What is contemporary art?

What is contemporary art? This is an old question, and it seems boring or meaningless to talk about it any more. But on the surface, there are many problems in the creation and production of contemporary art in China. These problems are obviously reflected in the art market, which is what we usually call the "contemporary art market", which has caused the "aphasia" of contemporary art criticism to some extent. Talking about the concept of contemporary art from the perspective of art market is becoming more and more vague under the special cultural and artistic system of China and the complicated social background of economic transition. To this end, it is necessary to talk about this concept.

In addition, the cognitive model of "international contemporary art" in China is basically superficial, and her value judgment is also reflected in the positioning of the art market. Therefore, the attitude of critic Li Xianting is to throw away the word "contemporary art" for the time being. In China, the concept of contemporary art has basically become synonymous with fashion in art districts. The internationalization, vogue and stardom of art are all related to contemporary art, and if artists want to be recognized as contemporary artists, they must first be recognized internationally. Based on this. In a recent interview, he said, "international contemporary art"? This word is terrible and scary. I started to do new art more than 30 years ago, when it was called modern art, and the word "contemporary art" was used in China, probably in the early 1990s of 1968+0990. Thirty years later, I am more and more afraid to say the words contemporary art and international. Of course, this first shows that I am old and have no spirit. "According to my personal understanding of this statement, contemporary art has clearly referred to the artistic way or the problems raised by art in the 1990s. From a certain reference point of view, she obviously has an opposition, that is, the relationship between the minority and the majority, the relationship between the mainstream and the periphery, and the relationship between the established art model and the art model to be determined. If these cross-reference factors are abolished, then the contemporary art we see is unified and integrated. Obviously, the holistic view of art is essentially the internal view of modernist art, and the philosophical background of modern art is the structural linguistic dimension of ontology. She puts all the contents of art on hold in a closed system of artistic ontology for construction. The visual form of her works is her ultimate pursuit. To some extent, the definition of modern art is basically a language game in visual differences, that is, intertextuality and carnival. She is an indoor symphony, not the noise in the street. Although exquisite, it lacks vitality or is somewhat wild. The reason is that this concept of artistic thinking ignores the difference of individual experience of artistic creators, the regionality of artistic context and the variability and uncertainty of problem conditions.

The concept of contemporary art is not produced in China, but an artistic concept from the West, just like the concept of modern art ... This is a common sense problem. The western contemporary art concept was formed and then established after 1968. This year can be said to be a watershed between modernity and contemporariness of western culture and art in a universal sense. In particular, the "May Storm" in Paris, France, directly led to the disintegration of the traditional western educational model and concept, which is more obvious in the field of university education, that is, re-examining the functions of universities and the mode of production of intellectuals on the ruins of cultural ideology, thus redefining the role of western intellectuals. One of the important aspects is the Marxist philosophy that once dominated the field of ideological philosophy, that is, the disintegration of the left-wing philosophical camp. This also means that after the May storm of 1968, the situation that Marxism dominated the world in French academic circles ended. As Foucault said, a new political and cultural tendency to care about personal interests began to appear. It is precisely for this reason that many of Foucault's works, which were originally circulated in small circles, began to have an impact in a wider public sphere. Before that, the mainstream of French philosophy was Marxism, Hegel's philosophy, structuralism and phenomenology, but Nietzsche's works promoted Foucault's philosophical research. Of course, Nietzsche's philosophy is closely related to art in essence. Therefore, Foucault also admitted that his philosophical works were first read by artists and writers, and had a great positive response, such as writers Blanchaud and Barthes. Other philosophers, sociologists or scholars in other disciplines dismiss this. After the may storm, post-structuralism began to enter the stage of western philosophy. The philosophical concept of this category is obviously different from the previous philosophy, so this kind of philosophy is called contemporary philosophy, also called deconstruction philosophy. In this field, French philosophers Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard are the representatives. In particular, Foucault's concepts of disorder, deconstruction and disappearance of name in artistic creation have been generally accepted and respected in the field of western contemporary art, and disorder has been vividly reflected in the artistic process of German artist richter. His artistic concept is a total reaction to structuralist modern aesthetics, and it is also a once-and-for-all rejection of the stylization of modern artistic concept style and artistic value tendency (classical thinking of art). So Corsos, an American conceptual artist, judged richter that richter was not a good painter, but he was an excellent artist.

