Contemporary art has a very broad context – you won’t know for sure what the author wanted to say. So why do we stand in line for fashion shows?
What is contemporary art?
Let’s be honest: contemporary art scares and attracts at the same time. There are no sensible textbooks or intelligible courses on the subject, because everything happens here and now. With you. And before you dive into this maelstrom, it’s worth agreeing on the shore: what we see before us now is art that is current. This term is not used as often as “contemporary art,” but it’s still more accurate. The work of living artists is a story about how they feel about our time.
I want to understand contemporary art. Where to start?
Relax. It’s like sitting on a couch at a psychologist’s office. It’s important to understand that actual art has a very broad context – you never know for sure what the artist wanted to say. Artists rely on their viewers, they give us the freedom and the right to invent meanings. And no matter what you come up with, you can’t go wrong. But if you still want to be thoroughly specific, look at the context. Study the artist’s biography. Where is he from? Under what circumstances did he become an artist? What are his hobbies? How much, in the end, is this obscure painting you’re looking at now?
If the painting is expensive, is it a good artist?
That is probably the most difficult question. The situation in the contemporary art market is very ambiguous. Admittedly, the old stock – paintings by artists of past centuries – is a much more reliable investment. Such art is well-studied, works usually have a rich history of ownership, that is, a provenance. And oftentimes a good provenance can drive a painting up in price, even though it has no great monetary value. It’s more complicated with contemporary art. We do not yet know which of our contemporaries in the XXII century will be considered a genius and which of them will be considered a talentless upstart, and whose names will be completely forgotten. Therefore, in times of economic crisis collectors buy works by old masters and on the rise are not afraid to invest in contemporary artists.
So it turns out that collectors decide everything?
Yes. I don’t want to disappoint you, but we are standing in long lines for fancy exhibitions because someone has already appraised these works. Measured their potential in money. Today, the word art critic means almost nothing. The right is not the one who knows, but the one who buys. The most active and famous collectors are still Europeans and Americans, although in the East there is a real boom in collecting. Someone banal invests in works of art, and someone, like François Pinault or Roman Abramovich, collects on the dictates of the soul. However, both categories are equally influential in the art business.
Where are the works of art sold?
There are auction houses. The biggest players in the market are Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Not only works of art are exhibited there. Bidding at these venues is undoubtedly the hottest. There is also an auction house in Russia, VLADEY, organized by Vladimir Ovcharenko, founder of the Regina Gallery.
Where, apart from museums, can one see actual art?
The market has no task to drive actual art into museums. Of course, there are a few successful examples. In Moscow, these are “Garage” and the MOMA. Most often, Actual Art lives in a more mobile space. The main formats are exhibitions and fairs.
The most important exhibitions of art are the Venice Biennale and “Documenta” in Kassel. The curators of these events are carefully selected, and participation in them is considered to be almost the pinnacle of an artist’s career. At the very least, the value of his work is guaranteed to increase afterwards. I would call the Venice Biennale and Documenta a sort of a showcase for artistic achievement. Unfortunately, today this format is in crisis. Mega-exhibitions are held every two years – too little time for something fundamentally new to happen in art.
Things are a little better with fairs, and again money plays a major role. Fairs like the prestigious Art Basel combine the format of an exhibition and an auction. Cosmoscow, the only international fair in Russia, is also organized according to the “buy-sell” and “study- contemplate” principles. Art does not come directly to you as it does at the Biennale, but it makes you realize that it is somewhere nearby, and you can appreciate it at any moment. Or you can price it out, depending on which team you are playing for in the art market.
Talking with a young art historian
In order to understand the subject, you have to define yourself terminologically. And this raises the question: What do you think contemporary art is?
Those who start out in art, sooner or later end up coming to modernity. I’m going to be a bit nerdy now and say that we’re not going to talk about contemporary art, but about contemporary art, because contemporary art is something that begins in the 1960s, with Impressionism. It’s a departure from the classical tradition, from classical standards. And what is happening now is contemporary art.
We live in a certain period of time and we should have lived in our own period. At university we were always being told that we had to listen to our own music, the music of our own times, that we had to read our own literature, not to live in the past, but to know what was going on here and now. It’s the same with the visual arts. And yet, what is contemporary art?
If we’re talking specifically about a definition, it’s a very complicated question. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a long time. I would say that not only contemporary art but, in principle, art according to the standard definition, is a reflection of reality in artistic images. That is, it is reality that we experience, but presented through the artist’s interpretation.
