Labels like ‘contemporary art’ were created primarily from art-historians or art-researchers to cover their contemporary need into caption the chapters of the art-history books they were writing or thinking to write. Otherwise there is absolutely nothing classic about Lee Bontecou’s art works while there is everything contemporary in Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos’ (El Greco) work.
However and since people need to label everything and mostly what they cannot comprehend, the answer should be: contemporary art is art made today by living artists. Next natural question? Why Picasso, Dali, Pollock or Rothko, all of them long dead, are considered the brightest stars of contemporary art. Again, because art-historians or art-researchers to cover their contemporary needs into caption the chapters of the art-history books they were writing or thinking to write and with no value in the reality of art’s evolution.
I used the word ‘evolution’ because for anybody who has deepen further than a headline or a label, art is an alive organism that constantly evolutes and is continually contemporary and classic. Michelangelo is the natural and contemporary evolution of classic Phidias and Louise Bourgeois the continuation of Auguste Rodin.
The most descriptive example of how labels fail reality is the label …classical music which oddly and schizophrenically marks music created after …Beethoven! After realizing the oddity of the explanation, art historian and researchers created a new explanation: classical is the music written in a Western musical tradition, usually using an established form, for example a symphony. Poor Ravi Shankar, doesn’t matter his huge contribution to the art of music and his influence to western contemporary music he will always remain a non-classical outsider for historians and researchers.
This is the one side of the coin, unfortunately there is another side as well and this is even uglier. Last two centuries semantics connect contemporary art with abstract art, cubism or neo-surrealism something that prejudicially excludes David Thorpe, a contemporary romantic painter. Again the labels. David Thorpe is a painter, period. An artist who doesn’t fulfill the boxes semantics have stage for contemporary art. And that …because art-historians or art-researchers to cover their contemporary needs into caption the chapters of the art-history books they were writing or thinking to write and with that they have contributed into popular semantics that mislead the whole meaning of art.
That goes even further, because labelling art expression as contemporary, classical, pro-classical or anything else can also be confrontational surfacing theoretical questions that touch personal issues and values. The dark side of the coin.
Concluding, asking what contemporary art always reminds me another question floating in a sea of labels: what is life.
Therefore when you enter a gallery consider what you see as part of evolutionary creation combined with the need of an individual for communication with the only way that fully expresses them and beyond labels and semantics.
First Published in Universal Colours
The Ovi 