What was contemporary art? The question, which has been nagging away at the back of everyone's minds for years, has recently become impossible to ignore. Amid the art fairs of the fall, dominated this year by paintings stripped of all but the blandest political content, the unavoidable impression was that contemporary art's demise is inseparable from the collapse of the social and economic infrastructures by which it has been supported since the middle of the twentieth century, and whose values it has reflected. And that it might be possible with the passage of that era to begin historicizing the artistic movement that defined it.
Perhaps the notorious difficulty of defining “contemporary art”—with its heterogenous modes of expression, ability to assimilate critique, globalizing tendencies, and seemingly endless expansion into other fields—will come to be seen as the most accurate expression of the culture with which it was associated. It is a project that, like others of the postwar period, depended ultimately on popular faith in both its principles and its representatives. That trust has been significantly eroded (as Lola Seaton has pointed out in her recent reflections in the New Left Review on the cynical opportunism of those who made, in Hal Foster's phrase, a medium of the market). Without the advantage of historical distance, it is hard to tell whether that era ended some time ago or is only now drawing to a protracted close. But it seems unarguable that something has recently changed. And so the opening question begs another, more appropriate for a critic than an art historian: what comes next?
One first impression is of a retrenchment, something akin to a search for order. At least in the context of a precarious market, there is a renewed tendency towards work in traditional media that, by engaging historical precedents, stakes a claim to a lineage extending beyond the past six decades. Or we might see a comparable desire for order in the recent (if waning) emphasis on art validated by the identity of its makers, in which cultural heritage is offered—at least theoretically—as an alternative means of guaranteeing a work’s value to the diminished authority of what Arthur Danto called “the artworld.”
Perhaps in opposition to this, a new strain of formalism has emerged which insists on being appraised on its own aesthetic and intellectual terms by actively suppressing the identity of its maker. There are the many artists using digitally innovative techniques to tell stories that might give structure to, and explain, a world that no longer holds to the established narratives. Others are seeking to form new political solidarities through art as the old constraints on power break down. If there is anything uniting these overlapping projects—and it is possible that there isn’t—it might be the search for secure structures of meaning in a world that no longer makes much sense by the metrics established in modernity. That, and the recognition that something new is needed.
