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> What happens when an artist in his early twenties gets some glimmers of potential success as a professional artist, and then goes down the rabbit hole for ab
by forgotpwtomain 9y ago
> What happens when an artist in his early twenties gets some glimmers of potential success as a professional artist, and then goes down the rabbit hole for about a decade only to find that their work is seen as mediocre?
Most of contemporary art is mediocre looking work which sinks or floats based on fashion, connections and marketing.
- theoh 9y agoThere's a lot of truth to that, except for what you said about "mediocre looking" which suggests that maybe you've missed something. Not all contemporary art is trying to be "retinal" (Marcel Duchamp's word for the visual) and beauty or visual impact has been something suspect for years, sometimes coming into style, sometimes fading. It is largely a trivial, social, reputation-driven thing, funded by idiots with pretensions... But that doesn't mean there isn't an intellectual side to it, pursued by people who actually care about art and what it could be.
- disantlor 9y agoit feels like this is shifting a bit. for example much of the work at the whitney biennial is quite political and hardly abstract. of course it's subject to many of the same forces as always (the fashion/connection/money) but at least it feels decidedly more engaged with the world than a lot of the easy-to-mock(-if-a-bit-unfairly) modern art that often comes to mind. and by being more connected to the common experience, it now sinks or floats based on whether it says something that feels true or insightful or relevant to our time. the key piece is that the average viewer can know wtf it's even talking about without much background or context.