當代藝術

Robert Smithson is largely considered the leader of the Land Art movement of the late 1960s and is also noted for his postmodern approach and conceptualization of art. Smithson and other artists associated with the movement, such as Walter De Maria, Alice Aycock, Michael Heizer, and James Turrell were aesthetically influenced by Minimalism but sought to bring art out of the gallery system and into the outside environment. This radical break with conventional modes of display were vested in the desire to de-institutionalize art. Land artists saw the heavy handed and powerful influence of art critics like Clement Greenberg and the troublesome, overbearing galleries as interfering with the creative process and preventing a more concept driven discourse.

The foundation of thought begun in the Land Art movement eventually lead to the Conceptual Art movement that flowered in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conceptual Art is based on the premise that the ideas or concepts behind an art work are more important than the physical manifestation of a work. Conceptualism was heavily influenced by the Fluxus movement, and is characterized in the works of artists like Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Yoko Ono and Douglas Huebler.

Postminimalism is a large, difficult to define trend that, as its name suggests, is united by its concern with or reaction agaist the art objects and theories of Minimalism. These concerns may include a focus on materials, on hand-made or process-oriented methods of production, and a formalist aesthetic, but also includes art that is not concerned with, or indeed is opposed to, these concerns. Early practitioners include Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, while more recent practitioners arguably include Anish Kapoor, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gabriel Orozco and artist associated with the Young British Artists group. Performance Art may also been seen as both a school of contemporary art, and a trend running throughout the history of art. It became an identifiable trend in the late 1950's to mid-1960's when happenings were an artistic and cultural phenomenon. Artists associated with this trend early on include Joseph Beuys, and Vito Acconci.

辛迪·謝爾曼的 photographic series of Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) was among the first to be labeled postmodern by critics. Sherman's work can be used as a marker for the beginning of contemporary art for several reasons.

Perhaps the most defining aspect of 21st century art is its indefinability and resistance to categorization. Before the Postmodern era, most artwork could be categorized fairly easily into specific schools or movements. In fact, the modern period in art is often referred to as the age of "isms" because of this tendency. While many critics and historians have attempted to draw a line between the ideologies of Modernism and Postmodernism, and thereby clearly map out their differences, these attempts are usually met with strong, and relevant, criticisms.

Throughout the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century the prevailing ideological movements in art have become even more difficult to discern. Some may argue that not enough time has passed for art historians to identify the major trends, but others say that the lack of organization into a coherent movement is one of the defining trends of contemporary arts.

Instead, contemporary art is defined by other social, cultural, and economic trends such as the changes in views towards culture due to globalization and increasing internationalization of societies and the artists themselves, by trends in technology that have created new media such as video, computer-generated images, internet-art, and installation-art, by trends towards artists using multiple-media and refusing to be defined as, for example, only a painter, by the increasing politicalization of art, by changes in the way art is distributed through galleries, museums, art fairs, biennales, and artist-in-residency programs, etc. Throughout this time period, the theories of Postmodernism have been very influential, and offer a persuasive explanation of the structures of and changes in contemporary art, but these theories have not been adopted by contemporary artists as the agreed-upon ideological construct of the movement in the way that Modern artists adopted Modernist theory.

Contemporary art is often discussed in terms of "trends," or common ideas, approaches and materials. It is important that many of the artists associated with these trends often do not like to be seen as defined by these trends, and may be active in several different areas of concern. A few of these trends are clearly most active during a specific time, while many that started in the 1960s are still being actively investigated by artists today. Many of these trends remain controversial, with little agreement on the defining theory or artists. Some of these trends are defined by a specific ideology, while others, such as installation art, are defined by the artists' medium.

Many trends in contemporary art, such as installation art, video art, and internet art are defined by the media the artists use. The artists in such groupings may have been working during completely different time periods, in different places, and with completely different sets of ideological concerns. The artists mentioned here may also be associated with other trends in contemporary art. Installation art uses sculptural materials and other media to modify the way we experience a particular space, and often located outside the traditional gallery environment. Artists include Ilya Kabakov. Video Art came into being in the 1960s at the same time the technology became more widely available. Artists include Peter Campus and Bill Viola.

Later trends in contemporary art include Neo-Expressionsim, Lowbrow Art, and others. Neo-Expressionism refers to art that reacted against the formalism of minimalism. Artists, mostly painters, created expressionistic paintings in bold colors to explore their emotions through the human figure and recognizable images. Artists include Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, etc. Lowbrow, also known as "pop surrealism" has been getting much attention in the early 2000's and refers to art that is influenced by underground comix, Graffiti, hot-rod culture, punk visual art = the visual aesthetic of punk rock, and other forms of popular illustration. It has claims to being a kind of folk art, and despite an anti-gallery stance, is shown in many contemporary art galleries. Artists include Mark Ryden and Gary Baseman.

