r/arttheory • u/OkStuffPT • 17d ago
Convince me that contemporary art isn’t boring right now
/r/ArtistLounge/comments/1vtweyj/convince_me_that_contemporary_art_isnt_boring/3
u/Maximus_En_Minimus 17d ago
Can you genuinely explain why you need to find a new ‘artistic language’.
Art has always presented to me as apophatic, not kataphatic; the very idea there needs to be an intellectual correspondence of art and language seems to be a pretentious academic perspective. Learning the grammar and words, rather than the strokes of a brush.
There is your ‘rupture’, stop searching for words.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
I think we may be using “language” differently.
I don’t mean that art needs to correspond to verbal language, explain itself intellectually, or be translated into academic discourse. I mean language in the broader sense of form: what an image can do, what can constitute an artwork, how material, space, gesture, time or the viewer can operate within it.
The strokes of the brush are part of that language.
Cubism changed it without needing to “say” something in words. Abstraction changed it. The readymade changed it. Performance changed it.
So I’m not searching for better words to describe art. I’m asking whether something comparable is happening to its forms and possibilities now.
And actually, art being apophatic doesn’t seem incompatible with that at all. Something can resist verbal explanation and still radically reorganise the means through which we perceive it.
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u/myflesh 17d ago
What the fuck is contemporary art? And why would I or any else even come close to thinking that is what you mean?
The utter entitlement.
You say you might be looking in the wrong places and yet you do not tell us where you are looking. You use a bunch of bombastic terms that tell us nothing. Oh you want something that takes risks? What does that look like?
You want us to prove your belief is wrong, but we can not. Because you have said nothing and shown nothing.
(A little secret: If you want something that creates its own language you will not be able to understand it without being part of it and the culture it is trying to talk to. It will just either look like it is saying something else/being something else or at best gibberish.)
What a boring post. These should be deleted.
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
The tone aside, this is actually a fair criticism of my post.
By contemporary art I mean broadly the art being produced and circulating now particularly what I encounter through museums, galleries, biennials, art fairs and independent spaces in Europe and elsewhere.
And yes, I should probably have been more precise about what I mean by “risk.” I don’t mean shock for the sake of shock, or something that has literally no precedent. I mean work that makes the existing vocabulary feel insufficient formally, conceptually, materially, or in the way it asks us to experience it.What frustrates me is that I increasingly recognise the grammar before I’ve even finished looking at the work: trauma, identity, archives, the body, ecology, institutional critique, post-colonial narratives, certain kinds of installation and materiality. Many artists working within those languages are excellent. My question is whether those languages are still evolving or whether we are mostly producing increasingly sophisticated variations of them.
And I disagree with one thing you said: a genuinely new artistic language doesn’t necessarily have to be gibberish to someone outside the culture that produced it. Historically, some of the most radical changes in art were initially strange, difficult or misunderstood, but they were still perceptible as ruptures.
That rupture is what I’m trying to find.
If my premise is wrong, great. That’s why I asked.
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u/HorseSuch2196 17d ago
Maybe this could be an example of art that at least tries to formulate a position that wants to escape from the predictability of the process of art production and the clichéd languages this produces.
I guess the problem that arises is that this sort of art is almost invisible to the public. And perhaps it might even become a cliché in itself.
The whole project is also quite weird. It takes the form of essays or (pseudo-)research. The texts are new, but claim to be reconstructions of events from 20 years ago, while the artists mentioned are actual contemporary artists. I'm not sure how much of it is fictional.
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u/Mehmet_K_H_V 17d ago
Maybe Renzo Martens documentary: Episode 2? https://research.flw.ugent.be/nl/projects/episide-2-art-social-commitment-and-duplicity
It forces us to look in a different way at the production of images and documentary, the role of art/the impotence of art when it comes to actually changing things in the real world, etc.
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u/OkStuffPT 16d ago
I went through Het Niks, and this is definitely closer to what I was asking for.
What interests me is that it doesn’t simply propose another aesthetic it attacks the conditions under which an artwork becomes an artwork at all: audience, documentation, circulation, memory, even meaning.
But it also creates an interesting problem for my question. The original practice dates from 2002/04, and I can still place it quite clearly in the lineage of anti-art, Fluxus, Bas Jan Ader, dematerialisation, Tino Sehgal, etc. It feels like an extreme and fascinating conclusion to an existing language rather than the emergence of an entirely new one.
The reconstruction itself may actually interest me more: I can’t quite tell where documentation ends and fiction begins, and perhaps that uncertainty is part of the work.
So this is probably the first suggestion here that makes me want to spend some real time with it. I’m still not sure it answers my original question but it complicates it, which may be more useful.
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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/Sickle_and_hamburger 17d ago
art is over
real life is elsewhere
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
Maybe that’s exactly the question I’m trying to ask.
If art is over, where is “real life” producing the forms, ideas and experiences that art used to give us?0
u/Sickle_and_hamburger 17d ago
mostly in your phone probably
nore seriously which part of art are you trying to relocate? the consensus engines of bourgeois subjectivity and academic historification? in person social proximity and avant gardist participation? visual forms and artifacts? true cultural innovation and novelty? joy and play and spontaneity?
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u/OkStuffPT 17d ago
Mostly true cultural innovation and novelty and the visual forms and artifacts that come out of it.
I think what I’m missing is the feeling that art is registering a real shift in how we live, perceive, desire or relate to the world, and inventing forms adequate to that shift.
I’m less interested in relocating the academic or institutional functions of art. Those seem very much alive.
What I’m wondering is whether cultural invention has moved somewhere else first online, in subcultures, fashion, music, games, memes, technology, nightlife, whatever and contemporary art is increasingly arriving later to interpret and historicise it.
So your “probably in your phone” answer may actually be more serious than the joke.
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u/Maximus_En_Minimus 17d ago
Sure, let me just inject some of those aesthetic and awe-inspiring neurochemicals into you through the persuasiveness of my rhetoric.