There is contemporary art?

Often, it becomes a difficult task to establish the practical limit between art and entertainment, the same work can serve both purposes simultaneously. In this case, the variation between one and the other will be more in the public than in the work itself. This highlights the importance of the author being able to also conceive of the audience he is addressing..

We know that contemporary societies are marked by strong tendencies towards mass structures; thus, artistic movements and the artists themselves thought individually, they are forced to fight against a powerful force that impels them to make great generalizations, transforming your works into products that can be easily placed on global markets.

Restricting artists to ghettos leads to automatic interpretations, by the general public and its critics, as works of little expression and fleeting existence. True art criticism must overcome this state of weakness and be able to recover its true participation in the fine arts: ignore or all (that must be understood and formulated by the public) and highlight some of the parts, in evidence-the, placing them at the focus of rereadings. Thereby, the public will be forced to question the entire already formulated, constantly adding new factors. It is this dynamicity that allows the work of art to gain its status of means of communication and not, as some point out, an end in itself.

The author who conceives a work itself – complete and finished – doesn't make art, makes entertainment, because it ignores any public participation other than that of consumption.

Modern art and the curator

Accumulation. Perhaps this is the term that best summarizes the history of human beings.. We have the tendency and need to accumulate the most diverse things, whether abstract or concrete; and the amount obtained, participating in a relationship with oneself and with other amounts, cultures give us.

Since the birth of Modernity – Industrial Revolution – the accumulation pattern has undergone profound changes, resulting in a standard more based on quantity than quality. After the excessive deepening of this pattern in the social structure, some groups started to focus on their differentiation through the qualitative standard. It was at this moment that the difference between art and entertainment reached its apogee., resulting in a forged duality. Self-styled elites began to reserve artistic production to themselves, while any other manifestation of this type was understood as entertainment. (e.g. cinema was an art when it was released, and today it is conceived – with worthy exceptions – as mass entertainment).

Two lifestyles were created, styles that refused to observe class or status boundaries. Both with worldwide reach: museum goers around the world and the masses (I often ignore). Each group gained its own gurus: the cold mass media were dedicated to the mass, while the curators were left to the elites.

Deep origins. Or human being, in his distant time as a cave dweller, began to establish the first pillars of the building that later became art. From the sound produced when two bones collide to the first scribbles on cave walls, we can find the origin of art as they served as forms of communication.

The more human beings moved away from their rude origins and sought to reverse the order of nature-human domination,, more evident was the need to develop standardized institutions and forms of relationships, sedimenting what became known, later, by community. For this to be possible, not only did the repertoire of information have to be drastically expanded, as well as the forms of communication of this information had to undergo a qualitative improvement in order to be able to respond to the increase in the abstract characteristics of information.

From mime and oral language, we move on to other forms of expression such as variations of mime language (dances and signs made with the use of the body) and oral language (he speaks, music and other sounds). The continuous increase in the power of abstraction gave rise to forms of communication entirely external to the body., such as the making of instruments and symbols. Like this, this new form of communication, to increase your chance of success, was forced to observe signs and forms of collective communication more than purely individual parameters. From this we can learn a lesson – forgotten nowadays: a work of art is the materialization/consummation of a form of communication, not an end in itself.

Art has progressed a lot since that time, even gaining some space for dedication on the part of science. Artistic movements followed and fought each other, they became hegemonic and then just dominated museum halls. How can we understand this movement without recovering the lesson presented above? These movements belonged to or were promoted by temporally traceable groups., locally and socially and, just as these groups once lost part of their communicative potential, your art – just another channel of expression – found herself stripped of her appeal from the previous moment.

As artes. Just like we write memoirs and history books, art has also gained its special place in the never-ending need we have to recover, save and reinterpret the past. In view of this, the action of saving appeared, space to store (the museum) and the person responsible for organizing this set of information (the curator).

When we go to an impressionist exhibition, It is important that the curator bridges the gap between the particular form of communication contained in impressionist paintings (with your time, history and particular social criticism) and the current audience. The curator has the difficult task of translate the language of those times, so that it is understandable today. Like all translations, we find interpretations – and here is the source of success or failure of a true healer.

If the apparently logical reasoning that has been developed here can easily convince us, we will have an inflection and rupture point when we reach contemporary art. The art is contemporary. We are contemporary. There are contemporary art curators. In other words: contemporary art is a form of communication between contemporaries and, even so, we need a translator. What is the point of a curator when it comes to contemporary art? How it exists and is active, we can reach two immediate conclusions:

1. the public does not have the capacity to understand and/or is out of time. If this is true, we will be forced to conclude that the world belongs to some elites conscious of their time while the majority of the population would be in a space of non-history, immersed in a condition of precarious communication. A rica, although ignored by some petty elites, popular culture seems to deny this thesis;

2. the work of art is not capable of expressing itself, coming to life only through the mediation of the interpreter (the curator). In this case, we cannot correctly say that it is a work of art (materialization of communication) but the intention of your. Works that fail to speak to their contemporary readers, sendo compreendida somente pelo artista e pelo grupo de "iniciados" that manages to penetrate the schizophrenia of that, should not be called works. With practically zero capacity for expression, they should be classified as an overflow of creative energy rather than an attempt at communication..

There are several causes that compete for the bankruptcy of what we dared to call contemporary art.:

1. typical anxiety of modern times reaches levels never before dreamed of. It is no longer the fact that it becomes obsolete as soon as it is consummated, It is the project that becomes obsolete before it is even implemented. At the time the work of art is being conceived, it has already become something outdated, demanding an increase in its complexity in order to at least materialize. Thus, the communication process is destroyed during its gestation: the destruction of things not yet realized decreases, when it is not impossible, public participation;

2. consumerist voracity, that takes on special contours among art consumers (who make a point of differentiating themselves from entertainment consumers) ends up requiring a work that is still immature, transforming it from a form of communication into information in itself. In this case, the objective is not the consumption of ideas but the materialization of their expression (no case, attempt).

Wanting for this rapid movement that affects us so much is an illusion, it is part of our world and of ourselves. Therefore, if we want contemporary art, We must first know our situation, then we will learn to communicate with him, for, there yes, we begin to exercise our artistic creativity. Otherwise, we will continue living under the maximum dictate of Modernity: you pretend to do, I pretend you did.

magazine Author

Tests – especially by the media and elites committed to democracy 2001