Contemporary art theory refers both to theories about art that is being produced currently, and to theories about all art produced since the putative end of modernism in the 1960s. This includes 50 years of the biggest changes in the art world, aesthetics, society and culture, and includes theories about current events for which we do not yet have the benefit of historical perpective. It is a large, sometimes highly academic, sometimes very controvesial and contentious topic upon which there is little consensus. This is compounded by the fact that contemporary art refers to many different art movements with many different ideologies, some of which are anti-academic and anti-theory. There have been many contemporary additions to the field of aesthetics, but as often as not contemporary art is involved with social theory.

The difficult to define theories of postmodernism claim that the period of modern art has ended, and analyzes contemporary art from this perspective.

Guy Debord's book "Society of the Spectacle" is a key text that criticizes modern society and the the seductive nature of capitalism and relates to Marxist theory. He lead the Situationist movement which influenced the Paris uprising of May 1968. Jacques Derrida did not write primarily about the visual arts, but his theories have become central to postmodern theory (though he did not claim to be a postmodernist). He wrote about deconstruction which looks at how meaning relates to text (which can include visual art) and post-structuralism which, in part, claims that the viewer's interpretation of art may be more important than the artist's intended meaning. Jean Baudrillard's book "Simulacra and Simulation" looks at the nature of reality and how reality is mitigated by the media in postmodern society. His claim that the copy has become more important than the original is a concern of many contemporary artists.

Other aesthetic theories include formalism (art). There are also links with Semiotics, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, etc.

Other schools of thought that are central to the understanding of contemporary art include theories that are less aesthetically than socio-politically oriented. These include theories of feminism, gender studies, LGBT social movements, civil rights and anti-racism, anti-globalism, Anti-imperialism, Marxism and other political theories. Contemporary art is often associated with leftist politics, but is often overtly apolitical.

Art after the Modern Era has transformed along with the large-scale economic, global, political, and socio-cultural change. The growing speed of the transference of ideas, money, information and culture around the globe seems to be happening within art worlds as well. Many of the boundaries and distinctions within Art have loosened.

Contemporary art should not be confused with the workings of modern art, although the trends and movements in contemporary practice may directly refer to modernism. Much of the direction of modern art involved exploring the very basis of painting, for instance, color, brush stroke, and canvas. Philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto has asserted that modernism (as well as "art history" itself) came to its end with the making of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which functioned as art yet were largely indistinguishable from their real life counterparts. These sculptures therefore marked the end of any pretense that art had some essential and objectively discernible trait that separated it from non-art objects.

Similarly, Donald Kuspit has labelled contemporary practices that fail to demonstrate historically evidenced artistic qualities as post-art. He criticizes socially-oriented art, exemplified by the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Jeremy Deller, for replacing: high culture with mass appeal, autonomy with homogeneity, mystery with transparency, skill with chance creativity, dialectic with dialogue, and “refinement of the unconscious” with spectacle. In the last case, this reminds one of Michael Fried’s disdain for Minimalist theatricality as being an instance of heavy-handed rhetoric. For Kuspit, as well as Danto, artistic categorization “is possible only on the basis of working knowledge of the past...looking to the past for inspiration,” looking specifically to what “post-art” supposedly does not contain, which is beauty. Most emphatically, Kuspit laments the disappearance of the “sacred studio” and the move to the "noisy public street".

One notable characteristic of Contemporary art is that it often engages matters and issues that presently affect the world. Cloning, politics, economics, issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, human rights, war or perhaps even the high price of bread being sold locally. This emphasis on politics, though not entirely new, does seem to have intensified. Historically, art was more closely aligned with aesthetic notions of beauty, purity and transcendence. It was identified with higher thoughts--not politics. Distinctions, however, may be made between politically-motivated art with activist purposes and socially-oriented art with political implications. Fundamentally, the conceptual basis of socially-oriented art is that a social formation may be taken as the art-object, with the result that the physical distance between artist and audience is collapsed through a project’s participatory, collaborative structure. This aesthetic shift has been defined variously by contemporary art theorists as relational (Nicolas Bourriaud), connective (Suzi Gablik), and dialogic (Grant Kester).

