avant-avant-garde?

Art has been evolving ever more quickly in the past couple decades. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but popular art has been aiming, it seems, to catch the eye of a more and more select crowd of art enthusiasts.  The appeal of the roof of the Sistine Chapel, it seems, is almost universal, as are some latter 19th-century impressionists’ works, like Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or “Starry Night.”  But we have reached a point where a canvas painted completely white is good enough to be hung in some well-respected museums. Even the most devoted art enthusiast could probably acknowledge the limited appeal of such a work. The question now is “where do we go from here?” Well, those paying attention may have noticed that we are currently in the nascent stages of era of “superartists.”

Art Magazine recently had a feature on two artists who are becoming famous throughout art circles and a bit outside of them. These two gentlemen are Olafur Eliasson and Takashi Marakami. Both of these people literally run art factories where art of their design is manufactured on an assembly line and sold. Clearly they are both very successful artists, but their “superartist” status has been conferred on them because they are true innovators in their field.  Art isn’t what it used to be; it’s been largely taken over by corporations who use it to advertise to us and create CG movies and cereal boxes and all sorts of different products. These superartists have taken full advantage of this environment and have created art that literally interweaves with other media. Both of them, for example have designed cars for major automotive companies: Murakami designed a prototype Nissan and Eliasson designed a prototype BMW.

The idea behind superartists is taking concepts of traditionally “low art” like T-Shirts, keychains, mousepads etc. and transforming them into “high art.”  Andy Warhol was one of the first to do this, but he was relatively limited in scope: prints and movies and maybe music (Velvet Underground perhaps?). The modern generation of superartists goes beyond this: they have turned the “culture industry” into “high art.”

The point is, traditional art has gone corporate: there will never be another Da Vinci, Rembrandt or Van Gogh. True artists have taken advantage of this fact like never before. The future of art is all too clear: only artists who can shape the overly-commercialized world in which we live to their whims will be noticed. These artists are trying to give meaning to the disposable culture brought upon by unbridled capitalism and as long as people are willing to give them a chance, they might just do it.