Our first lecture into Contemporary Art (for graduate students) was abruptly interrupted when a contemptuous voice blurted, “What is art?” and “Who’s to say that qualifies as art?” I immediately thought, Are you kidding? This is graduate school! Clearly, he was not kidding. I sometimes forget that students come to art school for industry jobs like film and television or photography and that, while MFA means Masters of Fine Arts, they probably haven’t been exposed to conceptualism or performance art and overall art of the 1960s up. What a dilemma! The professor took her time in answering the questions. After a long-winded explanation of how artists today choose to work with objectionable materials and concepts—almost disgusting or shocking—to (hopefully) evoke an epiphany, the professor ended with, “Contemporary Art is art for the mind, not the eye.”
(To give the student credit we were looking at a performance piece by Zhang Huan where the artist was naked laying on ice in a Ming Dynasty bed with an audience of pampered pooches in the middle of a busy New York street. Someone else said, “If I walked by, I would take a picture and show all of my friends how dumb the guy was.”)
In short, here’s a video explaining contemporary art to parents. Or use these handy cards from the Baltic to sleuth the meaning.
