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Understanding contemporary art
For ‘art’ to be real ‘art’, it has to be strange & disturbing
There is more to art than mere beauty
‘Art’ is an elusive quality which some artworks mysteriously possess. It means they are strange and disturbing. Any artwork that isn’t strange and disturbing, isn’t art. It’s as simple as that. Art has nothing to do with aesthetics, or skilled craftsmanship. Art is something special.
How can we possibly arrive at this, given what even informed people normally think about art ?
What follows here is not a definition of art by decree. Nor is this some kind of art manifesto. We are not saying this is how art should be, or could be, but how it is, if you let go of the prison of aesthetics, and follow an infinitely more interesting conceptual trail. This is about uncovering and identifying an approach to art which avoids the triviality of sensory-based aesthetic theory and moves instead towards exploring the experiential worlds that art presents us with. And this approach is not about diminishing…
