Contemporary Art in Focus Part 3: late 20th

The world of art has no borders, prejudices and stereotypes. Art can be in any form, period of time and expressions. In this article “Contemporary Art in Focus Part 3: late 20th” are presented the next five Contemporary Art movements of the late 20th century, more precisely, such as Sots Art, Graffiti, Postmodern Art, Metamodernism and The New Aesthetics.

Sots Art

As distinguished from pop art, an international phenomenon that has proven itself to the full extent not only in American and Western European cultures, but also in the other hemisphere, in Korean and Japanese art, the Sots Art style is usually considered as a Soviet product. In most encyclopedias on contemporary art culture, the term "Sots-art" is strictly localized within the framework of Moscow unofficial art of 1970-1980s.

Sots-art in the late 1980s was called the mainstream of the time of change, the art of the collapse of the communist formation, the style of "fading flags".

The founding fathers of the style V. Komar and A. Melamid repeatedly declared social art to be the Soviet analogue of American pop art. Both movements are built on active interaction with the contexts of mass culture, which in the United States is packed into consumerist temptations, and in Russia - into ideological coercion. In 1972, Komar and Melamid came up with the idea of social art, which inspired many authors to use Soviet clichés as artistic material and raised the question of cultural identity of contemporary art in the USSR.

The works of the Moscow Conceptualists were always provoked to dialogue, and in the same way, the Conceptualist environment itself was formed in constant dialogues.

The ideological basis of Sots-art is nihilistic relativism. Sots-art rejects the belief in everything it concerns. It tries to destroy all cults that are generated by the individual himself or are offered to the person from the outside - political, economic, spiritual and other authorities; Social Art does not tolerate anything that imposes on the individual unequal communication, brings the person to his knees and forces him to uncritical submission; Social Art is directed against any categorical, unconditional phenomenon.

Notable Sots Art representatives include Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Grisha Bruskin, Alexander Kosolapov and others.

Graffiti

The history of graffiti began with messages that representatives of New York gangs left on the streets of the city in the 1920s-1930s. Over time, such inscriptions began to appear on all kinds of real estate and movable objects, and the number of artists and styles grew exponentially until by the end of last century, the police and city authorities in different countries began to fight against adherents of street art. As a result, the underground current split into several directions, and some artists chose commercial streets and left for galleries, giving way to the most courageous veterans of the genre. One way or another, graffiti as a phenomenon is firmly entrenched in street culture, and without them it is difficult to imagine modern cities.

However, in fact wall inscriptions have been known since ancient times, they were discovered in the countries of the Ancient East, in Greece, in Rome (Pompeii, Roman catacombs). The significance of this word over time began to refer to any graphics, applied to the surface and considered by many to be an act of vandalism.

Today the graffiti artist uses a whole arsenal of tools to create a successful drawing. Spray paint in cylinders is the most important and necessary tool in graffiti. Using this material, reiter can create a huge number of different styles and techniques. Aerosol paint is sold in graffiti stores, hardware stores or art goods stores, and nowadays you can find paint of almost any shade.

Markers, brushes, rollers, stencils, posters and stickers are also widely used.

A characteristic feature of modern graffiti culture is commerce. When large companies realized the popularity of street artists' drawings, artists became more and more involved in advertising campaigns, and manifestations of graffiti in mass culture can be found everywhere - from advertising and films to video games.

Graffiti artists are under constant threat of being punished for creating their works in public places, so for the sake of security many of them prefer to remain anonymous. Banksy is one of the most famous and popular street artists, who continues to hide his name and face from the public. He is famous for his political and anti-war stencil graffiti in Bristol, but his works can be seen in different places from Los Angeles to the Palestinian territories.

Other popular graffiti artists are Frank Shepard Fairey, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring.

Postmodern art

Postmodernist art is a movement in art that contradicted some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as mediation, the art of installation, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly those involving video, are described as postmodern. Postmodern - the state of modern culture, which arose in the middle of 20th century and includes a kind of philosophical position expressing the (non)formal antithesis to modernist art, as well as mass culture of the modern era.

Emerged as an antithesis to modernism, which is open to understanding by only a few, postmodernism, which puts everything in the form of a game, levels out the distance between the masses and the elite consumer, relegating the elite to the masses.

The use of ready-made forms is a fundamental feature of this art. Their origin is not fundamental: from utilitarian household items, thrown in the garbage can or bought in a store, to masterpieces of world art.

Irony is another typological sign of postmodern culture. The avant-garde attitude to novelty is contrasted by the desire to include in contemporary art the whole world's artistic experience by means of ironic citation.

Game is a fundamental feature of postmodernism as its response to any hierarchical and total structures in society, language and culture.

Famous postmodern artists : dadaist, surrealist and founder of conceptualism Marcel Duchamp; pop art leader Andy Warhol; pioneer of the assembly César Baldaccini; the famous conceptualist Bruce Nauman and others.

Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture which emerge from and react to postmodernism. One definition characterizes metamodernism as mediations between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism.

Metamodern strives to find the meaning of culture and art, to endow works with depth. But this depth is a different order than in postmodern. The art of metamodern aspires to multi-dimensional, as, for example, in the paintings of artist Adam Miller. In his cycle "Among the Ruins" Adam uses techniques of classical iconography to actualize environmental and humanitarian problems. Another artist, Mitch Griffith, in his cycle of paintings "Indestructible Freedom" uses similar techniques to actualize the problems of the individual and free society.

Thus, the metamodern does not offer us a ready-made idea or concept, but offers us to find it ourselves using the "oscillating motion".

In the metamodern people open the fullness of culture, because it is possible without irony and ignorance to perceive all the music, literature, games and movies, because in the metamodern there is no high and low, but there is a single stream, where every element is important. The subject, culture, politics, philosophy merge into one constantly moving whole.

The New Aesthetics

The new Aesthetic term refers to the increase in the visual appearance of digital technology and the Internet in the physical world, as well as a mixture of virtual and physical. "New Aesthetics" is an art obsessed with a different concept of computer vision and information processing.

"New aesthetics" is an artistic movement. It is sometimes called physical or virtual, or tension between people and machines. Its basic visual emblems include pixel images, Photoshop failures, gradients, visual ghosts and, yes, animated GIF files. Data visualization, as well as a complex Venn diagram, can fall under the new aesthetic umbrella, as well as graphic information such as Google Maps screenshot. Strategically placing labels on a human face, so the machine can not recognize it as a face, it is an act of new aesthetics. Another popular trend is the photos of people taking pictures.

One of the most significant contributions to the concept of "New Aesthetics" was to develop and link with how digital and everyday life are increasingly interconnected with each other. Here the concept of unrepresentable computing, both infrastructure and ecology, is of great importance for understanding the general new aesthetic trend towards pixel graphics and retro-8-bit form. This is related to the idea of an episteme (or ontology) that is identified with computation and computational methods of observation and execution: computational.