Contemporary Art: Eating Itself Alive

In his new book, Contemporary Art: Eating Itself Alive, critic Klaus Desmondo deftly takes on the world of contemporary art. Here is an excerpt from this lucid and insightful book.

Contemporary art is crisis. The tsunami of social and personal artifacts that have been allowed to call themselves art has made the notion of excellence a nasty and pejorative declamation in the babbling halls of public discourse. Of course, history will pick its winners with generally good success, but the displacement of this task to the future only points to the failure to be able to sort out the visually cacophonous now.

The egalitarian confronts the elite. The political confronts the aesthetic. The real confronts the abstract. In the midst of these piddling battles, the plebian has conquered the attention of the general public in the form of Thomas Kinkade, sappy landscapes, and refrigerator galleries. Some artists enthusiastically bring art to the people, while others take art away from the people and into safe, sanctified and certified white boxes.

The meaning of something is only the meaning of something to someone. Today meaning is too often flabby, narcissistic, obscure and lazy in its attempts to justify itself. Push the spectacle button. Bing. Push the make-it-big button. Bing. Push the loud and obnoxious button. Bing. The public becomes the cat chasing the red laser dot.

It is clear in these few exhilarating paragraphs that Desmondo has his incisive pulse on the art of our times.