There really is no single definition of what contemporary art is or is about. From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, most artists or art collectors would have said that art is about beauty. Beauty was pursued as a human value, like truth or honesty. Beauty was represented in art as it was in literature, music, and architecture. Artists understood that human life included some suffering, but they believed that the beauty of art mitigated that. Artists said they sought to replicate the awe one felt on entering St. Peter’s Basilica and encountering Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–1499).
In the twentieth century, much art ceased to be about beauty; it was now intended to be disturbing, to challenge moral taboos. Contemporary art had to capture the imagination rather than excite the senses. The same transition occurred with music and architecture.
In fairness, some contemporary artists claimed that their function was still beauty, but now it was to have viewers see something as being beautiful that they had never before imagined that way. At one extreme was Jeff Koons’s stainless steel rabbit. At another was Martin Creed winning the £20,000, 2001 Turner Prize for a light that went on and off every five seconds in an otherwise empty room. Titled The Lights Going On and Off, the work represented the clutter and consumerism of the modern world. Other artists applauded Creed’s work, saying the evolution of contemporary art simply reflects the evolution of our consumer society.
Beautiful or not, the central characteristic of twenty-first-century contemporary art is that traditional artist skills of composition and coloration have become secondary to originality, innovation, and shock—however achieved. There are now few restrictions on methods or materials. As British contemporary artist Grayson Perry put it, “This is art, because I’m an artist and I say it is.”
Different formal definitions of contemporary art are employed by different auction houses. At Sotheby’s Contemporary Art sales, 1945–70 is “early contemporary” and post-1970, “late contemporary.” Christie’s uses the broader title “Post-War and Contemporary Art.” Their categorization depends on the work rather than the date. Gerhard Richter’s more abstract work is contemporary and his later photo-realist pieces are included in Modern and Impressionist sales. This mirrors the idea that contemporary art is more cutting-edge than that produced in earlier periods.
My working definition for the book is that contemporary art is that created after 1970, or similar to that which a major auction house has offered as contemporary. The descriptions and illustrations in the book provide a sense of what is included.
I discuss only two-dimensional works on canvas or paper and sculpture broadly defined to include an installation like Stephanie. If it is on film, if you can eat it, or if it involves sexual intercourse, it may be art, but I don’t include it here.
Even saying I include “painting” is not straightforward. A painting should be easy to define; it is what results after paintlike materials are applied to a flat surface. But some paintings are collages, cartoons, or graffiti. Damien Hirst pours paint onto canvas mounted on a spinning potter’s wheel to produce a spin painting. Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang produces gunpowder drawings, with the image being what remains after the powder ignites.
If words are painted on a surface, is this a painting? The Phillips auction in the first chapter offered a Christopher Wool work. It had black lettering on a white background, painted in enamel on aluminum. Untitled (1990), 108 x 72 inches (274 x 183 cm) read
RUND
OGEA
TDOG
Intrigued by the clever spelling, five collectors bid the painting (that is how it was described) to $3.7 million.
If Phillips’s 2010 fall auction offered a glimpse of the contemporary art market, perhaps Sotheby’s and Christie’s, each many times the size of Phillips, would produce a more representative picture. At Sotheby’s the evening following Carte Blanche, the cover lot was Warhol’s Coca-Cola (4)(Large Coca-Cola) (1962). In preauction theater, waiters circulated through the Sotheby’s crowd, delivering six-ounce Coke bottles with straws. Estimated at $20 to $25 million, the silk-screen sold for $35.4 million, reportedly to hedge fund owner Steven Cohen, who phoned in his bid from a dinner party at his Connecticut home.
The following evening at Christie’s auction, the star work was Roy Lichtenstein’s Ohhh . . . Alright . . . (1964), a comic book panel reproduction on canvas of a red-headed woman holding a telephone to her ear. With an unpublished estimate reported as $42 million, bidding began at $29 million and rose in $1 million increments. The selling price was $42.6 million; the previous auction record for the artist was $16.3 million, set six years earlier.
Another much-discussed work was Jeff Koons’s sculpture Balloon Flower (Blue) (1995–2000), one of five huge stainless steel sculptures from his Celebration series. The work sold for $16.9 million, above the $16 million estimate but well below the artist record of $25.7 million that a magenta version of the same sculpture brought in 2008 at Christie’s New York.
~~The Supermodel And The Brillo Box: Back Stories And Peculiar Economics From The World Of Contemporary Art -by- Don Thompson
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