Contemporary Art

Madeleine Newman

‘Art, when vital, is about setting the teeth on edge, of reminding us that we are alive for a span, and that the ugly and wholly unavoidable fact of death is never very far away. Art is about the beautiful. It is also about the nasty, the unpalatable.’ -Michael Glover

Rachel Whiteread - House, 1993
Tracy Emin - My bed, 1998
Michael Landy - Breakdown, 2001

Modernisms (Dada and Duchamp vs. Modernist painting)
Conceptual Art
Postmodernism
YBAs- Art in the 1990s
Art Now- Themes and Issues in Contemporary Art

Marcel Duchamp - Fountain, 1917
Sherrie Levine - Fountain after Marcel Duchamp, 1991

Modernism vs Postmodernism
- ‘High Modernist’ art aimed to ‘hunt’ art down to its medium
- new forms of abstract art
- abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction;
- ainters became interested in the characteristics of painting
- modernist painting was self-defining

Jackson Pollock - Action Painting
Mark Rothko - The Seagram Murals, 1958

Greenbeergian Modernism
- American art critic Clement Greenberg promoted the work of the modernist painters
- associated with a concept of Formalism/New Criticism - the dominant idea and criteria for ascribing value to modern art until the 1960s

Modernism to Postmodernism
'All Art (after Duchamp) is conceptual in nature because art only exists conceptually

'One will have to wait fifty or one hundred years to meet one’s real audience, but it is this audience alone that interests me'
Marcel Duchamp, 1955

Conceptual Art- 1960s/1970s
Dematerialisation - Lucy Lippard & John Chandler -‘The Dematerialisation of Art’ in Art International - February 1968

Conceptualism
- challenge to the ‘visual’ and the status of the art object
- systems, series and structures as concepts for art
- analytical art
- institutional critique and museum intervention
- global conceptualism

‘A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art’ - Joseph Kosuth - Art as Idea as Idea, 1967

Art in the 1990's
the YBA's - Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn, Damien Hirst

Concluding quote - ‘a worldwide system for the production, distribution and consumption of art on a spectacular scale….the art it shows, sells and talks about is non-medium specific ‘conceptual’ postmodernism…..the work of art is, in short, entirely dependent on the institution of the museum for its continued existence - inside the whale: an introduction to postmodernist art