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Re: Art Fear

There's this pep talk book for artists by Bayles and Orland titled Art & Fear. They have written it for artists who struggle with lack of confidence, procrastination, fear of untoward reactions from colleagues, or fear of not being able to live up to their own expectations. I think this book may be more to the point for artists working in fields where traditional notions of craft and artistic expression are important. You can improve your drawing skills by drawing a lot, by studying anatomy and perspective, by copying masters. Similar with painting, which is also helped by an understanding of colours (as pigments as well as their visual perception) and by practice with various painting techniques.

Since early modernism, some of these standards have shifted in importance. It isn't clear how anatomy or perspective are directly useful to paintings in the style of abstract expressionism, although I'm absolutely not suggesting that some practice with the basic crafts is a wasted effort.

However, I think the contemporary art scene, at least parts of it, is fundamentally different. The French sociologist Nathalie Heinich has described contemporary art as a new paradigm, as different from Modernism as Modernism is from pre-modern art. Notably, contemporary art is not about self-expression, or mastery of traditional techniques, it is predominantly conceptual and uses other materials and techniques than modern or traditional art, such as everyday objects, video, performance, site-specific installations, and so forth. And most importantly, in contemporary art the narrative about the work tends to be as important as the material work itself, it is absolutely crucial for getting the point of the work.

Contemporary art often replaces the concern for originality, expressivity, and technical mastery with programmatic concerns; it investigates problems such as climate change, mass extinction, plastic in the oceans, gender stereotypes, identity politics, refugees, self esteem and body ideals, or whatever other issues are on the agenda. As such, it becomes more activist and less concerned with formal problems of Art pour l'art. It wants to change the world, not merely represent it. If it is successful at that is of course another matter. I think that many of the concerned artists working in this field are more occupied with the struggle to save what can be saved of the environment, trying to increase awareness of marginalised groups, and so on, than they are worried about how their colleagues and audience sees them. But I'm generalising. The contemporary art scene is multifarious and so are the individuals in it.

This is not so much meant as a reply to a text by Idiomdrottning as a tangential reflection on some interesting observations she makes about improving as an artist, and a previous text on art fear.

gemini://idiomdrottning.org/art-improvement

I'm always happy that there are folks here at gemini, as well as other places, who care about art as an activity. There's much more to say about the contemporary art scene, but that's for another day.

Book references:

BAYLES, David and ORLAND, Ted. Art & Fear. Observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking. Santa Cruz: The Image Continuum, 1993.

HEINICH, Nathalie. Le paradigme de l’art contemporain. Structures d’une révolution artistique. Éditions Gallimard, 2014.

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