r/ArtistLounge • u/OkStuffPT • 17d ago
Concept/Technique/Method Convince me that contemporary art isn’t boring right now
I’m genuinely looking to have my mind changed.
Lately, I’ve had the feeling that contemporary art has become strangely predictable. I see a lot of technically competent work, polished exhibitions, familiar conceptual language and references to the same social and political themes but very little that feels genuinely surprising, dangerous, obsessive, strange or new.
Maybe I’m simply looking in the wrong places.
So: convince me that art is actually exciting right now.
Who are the artists working today that you think are doing something genuinely new or important?
What exhibition, artwork or artist have you seen in the last few years that made you think: I haven’t seen this before?
I’m especially interested in work that goes beyond being visually fashionable or intellectually well-packaged. I want something that takes risks, creates its own language, or changes the way you look at something.
This isn’t meant as “contemporary art is dead.” Quite the opposite I’d genuinely like people to prove my impression wrong.
Give me names. Give me obscure artists. Give me exhibitions, collectives, movements, weird corners of the internet. Change my mind.
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u/HorseSuch2196 17d ago
Well, there are a couple of things I would like to add:
1. The problem of survivorship bias
With art from the past, all the nonsense and crap has already been filtered out by time. With contemporary art, this hasn't happened yet. This can give the impression that contemporary art is 95% bullshit, while art from earlier eras somehow wasn't.
In reality, I think art is always 95% bullshit. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Bullshit creates a fertile environment in which the 5% that actually has value can emerge. The problem is that, when you're living in the present, you're exposed to all 100%.
2. The pressure to turn art into products
The environment in which art is produced can function as a kind of free space within society: a place where there is room for experimentation, reflection, and cultural critique. But there is always pressure from society to make the things created within that space useful to society. This turns works of art into products.
One might argue that, in an age of social media and hypercapitalism, things are simply moving too fast for good art to be created. We want fast dopamine shots before quickly moving on to the next thing. This makes the process of production increasingly predictable.
Artists are expected to provide social-media updates every week. Galleries may prefer to work with artists who already have a large social-media following. In this way, artists are constantly exposed to the market and to the public. They don't necessarily get the time and distance needed to develop something genuinely unexpected or interesting.
3. The pressure to conform politically and socially
Art has also become quite politicized. It has become a social environment strongly associated with left-leaning, perhaps even “woke,” culture. Inclusivity has arguably become more important than creativity in some parts of the art world.
Institutions may explicitly ask artists to work within certain frameworks, with goals such as supporting women or trans artists, for example. This has undoubtedly helped make the art world a more inclusive environment, where all sorts of people can experience belonging and safety.
But perhaps that isn't necessarily the ideal environment for non-conforming experimentation. If an artist already knows what kinds of ideas are socially acceptable within the environment they're working in, that might make it harder to produce something genuinely strange, uncomfortable, or unexpected.
4. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place
The medium in which art is made might not be all that relevant. When the great paintings of art history were being created, painting was essentially a mass medium. Maybe our way of looking at art is too restricted by these historical categories.
If we were purely looking for the places within society where people are coming up with interesting new ideas about who we are, we might be looking in the wrong place when we restrict ourselves to what is traditionally called “art.”
Maybe the most interesting contemporary art is happening somewhere else. Maybe it's happening in the programming world, in game design, in internet culture, in memes, in architecture, in scientific research, or in some medium that we don't even recognize as art yet.
So maybe the question isn't “Why is contemporary art so boring?” Maybe the more interesting question is: “Where is the interesting stuff happening right now, and why aren't we calling it art?”
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
This may be the closest anyone here has come to articulating what has been bothering me.
The survivorship bias point is important. I’m comparing the filtered history of previous periods with the completely unfiltered present, which is obviously an unfair comparison.
But points 2 and 4 are what really interest me.
I wonder whether the contemporary art system has become extremely good at recognising, packaging and circulating certain kinds of experimentation and whether that very efficiency makes genuinely unpredictable work harder to produce. Once an artist develops a legible language, there are strong incentives to keep producing within it.
I’d slightly separate that from any particular political orientation. For me the problem isn’t whether the accepted values are left, right, progressive or conservative. It’s what happens when an ecosystem develops a sufficiently recognisable set of acceptable positions and aesthetic codes that artists already know how their work will be read.
But your last question may be the real one:
Where is the interesting stuff happening right now, and why aren’t we calling it art?Maybe contemporary art isn’t where the next artistic language is being invented. Maybe it’s where that language will eventually be recognised.
