I’ll say it outright; contemporary art is terrible
from a traditional skill standpoint. Something about conceptual and popular art
in this period known as “Contemporary Art” is innately frustrating for both
artists and the public alike. Maurizio Cattelan’s “The Comedian”, sold for $120,000.
To the artist who has spent years honing his craft and studying traditional art
technique, a banana taped to a wall hardly seems representative of “good art”.
In 2002, the artist Santiago Sierra created a conceptual
piece where she invited esteemed art guests to a $500,000 exhibit in London. The
guests showed up to the gallery only to find the whole thing boarded up. The
point of the piece was to invoke frustration for not being able to access the
building, which had parallels to economic and political access around the
world. These modern art pieces and performances have something in common; rather
than being art in the traditional sense of the word, with skillful paint
strokes and the “thirds rule”, these art pieces invoked a strong psychological reaction
from the viewers, simply because they defied traditional art.
Does contemporary art define an important shift in ideas
from traditional skill and technique to perhaps social and psychological experiments?
In his book “The Psychology of Contemporary Art”, Gregory Minissale discusses
how we often associate beauty with traditional art, and how contemporary art is
slowly redefining what society believes to be beautiful. In the 1970s, an
artist named Marina Abramovic performed a conceptual art piece where she slowly
damaged her scalp by brushing it with a metal comb, while repeating the phrase “art
must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful”. This artwork can be said to be
beautiful not in its artistic rendering, but in its performance and intense
psychological impact, which widely applies to contemporary conceptual art.
While “The Comedian” itself had artistic skill left to be
desired, it invoked strong reactions from the public, inevitably bringing
people to ask the question “what is art?” The beautiful thing about art is that
art has no boundaries. What one person defines as art may not be what someone
else has in mind. One person could connect with a painting on a spiritual level
while another finds that he’s inclined to tear it off the wall and burn it. People
have ideas of what art should look like, how it should be observed and
interpreted. But perhaps the contemporary art period is so important simply because
it has opened the other end of a spectrum that people didn’t know existed. Eric
Wayne, an artist and critic currently based in Southeast Asia, commented on the
vastly different ends of the spectrum that conceptual art and traditional art
are placed on. “Because I’ve done conceptual art, including installation,
performance, site-specific art, and text-based art, as well as lots of drawing
and painting, I can easily see that they are very different disciplines, though
each has an element of creativity” (https://artofericwayne.com/2020/01/07/why-people-hate-contemporaryconceptual-art/).
One is not better than the other because even from a
neurological standpoint, beauty and art is subjective.
Citations
“The Psychology of
Contemporary Art” by Gregory Minissale, pg. 83
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