Saturday, November 18, 2006

Make art to experience and not art to read about

"7. Don’t make modern art.

Modern art tends to be ironical, cynical, self referential, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning
-other than the trendy discourse of the day-,
afraid of technology, anti-artistry.
Furthermore contemporary art is a marginal niche.
The audience is elsewhere.
Go to them rather then expecting them to come to the museum.
Contemporary art is a style, a genre, a format.
Think!

Do not fear beauty.
Do not fear pleasure.

(...)


Real people are starving for meaningful experiences.
And what’s more:

society needs you.

Contemporary civilisations are declining at an unsurpassed rate.
Fundamentalism.
Fascism.
Populism.
War.
Pollution.
The world is collapsing while the Artists twiddle their thumbs in the museums.

Step into the world.
Into the private worlds of individuals.
Share your vision.

Connect.
Connect.
Communicate.

8. Reject conceptualism.

Make art for people,
not for documentation.
Make art to experience
and not to read about.
Use the language of your medium to communicate all there is to know.
The user should never be required to read a description or a manual.

Don’t parody things that are better than you.

(...)

Don’t settle yourself in the position of the underdog: surpass them!
Go over their heads!
Dominate them!
Show them how it’s done!

Put the artistry back in Art.
Reject conceptualism.
Make art for people, not for documentation.
Make art to experience and not art to read about. Use the language of your work to communicate its content. The audience should never be required to read the description.
The work should communicate all that is required to understand it. "

-
Realtime art manifesto (fragment)
by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn

(but see e.g. the comment to this post at networkable social object for a critical view of the above)



6 comments:

DIRAN LYONS said...

I agree that coming to the world with 'art' [releasing it from the museum shackles] is in many cases imperative, but not at the expense of the conceptual. Even intentionally denying the conceptual aspect of art's ethos is contradictory, as the attempt to do such is the negation of argumentation with argumentation...which would seem to make it just as self-referential as, say, Modernism.

Anonymous said...

We are not advocating the rejection of concepts, but merely the rejection of art that is exclusively conceptual.

Anonymous said...

It appears this is a language issue then. The treatise contains a very clear proposition which reads "reject conceptualism". What I see you saying now is that there needs to be some form of marriage between the idea and the idea's manifestation, without in any way reducing aesthetics, or pleasure, etc. If that is what you are saying, I agree wholeheartedly.

Anonymous said...

There is no such thing as art that is exclusively conceptual any more than it would be possible to reject such a thing out of hand.

Anonymous said...

Surrealizm
Sętowski
Naliwajko

Anonymous said...

interesting concept.

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