I used to be the kind of person that walked into a contemporary art museum and gasped at how frivolous the museum was with what they called "art". I used to say that a five year old kid could splash paint over a canvas like Jackson Pollock did, yet I was never able to grasp Pollock’s painting particularly as special. These speculations continued to make me ridicule art, and it wasn't until I took an art history class that I gained different understanding of what art meant to me and show I can utilize my artistic side in a structural and systematic way. It was indeed well said when Rainbow Rowell said that, “art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something” in Eleanor and Park.
Here is a bit of a glimpse into the deal breaker of this paradox:
Let's start by saying that Contemporary Art is definitely not Modern Art for those of you who still mix them up like I did before, and you don't want to mix those up in front of an art geek or a gallery salesman– NOT CUTE!
Modern art is the precedent of Contemporary art. The movement dates back to the late 1800s, up until the mid 1900s. It was regarded as ‘modern’ because it didn’t conform to the institutional art teachings that preceded it; ‘modern’ instead ‘traditional’ in a sense.
One of the most recognizable Modern artists, according to art historians and critics, is Edouard Monet. And it’s quite self-explanatory in his case. He rejected the conformity to the traditional realist aspects of producing art. Prior to the movement for instance, it was not acceptable to mix art mediums, such as, painting and sculpting. Painting was presumed to be inherently flat with structural and minimal basis to it. Monet’s painting on the other hand highlighted the texturized marks that his paint brush left on the canvas.
That by itself was inspiring and influential to the next several generations of artists despite the controversies that it sparked. Artists of the modern generation began to pay attention to the other aspects of art such as abstraction, representation, and experimentation which has drawn attention to their mediums of production as well. The modern movement then split into numerous movements, such as, Cubism, Impressionism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism, etc.
Contemporary art, on the other hand, is the art that was produced roughly from the mid 1900s up until now. It’s ‘contemporary’ for two reasons. First, because the 1970s were the starting point for the emergence of the term “postmodernism” and the ending point of the easily classified artistic movements which the art world has witnessed an abundance of. Second, because to us it’s contemporary in the sense that “it has been and continues to be created during our lifetimes.” Even though the exact defining dates of the movements are hard to locate, the movement is ultimately defined by the aggravated flexibility of the definition of art which was in the hands of the individual artists; meaning that the artists of the movement chose to express their visions away from the definitions that were presumed to be inherent to it, while also incorporating elements of our contemporary life socially, economically, and politically.
The marking point of the movement was the shift from the aesthetic appeals to the importance of the underlying concepts of the work, which has set the focus on the end result of the work instead of the process in which it came to be. This notion has also set the grounds for many other subdivisions, such as, Conceptual art, and Minimalist art, Pop art, Performance art, etc. Many of our prominent social subject matters began to get incorporated into the movement, such as, feminism, multiculturalism, globalization, racism, AIDS awareness and many more.
