The Modern

Featured image: Just Call Me Lucky

A Couple of weeks back I wrote about post modernism and DuChamp. I wrote about how I believed that it was the beginning of the historical postmodern art movement and a major shift in how our culture’s attitudes toward art changed. In my opinion, our cultures understanding of what art is changed for the worse.
Perhaps the problem is that we as art historians and artists have always label these major shifts in art movements. In labeling the shift of modern art to post modern art, we were signaling the shift to others and defining it. This established that art qualified as art because it was something new. I wonder why. Doesn’t the modern always mean the present?

I refer to Charles Baudelaire, a French poet, writer and art critic in the 1800’ s. Baudelaire believed that to be modern is to be in ones own time. The role of an artist is not to present the shocking or the new in order to be recognized. I agree with Baudelaire. As I have said in the past, the role of the artist is to understand their own historical past in its own context but also according to the conditions of the present world and the conditions of the individual self and their relationship to the past and present.

If I were to relate this to my favorite topic of the space in the middle and the individuals in the middle, trying to shock, to always have the new, to not recognizing the individual for the individuals self and own history is perhaps why some don’t understand that the middle is not grey but, motley and multi- colors.