Contemporary Art Has Kept Defying Conventional Wisdom

However much one loves art, many people probably feel that "I just don't understand contemporary art."

Art is something that expresses "beauty." Generally, we think a work is more valuable the more it has the artist's originality and the rarer it is.

Yet much of contemporary art seems to fall outside that concept of art. Things that are ugly, or merely industrial products lined up, or things that belong more to subculture, are praised as art.

In school art class, pictures that drew shapes and colors just like the real thing were praised. Whether something looks real is an easy-to-grasp value judgment, so it is easy to evaluate. We, too, have come to think that pictures painted to look real are wonderful pictures.

But contemporary art is not based on such value standards, so we end up with the impression that "I have no idea about contemporary art."

And yet, once you come to see "Oh, so that's it!", contemporary art becomes suddenly fascinating. Of course, you are also free to find it uninteresting even after you understand it.

Contemporary Art Is an Objection to the Art of the Past

Claude Monet, "Impression, Sunrise" (1872) — Source: flickr

In fact, art has evolved by raising the banner of revolt against the concepts of the art that came before.

For example, many Japanese say they love Impressionist paintings, but when "Impression, Sunrise" first appeared at the French art academy, it was savaged.

The standard of art at the time favored clear, accurate form, and colors with a sense of weight and depth. But Impressionist paintings are hazy, their outlines vague. The colors are bright, without a shred of gravity — fluffy, like water vapor. Critics panned it: "A mere impression. Wallpaper in the making would be better."

Perhaps the people of the world were settled comfortably in tradition and could not understand the new wind.

It is the same for us: it is hard to understand art that lies beyond the established concepts we are steeped in. To understand contemporary art, it may help to think about what the artists denied of the past, and what they valued.

Matisse, Who Bet on the Power of Color

Henri Matisse, "Portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Stripe)" (1905) — Source: flickr

If you showed this picture to someone who didn't know Henri Matisse, they probably wouldn't think it a masterpiece that would go down in art history.

The way the ground color is applied and the way the outlines are drawn are both crude. There is next to no sense of texture, and above all there is the strangeness of a green stripe drawn down the nose, with the left and right of the face painted in different colors. How many people would feel this picture is "beautiful"?

But Matisse does not follow the traditional rules of art that copy reality. To him, such things did not matter. What he valued most was color. Color, in itself, expresses human inner emotions and sensations. Depending on how it is combined, it has the power to evoke all sorts of impressions in people — quiet ones, passionate ones, and more.

Matisse did not try to depict things realistically; he tried to paint the very world of expression in painting, and he believed that this was precisely the painter's role.

When you gaze at this picture paying attention to color, as Matisse intended, doesn't a slightly different scene come into view?

Picasso, Who Tried to Paint "the Truth of Existence"

Pablo Picasso, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) — Source: flickr

When people want to say "a picture I just don't get," Picasso's paintings tend to be brought up. In depicting a human face, the parts of the face point in impossible directions from one another, and the outlines are jagged and hardly human-like. Few people, surely, think Picasso's paintings are "beautiful" either.

Picasso came to be valued as a master because he invented the technique called Cubism.

People usually look at things from a single point. When you look at a cone, for example, from directly to the side it is a triangle, but from directly above it looks like a circle. In describing the object that is a cone, both views express the cone's appearance; you could say both are correct, and also that both are wrong.

Cubism is a technique of viewing an object from many angles and writing every way it appears into a single picture as small squares (cubes). People marveled at that revolutionary method of expression and saw in Picasso's paintings a new art.

Kandinsky, Who Longed for an Art Far from Reality

Wassily Kandinsky, "Composition VI" (1913) — Source: flickr

Speaking of pictures where you can't tell what is being depicted, abstract painting is also hard to grasp.

Even Picasso's paintings, said to be hard to understand, still let us tell that he is probably depicting a human being. But with Kandinsky's paintings, it is very difficult to explain what they are.

There is an anecdote about Kandinsky.

One day, returning home from an errand and entering his studio, he found an unfamiliar painting placed on the easel. He couldn't tell what was depicted, but he was captivated by its beauty.

However, it was simply his own painting placed on its side. When he realized this, the beauty of that painting that had moved him so much vanished from his heart.

Caught on the point that he could find beauty only when he couldn't tell what was depicted, Kandinsky came to think that representational things might be getting in the way of beauty.

From there he began to explore abstract painting. Later, Kandinsky came to be called "the father of abstract painting."

