Vanguardism and Contemporary Art: the social perception of the value of a work of art

What determines the value (or price) of a work of art? We explain it to you in this article.

"Art is fatally threatened by a society that only gets excited about it in the auction room, and whose abstract logic strips the world of its sensible quality."

Terry Eagleton

The avant-garde, o "avant-garde art"which emerged at the beginning of the last century, was nourished by the rejection and criticism of traditions with the purpose of transcending its historical time in a new creation. This art, revolutionary and groundbreakingtypical of modernity and, therefore, related to convulsive times in which everything was possible, contrasts with the current fashion, or "postmodern art". "postmodern art"..

The transition from avant-garde art to post-modern art apparently preserved a dissident attitude, but always in consonance with its introduction into the circuit of daily consumption. Having become a whole subculture, the critical is now nothing but a fashion or a way of life in which the rebellious attitude finds no discrepancy with the false fullness of a joyful life that preserves the established order of things.

The fact that postmodern art does not aspire to surpass society does not mean that it is based on the conventions of the established order for its production, for it rather operates by creating a lack in society that it intends to make up for through its creation. It is not a question of denying society as a holistic whole, but of opening up interstices in it, material or spiritual needs to be filled by the new work.

But looking back in order to establish a certain comparison with respect to current artistic development, it must be said that, in spite of having a vocation of social utopiaIn the past, avant-garde art tended to become an intimate creation, carried out by by y for the author himself. On the contrary, postmodern art, lacking any social commitment, is stripped of any idealistic will that transcends the established order of things, it is a creation in continuous projection to the outside: it only makes sense when it is disseminated and consumed..

This is explained by the fact that artistic creation, arrogated by industrial designers, is a creation in continuous projection to the outside world: it only becomes meaningful when it is disseminated and consumed. industrial designers and advertising agencies, is no longer in the hands of virtuosos for whom the mass production of the work of art would have invalidated the artistic condition itself: each work, if it is to be considered as art, should be singular and unique. Let's take into account the consideration by which art is associated with the sublime, and this with the exceptional..

The popular art into which fashion has become, with the pop art as an exponent, he left us soup cans (Campbell's) even in the soup. Silk-screen printing, in fact, is a technique whose main characteristic is the feasibility in the reproduction. Similarly, fashion, in its broad sense, refers to those repetitive trends, whether in dress, consumption or, ultimately, behavior.

Thus, while the avant-garde was part of "high culture", a motif of distinction, fashion as an epiphenomenon of "mass culture" is by nature homogeneous, losing the abstraction that could have been its own.The fashion, losing the abstraction that art could solicit during the avant-garde and becoming a product of the most mundane and secular: art went from the temples, in allusion to museums or theaters where acts of worship took place, to the television screen, where each advertising commercial is in itself a creation.

It is true that fashion as such does not constitute a new typology of art.Unlike the avant-gardes, which were artistic movements specific to a given period. To tell the truth, fashion is an allusion to customs, not circumscribed to the artistic field, that mark a specific time or place, so we can affirm that fashion was something, not contemporary to the avant-gardes, but much earlier than them.

It happens, however, that nowadays all art is fashion. In the artistic field, the influence of postmodernity means that trends are not the same as in the previous avant-gardes, where there was a progressive development in tune with a socially and technologically revolutionary century, since nowadays fashion trends are, on many occasions, regressive.

Tracing the past to recover its attributes, as well as probing the future to anticipate its epithets, fashion establishes a fickle and irresolute present that knows it has an expiration date: unlike avant-garde art, claimed as the spearhead of a socio-political process it guided.Unlike avant-garde art, which was claimed as the spearhead of a socio-political process it guided, today's art is designed to fade away, for only by creating transitory and perishable trends does it fulfill the purpose of creating consumption peaks with each new appearance.

In other words, the short fashion cycle requires instantaneous and mass sales of items for brief and intensive use in such a way that novelty succeeds kitsch. kitsch knowing that sooner or later it will become kitsch. kitsch. And having the economic profit for substance, the current artistic tendencies are partial and not ecumenical, since they try to find niches in the market.because they try to find market niches to occupy, and then reinvent again.

In light of this, it is evident that, while avant-garde art is that of the minorities who aspire to reach the majorities, fashionable art is that of the majorities who aspire to become minorities.. And since it has no motivations, fashion seeks influences here or there, who cares: how can postmodern art accompany society if it is essentially skeptical with the existence of an objective reality and, consequently, with the possibility of transforming it.

And since postmodernity not only does not provide, but denies, judgments on qualitative elements, necessary to define social reality but also the reality of the artistic work under the criteria of good or bad, beautiful or uglyall what remains as a guiding principle is quantity. The principle that the more people the art reaches (the more it sells) the better it is, makes such art an eminently trivial art. trivial. Such is the condition of mass or popular art.The work that used to be claimed, on some occasions, as an anti-art, today takes the form of any landmark conceived for (and assimilated by) the art market..

In any case,the psychological process by which the cairn comes to be conceived as a work of art lies in the fact that the piece lacks a value in itself and is always subordinated to a factor external to its reality, such as, for example, the price of a piece of art.such as, for example, the price achieved by the author on the basis of highly questionable conventions. Thus, just as advertising does not sell the bar of soap but the idea of beauty, contemporary art is prone to offer itself as the interface of an object, or even experience, essentially symbolic.

But an art that, while considered subjective and open to all kinds of interpretation, requires an external recognition is in itself contradictory.. The current work of art can also be considered a motley of images, sounds and words present in any area of our everyday life. In such a case the work would be everything and, at the same time, it would be nothing (performance is that work that, resisting to enter the commercial circuit through which the exchange value circulates, is ephemeral by its own idiosyncrasy).

It seems that the avant-garde died strangled by the plastic rings of the soda can packages and its corpse was buried under liters and liters of plastic paint that, superimposing one color on another, came to form a mound that engendered the new work of art, born directly from the ground and not from the flowers that grow from it. Perhaps the ultimate purpose of art is nothing more than its lack of purpose.and so, as a silent critique of instrumental rationality and market values, it acquires as its finality in gagé the autonomy of value, the reverse of capitalist utility.