The Absolute Truth About Contemporary Art
Mar 7, 2011 by Peter Plagens
Read the entire thing here:
http://www.illuminateme.org/arts/truth-about-art.html
Here are some quotes:
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I’m a dedicated modernist and I’m certainly no nativist. But I am a negativist by temperament, and experience has confirmed that 90 percent of what’s offered for sale by the galleries today is bad art, and that 90 percent of the art offered for viewing by museums isn’t nearly as good as their press releases say it is. Although my reasons for thinking this are wildly different from Cortissoz’s condemnation of modernism, I have, over the last 20 years or so, written about the deleterious effects on contemporary art of pervasive irony, the unfortunately increasing overlap of art and superficial entertainment in gallery offerings, the preening confluence of art and the runway fashion industry, and even the morphing of call-it-like-you-see-it art criticism in more or less plain language into theoretical, judgment-averse “post-criticism.”
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In the New Art World of today, the typical young ambitious artist once more has an MFA degree. But in order to get career traction right from the start, it has to be from a short list of “hot” schools, especially one of the big three in southern California: UCLA, CalArts, or Art Center. Since the artist’s MFA is now probably in some form of “new media,” his or her work (our artist is now just as likely to be female as male) will consist of either some tricky configuration of projected video, or retro-Pop-Art objects in some kind of fancy plastic made on order by a fabricator. Since all but the most minimum-wage adjunct teaching jobs are as scarce as hen’s teeth, and since government grants to artists are for all intents and purposes extinct, sales now count for just about everything. So our young artist makes work whose point can be quickly apprehended by peripatetic collectors.
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Whatever clout painting and sculpture still enjoy in the general culture has to do with either money (that is, sensationally high prices) or the artists being “hot” (that is, photogenic and starting to command high prices). Except for the occasional scandal involving the depiction of sex, or a satire of a religious belief, no really consequential ideas or philosophical tenets expressed in an embodied way in a contemporary painting or sculpture gets much attention at all. Contemporary painting or sculpture is all about clever irony. Think John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, or Jeff Koons.
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But part of the comparative neglect also comes from the fact that contemporary art still isn’t intended for a large audience. A contemporary artist doesn’t want a million people to give him or her a dollar apiece to look at his or her work. He or she wants one person to pay a million dollars to own his or her work. That being the case, the contemporary artist—whatever his or her still-sublimated movie-directing ambitions—isn’t required to make the work intelligible to a greater public. Chances are, in fact, that the collector the artist has abstractly in mind as a buyer wants the work to look a little weird and indecipherable. After all, that’s part of the staying-ahead-of-the-curve feeling the collector is paying for.
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