But how does a normal person understand contemporary art? Often such a person comes to an exhibition and sees, for example, garbage. And he doesn’t understand what it is and how to take it? Does this come with experience or does one have to learn?
Actually, when it comes to contemporary art, we have to walk a rather slippery slope, because there is so much art these days. If before there was always one kind of direction, like baroque, and the leading artists painted in that style, now there is no such streaming direction. And every person, the artist, tries to express himself in a special way. He tries to do something that has not been done before.
I think there are two trends now: research artists (that’s exactly what emerged after the 70s of the 20th century) who study social processes and they show the results of their research in their art. And to understand this line of art, you have to know the theoretical basis. The author expresses some kind of idea, it is usually justified in some way, and you have to know this idea to understand the essence of what is going on.
And the second direction is those artists who express their emotions, themselves, their feelings, their experiences. And there is no theoretical basis any more. Here everything is calculated on emotions, on how a person perceives it, not with his brain, but with his feelings. Art for the sake of art.
What makes people freeze in front of a work of art?
In the museum where I work (Museum of Modernity, Samara) several years ago there was an exhibition called “World of Art” (this is such a large group of Russian artists of the early 20th century). They brought a big sculpture of Vrubel to that show, and there’s even a video of an old lady standing in front of it for ten minutes. She was walking around it, looking at it, as if she was in an active dialogue with the sculpture, and that went into the archives of our museum. I think a person is such a blob of memories, emotions, knowledge, of everything going on around them. If a person freezes in front of a piece, he resonates with it. He finds in it something consonant with his state at the moment. If it’s contemporary art, it’s usually something unspeakable. Somehow…somehow you want to stand there and feel that this is yours. But there is another option: everyone has a sense of inner harmony, and harmony of both form and color. So, most likely, something seems harmonious to a person at work, and this affects them.
There is a category of people who say that going to exhibitions of contemporary art is a waste of time and money. What can an expert answer to these remarks?
My answer is simple: study art history! For ordinary people who say that, art ends with Shishkin and Aivazovsky. They know Malevich, but they don’t understand him at all. They need, first of all, to understand that art today is different from the 19th century realist artists. They need to accept the fact that contemporary art is and will be strange, frightening, incomprehensible, and then start to study it. In any case, everything is about knowledge, and if one has an understanding of art history, one will be more relaxed about contemporary artistic processes and will at least try to understand them. And that’s the only advice I can give such people at all.
What are artists guided by when they name their paintings?
I think, again, by the idea of what he wanted to say in the work. There’s a thought, and he expresses it in an artistic image. Sometimes the thought doesn’t fit into that image, and then it extends to the title, too. The reality is quite simple and more trivial. Sometimes a title is thought up a few hours before the exhibition opens.
Why is it that someone’s paintings with a couple of stains or strokes can be worth millions and someone else’s can’t?
Yes, this is a question that worries a lot of people. People usually say, “My five-year-old son can paint like that! In the middle of the 20th century, the relationship between the creator and the artist came into question: “This work is art, so I’m an artist. Or I call myself an artist, so everything I do is art? And now a lot depends on the personality of the artist. This is a person who is essentially called an artist by a critic, so everything he does is art. Anyone can paint a picture, but it won’t sell because the person himself is not known in the art community.
What’s important is the artist’s creative method and how innovative it is. Let’s say Jackson Pollock with his abstract expressionism and sprinkling technique. He was the first, went down in history, became one of the most famous artists of the XX century, and just his work is sold for fabulous money. As, by the way, does the work of Mark Rothko, who is usually fondly remembered by “residents” of social networks. All of these avant-garde artists had a classical education, but they did not stop there, and went on to develop their own vision of art. If someone wants to repeat the creative method of Rothko or Malevich, of course, this will not be quoted on the art market, because “we’ve already seen it.
But someone will get into the art community, starting with paintings like this, right? Is that a matter of luck?
These days a lot depends on interpreters and translators, usually private galleries that gather artists around them. They often exhibit them and present them to the public as real artists. Since the gallerist is a professional in his business, ordinary people shouldn’t have any doubts about the talent of the chosen artist. For such art – laconic, obscure, seemingly simple – it is necessary to hit the trend. Art lives and develops together with society, it responds to the demands of today. If we see a circle and a rectangle in a picture, it’s probably the only way to express what’s going on in the artist’s world today.
How do you come across a critic who says this is art?
