Arts

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on 32 canvases, each 20 x 16″ (The Museum of Modern Art) (photo: Steven Zucker)

“Getting” Contemporary Art

It’s ironic that many people say they don’t “get” contemporary art

because, unlike Egyptian tomb painting or Greek sculpture, art made

since 1960 re�ects our own recent past. It speaks to the dramatic social,

political and technological changes of the last �fty years, and it

questions many of society’s values and assumptions—a tendency of

postmodernism, a concept sometimes used to describe contemporary

art. What makes today’s art especially challenging is that, like the world

around us, it has become more diverse and cannot be easily de�ned

through a list of visual characteristics, artistic themes or cultural

concerns.

Minimalism and Pop Art, two major art movements of the early 1960s,

o�er clues to the di�erent directions of art in the late 20th and 21st

century. Both rejected established expectations about art’s aesthetic

qualities and need for originality. Minimalist objects are spare geometric

Reading: Contemporary Art

4/27/2018 Reading: Contemporary Art | Art Appreciation

forms, often made from industrial processes and materials, which lack

surface details, expressive markings, and any discernible meaning. Pop

Art took its subject matter from low-brow sources like comic books and

advertising. Like Minimalism, its use of commercial techniques

eliminated emotional content implied by the artist’s individual approach,

something that had been important to the previous generation of

modern painters. The result was that both movements e�ectively blurred

the line distinguishing �ne art from more ordinary aspects of life, and

forced us to reconsider art’s place and purpose in the world.

Shifting Strategies

Minimalism and Pop Art paved the way for later artists to explore

questions about the conceptual nature of art, its form, its production, and

its ability to communicate in di�erent ways. In the late 1960s and 1970s,

these ideas led to a “dematerialization of art,” when artists turned away

from painting and sculpture to experiment with new formats including

photography, �lm and video, performance art, large-scale installations

and earth works. Although some critics of the time foretold “the death of

painting,” art today encompasses a broad range of traditional and

experimental media, including works that rely on Internet technology

and other scienti�c innovations.

Contemporary artists continue to use a varied vocabulary of abstract and

representational forms to convey their ideas. It is important to remember

that the art of our time did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it re�ects the

social and political concerns of its cultural context. For example, artists

like Judy Chicago, who were inspired by the feminist movement of the

early 1970s, embraced imagery and art forms that had historical

connections to women.

In the 1980s, artists appropriated the style and methods of mass media

advertising to investigate issues of cultural authority and identity politics.

More recently, artists like Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans’

Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., and Richard Serra, who was loosely

associated with Minimalism in the 1960s, have adapted characteristics of

Minimalist art to create new abstract sculptures that encourage more

personal interaction and emotional response among viewers.

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These shifting strategies to engage the viewer show how contemporary

art’s signi�cance exists beyond the object itself. Its meaning develops

from cultural discourse, interpretation and a range of individual

understandings, in addition to the formal and conceptual problems that

�rst motivated the artist. In this way, the art of our times may serve as a

catalyst for an on-going process of open discussion and intellectual

inquiry about the world today.