Conclusion

Contemporary art wants to find value by becoming facet of the academic process[1]. The grand linear historical and conceptual narrative so often used to judge new works of art and new artists is beginning to breaking apart, fragmenting under it’s own weight. There are no ‘centres of art’ anymore. Arts presence is felt across the world creating a de-centralized global art society.[2] There are too many artists, too many histories, and too many shifting morphing concerns to embrace them all in a coherent logical fashion. As art has become more commercialized and as other and traditionally non-art fields like fashion, design and architecture grow in artistic statue it is hard to clearly define what is art or even who are artists anymore. Subjectivity is a corrosive acid that has destroys the fabric of everything it touches. It reduces everything in its path to the unrecognizable sludge of opinion, one person’s subjective response over another’s. A Picasso or a Pollock have no real value other than the value I assign, my opinion of the work is their only true value. This position is wholly repulsive and unacceptable to a capital driven art market. In the eyes of the market all things must have a numerical value, a dollar value.[3] This is art as artifact and who would want to deny our cultural heritage or want to deny the value of such works? However it is through this prism that we unwittingly judge the value of contemporary art.[4] The contemporary artist is at the whim of art schools, curators, art writers, art bureaucrats and art profiteers who have a vested interest in perpetuating the false economy of ideas.

As a global society we are moving towards the digital realm where geographic and cultural centres lose relevance. The Internet and the digital manifestations of our world, our society and ourselves reflect the new paradigm precipitated by the ‘Grandfathers of Chaos’ Cantor, Boltzmann, Heisenberg and many others. Our society is an atomized ‘bottom up’ structure, an inverted hierarchy reminiscent of Boltzmann’s view of physics. Visual culture is digitized and generated by Youtube users and basement dwellers[5] in the unholy bowels of the Internet.[6] Conceptualism has lead to a crisis point in art, a point I don’t think we can recover from with words alone.

With our new eyes patient reader and our understanding of this new paradigm in our hearts let’s reassess the image at the beginning of this essay. But before we can even begin there is a problem…

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[1] If only as the younger, mentally retarded cousin of academia.

[2] What is Chinas art history? Taiwan’s? Afghanistan’s or Quebec’s? All must be considered in our new art paradigm.

[3] This is generally done but assessing the works role in creating a historical narrative the artificial ‘grand narrative’ generated by the art world to assign value to art works or artifacts. Picasso is invaluable to the grand art history narrative representing the link between traditional artistic aims and practices to expressionism through to cubism and abstraction. Pollock represents the link between Abstract Expressionism and action paintings or body art and so on.

[4] New works are evaluated on how and to what degree do they add to this conceptual lineage or fit in to its historical narrative.

[5] http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Basement_dwellers

[6] http://boards.4chan.org/b/