For over two thousand years European art has developed about 10 clearly distinct styles. The creation of the next ten lines lasted one hundred years (1850 - 1950). Over the next fifty years artists have created so many styles, directions and trends that even experts can not catch them.
In an ever larger halls, a growing number of "White cubes" put up more and worse works that, and more say and who are increasingly less significant.
Not to worry, these are the rules of trade. Professionals themselves are to blame, because they have created most of these "brands".
It depends on us whether we can separate the wheat from the chaff, and this is not at all difficult. Contemporary art is governed by the same rules as the art of the Renaissance. In the old days also produced mediocrity, but it was not technically possible to show in the Antiquity you-tube and then Warhol them (in the creative act), the ancient hamburger.
But the thing ...
Almost all modern art is derived from modernism and its continuation or denial. You can even say that the true continuation of modernism is its negation. The problem is whether the denial is to be creative, whether it be total destruction. Even before the war, there was expressionism, realism and symbolism, and the fourth stream - anarchic Dadaism. In the postwar history of art all that creative was a continuation of the three "isms." Any continuation of Dadaism turned out to be sooner or later, social engineering manipulation.
The entire contemporary art is divided in half towards tradition:
- The marginal part of the artist believes that culture is a certain continuity and new always arises in relation to the old - even by the extreme negativity - but not by contempt. In this group problematic is the issue of the workshop, but a work of art as such is not questioned. This part of the art world for decades was ignored by critics and art-business,
- The mainstream believes that the past is a closed book and in the new era must start all over again. That attitude can be represented by futurists and dadaists, and continued her post-modernists, but the first post-war phenomenon became informel - abstract expressionism.
The emergence of abstract expressionism in its commercial dimension is a separate topic to discuss. Informal was undoubtedly an important experience (especially for those artists who broke his career), but came quickly to the limits of their creative possibilities, led the audience to boredom, and the whole world of art to the reaction.
This reaction was pop art and minimalism - streams simultaneously, contradictory, and in effect completely different from the plans. Pop Art cynically mocking the consumer society has created a golden calf well-paid pop culture. Minimalism Modernist abstractionism parodying a work of art reduced to zero.
Experience informel (summarized by painting of chimpanzee Congo) and its postmodern "antidotes" reiterated the fundamental questions about the meaning of art and meaning of works of art.
Responses varied:
- the part of artists challenged the technical efficiency as the hallmark of artistic activity. In this way they went neo-expressionists and stuckists.
- other artists challenged the permanent facility as a result of the creative process. In this way he went happenig, performance, instalation and embalage,
- yet another group questioned the need for any work at all, emphasizing the importance of the concept. This method was chosen various conceptualists.
However, the concept was understood in different ways and different was the result:
- in one case, the concept is the idea of filling a relationship between non-art objects. Work of art is not there these non-artistic objects, but that they illustrated the same idea. A classic example is the "Oak" - consisting of a glass of water and paper with explanatory text. The problem with this trend has become monotony, because in a world of visual arts in this way is difficult to produce new works that have no significant aesthetic values remain respectable audience in suspense. Honestly I must admit that this method required at least some intellectual effort to explain what makes a glass of water oak.
- for the second concept is the act of creating art from non-artistic objects - this applies to the direct heirs of Duchamp's Fountain. This method no longer requires an artist absolutely nothing, apart from his divine nature. However, while the same Marcel Duchamp (smart and funny man) mentions that the fountain urinal promotion was fantastic fun, a similar method practiced today opens the field to the brazen fraud.
Nobody knows whether, to whom and for how much was sold Duchamp's fountain - he was probably quite pleased that it exhibited in museums and reproduced in countless textbooks of art history. Contemporary art is big money, however, and today no one would buy a urinal fountain. Therefore, the only chance for today's neo-conceptualist is to create objects which, although they are not works of art, but whose performance is outside the capabilities of ordinary people. This could be a shark in formaldehyde, halved pig, or a skull set with diamonds (necessarily, at least for a few million pounds).
Always existed, exists and will exist a group of idiots who will pay for the opportunity to see a woman with a beard.
Since about thirty years now, somewhere on the margins of the phenomena described functions art renewal and classic realism, Mitoraj creates his sculptures, in Italy and the United States created a private studio workshop educating students of the traditional old masters - it happens a lot, only a few know that. It is unknown whether this is a new contemporary art. But there are people who are trying.
Contemporary art and artists often - and not without reason - accused of fraud and many other sins, but the situation is really difficult, not to say - desperate. Interwar avant-garde work done titanic - formulate new problems, solve them and it turned out that there's still no nothing ... - at least in the art understood as a professional, demanding mastery of technique and equipment performance art. Realists dismantled object and space such as breaking up the atom, the Symbolists have already studied all varieties of the Oedipus complex, and expressionists have shouted everything you could scream (as) articulated scream. In the best situation, as usual, were (and are) decorators. They at least know what is the goal.
In these words there are more compassionate than irony. There is something in human nature, which forces to create art, and there is something in the nature of art, which makes her work more than just decoration - gives it a higher meaning. In an increasingly secularized world it is hard to find a sense of art, just how difficult it is to create their own unique language (in modern art expressionists just went a step further - by going from screaming to howl, moreover, carefully programmed.)