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What is Contemporary Art?
This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal devoted to the question: What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentieth-century artistic movements? A single hegemonic “ism” has replaced clearly distinguishable movements and grand narratives. But what exactly does it mean to be working under the auspices of this singular ism?
“Widespread usage of the term 'contemporary' seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of 'contemporary art' may be taken as an anachronistic exercise in cataloguing or self-definition. At the same time, it is no coincidence that this is usually the tenor of such large, elusive questions: it is precisely through their apparent self-evidence that they cease to be problematic and begin to exert their influence in hidden ways; and their paradox, their unanswerability begins to constitute a condition of its own, a place where people work.”
e-flux journal: What Is Contemporary Art? puts the apparent simplicity and self-evident term into doubt, asking critics, curators, artists, and writers to contemplate the nature of this catchall or default category.
Contributors
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Boris Groys, Raqs Media Collective, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hu Fang, Jörg Heiser, Martha Rosler, Zdenka Badovinac, Carol Yinghua Lu, Dieter Roelstraete, and Jan Verwoert
e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
“Widespread usage of the term 'contemporary' seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of 'contemporary art' may be taken as an anachronistic exercise in cataloguing or self-definition. At the same time, it is no coincidence that this is usually the tenor of such large, elusive questions: it is precisely through their apparent self-evidence that they cease to be problematic and begin to exert their influence in hidden ways; and their paradox, their unanswerability begins to constitute a condition of its own, a place where people work.”
e-flux journal: What Is Contemporary Art? puts the apparent simplicity and self-evident term into doubt, asking critics, curators, artists, and writers to contemplate the nature of this catchall or default category.
Contributors
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Boris Groys, Raqs Media Collective, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hu Fang, Jörg Heiser, Martha Rosler, Zdenka Badovinac, Carol Yinghua Lu, Dieter Roelstraete, and Jan Verwoert
e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
- GenresArtNonfiction
216 pages, Diary
First published October 15, 2010
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About the author
Julieta Aranda
81 books18 followersJulieta Aranda is a conceptual artist that lives and works in Berlin and New York City.[1] She received a BFA in filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts (2001) and an MFA from Columbia University (2006), both in New York. Her explorations span installation, video, and print media, with a special interest in the creation and manipulation of artistic exchange and the subversion of traditional notions of commerce through art making
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 14, 2019
A good collection of essays that gives a glimpse of how bad the contemporary situation is, and also what is it? The beginning part of the book is something every art teacher should read. Cuauhtémoc Medina's Contemp(t)orary: 11 theses, and Boris Groys's Comrades of Time are the good ones to start this with.
March 18, 2020
Good read, though not really for people who don’t know what contemporary art is!
January 25, 2020
I wondered if this book maybe a good introduction to the question indicated by the title.
The auratic presence of H.U.Obrist probably has attracted my attention the first once I read the index, but I confess his article about avangardist manifestos is not much interesting for me. “Contemporary art”, as it reknowed, is an elusive term indicates many situations but it is not a genre or a category. I’m not surprised for that. Nevertheless there are in the book some essays that explore the artistic world with serious attention to what is or would be “contemporaneity”.
Zdenka Basovinac writes about Slovenian artistic scene like something outside of what she defines “modernist orthodoxy”. In 2000 she was the curator of a project called Arteast Exhibitions, where the objective was to give a context to the art of Eastern Europe beyond the gaze of Western institutions. This point of view is shared by other critics like Carol Yinghua Lu.
I founded very attractive her critical narration about chinese art because – relaunching a debate sustained by Hans Belting around “the end of art history and the end of art historical narrative”- she highlights well how “cultural, spiritual, and artistic aspirations became secondary to a quickly spreading and highly infectious mood of market optimism and global trade”, so the China Art is became a sort of fashionable icon. But only a little few chinese artists are became really famous, like Chen Zen and Zhang Huan. Above all, who had received a remarkable attention by the market are “cynical realist, social realist, political Pop that feeds into a kind of collective imagination of Chinese society”, so it was this filter that organized everywhere the dominant image of what is “chinese contemporary art”...
The auratic presence of H.U.Obrist probably has attracted my attention the first once I read the index, but I confess his article about avangardist manifestos is not much interesting for me. “Contemporary art”, as it reknowed, is an elusive term indicates many situations but it is not a genre or a category. I’m not surprised for that. Nevertheless there are in the book some essays that explore the artistic world with serious attention to what is or would be “contemporaneity”.
Zdenka Basovinac writes about Slovenian artistic scene like something outside of what she defines “modernist orthodoxy”. In 2000 she was the curator of a project called Arteast Exhibitions, where the objective was to give a context to the art of Eastern Europe beyond the gaze of Western institutions. This point of view is shared by other critics like Carol Yinghua Lu.
I founded very attractive her critical narration about chinese art because – relaunching a debate sustained by Hans Belting around “the end of art history and the end of art historical narrative”- she highlights well how “cultural, spiritual, and artistic aspirations became secondary to a quickly spreading and highly infectious mood of market optimism and global trade”, so the China Art is became a sort of fashionable icon. But only a little few chinese artists are became really famous, like Chen Zen and Zhang Huan. Above all, who had received a remarkable attention by the market are “cynical realist, social realist, political Pop that feeds into a kind of collective imagination of Chinese society”, so it was this filter that organized everywhere the dominant image of what is “chinese contemporary art”...
September 12, 2020
Very interesting rumination on contemporary art. It was really well collated and put together. It ranged from Discussions on time and how there is a dissonance on how to define contemporary art in terms of movements. Speaking to the globalised and capitalist machine.
There were a huge amount of concepts and I think it would have been good to have a conclusive chapter that reflects on all the ideas of contemporary art ppl just wrote about - it felt really unconnected and lacking finality.
There were a huge amount of concepts and I think it would have been good to have a conclusive chapter that reflects on all the ideas of contemporary art ppl just wrote about - it felt really unconnected and lacking finality.
February 3, 2024
This collection of essays offers illuminating reflections from art-world practitioners on the meaning of contemporary art. Engaging and thought-provoking, it is recommended for both art enthusiasts and art theory aficionados.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews