The contemporary art

The contemporary art isn’t that I was going to write about today. But today I just woke up with a thought in my mind: What is exactly the contemporary art? Since when we can talk that it is the contemporary art? So, let’s figure it out.

Okay. My first step in any question I don’t understand is the Internet. On the Internet, I found a lot of sites where was information about the contemporary art. On every site, the information was so different. Started with that the contemporary art is a piece of shit, and ended up that it is the most precious art in the world.

So, there wasn’t any clear definition of the contemporary art. But one thing was clear for me. The contemporary art began since modernism. It is late XIX century – early XX century. It is the time when an artist decided that he doesn’t have to portray the world as it is. The modernism is a common name of art styles which mostly end up with ‘ism’ – Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Fauvism, and etc.

The contemporary art in its current form was formed in 1960s-1970s. In that time, artists wanted to do something that could be absolutely opposite from modernism. It initiated such styles as Installation, Minimalism, Pop-Art, Op-Art, Street Art, Conceptual Art, Kinetic Art.

So many different art styles appeared because of impressionists. When impressionists showed their paintings at the first time, the public didn’t like it, everyone laughed at them. But then this art style became very popular and every art critic and collector wanted impressionism art in their collections. Since that time art critics have a fear of failure. They accept any new movement of art because they afraid to reject may be the future very popular art style. As the result, when we go to a contemporary art gallery, we can find something really interesting and something really strange.

We can say that the contemporary art is a rejection of traditional art and creation of something new. The contemporary art appears when artists decide that they don’t want to follow current movements of art and want to create something new. I think, now we already cannot call modernism as the contemporary art. In the current time, the real contemporary art is all these installations, minimalism, conceptual art and etc.