Why do the lights keep going on and off? How is less more? What place does a balloon dog have in an art gallery? Or, as a lot of people have been asking Google: “Why does contemporary art look so simple?”
I am tempted to answer, “because it is idiotic,” but first, we need to define what contemporary art means in this question.
Plenty of today’s art does not look simple at all. On the contrary it looks complex and rewards the beholder accordingly. There is nothing simple about the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, saturated with troubling imagery and made with forbidding layers of ash, wood, straw and pigment. Nor is there anything simplistic about Tacita Dean’s eerie photographic panoramas of landscape and memory, or Cy Twombly’s sensual scrawled epics, tremulous with poetic erudition. Does it look “simple” to quote Cavafy and Catullus as much as Twombly’s paintings do?
Yet we all understand what kind of art the question is about. When artists such as Damien Hirst were taking the Turner Prize by storm in the 1990s I used to hear old-timers moan about the triumph of the “one-liner.” The essence of contemporary art has come to be seen as a smart, precise, quickly absorbed conceptual masterstroke. An empty room, with some sound art echoing in it.
Art reflects its times. We live in an age of constant visual and conceptual barrage by advertising, TV shows and photographs that go viral on Twitter. Seriously, what kind of art do you expect the information age to produce? We want information we can quickly decode and respond to and share. As long ago as the 1960s artists were pioneering the reductive aesthetics appropriate to our time. Andy Warhol turned soup cans into artworks and news photographs of celebrities into portraits. The Minimalists created an almost religious cult of unaltered industrial materials. Conceptual art, invented in the late 1960s, denied that a work of art needed to take any unique physical form.
By the 1980s, on the eve of the Internet, artists such as Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger were insolently fusing these avant garde notions with the blunt rhetoric of advertising. Why should art not be as grabby as a good advertisement, Koons asks in his early works, which directly “appropriate” advertisements. Richard Prince borrowed the Marlboro Man with the same utter simplicity.
Then a new generation led by Damien Hirst freed this bold, shameless style of conceptual wit from its advertising roots to make “big” statements about biology, time and death.
To complain about Warhol, Koons and Hirst is in many ways to shoot the messenger. They are simple in a way that addresses the speed and distraction of contemporary life. The apparent simplicity of contemporary art has become the secret of its success. You can grasp this art so quickly — from a spiraling slide in Tate Modern, London to an Antony Gormley statue, the instant impact of so much of today’s best-known art means that busy people can enjoy it easily, not as boring old high culture, but as entertainment. It takes hours to watch a ballet or a play and even more hours to read a book. It can take just minutes to appreciate the most acclaimed art of our time.
That might seem a condemnation. Yet it gives contemporary visual art (not that it is always visual any more) an edge over all other elite art forms.
A novelist like Jonathan Franzen could spend hundreds of pages trying to describe the reality of our time, but a work of art can express that reality in its own nature, because the triumph of simple bold conceptual art is one of the phenomena that define our age.
So, one answer to the question “Why does contemporary art look so simple?” is that by being throwaway and ephemeral and as blunt as an advert it sums up the time we live in. Deal with it. That is your reflection in the balloon dog. By embodying the crassness of this era of spectacle, what we think of as “contemporary art” has turned itself from a minority interest into popular culture.
Why does contemporary art look simple? Why did rock music replace jazz music?
Yet the question reflects an anxiety — and that anxiety has to gnaw at anyone who really cares about today’s art. The simplification of art that began in the 1960s, reached truly reductive levels in the 1980s and ‘90s and is part of the fabric of today, has made a lot of people rich — because the other great thing about simplicity is that it sells. Collectors seem to like stuff they do not have to think about too much. It creates that unique Tate Modern vibe that always leaves me wanting to go next door and buy some tickets for Shakespeare’s Globe. It is a picture of the way we live now, but it is an ugly, depressing picture.
Does art really have to imitate the lowest attention span horrors of modern life to be contemporary? Of course not. I have already mentioned some artists who are complex and serious and not in the least bit simple. The truth is that artists themselves are sick of the simple art of the Hirst era.
Galleries are full of art that wants to be complex. Unfortunately, a lot of it ends up being boring and impenetrable instead. There are Godard-like “masterpieces” of turgid video art galore, terrible epics of performance art and desperate attempts to make art more “serious” by turning it into gardening or community architecture.
Indeed, contemporary art is in danger of losing the “simplicity” that made it popular — without regaining the depth that might make it truly matter. That is why we live in such a strange time for art and why its future seems to be stalling.
Art stripped itself of so many enriching things and reduced itself to such a stark mirror of this age that now it struggles to find a more intellectually and emotionally rewarding vocabulary again. There are formidable exceptions. Great art is still being made. It will be made in the future, but yes, the answer to the question is that a lot of contemporary art looks simple because it is idiotically one-dimensional, poetically bankrupt and perceptually banal.
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