Artists are not the only people who need to keep up with what is happening in their field. So do art critics.
Unfortunately, there is no way for them to do so. The art that’s about to become hot is not yet being shown anywhere, and the art that’s about to fall out of favor still is. And even if critics could somehow see ahead, there’s no way for them to tell which new thing will be good and which will be bad. If a critic says a new artist is good, everyone assumes it’s a case of favoritism or snobbery, because how would the critic know? And if the critic says a new artist isn’t good, then people assume it’s because the critic doesn’t get modern art.
Description:knows her subject
It’s time to apply the creativity that inspired your work to a new challenge: surviving in today’s art world.
Your first reaction is probably to dismiss this as impossible. It isn’t. The art world has changed dramatically over the past few decades, but it still needs good artists. The trick is figuring out how to make yourself into one of those.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that most people who want to become artists are better at talking about it than doing it. You don’t have to be an expert on the history of avant-garde art movements, or even know what they are. But you do need to understand why there is now so much more artwork than ever before, and why so much of it looks like crap from an evolutionary perspective.
A major factor in the evolution of modern art was the development of technology for producing unlimited copies at little or no cost. This made possible a creative strategy previously limited to fields like poetry: pouring more and more effort into your work in hopes that some small fraction of it will be so good that everyone will talk about it.*
The problem with this strategy is that its returns diminish quickly, especially when every artist is using it. Another evolutionary insight is therefore required: quality can survive only if it
Art is a language. It is used to communicate ideas and emotions, just as ordinary language is used to communicate information. A movie tells a story, an advertisement sells a product, a novel expresses an idea.
Modern art is now firmly entrenched in the art world. It’s not just for museums and wealthy people anymore, but for everyone. There are modern art gift shops, modern art restaurants; you can even buy modern art cosmetics. My advice to young artists is: don’t get too attached to your work. Because someday you will be old and rich and someone will be taking a dump on it.
The reason I know this is that I have read about it in an article by the famous critic Jerry Saltz who wrote, “Modernism has become Mass Art.” And he says, “It’s easy to hate on Jeff Koons because he epitomizes the rise of the commodity and our mass culture. But the truth is that almost everyone in the art world has become either a Koonsie or a wannabe.” He goes on to quote several other critics who agree, including one who describes Wangechi Mutu as “basically appropriating pop tropes like Brillo boxes and Marilyn Monroe.”
“Just as the avant-garde became coopted by the market,” says Saltz, “the market is now being coopted by everything else – most significantly by pop.”
Ah yes, pop. The word used to mean something specific – popular music
In the last century, art became more and more abstract. This seems easy to explain. Modernism is a rebellion against tradition, so it starts by rejecting the old forms – painting and sculpture in particular. Then it rejects everything else, one at a time.
The most abstract art is made with words or numbers rather than paint. So I’m not talking about that. But why did painters start using abstract shapes? And why did other artists stop using paint?
If you read histories of modernism, they will tell you that the painters had to use non-representational forms because they were exploring new ways of seeing, and these new ways could not be expressed in traditional terms. If you talk to painters, they will tell you that their medium just happened to change, but if it had been done with crayons instead of oil paint it would look pretty much the same.
What happened was that abstraction was popular in the art world at some point, and then it stopped being popular, so people who wanted to be avant garde stopped doing it.
Modern art died in St. Louis, Missouri on Sunday when it was found that over a million dollars worth of paintings and sculpture created by students at Washington University had been destroyed by the museum staff when they were left unattended.
The head of security at the museum, who wished to remain anonymous, said that he had received a phone call from a distressed staff member who reported that “the paintings were crawling off the walls and chewing their own tails.” When he arrived at the scene, he witnessed all three floors of the museum crawling with “giant self-devouring canvases.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “One second it was just a bunch of crazy-looking paintings, and then suddenly they started moving! I mean, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure these weren’t supposed to move.”
Eyewitnesses report that the canvases had begun hatching from the frames and eating each other shortly after entering the building. The larger works began to consume smaller ones until only one was left.
A spokesman for the museum confirmed that they would not be pressing charges against any of the students or their parents as long as they agreed never to return to St. Louis again.
A trend is a phenomenon that appears over time. It has different forms in different places and times, but its essence is always the same. The essence of a trend is that its popularity grows because it’s popular.
I’m talking about things like shoes, music or art. And I’m not talking about trends in technology or finance or politics, where popularity doesn’t make them more popular.
I’m not saying trends are always bad. A trend can be good or bad depending on what it’s a trend for. High heels are a recent trend, but one could argue they’re good because they reduce foot injuries from running and kicking. But the effect of high heels on your legs isn’t just positive—it’s also negative if you wear them too much and hurt yourself (and are thereafter more likely to wear them again).
The defining feature of a trend is that it becomes more popular because it’s already popular. This means that once a trend starts, it feeds on itself, because popularity makes it even more popular. No one wants to be left behind in something that’s already popular, so they join in too. This is how trends grow, and why trying to stop one right at the beginning is so hard: there aren’t very many people doing it yet