You could describe the art of today as the product of the introspective mirror. A FB friend of mine says that in fact all art is a selfie. In some ways that is true if you remove the propogandists and those who continue to hold up a mirror to nature and even the propogandists are using their personal and racial history as a weapon. The selfie has become commonplace as individuals who would in previous times have come and gone as unrecorded lives attempt to cement their place in history and while there have always been self-portraits painted they were meant more as personal mementos and not intended for public consumption unless it was a joke such as the masons of Chartres Cathedral adding themselves into the sacred narrative. Selfies though are a different matter in that unlike say a Rembrandt self-portrait which speaks in a direct way to the emotional state of the artist, a contemporary selfie is a shallow and momentary likeness. We live in age not just of a lack of common beliefs but one where the inner workings of the self is celebrated. I can trace this back to the age of humanism and a human centric universe but it is the twentieth century that refines the approach. Picasso as the archetypal modern artist probably had a lot to answer for in that once the smokescreen of Cubism is removed, what remains are the scoriated remnants of his life. His artistic descendants saw no other approach to art. The late sixties where dropping out to discover yourself was practically a religion and the whole abstract ‘movement’ pushed art into a sphere where it ceased to have a collective social function and relied upon the inexorable rising to the surface of individual memorial angst.

Art was once required to address large audiences or congregations or worshippers with subjects that had meaning for all of them but while the volume of art produced has increased exponentially in size, the audience that visits galleries and buys art has become narrower and the art itself has become specialised and increasingly aesthetic. Attempts to alter this in recent history resulted in State art and Social Realism – propaganda – but through whatever mechanism that is operating now, art has become not just aesthetic and reliant upon either an artist’s statement or critical opinion to explain it but has become the product of individual memory. Even when art is being made for large galleries and museums such as the Venice Biennale with its upcoming theme of the refugee and the outsider as selected by its South American curator, the idea of the medieval cathedral remains but without the shared belief system. The 2024 Venice Biennale by definition becomes propagandist and exclusive. Shared beliefs and common narratives have little part to play unless shared paranoia, propaganda, disenfranchisement and group psychosis are the beliefs and narratives of the 21^st century.

While there may well be a shared belief in humanitarianism, even if it is not practised, the ‘market’ is what is dictating the message as nations vie for moral and ethical acceptance through their choice of artist. If this is the face of contemporary art, then all that links the works together is the notion of being contemporary. What happens when the term ‘contemporary’ ceases to have any function just as ‘modern’ did, is anyone’s guess.

Whether intended for public consumption in either a small local or grandiose temple of art, the work or art relies upon finding a kindred spirit as an audience. Whatever inherent acceptance of the canons of beauty that may be apparent, most art has limited exposure. If anything, the audience could be no more than friends and supporters who turn up for a cocktail opening as part of a cult-like Facebook group of mutual understanding, or the selected email list of a knowing curator or representative of an art elite who gives it a nod.

So, what is the answer? One thing is certain, we cannot go back. A thousand years of the Western Tradition has seen to that but what in the end have we lost, or is that the wrong question? I recently saw film of an Australian Aboriginal dance festival in the northern Territory where the collective traditions of the last sixty thousand years are being kept alive and the individual plays no part. The dancers will all go back to their other lives, whether urban or rural and the visual artists among them will continue to paint in the coded patterning that has become so familiar but for the rest of us, there is no such tradition to which to return. The selfie has become emblematic of a shattered and fragmented society dictated by external technological forces and no one is going to be giving up their phone any time soon or the opportunity to record their otherwise inconsequential lives. Artists, of course, are no different and fill their available FB and Instagram spaces with whatever renders them as human while searching for their inner selves and hoping that someone is paying attention long enough to notice. Given the ever-decreasing attention spans and the equally shrinking news cycle, it is the cacophony of noise combined with speed of the passing world that dictates whether all of the individual angst rises to the surface long enough to be noticed.

I guess in the end it comes down to just which selfie is going to be important enough to be remembered, collected, bought and sold. The odds would bear comparison with buying the winning lottery ticket and the prospect of shared hope such a win engenders. Perhaps that is the message of contemporary art. Rather than shared belief it is the shared hope of discovery that drives the creative process.