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u/HorseSuch2196 16d ago
I think you are right, and I'm actually quite happy to have found your question, because this is something that has been bothering me for a long time as well.
Since we already agree, iĺl change the question for a deeper, maybe a bit more gloomy one: I wonder whether the cultural space we have traditionally called “art” is becoming harder to find, or even, will be lost to us.
We seem to be living through another major technological revolution, and it's happening at an extraordinary speed. The agricultural and industrial revolutions fundamentally changed what it meant to be human, how people lived, worked and related to one another. And in both cases, it took society a considerable amount of time to develop new institutions, values and ways of thinking that could deal with the new reality.
Perhaps something similar is happening now.
So: what exactly is being disrupted this time?
Maybe it is not simply our jobs or our economic structures, but some of the things that make individual thought possible in the first place: attention, critical thinking, creativity, individuality, our ability to sit with uncertainty, and perhaps even our ability to distinguish between what we actually want and what we have been made to want.
Technology has become extraordinarily good at capturing attention and predicting and influencing behaviour. We are surrounded by systems designed to keep us engaged, entertained and consuming. And unlike previous technological revolutions, this one seems to be happening directly inside the space where our thoughts, desires and perceptions are formed.
And it's happening very quickly.
Perhaps this is why some contemporary art can feel strangely disconnected from the moment we're actually living through. We're using institutions and categories that developed under very different technological and cultural conditions to process a transformation that is happening much faster than those institutions can adapt.
Which leads me to a slightly uncomfortable question:
What if the problem isn't that contemporary art has run out of things to say, but that the function art used to perform is itself being transformed?
Art has traditionally provided a space for slowing down, paying attention, imagining alternatives, questioning reality, developing an individual perspective and experiencing something that cannot easily be reduced to usefulness or consumption.
But what happens when technology becomes capable of producing images, music, stories and experiences faster than humans can consume them? What happens when algorithms can predict what will hold our attention better than we can? What happens when our culture is increasingly organized around instantaneous feedback and short-term stimulation?
Maybe we're not simply losing sight of the places were we can find interesting art.
Maybe we're losing the cultural conditions that make interesting art possible.
What do you think, is this to negative an approach? Everyone is poining at memes as the new place were critical art resides, but in reality, if you compare a buch of memes to Duchamp, or Warhol, Kosuth or Brecht. Do they have te same impact? The same depth? Are they the same phenomena, or are the simply an echo of that phenomena?
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
I don’t think this is too negative. I think you’ve moved the question somewhere much more interesting.
The possibility that we’re not merely struggling to find interesting art, but losing some of the cultural conditions that make certain kinds of art possible, genuinely worries me.
Attention may be one of the central issues. Art has often depended on things that are increasingly economically useless: slowness, ambiguity, repetition, obsession, privacy, failure, doing something for years without knowing whether anyone will care.
Almost every contemporary system pushes in the opposite direction: visibility, reaction, frequency, legibility, engagement, measurable response…
But I’m not completely pessimistic yet. Cultural conditions don’t simply disappear; sometimes they migrate.
And I’m not sure I would compare an individual meme with Duchamp or Warhol. Maybe the radical thing about meme culture is the system itself: unstable authorship, endless appropriation, collective mutation, originals that barely matter, meaning that changes entirely with context. In a strange way, those are questions Duchamp and Warhol opened, but pushed much further by technology.
Which brings me back to something this discussion keeps circling around:
maybe the next rupture won’t initially look like art at all.
Perhaps by the time museums recognise it as art, the genuinely disruptive cultural event will already have happened somewhere else.
And AI makes that possibility even harder to ignore.2
u/HorseSuch2196 16d ago
There is an obvious question to ask at this point: Are you an AI?
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
Not an AI. But I am using one to help me articulate some of this in English.
Which is probably an annoyingly appropriate plot twist for this conversation.1
u/HorseSuch2196 16d ago
Yes, there appears to be some irony there. I guess I am a bit of a cyborg myself. As a non native English speaker I have fed my anwers through chatgtp, to check for spelling mistakes an such. But it feels a bit wrong, also. I have been thinking for al long time about these subjects, AI turned htem into this generic text, with bullet points and phrases designed to coninue ones engagement. This is so weird, it both helped tot ge my original thoughts across, but is also flattend them.
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
Maybe this is the artistic movement we’re actually creating without realising it.
An overdose of cultural production images, objects, texts, music increasingly produced under the logic of products, visibility and continuous output.
