Coincidence or not, the film, like the four sides of a square, unfolds four issues of contemporary art institutions: funding and sponsorship; art and marketing; exhibitions and the public; social and public relations. Either side can extend to an infinitely broad problem.
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In the movie, the protagonist stood outside the square countless times and refused help requested by others, and he also fell into the circle and turned to others for help and was rejected. The contemporary art system may be like the inside of the square itself, which symbolizes "trust and love", and to outsiders, it is fictionalized within this ordinary and forcibly given meaning within the four sides. On the one hand, they have such a clear threshold: the closed quadrilateral clearly separates "trust and love" from the cold reality, the border between art and life - why is the art exhibition area and the castle separated by a door Two completely different directions? Why did the audience quickly escape from this place in embarrassment and some nervousness after they probed their brains and glanced carefully? On the other hand, it is difficult for us to find the definite boundary of contemporary art, just like the protagonist wandering in and out of the square unconsciously in his life-why should he be infinitely tolerant of people with Tourette's disease? Why did no one come to "help" for a long time in the art performance of the dinner party? It was not until the behavior that was truly infinitely close to "criminal" happened that the surrounding patrons dared to rush forward; and when the virtual children in the square were bombed, people began to conduct strong moral protests.
The three are like a progressive relationship, testing the bottom line or boundary of contemporary art. First, stay within the non-criminal realm that is generally accepted by society. Second, be careful, the punishment may not be the crime itself, but the ability to communicate that may affect others, the seed buried in the heart.
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Of course, in real life now, it is hard for us to see such extreme artistic behavior. In fact, mere general confusion about contemporary art is enough to make the audience question art.
Karen Smith, curator of OCAT Xi'an, said in 2014 that the well-known artist Xu Bing was not so well received in Xi'an. "The special exploratory method used by Xu Bing to make Chinese character works is too experimental for the circle in Xi'an. When people leave Beijing and Shanghai and go to inland cities, their ideas and concepts of art will change a lot, and there will be The tendency to oppose the concept of contemporary art.”
In The Weak Universalism, Boris Groyce uses Malevich's art to reveal the meaning of "weak universalism", and the discovery of unoriginal images is understood as an originality The discovery of, through a feeble, self-eliminating force that produces feeble images, makes its own universal success possible. "My children can draw like this" can also be used to appreciate children's works in reverse. On the contrary, it shows that Malevich has opened up the field of art, facing all possible faint images, and children's paintings can also be appreciated as art.
"Doing art according to theoretical reflection can only fall into an infinite loop." Modern art is "reflexive", constantly pursuing self-reflection, reflecting on what art is, and where are the boundaries of art? Then the elements of the final painting are cut and there is a blank canvas, there is Duchamp's fountain, or that banana. Explore what makes art art. The inside and outside of the square may be completely opposite, which makes me feel that contemporary art is like a magical logic game.
Following this logic, we may admit that contemporary art has opened up a part of the possibility of art appreciation, but it has not expanded the industry itself in an artistic sense. Exhibition display and appreciation still have such intellectual and economic thresholds. But at the same time, with the establishment and development of the modern art market and art industry, the competition of art exhibition has changed from the competition of other art works to the competition with other leisure, tourism and entertainment industries. "Art funding exists in any era and in any country. But art capital is different from sponsorship. Although funding also determines the type and quality of artistic creation, we can say that it is a kind of power discourse. But art sponsorship can also be obligatory and donated. But capital is not, capital is to be rewarded, and it must also appreciate and return value.” (Gao Minglu) At this moment, if the audience’s ambiguity of the threshold and the market demand exist at the same time, then capital is very likely to choose a more “high cost performance ratio”. "art display. Of course, art has gone from boycott to participatory irony in the last century.
Big things are sometimes exhilarating and sometimes emptiness. Perhaps we should break away from theory and focus on the present moment we are seeing, to believe in immature but direct experience, to believe in simple things and the joy of being amazed when facing the same work together.
3
Thinking of the controversy caused by Song Tuo's "School Flower" this summer, for me, this incident cannot be called a good "contemporary art" - the point is not whether it violated ethics, but the "artist" obviously It just reinforces a certain existing logic, but does not show in-depth thinking and further real transformation in the exhibited works. It had nothing to do with the "offensive" and social issues, but rather the issue that made him slack. If there is no formal beauty and no thinking, and "throwing up a controversial topic" is art, then you don't need an artist, just Sina Weibo.
So no matter what the content is, this is not a work that can stand up to scrutiny in my opinion. At the same time, the museum and curators have not completed the task of further traction and promotion through the concept of the exhibition. (I know there are many practical factors, but at the moment we only talk about art) Instead, it is a curatorial scholar, a theoretician, who I pay attention to, who has completed the dissection and questioning of art for them.
After being criticized, the "artist"'s light-hearted sentence "I expected the public to be like this" is a kind of behavior of confronting and suppressing individuals with a high-profile position of "capital art". This is not a communication, but a sophistry to avoid taking responsibility for thinking. . The world is a web woven from multiple perspectives, which is hierarchical but also intertwined. In my opinion, art is a medium of communication, it should allow us to open up a new dimension of communication, not to exacerbate this gap.
If art is no longer as obvious as it used to be, if the square of contemporary art can only be made of capital and the market, then curators can at least participate in part of the placement work and make it more beautiful.
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