There are critics who have made a name for themselves in the art community. They are respected, their opinion is listened to. Usually they talk and write quite a lot, so the main thing is to hear it. And his opinion decides a lot. But it’s quite a complicated process to make a person an artist. For example, Rothko is still connected to abstractionism, and he became one of the main people of his movement. He was spotted by some gallery owner, who started exhibiting, promoting and selling. I think, for the most part, it’s the person who gives the theoretical justification that decides. Talent also decides a lot of things in contemporary art. It has to be innovative, a new word in art, another step.
How do you communicate the complex language of art to a lazy viewer today? And what are the ways?
Why? I don’t understand, why should all people like art? Everyone knows there is literature, but not everyone likes to read or doesn’t like a certain genre. The most important thing, it seems to me, is to make it so that the person accepts art. There’s a lot of hullabaloo right now: why all this, it’s not necessary! It’s necessary because it’s a reflection of our modern lives. A person can dislike it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, my not so much experience has shown that it is possible to deliver information through lectures. You can read information quietly and on the Internet, but people are interested to listen to such a person, who will speak in simple language, easily. I joke all the time and usually don’t say things I am not interested in. Modern art requires knowledge. It is coded, and in order to understand it you have to know the language, the code. And you can’t go anywhere without it. If you’re lazy, you need to go to lectures, that’s all I can advise.
Any system undergoes some changes over time. What kind of breakthrough is modern art waiting to make and how do you see it in the future?
Again, art is very much tied to modernity. And it will in any case deal with contemporary problems and trends. After all, artists are ordinary people who live in society, who also feel and think and imagine something and something happens to them, so they rethink everything that is going on around them creatively and show it in their works. There is quite a serious tendency right now to move away from the pictorial to the documentary, and this process is very much related to nature. Art may just pour into observation, and the main task of the artist will be to see a particular process, sometimes hidden, and show it to everyone else. Another option: these positions (art as research and art as expression of emotion) will expand and depart from each other, existing as parallel paths that will not intersect. And this will not be one single style in the future. Right now, everything is very variegated, bright and heterogeneous.
Is the art critic himself involved in the creative process?
As a rule, yes. I have a friend who and I went through 6 years of training together, who is an artist. It is interesting for her, and it is the way she expresses her attitude to the world. Personally, it’s not that I’m not interested, I just don’t want to go into art. I want to go into theory and criticism!
The everyday life of a Russian art critic. What are they like?
There are many art historians now, and they are everywhere. They are engaged in all kinds of activities. I am a researcher at a museum, so my duties include organizing exhibitions. I am a kind of cultural manager. I write texts, lectures. And lectures are quite a successful project, which the city really supported. About 20 people or more come to each lecture, just to hear about art. I prepare for these lectures, find interesting information to convey to the visitors in simple language. But the bureaucratic stuff is on my mind right now, because all the museum documentation is one frantic accounting. That’s what gets in the way the most.
You, as a young professional, have already encountered some problems. What can you single out as a category of problems in your place of work?
The first thing I would like to single out is the bureaucracy. If you do an event, usually when you get to it through economists, lawyers, and so on, there’s nothing left of this artistic project. But can we beat this bureaucracy now? – I don’t think so. We have to try to abstract it away. The second thing is that now museums, like cinemas, have to make money. This is a very bad tendency. Here the museum is aimed not at education, but at ratings. And there is not explicit, but quite strong competition between museums. I think this is very wrong. It is necessary to create such a cultural environment in the city so that people can choose not between museums but between, say, a museum and a shopping center. I really want people to spend more time learning something. I am in this environment, and I know what and where is going on, but most people don’t get this information. It seems to me necessary to create a unified platform, a site, where all the information about all the museums of the city will be concentrated.
And thirdly, the fixed stereotype that a museum is a dead and boring place. A modern museum is a space in which it is possible to spend time in an interesting way. For example, most of our projects are aimed at the young public. We need to make it clear that museums are not boring, interesting, and even more “entertaining” than cinemas. Those are probably the three main problems.
Conclusion of a review of an article on contemporary art
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of contemporary art. It is evident that the author has a deep understanding of the field and its various sub-genres. The writing is clear and concise, making it easy for readers to follow along. While some may find the level of detail daunting, it offers a unique perspective on current art trends. We highly recommend this article to anyone interested in learning more about contemporary art. Have you read other reviews on our website? If so, what did you think? Let us know in the comments below.