The Current of Art That Began with Duchamp's "Negation"

Marcel Duchamp, "Fountain" (1917) — Source: flickr

The artists mentioned so far were people who raised the banner of revolt against established art, but in the point of creating original works, they still followed tradition.

Then in 1917, an outrageous incident that overturned the art world occurred. At the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, a men's urinal bearing only the signature of a fictional artist (R. Mutt) was brought in under the title "Fountain." The culprit was Marcel Duchamp.

A urinal is an industrial product, so any number of identical ones can be made. Moreover, it was manufactured by a machine — not even made by a human. At first, "exhibiting such a thing is out of the question," and it was hidden behind a partition.

Is "Fountain," then, art?

Duchamp's artistic innovation lies not in the work as an "object" but in the "way of thinking." At the time this work was submitted, it was the middle of the First World War. Duchamp thought the reality of people killing one another was wrong, and he came to view the world negatively. At the same time, he came to thoroughly deny existing concepts and values.

He turned to deny art itself as well. Why must it be painted beautifully? Why must I create it myself? — he hurled fierce questions at the concept of art. As a result, he submitted as art the dirtiest and most commonplace of industrial products, a toilet, demanding a fundamental rethinking of values.

This attitude of Duchamp's later became the current of art called "conceptual art" or "readymade," and it has been carried on to the present.

Warhol, Who Affirmed Consumer Culture and Made It Art

Andy Warhol, "Brillo Box" (1964) — Source: flickr

The current Duchamp began — of bringing intellectual activity into art — was received with great acclaim by the younger generation and grew ever more radical. But art that had become too conceptual grew hard for the general public to understand.

In the era when Andy Warhol was active, the center of art had long since moved from Paris to New York, and it was a world of mass production and mass consumption. No longer was it a desperate situation as in Duchamp's time; it was a somehow cheerful era. Catching the mood of such a time, Warhol pulled art, which had had a lofty air, all at once down (or up) into popular culture.

Originally a commercial designer, Warhol brought design into art: he made imitations of an ordinary detergent box called the Brillo Box, lined them up, and insisted, "This is art."

Warhol's works, which affirmed consumer culture and claimed that making money, too, was art, blurred the difference between what is art and what is not, and came to ask people, "What is art?"

The answer the philosopher Arthur Danto gave to this question was that "whether something is art or not is judged in light of the theories, circumstances, and environment of art up to that point."

The philosopher George Dickie, who developed Danto's idea, says that "whether something is art or not comes down to whether those who view it can hold a social and cultural understanding that 'this sort of thing can be regarded as art.'"

In other words, it is not the maker but the viewer — whether the viewer recognizes it or not — that decides whether something is art.

Source: flickr

It could be said that the viewer of contemporary art has moved from the passive position of gratefully being allowed to appreciate a work the artist poured all their strength into, to the active position of appreciating, scrutinizing, and dialoguing with a work to judge whether it is art or not.

Contemporary Art in Full Bloom

Having repeatedly denied the concepts of past art, contemporary art has come to the point where even the most ordinary thing can become art. But this is not the end; further overturning of common sense has been attempted, and contemporary art has come to a state of anything goes.

Things once thought "this is not art" are now proudly housed even in authoritative museums. That Bandai's (now Bandai Namco's) video game machine "Pac-Man," for instance, is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York with no alterations at all — is this, too, a sign of the times?

Source: flickr

And if "the way of thinking" is what matters to contemporary art, there is no need to be bound by forms such as painting and sculpture as in traditional art. Performances such as setting a piano on fire and playing it, pickling a violin in oil, or obsessively sweeping and disinfecting a road — if they are recognized as art, they are art.

If the anime figures called "otaku culture," which tend to be seen as rather "lowbrow," are art, then so is a facility where you play with light among computer-controlled objects.

We sometimes witness digital art — its uniqueness guaranteed by NFTs that make use of blockchain technology — opening up, by virtue of that very quality, horizons of art never seen before.

Contemporary art is truly in a state of full bloom.

In such a situation, it is the viewer's privilege to judge whether those things are "art or not art." Turning this and that over in your mind, and talking about art with friends, can also be said to be one of the pleasures of contemporary art.

There is no need to be swayed by an artist's name value. To put it to an extreme, you are even free to say that "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is not art.

[Reference]

Rei Fujita, Gendai Art, Chō Nyūmon! (Contemporary Art: A Super Introduction!), Shūeisha Shinsho