The Threads of Practice

Excerpt

Just what is contemporary art? Since the break with “modern art” – what we now think of as twentieth-century classical art – in about 1970, artists, critics, curators, and even collectors have determined that what had been labeled modern was old-fashioned. MoMAs are replaced by MoCAs. Beauty was replaced by intellectual challenge. So for almost a half-century we have been in the contemporary age. This is an age without an avant-garde because there is no rearguard. But without an avant-garde to provoke and to challenge and a rearguard to resist will there ever be a next new thing? Are we stuck with the jumble and jangle of contemporary art, a panoply of practice without label or direction? Do we even have subgroups anymore – minimalists, neo-geo, hyper-realists, and others? …