Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) by Jeff Koons
Why are they constantly starting and extinguishing the lights? How less can it be? Or as many people have asked Google: "Why is modern art so simple?" I am tempted to answer - because it is idiotic! But first we need to determine what "contemporary art" means in this matter. Most of today's art does not seem simple at all. On the contrary, it seems complicated and gives the viewer the pleasure in an equally complicated way. There is nothing simply in the pictures of Anselm Kiefer, saturated with disturbing images and composed of dark layers of ash, wood, straw and pigment. There is nothing simple about the sinister photographic panoramas of Tacita Dean's landscapes and memories, or say Tuomble's sensual, scratched epochs, trembling with poetic erudition. Does it seem so "simple" to quote Kavafis and Kathul just like the paintings of Tuomble? We all understand what kind of art is asking the question. When artists like Damien Hurst began to receive the Turner award in the 1990s, I heard people in the old generation hang around because of the triumph of the painters. The essence of modern art has become that of being accepted as a bland, precise and easily digested conceptual masterpiece. A empty room with some art sound echoing in it.
Art reflects its time. We live in an era of permanent visual and conceptual barrages of commercials, TV shows, and pictures that spread epidemically in Twitter. Say honestly, what art do you expect to produce the information age? We want information that we can quickly decode, respond and share. As early as the 1960's, artists created the minimalistic aesthetics of our time. Andy Warhol turned table cans into portraits and reportage photos of celebrities in portraits. The minimalists have built an almost religious cult of untreated industrial materials. Conceptual art, invented in the late 1960s, rejected the idea that a work must necessarily have a unique material form.
Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank by Jeff Koons
Until the '80s, at the dawn of the internet, artists like Jeff Koons and Barbara Krueger inherently merged these avant-garde views with the unceremonious rhetoric of advertising. Why art is not as catchy as advertising, he asks Koons in his early works, which directly "assign" ads? Richard Prince borrows the Marlboro mannequin with the same extreme simplicity. Then the new generation, led by Damien Hurst, freed this bold and shameless conceptual wit from his advertising roots to make "big" statements about biology, time, and death. To complain about Warhol, Kunst and Hurst is almost the same as shooting the envoy. They are simple in the way they reflect the speed and madness of modern life. The seeming simplicity of modern art is the secret of its success. You can grasp this art so fast - from the spiral slide in Tate Modern to the statue of Anthony Gormley. The immediate impact of much of today's most popular art means that people can easily enjoy it - not as a tedious old culture but as fun. It takes hours to watch ballet or staging and even more hours to read a book. And you only need a few minutes to appreciate the most glorified works of our time.
This may sound like a censure. But it gives modern visual art (not that it is only visual) a greater impact than any other elite art form. A novelist like Jonathan Franzen uses hundreds of pages in an attempt to describe the reality of our time, but a work of art can express this reality in its own essence, because the triumph of simple, bent conceptual art is one of the phenomena that determine our age. So, one of the answers to the question, "Why contemporary art seems so simple?" Is that because it is easily interchangeable, fleeting and as unceremonious as any advertising, it sums up the time we live in. Accept it. This is your reflection in the balloon dog. Incorporating the ignorance of this epoch of spectacles, what we think is "contemporary art" has turned out to be of interest to a few in popular culture.
Anselm Kiefer Aurora
Why does modern art look simple? Why the jazz was moved by rock? But the question is also an expression of anxiety - and that anxiety must be bothering everyone who cares about contemporary art. The simplicity of art, which began in the 1960s, really went too far in the 1980s and 1990s and became part of the essence of our time, made many people rich - because the other great thing in simplicity is that it sells. Collectors seem to love things they do not have much to think about. It is these things that give the unique atmosphere of "Tate Modern", which always awakens to me the desire to go to the neighboring building and buy a ticket to the Shakespeare Theater Globus. This is a picture of the way we live now, but it is an ugly and depressing picture. Do art really have to imitate the lowest and fleeting horrors of modern life to be modern? Of course not. I have already mentioned some artists who are complex, serious and at least simple. The truth is that the artists themselves have been tired of simple Hearst art. Galleries are crowded with art that pretends to be complicated. Unfortunately, instead, much of it is boring and incomprehensible. There are many "masterpieces" in Godard's stylistics, which are nothing but high-quality art videos, terrible epochs of performances and desperate attempts to make art more "serious" by becoming a gardening or, say, a communal architecture .
Tacita Dean’s The Book End of Time
In fact, modern art is in danger of losing the "simplicity" that made it so popular without regaining the depth that would make it meaningful. This is why we live in such a strange time for art and why its future seems unclear. Art deprived of so many enriching things, and descended to a boring mirror of its age, now trying to find more intellectual and emotional means of expression. There are remarkable exceptions. A great art is still being created. And it will be created in the future. But yes, the answer to the question is that most contemporary art seems simple because it is idiotically one-dimensional, poetically bankrupt and banal to perceive.
