The arts are an essential part of the human experience, and a reflection of our society. The arts have always been intertwined with the culture, politics, technology and economics that defines a time, place and people. In this article we shall explore the current state of modern art and its future direction.
We will begin by examining the definition of art: what is it? What is art? Should art be considered in terms of quality, or should it be thought of as something that has no specific value but rather is subjective to each individual person? Or, perhaps even more simply, does it even matter whether or not art has any intrinsic value? Does it even matter whether there is such a thing as art or not?
These questions are important to consider because they help us understand how we perceive ourselves and our world around us. They will help us answer the question: Is there hope for modern day art?…
A century ago, art seemed to possess limitless possibilities. It was on the verge of transforming experience entirely through an unprecedented fusion of sight, sound, and motion. It was on the verge of establishing a new relationship between the individual and society by becoming a collective creation, one that offered its own kind of community and experience.
The failure of these developments is what we now call Modernism. The idea that art could radically alter human experience had been alive since the Renaissance. In the early 1900s, it finally seemed about to be realized. But by the end of World War II—with the death of Jackson Pollock in 1956—it was already clear that something had gone terribly wrong. Art now seemed to have been reduced to objects whose only value lay in their market price.
Art has yet to recover from this failure; indeed, art seems barely capable of thinking its possibility as a failure at all. A few years ago, at Art Basel Miami Beach, I watched a young woman spend 15 minutes staring at a David Foster Wallace book displayed on a pedestal in front of a video monitor, which itself sat atop a glass table next to four small vases filled with artificial flowers and fruit. There was nothing else there, unless you count the gallery attendants standing around in
The art of today is characterized by a strong tendency towards negation. What is being negated? The answer is the past. In fact, every avant-garde movement from Futurism and Dadaism to Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism had as its main objective to negate what existed before it; Futurists and Dadaists negated the art of their own time, the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Surrealists the “bourgeois” art of the 19th century, and Abstract Expressionists the “academic” art of theirs.
The experience of the last ten years has shown that this attitude tends inevitably toward nihilism, which is its extreme form. It seems that even if they do not go all the way to nihilism, avant-garde movements have nothing else to say except “no.” And in order to keep saying no, they have to change what they are saying no to all the time.
In fact, however much we may be attracted to new things, we all must accept a certain continuity in our lives; otherwise there would be no way for us to function as human beings who have a past and a future.
Art is one of the most interesting issues of our time. The subject of art is very complex, but it is something that has been discussed for a long time, especially in our century. There are many opinions about what art is and how it works, but there is no general agreement.
The term “art” can be used for various kinds of activity: painting, sculpture, music and so on. To avoid confusion we can say that the term “art” can be used to identify any type of creative activity.
In the history of humankind there have been instances where the topic of art was not discussed. For example, the concept of “art” in the time when spiritual values predominated was different from the concept now.
There have been many debates about what constitutes good art or bad art. There have always been many schools that support specific styles in arts; but it has also been seen by many as a kind of progress.
The concept of “progress” is linked to one of the greatest themes in philosophy – hedonism. Hedonism assumes that there are pleasures to be enjoyed and that their number increases with progress and development. But there are some people who think that pleasure is not always the main goal in human life and that we shouldn’t
In other words, the human race has been around for a long time, and for much of that time it has been producing beautiful art. If there were some law of nature that prevented this from continuing, we would have known about it before now.
If we lack the resources to produce beautiful art today, it is because they have been diverted to something else. In the past that “something else” was war. Now it is advertising.
Beautiful art requires free artists and free audiences, and both are becoming ever less free. The audience must be free to ignore the artist when necessary, otherwise the artist will spend all his time catering to the prejudices of his patrons rather than dealing with reality as he sees it.
Future generations may yet see great works of art; but if they do, they will not be thanks to our culture’s current business model.
Art is not just beauty. Art is a purposeful, creative process involving an artist producing a work of visual or audible expression for the purpose of communicating with others and/or expressing their own inner feelings.
Art is a conscious activity, requiring conscious effort by an artist to create, yet it also reflects the unconscious, emotional responses of the artist to the world around him or her. So, art can be both beautiful and ugly, depending on the subject matter and style of the artist.
What we are seeing in much modern art today is not only ugliness but also intentional offensiveness and even violence against the viewer. This has its roots in postmodernism as described by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who said that meaning is “undecidable,” so artists can make any statement they want at any time because there are no rules or boundaries in art. The impact this has had on art is obvious to anyone who has observed it.
Art has been co-opted by the political left and made into another tool for promoting their ideas. Political correctness demands that all artwork conform to leftist thinking or be banned from public view.
In recent years, we have seen a trend toward ugly and gory “art” showing up in public places such as parks
In the past, paintings were made by a person who would design them. He would paint with his own hands and he could show them to people. The viewer would like the painting if he liked the feeling it gave him and not otherwise.
Today, computers are doing that job. The one who takes the decision to create a piece of art is no longer a person but a program. Such a program has no feelings at all but some kind of mathematical model. And there is no more handwork; the whole thing is made by machines.
The result of this change cannot be very good. The computer is working according to whatever instructions it has been given, so it will deliver only what was in its instructions, nothing more. And if it can’t do anything else, neither can people looking at it; they will see only what they have been told to see, nothing more.
This means that art is becoming less and less interesting and we have to look for other things to do than spending our lives staring at screens showing works of art made by programs for which we can feel nothing but boredom.”
