CONTEMPORARY ART
What gives contemporary art value, and how has that changed over time? If we recognize an artwork for the artist’s “brand” rather than technical artistic qualities or the materials used, what defines art today?
Historically, art’s value has been largely defined by its physical components — gold, marble, lapis lazuli, ultramarine and other pigments or materials all demonstrated the patron’s wealth or signified the status of the artwork’s subjects (like using precious materials for religious paintings and sculptures). For example, in the Renaissance, ultramarine was the finest and most expensive blue pigment available. It was often used for the robes of the Virgin Mary or portraits of patrons.
Scale and craftsmanship were also historical indicators of the value of an artwork. Large paintings, monumental murals and large-scale sculptures were very expensive to produce and therefore indicated the value of the artwork itself.
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For example, the classic sculpture David by the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo is both made of marble and large-scale. Towering at 17 feet tall, David's eyes glower towards Rome, where the influential Medici family lived in exile from Florence. The sculpture uses scale to challenge the Medici's incredible political and economic power.
But today, the concept of the artist is prioritized over both the artwork’s scale and material properties as well as its craftmanship.
For example, Damien Hirst’s 1991 work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living downplays craftsmanship and artistic materials, while completely emphasizing the concept underlying the work. The piece consists of the carcass of a tiger
shark immersed in formaldehyde, within a manufactured vitrine — the artist did not make any part of the work with his own hands, but he is the author of the concept.
This idea was first explored by philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin writes that mechanical reproduction (namely photography, photocopying and printing, although this theory can also be applied to digital reproduction today) devalues the uniqueness or “aura” of an artwork, as its image can be widely shared. If a painting can be photographed and infinitely reproduced, what is its value if not uniqueness? However, Benjamin argues, the aura of a work of art — its original presence in time and space — is precisely what cannot be reproduced. This theory has been both supported and rejected, but ultimately it greatly influenced conceptualism and appropriation art, leading many artists to question assumptions about authenticity and originality.
So, the value and power of contemporary art relies on the concept. Art now innovates and makes historical ideas new by leveraging the following techniques:
Appropriation (exemplified by Marcel Duchamp, Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei, Faith Ringgold and others)
Processes like seriality (exemplified by El Anatsui and others)
Media immersive installations (exemplified by Kara Walker, Nam June Paik, Nick Cave and others )
In order to infuse new meanings into established tropes, contemporary art is often referential, visually alluding to existing images and ideas. Many artists reimagine artworks and movements from the past in order to comment on issues of the present.
Appropriation
Using appropriation as technique, contemporary artists deliberately borrow from pre-existing artworks or objects and places them in a new context, similar to a quotation. Appropriation essentially questions notions of originality and authorship.
Readymades and collages are two forms of appropriation, which can be traced to the early 1900s. Appropriation art became particularly widespread later during the 1980s, gaining attention with artists like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons. Both Levine and Prince reproduced existing artworks and claimed them as their own. In Levine’s 1981 series, After Walker Evans, she rephotographed Evans’ 1930s images directly from an exhibition catalog, intending to dispute notions of the male “genius” and the idea that photography inherently presents an authentic reality.
Marcel Duchamp
One of Duchamp’s most important artworks is Fountain from 1917. He simply flipped a urinal upside down, and then signed and dated it “R. Mutt 1917.” Although he did not make this urinal himself, he selected it, signed it and proclaimed it to be art. He sent Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, which was hosting an unjuried exhibition and claiming to exhibit any work of art submitted. The piece was rejected with the argument that because it was a manufactured object, it was not a “true” work of art, and Duchamp resigned from the Society in protest.
With this sculpture, Duchamp invented the concept of a “readymade,” or a found object recontextualized by the artist as a work of art and thus reinterpreted/given meaning in a new way. He de-emphasized craft and creation, placing the emphasis wholly on his concept and intent.
Duchamp caused a fundamental shift in the social idea of what constitutes art, paving the way for contemporary artists.
Kara Walker
Kara Walker appropriates racist, exaggerated caricatures from American history (particularly the Antebellum South) in order to confront the legacy of slavery and segregation. She arranges black silhouettes in violent and often sexualized scenes to evoke disturbing feelings in the viewer. Her work is deliberately offensive and unsettling, but at the same time, she is simply re-presenting imagery that has already existed in some form.
Walker’s work is also participatory in some aspects, as viewers cast their own shadows on the walls while navigating the installation. She implicates these viewers in her work, pushing them into encounters with racist, stereotypical images in a contemporary setting, and asking them to confront their roles in systems of racism and discrimination.
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei uses materials with inherent cultural significance to question the traditional values and notions of art. He was influenced by Duchamp and the idea of a readymade, but in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, he substitutes a priceless Chinese antiquity for cheap objects. In a series of photographs, Weiwei documents himself in the performative act of dropping and breaking a 2000-year-old ceremonial urn.
Weiwei interrogates how and by whom cultural values are created — why should something old be valued more than something new? It is generally considered unacceptable to destroy a historical, irreplaceable artifact. But can the act of the destruction can be considered art, which is typically defined as an act of creation?
