market by making it blend with the parody of 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 at the Venice Biennale , has broken slabs flag as a reminder of the founding of the flag under the Nazis. Examples abound in this regard and invite the public to try to know the contents of the works, a priori opaque in many cases. "Good taste" does not exist in contemporary art because the artist has stopped being a simple executor of works commissioned by a patron , who defined his status before the Renaissance.

Criticism of Contemporary Art

The three excerpts below summarize the main criticisms leveled at the art called "contemporary" vision pamphleteer Jean Monneret , which sees mainly an art supported by state officials who squander the irresponsible taxpayers' money; analysis of Philippe Lejeune , who goes to the end of the dialectic of the proponents of contemporary art, demonstrating their negation of the idea of Beauty, Fred Forest , which rose to act to defend beliefs similar to those of Jean Monneret by attacking the State before the tribunals.

In the catalog raisonne of the Salon des Independants of 1999, the president of the Fair, Jean Monneret , launched a violent diatribe against the agreed definition of contemporary art, after having long criticized the officials who govern the teaching of art and the choice works purchased by the state and local governments (p. 51):

"Contemporary art? All living artists are part of contemporary art. These are the artists who make art. All artists. Free!
Now the state wants the public to believe that there is a noteworthy art, art called "contemporary", that is to say, the art of state. As if the installation, performance art or uneducated - as long as the caption is the logorrhea - are in themselves, then historical, linear, indisputable artistic tradition. It is true that art called "contemporary", the less there is to see, the more there is to it! In a contemporary art exhibition, a ventilation duct, emergency equipment or tiles of health are often confused with the works presented. The question then is, where is the work? Both perfect harmony between the container and contents.
In reality, the State Art takes a unique path which excludes arbitrarily art of the best artists of historical exhibitions. Democracy would require the State, concerned about the taxpayers' money, accounts of contemporary reality in all its diversity, inclusive ... "

In the moral Taylor July 2006 (p. 6 and 7) review of the foundation of Baron Taylor , vice-president, the painter and journalist Philippe Lejeune , distinguishes between the Fine Arts Contemporary Art.

" against the MNAM (Centre Georges Pompidou), Fred Forest wrote on the back cover of his book Operation and dysfunctions of Contemporary Art (L'Harmattan, Paris, 2000):

"This book seeks to reveal the limits and contradictions of a system that can no longer continue as current elite in favor of a privileged few, always the same, who enjoy the convenience and the public manna. Struggle of the earthen pot against the iron pot, it's the menu description of my trial until the State Council against the Centre Georges Pompidou, and through him, against the public institutions of contemporary art for their refusal to transparency on acquisitions and their failure to respect the law of 78 in public accounting. Beyond art, the approach adopted here is first and foremost a citizen approach asking the real question of the use of public funds, and that of culture in a democracy. "

Movements in Contemporary Art Art

The post-war period : the transition between modern and contemporary

The 1960

The 1970

The 1980

Years in 1990 - 2,000

Years in 2000 - two thousand and ten


World market for contemporary art

Average

Countries' share in world market

Sales figures from 1 October 2004 to September 30, 2005: U.S. 58% UK 27% France 3%, 2% Italy, Germany 2%, other 8%

  • Evolution from France: 35% in 1990, 9% in 1995, 5% in 2003, 3% in 2004
  • Developments from the UK: 4% in 1990, 27% in 2004

Major exhibitions

The contemporary art fairs are the place where the great galleries to exhibit their international clients a selection of the artists they represent.

Main galleries

Main article: Contemporary art gallery.

Major buyers

France

Overseas

The places to see contemporary art

Major events of contemporary art

Major museums

Institutional places that have a mission to preserve the works, they buy contemporary art collections and show well done. They also make exhibitions of works by borrowing from other public and private collections.

Main article: Museum.

In Europe

View Article a href = "% C3% Liste_des_mus A9es_d 27art_contemporain_en_France%" title = "List of contemporary art museums in France"> List of contemporary art museums in France.

In America

See article List of contemporary art museums in the United States

Centre for Contemporary Art

Main article: Contemporary Art Center.

Unlike museums, their purpose is not conservation. As a result, they are not collections. They perform exhibitions based on their editorial choices, the objective being the promotion and dissemination of contemporary art.

France

Switzerland

Belgium

Ecuador

The FRAC

Sources

Bibliography


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