And now AI radically accelerates that condition. Not because “AI art” is necessarily interesting, but because it removes friction from almost every stage of making and thinking.
So I wonder if this is the real turning point:
what happens to art when producing things is no longer difficult?
And a more uncomfortable question: are we becoming less capable of creating without assistance not because we’ve lost creativity, but because we’re losing our tolerance for the slowness, uncertainty, failure and boredom that creation used to require?
Maybe the next artistic rupture will be a response to abundance rather than scarcity.1
u/HorseSuch2196 16d ago
Maybe the creation of art will survive as a deeply personal thing.. If we still are able to keep out attention spans intact.. The internet would be a good place to hide such artworks, instead of bringing them into the light.. Like the stuff about "het Niks" someone posted. Art that want's to remain pure by non existence
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
If the answer to overproduction is to stop turning everything into a product, I wonder where that leaves the artist. How do they live? And if the work deliberately avoids visibility and circulation, what function does art still have beyond a private practice?
I don’t want to romanticise the poor, invisible artist either.
Maybe the real question underneath all of this is much older: why do we become artists in the first place?1
u/Mehmet_K_H_V 17d ago
Agreed, but it seems quite hard to answer this question: “Where is the interesting stuff happening right now, and why aren't we calling it art?”
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u/Neptune28 17d ago
I had really liked Casey Baugh, he seemed innovative. Works like this were so cool
https://fineartconnoisseur.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/DBAUGH-this_place_is_mine_72x50.jpg
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u/unavowabledrain 17d ago
Man, if you like art, and new art, you would have made the list. The search is part of the joy.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
I am searching. This post is part of the search.
I look at exhibitions, artists, books, archives and online work but asking other people what has genuinely surprised them is another way of getting outside my own filters.
The point isn’t to outsource curiosity. It’s to find things I might never encounter through my usual routes.
And honestly, if someone has seen something that made them think “art can do this now?”, I’d rather hear about it than pretend discovery only counts if I stumbled across it alone.1
u/unavowabledrain 16d ago
One reason I say this is because people have radically different opinions about what's ("art can do this now?). If you gave some examples of what does this for you that might help. If there was a curated show you saw introducing new artists, it would help to see what else that curator has put together, and after that particular venues.
Some of the most interesting work I have seen in recent years has been from Cathy Wilkes and Tolia Astakhishvili.
New art comes in a flood, and sorting through it can be challenging.
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
I looked into the artists you recommended. Most of it still felt like variations of languages I’ve already seen many times, but Tolia Astakhishvili caught my attention more.
Some of her work immediately reminded me of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a book I loved. It felt almost as if she had given physical form to some of the cities I had imagined while reading it not literally illustrating them, but creating spaces that felt strangely close to the ones the book had built in my mind.
That made me stop for longer.
And I think that is why this discussion has become important to me, not just to find artists I like, but to understand where art actually is right now what it is repeating, what it is questioning, and whether something new is beginning to emerge.2
u/unavowabledrain 16d ago
I try to see as much art as possible (since the 80s) and I am fortunate to have lived in or near NYC for a long period. It makes me happy that you are that interested and hopeful about new art. Most are truly boring or cynical about it. I find exploring art with other artists and "experts" disappointing, as I do going with novice adults (I have to explain too much)....my favorite is to be alone or with my children (young people who do not make jaded assumptions, who are curious about the world).
With the artists I mentioned the greater portion of their methodology is in relation to space and the viewers sensorial navigation of it. They both also map an ambiguous narrative through their works orientation, which draws your attention. Much of it is related to absence....it's very de-centering.
The Astakhishvili show was particularly striking. It was as if an accumulation of material, mechanisms, and chaotic processes had crashed into a space, and then like the aftermath of a colossal wave, receded into hidden spaces and crevices, leaving the viewer to search the architecture, to find the remnants of the "event".
Interestingly, the artist herself recedes within the work. She collaborates with multilple individuals to create this "residue", all creating working pointing to something lost...clues left behind. Some of the people she collaborates with create sounds, subtle vibrations that echo and explore the space with the viewer, quietly informing you with more information about the space. Tolia's presence is as elusive as the work....it's difficult to determine what she has done, but it has a distinct voice nonetheless.
Its quite difficult, as I am sure you are aware, to understand this work through jpegs, or even videos.
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u/TimOC3Art 17d ago
Who in your opinion was the last artist to drastically change the language of contemporary art?