The son of an exiled poet, Weiwei grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, a period during which many cultural, religious and artistic objects were destroyed in order to create a “blank slate” for the future of China. Throughout his career, he has expressed criticism of the Chinese government’s attitude towards democracy and human rights violations.
Faith Ringgold
In her work Dancing at the Louvre, from her 1991 series of twelve “story quilts” called The French Collection, Ringgold depicts the fictional narrative of Willia Marie Simone, a young Black woman who moves to Paris in the early 20th century. Willia becomes immersed in the artistic and literary scene of France, meeting iconic figures like James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, Langston Hughes and Rosa Parks. In this particular scene, Willia and other Black girls dance at the Louvre, which is one of the most important and comprehensive museums of Western art.
Ringgold appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s famous paintings of women, including the Mona Lisa and scenes of the Virgin Mary, to create a visual contrast between (Black) modern women and (white) women in the past. She rewrites art history to include and center women, positioning herself in an artistic lineage and offering an alternative to the dominant white male perspective. She also combines multiple methods and artistic traditions in one work, by referencing European painting while using craft quilting techniques and nodding to African-American culture.
Seriality
Serial art is produced in series or through exhaustive repetition. The rules or framework used to create the artwork take priority over the execution of the work. Rooted in conceptual and minimalist post-war art in America, seriality marks art’s movement away from personal expression toward the anonymous and even mechanical properties of repetition.
Seriality questions the individual “aura” of art, the belief that a work of art must be unique and irreplaceable. Pop Art pieces such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup or Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, as well as Minimalist works such as Donald Judd’s stacked rectangles, employ processes of mass production — the ultimate works deny the uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of the artist’s hand.
El Anatsui
Glittering and eye catching, Anatsui’s works present an illusion of luxury and a critique of colonialism. Arranged in shifting grids in interlocking rows are hundreds upon hundreds of flattened bottle caps, which shimmer like precious metal and give an impression of textile. He sources these bottle-tops from recycling stations, weaving them together with copper wire into a cloth-like wall-hanging sculpture. He uses seriality to create a spin on the traditional use of expensive materials like gold.
Resembling the traditional African textile called Kente cloth (Anatsui is reclaiming various cultural traditions), his flexible and ever-changing work masks a much more powerful message — he explores the human cost of colonialism in Africa, as well as consumption and its effects on the environment. The bottle caps represent the history of unequal trade between Africa and Europe, as alcohol was brought by Europeans and often a product in the transatlantic slave trade. He exposes the discrepancies between what Africa offered and received, and he navigates how this history has continued to impact the development and economy of Africa to this day.
Immersive media installations
By nature, installations are not a single, finite art object (like a large-scale sculpture or monumental mural) but rather a whole experience, designed by the artist. The viewer is central to the work and the activator of its purpose.
Large-scale, mixed-media installations originate from Duchamp’s readymades as well as conceptualism. Unlike within the sculptural tradition, the installation’s emphasis is not on form but on the intention of the artist and the effect on the viewer.
Kara Walker
Walker’s 2014 ambitiously large-scale installation consists of a central sphynx-like figure as well as fifteen other “attendant” sculptures. Its full title is A Subtlety. The sphinx recalls ancient Egyptian art while also playing into the stereotypical physical attributes of the “Mammy” figure, or a Black woman who worked as a domestic laborer for a wealthy white family. It embodies both past and present, navigating racism, cultural biases and the representation of Black women.
Commissioned by Creative Time, the final work was coated in sugar and displayed in Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg, which was formerly the largest sugar refinery in the world. The medium is the message in Walker’s work — sugar (and the trading of sugar) is closely related to slavery and colonialism.
Due to their size, large-scale installations are usually ephemeral, on view for a period of only a few weeks or months. Cynically, this short time can a marketing tool leveraged by museums and other organizations in order to drive visitors. In fact Walker’s work was reported to have received 130,000 visitors between early May and early July.
Nam June Paik
Credited with the advent of video art, Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and moving images. His installations are rooted in found objects — television sets — and challenge understandings of visual culture. Treating the TV screen as a canvas, he celebrated the speed of electronic communication and explored the impact of these technologies on culture.
Paik is not actually creating the sculpture himself or producing narrative films. Instead, he is arranging various elements for the viewer and presenting them in new combinations and contexts, encouraging the viewer to look at modern media communications with a fresh perspective. He even introduced participatory elements in some installations, in which viewers would encounter themselves on the screens in real time.
Nick Cave
Similar to Duchamp, Cave is known for appropriating found objects sourced from flea markets, thrift stores and online marketplaces like eBay. His installations give abandoned objects new meaning, often drawing on their nostalgic or historic implications.
The installation above at MASS MoCA in 2016 consisted of millions of beads, many thousands of wind spinners, thousands of ceramic birds, thousands of crystals, dozens of chandeliers and several metallic lawn ornaments, among other random objects. The work may appear like a fun, shimmering playground, but its objects point to a political commentary. Cave’s work, while bright and alluring, typically has an underlying meaning that addresses American cultural issues like gun violence and race relations.