Artwork
HOW WILL WE DEFINE THIS ERA?
Historically we can look back over the last century and see how art reflected the time in which it was made.
IS IT MY MEMORY OR ONE THAT I APPROPRIATED?
Memory is defined in the dictionary as ‘the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, or of recalling or recognising previous experiences’. How that process works is still a mystery as is why some impressions are registered and retained and others are not. Recollection is another matter. Having something ‘on the tip of your tongue’ is a common phenomenon. What eventually brings it to mind? Synaptic association?
ART, THE MEASURE OF CIVILISATION
The 80s is forever condemned to being defined by the gaudy concoctions of Jeff Koons and the 90s by a shark in formaldehyde and the soulless reconstructed planes of Keiffer. Even now some two decades later, it seems as though art and artists were raking over the corpse of civilisation rather than defining it.
IS IT IGNORANCE OR JUST PLAIN STUPIDITY?
I hear people refer to work as abstract all the time. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of understanding and sometimes it’s a derogatory term suggesting that any work that doesn’t imitate nature in all its detail, is not art.
MODERN, POST MODERN and CONTEMPORARY
There are any number of terms in art that cause confusion not least of which are those that try to divide art, artists and time into clearly defined movements as you so often find in art text books.