from complicity to criticism

art & culture

[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

The word avant-garde described any group of people within art, culture, and politics who were pushing the status-quo by introducing innovative ideas to challenge tradition.

[bandtshirt]

naomi campbell by peter lindbergh for harper’s bazaar, jamaica, 1992

manao tupapau, paul gauguin, 1892

[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

Direct patronage and commissions from the Church declined as the main way artists made their livelihood, and an ascending new class, the bourgeoisie, created a new market for art apart from solely political or religious uses. Most people were still illiterate at this epoc, as the skills of printing only affected the small upper fraction of society, leaving a great responsibility on art, particularly public art to play a role of didacticism in determining mass social and religious conventions. This meant that the changes in visual culture in Europe could serve as a historical force and influence public thought. This marked a great shift in the new status of art. Before, art centralized acceptable taste and was the exemplary voice of the King or Church. With the introduction of the salon comparable to the art gallery of today, people could come to view an array of styles and images, giving the viewer the power to make comparisons and determine superiority of aesthetic choice.

[supersonicart]

Jenny Morgan’s Portraits.

Jenny Morgan’s portraits are stately hypotheticals into the personality of the individual represented.  Morgan chooses friends she is not well acquainted with to increase the mysteriousness of the work, but also she sands away slightly at the canvas which puts forth a sense of “digging away” at knowing something.  Perhaps like an archaeologist might slowly dust away layers of dirt to discover a long lost treasure.  See more of Jenny’s work below:

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[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

What was once a space for experimentation, resistance, critique, subversion and Utopian desire has become a homogenized, affirmative and commercial affair. From being an independent and truly radical practice, which it essentially was until the late 1960s and early 1970s, art has become generally not much more than entertainment, commodity production and spectacle – in other words, an embracement of amusement and excess.

Jens Hoffmann, director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London

[contemporary-art-blog]

British photographer Martin Parr, uses no photoshop Contemporary-Art-Blog

[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

It’s the end of big ideas and social designs. It’s the death of modernism and the beginning of a period that solely defines itself as “the period thereafter."

Says Harald Falckenberg, a contemporary art collector from Hamburg.

[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

We are living through an historical tragedy: the extinguishing of the field of art as a site of resistance to the logic, values and power of the market.

Andrea Fraser, a New York based artist. 

[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

Now, that the concept of contemporary art has been defined  solely marker of time, as opposed to the past -isms (i.e. modernism, futurism, surrealism) this definition void of conceptual definition allows it to escape critical judgment.

There are no boundaries, limitations, rules, or guides, galleries and artists are free to represent anything in the name of art.

[fromcomplicitytocriticism-blog]

The word "contemporary,"  to be of the moment, creates an inevitable refusal to be historicized.