Contemporary art and the shipwreck of taste
"Contemporary art," a formula to define the protected territory of an exclusive and idiopathic art within art in general? Art for everyone and contemporary art for others.
A fashionable name. A label of respectability. Why not say current art? Which would be in accordance with reality. This infatuated and disdainful category known as "contemporary art" has good reasons to appropriate the quality of art in order to gag the whole art. Anything that does not belong to the world of so-called contemporary art would de facto be plunged into humiliating anonymity and deprive it of a surname.
In general or specialized literature, it is common to find behind the name of a living artist the mention "contemporary artist." To say of a living artist that he is contemporary seems suspect and problematic. The oxymoron is present. The artist in question would be neither painter, nor sculptor, nor plastic artist, nor musician or whatever, he would possess a title of nobility which would put him of authority outside and above intelligible categories.
The contemporary adjective sanctifies the man who wears it, and confers on him a distinction making unnecessary precision concerning his real profession. He is contemporary that's all. And that would be enough to give it a legitimate and authorized place in the living art market's learned algorithm. In a column published in Le Monde in 2010 about the exhibition of Takashi Murakami's works in Versailles, described as "Japanese toys", academician Marc Fumaroli declared: "Why hide from the public the fact that so-called "contemporary" art, this brand image invented from scratch by an international financial market, no longer has anything in common, nor with everything that has been called "art" so far, nor with the authentic artists living but not listed on this stock exchange? "And to quote the sociologist Alain Quemin in n ° 466 of the Journal des Arts in his article entitled" Question of method ":
"We have decided to consider as "contemporary art "what is defined as such by the social world formed around this object, particularly by qualification and selection bodies whose activity is accompanied by judgment operations that are 'are based on common values. '
Following these reflections, it is easy to understand that contemporary art is a comedy orchestrated by an oligarchy of interest that mischievously manipulates the verb and the substantive and gives itself the power to sprinkle holy water on the ignorant. We are not in the time of Prometheus or that of the production of real artistic wealth but in that of Hermes, which is that of a shadow theater's communication. High Mass is said when we manufacture value without making wealth. Wealth is a matter of culture, while value is a matter of stock market game. Nietzche already said in "Thus spoke Zarathustra" "Everything that has a price has little value". In a museum or in the presence of a work of art, one should not consume; one seeks to cultivate oneself. Paul Cézanne said that The Louvre is a book where you learn to read. Drinking intelligence juice is what we should advise our children.
The imperial entrenchment in which the "contemporary art" label is displayed reveals its weakness and concealing pathology. Because it is obviously no longer art. This is something else that emerges from a form of alienation that the lords of commerce are trying to legitimize. It is in their financial interests, and the money they have invested should never be invested at a loss. Commercial advertising around so-called contemporary art resembles the force-feeding of geese. Innocent geese die, and their torturers get richer. Large coalition of certain elites in the art world whose role is to convince themselves of what they say.
Love of emptiness is a modern disease of which contemporary art is a vector of ideological and political rupture. To put men in chains you must first put them to sleep. And as Charlotte Perriand said, "The void is all-powerful because it can contain everything ". The grim observation is that the love of the void is given birth by empty brains and makes empty brains. Where is the beauty in all of this? Today's academician François Cheng has admirably rehabilitated this notion of beauty. It follows Plato who said that "The beautiful is the splendor of the true". The human soul draped in the epitoge of beauty, a formula that artists should adopt as their motto. Let us listen to André Malraux, who affirmed that art should honor and transmit the nobility of man. We cannot forget that art also has the function of conveying the horror of existence, but it must always do so in the form of the beautiful. Let us be proud to use this word.
Art is not a dumping ground into which we freely throw our personal failures. Andy Warhol summed up the spirit of our time well when he said he was known for his fame. Let Edgar Degas answer him with: "He succeeded, but in what a state! ". But this is not the end of history. We must of course, change what needs to be changed, but keep what is worth. Timeless beauty has a future.
To conclude, let us meditate on the words of Régis Debray: "We did not foresee the return, brand new, of the old ". And Immanuel Kant to declare: "Is beautiful what pleases universally without concept ".
So-called contemporary art has nothing universal except its rejection of beauty and its ignorance of taste. The financial elites who are its promoters care about culture as a buffer pollock. Let us hope that our children will escape the harmful and pernicious embrace of the gravediggers of art.
article from Front Populaire- article by Pierre Reklin