Après-garde Art: Almost an Epiphany

In a somewhat meandering piece on the value of "après-garde" art work, Financial Times writer Peter Aspden almost convinces me he's got a point, but....

Much contemporary art of recent years has set out to shock, despite the disingenuous disclaimers of its practitioners, in the hope that public outrage will be identified as a symptom of the artist’s avant-garde brilliance. But it is not necessarily so. There is a difference between genuine outrage and knee-jerk Daily Mail polemicising. Now there is a sense of near-ennui when confronted by the frantic efforts of certain artists to make headlines.

The truth is, their argument has been won. The rich and varied strains of contemporary art are now accepted by a public that is thirsty to see their results. That is because their art speaks of its time, and is all the more satisfying for it. The reason we live in a contemporary art boom at present is not entirely down to hedge fund speculators and restless Russian oligarchs. We have a genuine confluence of public feeling and the artistic imagination.

This is nowhere more vividly illustrated than at London’s Tate Modern, where the latest Turbine Hall installation, Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth”, aka the giant crack in the ground, is attracting extraordinary numbers of spectators. Last Saturday, more than 34,000 people came to see the work. To put it in some perspective, only three football matches in England attracted a bigger crowd than that.

It is a profound work, nothing less than a literal defacing of a temple of culture to protest against the fissures that still divide mankind. It is art of the here and now, and we are privileged to have it.

I wish, just once, someone who insists much of contemporary art "set out to shock" would name names. I understand it's considered widely understood to be the case, but like much conventional wisdom, when one gets down to specifics it often turns out not to be that defendable a position.

I got confused by what seems a contradiction in Peter's argument. He notes early in the piece that "[A]rt that is behind its time arguably serves an even more important function....[it] expresses something that is already in the air but has not yet been creatively articulated." But then suggests that "contemporary art...speaks of its time, and is all the more satisfying for it."

Again, I think I know what he's getting at, but as with the assumption that many artists set out to shock, I'm not sure it stands up to close inspection.

Note: Shaky image above is not an earthquake photo, but rather Bambino (who's celebrating his birthday today!!!) contemplating Salcedo's "Shibboleth" at the Tate.