Bruce Hill
Graduate Art Seminar - Week 2

The Modern Art Movement, is generally thought to have begun in the mid-nineteenth century in western Europe amid a background of social and political upheaval. Like the larger movement of modernism it is characterized by ideas that emphasize the individual. Industrialization and urbanization were ascending while the importance of religion and artistic patronage were on the decline. The rise of a middle class created a new market for artists and craftsmen free to choose the subject or content of their art. This is manifest in the rebellion against the art academies and the eventual abandonment of "realism". This was very liberating to artists who mostly continued to work in traditional mediums. Issues of "quality" and artistic merit were and still are being debated. A cycle of movements an counter movements was the result of the ego driven rebelliousness against the established order of the day. The abandonment of a clear subject matter eventually led to the formal elements of art, such as composition, line, value, shape, schale and qualities of the medium to be considered as content (ex. a painting is about paint). This related to the ideas that quality or beauty is inherent in the object. The idea of fromalism is usually associated with the art critic Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who promoted the wrok of mid-century artists: Jackson Pollock, William DeKooning, and Mark Rothko, and other abstract expressionists. Eventually, the reduction of painting and sculpture to its most essential elements brought about a amovement known as minimalism, perhaps best illustrated by the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, and the cubes of Donald Judd. Art critics like Greenberg and dealers like Leo Castelli, became king makers in the art world, where art becme a commodity for well off collectors and museums, but other forces were at work.

In the 1960's pop artists like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and others, blurred the distinction between high and low culture. In, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post Historical Perspective, the author Arthur Danto credits Warhol with "the end of art", a point maked by some as the end of modernism as a art movement. Obviously, modernism is not dead, but has been somewhat defanged by the advent of post-modernism, a movement that seems to have provided a new liberation for artists. While modernism venerates the artistic genius and the notion that certain truths are universal, post-modernism, like the post-structuralists, find truth relative and see arbitrariness in nature. Post-modernists seem to be more electic in their choice of media, more concerned with popular culture, and an awareness that aart has a socio-cultural context, an ability to sample, appropriate and assemble art ou to the detris of our world, for whatever shifting purposes one might need. Much feminist art seems to embody mony of the charaacteristics of post-modernity's pluralistic sensibilities and willingness to take on certain cultural and political issues. The idea that an artwork can have multiple interpretations based on the context of the viewers' experiences seems to have gained institutional credence. Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and David Salle are among the artists that are appropriating objects and ideas from the past and placing them in a new context.

In naming the art of this time, I will engage in a little borrowing by calling it "Multi-cultural Neo-pluralism". It began in pre-historical times when Cro-Magnon and Homosapien crossed paths. The main principle of this movement is adaptability. No major critics of the movement have emerged yet to m knowledge, but some of the main charcteristics or important aspects might be an interest in: storytelling or narrative imagery, exploration of process, mapping, accessing the subconcsious, making or building things, humor, movement or transition.