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APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART
Contemporary art: which bit is the ‘art’, exactly?
It’s important to know what to look for, otherwise you won’t ‘get it’.
Scenario: imagine someone presenting you with a plate of food. You hold the plate up to your ear and declare ‘I can’t hear anything. Not a thing. This is not music! My five-year-old could do better.’ Now imagine someone going into an art exhibition and thinking to themselves ‘What is this shit? My five-year-old could do this.’
You can see what we’re up against.
This short article is about the essential difference between art and craft, and why, if you want to understand and enjoy contemporary art, you need to be able to see that art goes beyond mere crafting and into a realm of its own.
‘Art’ — especially as in ‘contemporary art’ — continues to baffle and confuse people, because something happened to destroy the simple certainties that existed before the advent of the modern era. What happened ? Ultimately there was a switch from the aesthetic to the narrative — meaning a change from an obsession with beauty and skillful crafting, to the emergence of a new realm of artistic expression, this time involving theatricality and ‘narrative states of mind’ — and this new realm remains poorly…