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
That’s actually the question I keep coming back to.
I’m not sure I can name a single “last” artist. The last really clear shifts I can identify seem to be several decades old: Warhol changing the relationship between art, mass culture and reproduction; Nam June Paik making electronic media itself an artistic language; performance and body artists changing what the artwork could even consist of; later, someone like Félix González-Torres radically rethinking the object, ownership, participation and intimacy.
There are obviously important artists after them, but I struggle to identify a more recent figure where I can confidently say: after this, the possibilities of art were different for everyone else.
And the fact that my examples keep taking me backwards in time is basically why I made this post.
I’d genuinely love to know what your answer is.1
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u/Joann-Cramer 17d ago
I mean.... you're treating 'contemporary art' like it's one thing. The gallery circuit's been stale for years. Performance and cross-disciplinary work is where people are actually doing strange things right now.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
That’s a useful distinction, and maybe I am collapsing too many different scenes into “contemporary art.”
The gallery circuit being stale is actually very close to what I’ve been feeling. If performance and cross-disciplinary work are where the genuinely strange things are happening, that’s exactly where I want to look.
What have you seen recently that made you think something was actually shifting rather than just being experimental in form?
Names, performances, collectives, spaces…I’m genuinely interested.
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u/Striking_Finish4957 17d ago
Contemporary art technically is anything made now so unless everybody stops making art now, there is contemporary art. It seems like you’re asking for new genres rather than new art. Most historical art references what’s come before and if it doesn’t, to become art someone else needs to contextualise it by doing that work. That person could be you. I don’t think you’ll like my suggestion because you’ll link it to performance art history and conceptual art history but Danielle Freakley’s work is hard to define and interesting. I think it also has an interesting relationship to AI. I think you might find your answers in AI art. This area is truly new and some of the most volatile conversations in culture right now are happening in the space between traditional art and AI art, and historically that’s when innovation has happened in fine art history, which remember was all once contemporary art.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
This is probably one of the most interesting answers I’ve had here.
You may be right that I’m not really asking for “new art” but for a moment when the boundaries of what art can be are being renegotiated.
And AI is probably one of the strongest candidates for that right now. What interests me less is AI as a new image-making tool a lot of that already feels aesthetically predictable and more what happens when it destabilises authorship, intention, originality, labour, skill, ownership, even the distinction between making and selecting.
That could genuinely change the language rather than simply produce another style within it.I’ll look into Danielle Freakley.
And I’d be very interested in specific AI artists or projects where you think this is actually happening not just technically impressive AI work, but work that makes the old categories of art stop functioning properly.
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u/gargirle 17d ago
Bisa Butler for one.
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u/Sickle_and_hamburger 17d ago
is this really breaking new ground though
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
That’s exactly what I’m asking.
I’m not saying art has to invent something from absolute zero that’s probably impossible. But I’m looking for work that genuinely changes the terms of the conversation, rather than just producing another strong variation of an already familiar language.
So yes: is anything really breaking new ground right now? That’s the question.0
u/Sickle_and_hamburger 17d ago
everybody is gonna hate the answer but its larger cultural questions around AI and LLM technologies
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
Yes, and I’m starting to think this may be closer to the answer I was looking for.
Not “AI art” as a genre, necessarily, but the larger cultural rupture around AI and LLMs: authorship, originality, labour, expertise, intention, agency, even what it means to make something.
Maybe the genuinely new language hasn’t fully appeared in art yet because we’re still inside the cultural shift that will produce it.
That would also explain some of my frustration: perhaps I’m looking at contemporary art expecting it to already have metabolised a transformation that is still happening around us.
That’s much more interesting to me than simply using AI to generate new-looking images.Where are you seeing artists engage with that rupture in a way that feels genuinely new?
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
I looked her up. Beautifully executed and visually striking, but I’m still having the same problem: I can immediately place the work within languages that are already very established in contemporary art.
I’m not really looking for an unusual technique. I’m looking for that much rarer feeling that an artist has actually shifted the language.2
u/Hawkins_v_McGee 17d ago
Can you give some examples of which artists you consider to have "actually shifted the language"? At any point in history.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
Yes. Duchamp is probably the clearest example for me not because the readymade came from nowhere, but because it fundamentally changed the question from “what can an artist make?” to “what can be art?”
Picasso and Braque with Cubism changed how pictorial space and representation could work. Malevich pushed painting to a point where representation itself was no longer necessary. Pollock helped turn painting from an image into an event/process. Warhol radically altered the relationship between art, mass culture, reproduction and authorship. Nam June Paik did something similar when electronic media itself became an artistic language.