Contemporary art often also crosses the boundaries of medium; it is not limited by materials or methodology. It may or may not use traditional forms such as painting, drawing, and sculpture but may engage performance, installation, video and employ any variety of materials or readymade objects. Since the modernist days of the first half of the 20th century, art has also engaged post-modernism, neo-conceptualism, High art Lite (the Young British Artists movement (YBAs) of the mid nineties), as well as multi-culturalist work within the post-postmodern. It often engages a multi-disciplinary discourse, utilizing a diverse body of skills and peoples to ultimately engage the mass with a substantial, and sometimes provocative discourse pertaining to the relevant issues shaping the world right now. It is continually engaging, and affecting the boundaries of perception.

The future development of Contemporary art is often directed by massive biennials (The Whitney Biennial, The Venice, Sao Paulo, the Kwan Ju, the Havana...), triennials (Echigo-Tsumari), and most importantly the exhibition of documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Contemporary artists must deal on a regular basis on the intention and message behind their art, and increasingly, issues such as site-specificity and choice of materials are becoming more and more relevant in the broadcasting of both their message and the physical aesthetic of their artwork. Art is put to the service of generating a sense of authenticity and uniqueness of place for quasi-promotional agendas, one of the fundamental ideas behind the artwork is to create a dialogue between artists, the locality and the public, to encourage the artists to create projects that dealt with conditions in the town, its architecture, urban planning, its history and the social structure of society in the town, a place for a natural confrontation between history and contemporary art. If there is a clash between choice of materials and a site for their artwork, the very meaning of that artwork can change or deviate from the intended message or significance, thus exaction is required in order for the intended audience to perceive the intended message. Superscript text The appropriate decisions regarding choice of materials and site has resulted in many new areas of public art, subsections or categories of this artform, each of which convey different messages. One recent sub-genre of public art is `art in the public interest', often city-based programs focusing on social issues rather than the built environment that involve collaborations with marginalised social groups such as the homeless, battered women, urban youths, AIDS patients, prisoners, and which strives towards the development of politically-conscious community events or programs.

An example of the `art in the public interest' theory, Janet Laurence's site-specific installation, `Edge of the Trees' is experiential language of art, involving the viewer not just optically, but through the whole body's sensory system. The artwork primarily deals with Australia in its earliest stages of colonialism; the effect of western culture on the original inhabitants of inner-city Sydney, the Eora tribe or aboriginals, and it comes as no coincidence that this is where the installation is located. It is through this use of site-specificity that the artwork itself is given added depth and significance. Her choice of materials is also equally valuable; she has selected certain essences of history, the names of the first fleet, a visual representation of the environment, an audio tape of the aboriginal language. It is through these sensible decisions that Laurence had earned the credibility of creating a sensory artwork that has the significance and relevance of many dimensions, fulfilling each of them respectively.

Another subsection of public art is `art as public spaces', less object-oriented and more site-conscious art that sought greater integration between art, architecture, and the landscape through artists' collaboration with members of the urban managerial class (such as architects, landscape architects, city planners, urban designers, and city administrators), in the designing of permanent urban development projects such as parks, buildings, promenades, tourist centres. Another common example of this diversifying of public art is the rapid occurrence of `art in public places', typically a modernist abstract sculpture placed out-doors to "decorate' or 'enrich" urban spaces, especially areas fronting federal buildings or corporate office towers or business districts.

Site specificity and public art in this context find new importance because they can supply distinction of place and uniqueness of locational identity, highly seductive qualities in the promotion of towns and cities within the competitive restructuring of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, site-specific art remains inexorably tied to a process that renders particularity and identity of various cities a matter of product differentiation. Under the pretext of their articulation or resuscitation, site-specific public art can be mobilised to expedite the erasure of differences via the commodification and serialisation of places.

Some competitions, awards and prizes in contemporary art are

• Emerging Artist Award awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
• Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum
• Turner Prize for British artists under 50
• Jindrich Chalupecky prize for Czech artists under 35 [1]
• Participation in the Whitney Biennial

• 2006 "Robert Rauschenberg Combines"
• 2006 "Ecstacy: In and About Altered States" at MOCA, Los Angeles
• 2005 "Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art"
• 2004 "100 Artists See God" traveling exhibition
• 2003 "Matthew Barney Retrospective" at the Guggenheim Museum
• 1997 - 1998 The Sensation exhibition or "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" in London, Berlin and New York
• 1996 "Cindy Sherman Retrospective"
• 1996 "1965 - 1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art"