The new shock of the new

spectacleinrock

Ok message received, if i want discussions on art i should at least try and start some. I kinda did, i recommended a show i had seen which i hope other people could start doing. I am working full time for the summer and as one of my days off is mondays i find it difficult to get to see a lot of shows, so advice on what to see and what to avoid would be very helpful.

I was going to say something about the graduate shows in dublin a few weeks ago, but I’m a mid course crisis and if i think about graduate shows ill freak out! So im going to have a rant about the New Shock of the New which was aired about two weeks ago.

Don’t get me wrong, i like Robert Hughes, I generally respect his opinion and to be fair my essays in college for art history generally are completely based on his ideas. But the new shock of the new was an absolute farce! It was billed as an indepth evalution of contempory art, but turned out to be an hour long rant on how there is not enough painting in the world. Which to be honest was infuriating for me, an artist who works with video and photography. Robert Hughes only acknowledegement of any new medium was to say that Hockney had dabbled with photography and that it was not his best work....

The programme focused on Jeff Koons, Paula Rego, David Hockney and Lucian Frued. All of whom are very established artists but not the artists a line-up i would have expected in a overview of contempory art. I really dislike Jeff Koons, he is far too much the business man and will milk every idea , which is alright cause everyone has to make a living and its no different to painting irish landscapes for american tourists to make a bit of money but it doesnt exactly inspire me. But for a respected art critic to diss him purely based on the fact he has a factory of people making his work his bull****. Andy Warhol did it and so did Raphael!

I guess my main problem with this programme, was the fact that unlike its predessor it was one hour long which left little room for disscussion. There are so few shows analysing contempory art, its a shame that this one dismmissed the vast majority of contempory art as being sensational, with little depth. I dont beilieve this to be true- a work in the DL graduate exhibtion made me cry (sensational impact) but i am still thinking about it weeks on - it affected me and contuinues to affect me and refuses to leave my brain which in my opinion is the sign of a good artwork.

blah blah ranted enough, did anyone else even watch it.

mike65

I watched it and while his arguments were not as well marshalled as one would expect from Hughes I agreed with his main thrust -

Modern art is rubbish!

Jeff Koons was included only so we could see the horror of it all, money is killing the art environment I'd say.

Mike.

chewy

i agree with the first guys reaction especially about photo and video being more vital these days


plus the other thing is that the guy is reviewing famous artist works, so there is a time lag built in there and the best stuff isn't necessarry made by the famous guys...

then theres fine art vs art...


ps i like hockneys stuff (well not his _latests_ paintings) but i did like his photogrpahy and his work on the history of art have moved art along itself.... makings us realise things like raphael was just like warhol nd the use of the camera obscurer...

Monkey

"Modern art is rubbish!"

This is not his point. All of the artist's he disccused are modern artists. The (old) Shock of the New was about modern art and so was The New Shock of the New.

Any art of the twentieth century is modern or perhaps postmodern.

Robert Hughes has not moved with the times and kept up with what is new. He has particular modernist ideas about what art should be. He no longer celebrates the new because he is from a different genertation. There was nothing new or shocking about The New shock of the New.

He also shows a clear bias towards painting choosing four painters to put forward as good contemporary artists.

He dismissed non-traditional art (taking examples of Koons and the YBAs) as art based on gimmicks. He wants "slow art" but he doesn't look into people like Bill Viola who uses video in a "slow" way inspired by renaissance art.

The only pieces of non-painted contemporary art he praises are "Dead dad" and "the Weather project" and he doesn't spend much time on either.
The programme was too short to fully cover and develop the points he was trying to make.

mike65

I agree about the programme format which is typical of 21st century tv I'm afraid, BBC4 are re-showing the old Shock of the New at the moment.

On photography he gave that short shrift in the original series too, maybe he simply views photography more as a technical exercise than an artistic one. Horses for courses.

Mike.

DadaKopf

Popular art critics are dumb. They lack the knowledge and training to be able to understand the context in which art is produced. Because they're unable to understand the national and global economic, political, cultural and technological changes that are occurring at all levels of the social world, they lack the capacity to understand what contemporary art represents and how that is represented.

It's only with hindsight that we now understand what the, broadly speaking, European Modernist period was about. Most of the great artists of the day were ridiculed by the establishment press for being radical, degenerate, unartistic. Some artists even used unorthodox materials like ripped up newspaper (Picasso, Schwitters) and some used objects made in a factories, claiming art to exist only in the mind (Duchamp). It's only now that we can look back and understand the context in which all this emerged: the industrial revolution engendered certain social changes which, in turn, altered culture, politics etc. and Modernism was the expression of these changes, an articulation of all the optimism and anxiety of the age. These radical changes motivated artists to search for a new language to reflect these times and, nearly automatically, this inferred breaking with tradition and embracing new materials of the day (including ideas) to articulate the new world.

Because of their stupidity, popular art critics are unable to comprehend how contemporary art does the same thing. Critics simply don't understand the contemporary world, perhaps some are even anti-art in their insistance that art should revert to traditional materials only - but if art ceases to be relevant to us today, it dies. Their lack of knowledge about the shape, structure and processes of the contemporary world within the context of globalization leads to a complete misreading of the value of contemporary art.

This ignorance leads to theoretical paralysis and critical blindness.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that this is happening right now in non-art circles too - the Irish government's directionless leadership anyone?

I'll take the whole 1990s Brit Art thing as an example. When I look at, my immediate impression is that it's vacuous, conceited and difficult to tell whether I'm looking at an egotistical artist's scream in the wilderness or a big joke - or a rich advertising exec's pension fund. But I think that's OK because it reflects the times we live in. I genuinely think that in 100 years, scholarly critics (not to be mistaken with popular critics) will look back on British art in the 1990s and conclude that it truly reflected the times - so-called anti-establishment high art was de-ideologised and commodified by the new economic establishment, the apparent intellectual vacuity of the works reflected the anti-ideological current of the times, it also by consequence represented a crisis at the heart of British identity as it, ironically, emerged as a reaction against Thatcherism but became bound up in Third Way New Labour crypto-neo-liberalism. Much of this isn't thought out, it's not a big plan, it's a a tendency predicated on larger, deeper social structures and relationships in the world which our establishments are busy denying and embracing simultaneously. The Brit artists, perhaps only intuitively, managed to capture and symbolize those - these times (Indeed, the great artists in Monmartre may have been steeped in Marxist literature but their genius is largely attributed to their ability to intuit change and point us in a new direction).

Most art critics write about art as if art movements occur as reactions to other art movements. Yeah, this is very true - artists often define themselves in terms of being different to the crap that went before them. Art critics should write about how art emerges as a reaction against art and as an articulation of all-encompassing social processes that affect us all. Perhaps if critics paid more attention to social reality rather than the materials people use, we might get somewhere.

Particularly interesting is the rise in the importance of photography, video and graphic design. Photography has increased in stature because of a long, long campaign by photographers to have the medium accepted as more than a technical exercise through the way photographic artists have made their art. Video has risen because of the rise in the centrality of the moving image in contemporary culture. Graphic design has risen because, well, as is the case with photography and video, the rise of capitalism has framed and articulated social reality in a very particular way for very particular purposes - to manufacture interest and to make money.

Naturally, as was the case during the height of Modernism, artists are attacking hegemony-producing sites of social construction through the use of the materials of that construction. This is how contemporary art can be made relevant. It has to encapsulate the specifics of the moment, but point towards the universality of its effect.

Like radical fundamentalists, those who advocate a return to 'traditonal' forms of art are merely attempting to reverse what has already happened. They're denying reality.

DadaKopf

OK, I guess people don't want to discuss art afterall.