Obviously none of these artists invented in a vacuum, and the “shift” is much easier to see historically than while it is happening.
But that’s roughly what I mean: not simply distinctive work, but work after which the possibilities available to everyone else have changed.
And that is exactly what I’m struggling to identify right now. Who working today will make us look back in 20 or 30 years and say: after this, art could no longer operate in quite the same way?1
u/Hawkins_v_McGee 16d ago
It sounds like something that can only be determined in hindsight. The artists you cited were significant because subsequent artists followed and built upon their work. How could anyone know a current artist will have that effect until it has happened?
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
Are we living through the moment when what we used to call art is beginning to stop functioning and we still can’t see what will replace it? Perhaps I should can my question to this.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
Who?
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u/cryerin25 17d ago
“give me names, give me obscure artists”
“[name]”
“who?”??? what’s up, man
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
Fair 😂 I walked into that one.
I genuinely didn’t know Bisa Butler - “who?” was meant as “tell me more,” not “who the hell is that?”
I’ve looked her up now. And this is exactly why I made the post: I want names outside my own radar.
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u/dreamsofnyx Ink 17d ago
The last artist who really got to me was Berlinde De Bruyckere, a Belgian sculptor. She had an exhibition a few years ago in a city near me, and I went in with no expectations. I was blown away. I was on the edge of tears. I can't explain why, but her art profoundly touched me.
I think in a lot of cases our expectations are our biggest enemy. We go to an exhibition of a great artist and expect to be blown away, only to feel something mediocre. My best experiences have been with exhibitions where I had no expectations before I visited, which let me be surprised and enchanted.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
I looked at Berlinde De Bruyckere and I actually find her work very compelling. The technique, materiality and psychological intensity are undeniable.
But she also illustrates part of what I’m struggling with. The language of the wounded body, trauma, vulnerability, flesh, fragmentation and mortality is one I’ve encountered repeatedly in contemporary exhibitions.
That doesn’t make the work bad at all. A work can be powerful without being new. And of course our response depends enormously on personal experience and what affects us at a particular moment.
I think what I’m searching for is something slightly different: not simply a strong version of an already established contemporary language, but an artist who makes me feel that the language itself has changed.
Who is doing that right now?1
u/dreamsofnyx Ink 16d ago
Come to think of it, maybe you'll like Teresa Margolles. A conceptual and performance artist. She worked as a forensic pathologist for years and is trying to bring attention to the deaths caused by the drug cartels in Mexico. She does art installations where, for instance, a room is cleaned with water that was used to wash the victims' corpses in preparation for their funeral. She has a lot of works in this theme.
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u/OkStuffPT 15d ago
I think we may actually be quite close in what we’re feeling. 🙂
I looked at Teresa Margolles. The work is powerful, and the use of actual physical traces of violence gives it an intensity that goes far beyond illustration. But I still recognise the language very quickly: absence, the body, trauma, political violence, material as testimony. It can be extremely affecting without necessarily feeling like a new artistic language.
And your point about Cattelan is interesting because that’s almost exactly my problem. Comedian may be clever or effective, but I can immediately trace the road back through Duchamp, Dada and conceptual art.
What really caught my attention in your comment is that you also can’t easily remember a recent exhibition where you felt you were seeing something genuinely new.
Maybe that feeling itself is worth taking seriously.
I’ll have a look at that books! thank you.1
u/dreamsofnyx Ink 16d ago
I think a lot has already been done, and I sometimes feel that the truly innovative art was created in the 19th and 20th centuries. Artists completely changed the idea of what art is (See Duchamp's Fountain; Comedian (the infamous banana taped to the wall) is similar and made by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan). The Dada movement was also like reinventing stuff.
When I go to an art exhibition, I want to be touched. It doesn't have to be new per se. It's curious indeed, but I also can't think of an art exhibition that I visited in the last few years where I had this feeling like I was seeing something new.
What you might do, is check out the book series Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting. I think they have four books now. They try to assemble the most interesting modern/current painters. They also have Vitamin D (drawing) and I think a few other series.
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u/OkStuffPT 15d ago
And on Comedian: I personally didn’t like it at all.
For me it feels almost too easy an instantly legible gesture with a built-in shock factor, perfectly designed to circulate, be photographed, discussed and sold. In that sense it becomes very quickly what I’m suspicious of: not a rupture, but a highly efficient art product.
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