In the weeks before coronavirus shut down the world’s Art Museums, I saw a staggering amount of Contemporary Art both in Los Angeles which held its contemporary Artmegaddon – Frieze LA-Felix-Art Los Angeles Contemporary (all in one weekend!) and I also visited a number of contemporary art collections in South Florida, including the Perez Art Musem in Miami, the Rubell Museum, the DeLaCruz and Margulies collections in Miami and the Beth Rudin DeWoody collection, The Bunker ArtSpace, in West Palm Beach.
I hope to write about the South Florida collections more extensively once they re-open and can be visited again. In the meantime, I wanted to share some general thoughts I had from seeing so much great work by contemporary artists from all over the world.
Before I begin, let me distinguish between Contemporary Art and Modern Art.
Fifty years ago, there was an explosion of Modern Art Museums. At the time, that meant works that began in the Impressionist era, and then featured the work of Picasso, Dali, Miro, Matisse and their contemporaries, some abstract expressionists such as Pollack, Rothko, and perhaps a few of what was then considered contemporary art, such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella.
Today’s Contemporary Art Collections begin where the Modern Art museums trailed off (although Modern Art Museums, and even more traditional encyclopedic collections such as the Getty Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art also now display Contemporary works – which I suspect is as much a nod to their board members’ and donors’ collecting habits as it is an appeal for their engagement and support.
What struck me about the range of Contemporary Art I saw was the feeling that there is already history to them. There are artists of the first generation, such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, who are now regarded as Elders (and certainly if they are elders then Warhol is their godfather). They are followed by successive waves of artists that still command wall space such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman, and Tracey Emin to name but a few.
Perhaps this is just the human inclination for pattern recognition, and for stratification, organization and pecking orders but some forty or fifty years on, what is considered contemporary is becoming historical.
At the same time as Contemporary Art is deepening in its historicity, it is flattening and expanding as to diversity, geography and materials, as much to right historic wrongs and omissions as to meet the increased international demand to see and/or collect contemporary Art. And as that demand is met, there is a byproduct – an explosive growth in the number of educated informed engaged people working in the art industry complex.
So, for example, when attending Frieze LA which has held on the Paramount Studios lot, and Felix, the Dean Valentine founded art fair held at the Roosevelt hotel, what was striking to me was not just all the art, and all the attendees and all the galleries from all over the world, but that at each booth and installation there were always two or three young people working away on their Apple Macbooks, typing away furiously (to what end I can’t say). And should you disturb one of them to ask about an art work, detailed fully-formed paragraphs of artspeak flowed about the artists and the artworks. It was impressive to think about an art market that supports all these persons’ erudition. I can only compare it – with all differences noted – to the thousands of young people now working in weed dispensaries who appear so knowledgeable about the products before them – My point is that five years ago, all these jobs were not there – and now they are filled by knowledgeable enthusiasts. That speaks to the growth occasioned by Contemporary Art.
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The bottom and middle of the Art pyramid has become wider and more populous as income inequality has grown. Even as super-rich old white men became super-richer – the ranks of the newly rich became more global, more diverse, more interested in contemporary art as trophies and competitive measuring sticks among themselves. As the number of collectors and patrons increased, demand and infrastructure has grown to meet their need. As demand for more diverse representation among artists and collections grew, curators and dealers globalized, commercialized and bid up the prices for contemporary artwork from artists in all parts of the globe.
Collectors, art critics, collections increasingly demanded works where they could see themselves represented and made by artists who looked like them. That was true during the time of the White Male patriarchy; it remains all the more true today – it’s just that the global appetite and the global collectors are more diverse.
Women, long unrepresented and unheralded unless at the end of their careers, filled art schools as teachers and students, and were instrumental in re-writing art history to include those female artists who were always there, just unrecognized by the male gaze. So, for example, The Bunker in West Palm Beach has half a floor of works on paper devoted to an exhibit called “HerStory” which features work exclusively by women from the 1970s to the present – and it is mind-blowingly great assemblage of notable work.
Concurrently, over the last two decades, previously underrepresented artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley Julie Mehertu and Amy Sherald have been justly celebrated and their work exhibited in major exhibitions at both Encyclopedic, Modern and Contemporary Art Museums. While at the same time, art initiatives such as the Getty organized Pacific Standard LA-Latin America brought recognition to South American and Latin-American artists little known in the United States.
Taken together these are but some of the examples how Contemporary Art has expanded while becoming more diverse and inclusive.
It is not surprising then that the trend most evident among the South Florida collections I visited was art from African artists, most notably from Ghana. The Perez was about to mount an exhibition of African and African diaspora artists from their collection, and had a room of work by Melego Mokgosi, a Botswana artist who lives in New York. The Rubell also has an African Art initiative.
Of course, at some point all of what we now call Contemporary will need a new name. Artists now in favor may fall from grace, and collectors may rethink what they covet. Who knows? We may even return to finding the old more valuable than the new. But, for now, there are more private collections, galleries, museum shows of what we call Contemporary Art to see than ever before working in a greater range of materials and forms than ever from more diverse artists from all over the world and with more knowledgeable people to engage with to explain even the most difficult work. Now, at a time when we don’t know how the economic impact of the coronavirus will affect the art industry, we should celebrate what is out there to be seen, even if we are only watching online.