The above passage probably explains the basic philosophy and social and political background of contemporary art in a specific historical period in the West. In this context, she constantly expands and extends her artistic concepts, forms and related issues. The concept of art extends to people's social daily life space, forming the continuous integration of art and life under specific social conditions. As far as its artistic scope is concerned, the concept of contemporary art actually comes from Duchamp's finished urinal work Spring. In the strict concept of contemporary art, spring has become a starting point of contemporary art ... but any artistic trend can not be separated from combing and integrating her theoretically to establish the rationality of her existence. It is also an old saying that a revolution without theory is a blind revolution and a superficial revolution. Contemporary art can not be separated from her theoretical foundation, otherwise any of her actions can only be self-expression entertainment, on the other hand, artists may also become folk artists.

In my opinion, the formal position of contemporary art in the western social operation (entering the communication system) and theory (art history) is the first exhibition "When Attitude Becomes Form" planned by Harold Zeman in Berne Art Museum in 1969, which almost included all the latest artistic explorations and radical art pioneer experiments in the West at that time, and also established the concept of independent curator of contemporary art. Therefore, the theory, practice and independence of contemporary art. Today's world contemporary art exhibitions (biennale and literature exhibition) are all independent curators. Only under the premise of ensuring the independence of curators can an art exhibition truly maintain its own contemporary art. The following 1972 Kassel literature exhibition further determined the future development direction of contemporary art and established the independent curator system for the first time. This year's "Concept Art" exhibition was publicly exhibited in Basel.

As for the emergence and development of the concept of contemporary art in China, as Li Xianting said, it was 90 years later. Before that, it was called modern art. Therefore, the growth, development and changes of contemporary art in China lagged behind those in the West for decades. The understanding between the East and the West in the dimension of contemporary artistic concepts has objectively formed an unquestionable historical space-time difference. As a result of this difference, all artistic concepts and forms that have not yet appeared in China can be regarded as new art, and many people's understanding of the contemporary is obviously a contemporary concept, that is, the present is equivalent to the contemporary, so all artistic phenomena that are happening now must be attributed to contemporary artistic phenomena. Obviously, this is a kind of time logic of artistic development, not the cognitive logic and conceptual logic of artistic concept development, not to mention the logic of art history. If we have to sort out China's own logic in the historical clues of the development and change of modern and contemporary art, then she is more likely to live in some kind of cultural and political development logic. And many things that happened in China are emotional. One characteristic of these things is the collective mode. Therefore, the public's desire for sports is innate. But all the movements were eventually brought into the track of power to be corrected and integrated, and the most obvious individuals were eliminated. Therefore, we can see that the sounds inside the movement are homogeneous, and there are few heterogeneous sounds, which is almost impossible to exist.

Based on this, the superficial and so-called mainstream contemporary art in China is basically a powerful contemporary art. In a country with a single political power system, to what extent can contemporary art with a single power form be called contemporary art? If it must be said that it is contemporary art, then I think it is also contemporary art that cancels the differences and becomes a centralized contemporary art. From the concept of artistic freedom, centralized "contemporary art" just goes against the essence of contemporary art.

In a word, the concept of contemporary art is essentially a decoding concept, not a coding concept. Nor is it the ultimate concept in the sense of artistic morphology. It is not her purpose to establish an art form, but the way to ask questions in different question contexts. The reason why artists want to make art is not the lack of beauty in life. Of course, the concept of beauty here is a concept of visual aesthetics in daily life. On the other hand, it also refers to the artistic aesthetic concept that we passively accepted when we first knew beauty. She conforms to our general aesthetic experience, that is, a habitual aesthetic consciousness. Contemporary art is a relative artistic aesthetic concept, or her artistic aesthetics is an aesthetics that deviates from conventional aesthetics. What distinguishes her from the former is reception aesthetics, not passive aesthetics, but creative aesthetics, and initiative is her main feature.

If contemporary art is a kind of decoding art, then it is her job to doubt and question. Or this is the first step of art, the category of her concept, and she can only exist in this category. Therefore, contemporary art is an ideological art, not a purely temporal art, nor an art with established artistic experience and fashion. On the contrary, it is an art that gives artistic experience mode, and it is a departure from the subjective consciousness of artistic universality in the principle of artistic regularity. Her thoughts and forms are schizophrenic, so it can be said that any contemporary artist in a strict sense is schizophrenic or has this tendency.