On the Politics of Contemporary Art (Why Modern Day Art)

 1. The conceptual ecosystem of  Contemporary Art has been saturated by political messaging.  

2. It forms and deforms the meaning of Contemporary Art.

3. The signifying message of Contemporary Art requires that the art itself pay a virtue signal  tax for being allowed acceptance to the genre.

4. The Contemporary Art ecosystem constrains and governs its aesthetic territory by rejecting alternative art expressions from self-signifying differently.  

5. Its authoritarian stranglehold on the art vernacular creates and distorts cultural discourse.

6. This political aesthetic Kafka Trap operates as a cultural sensory deprivation mechanism.

7. The Contemporary Art ecosystem entangles and engulfs all currently produced art into an inescapable framework of political polarization.  You cannot choose a side.  The side chooses you or NOT.

8. Abstraction and other more esoteric territories have been co-opted. Play or perish.

9. The social politics of Contemporary Art are aesthetically cancerous.  Contemporary Art is a money sink for political and social special interest groups whose promotional interests have nothing to do with art.

10.  Contemporary Art is a self-serving, self-perpetuating system that demands absolute conformity.

This is where artists such as myself fork away from this madness to create a new stream of expression that is called Modern Day Art.

It's a cohort of artists whose byproducts are not described by Identity politics or any other form of political bigotry.  Art for Art's Sake on a planet whose insane asylums have open borders.

Bound By Creativity, Imprinted with Victimhood

 On page 112 of Hannah Wohl's Bound By Creativity book, the assertion that women and others are under-collected because they are under-represented in galleries is made without any further evidence.  The author, claiming deep and thorough research of the subject matter, is wholly imprinted with the meme that women are and have been victims of gallery neglect.  Its an assumption as certain as the sun rising the next morning.

Readers of this blog can do the arithmetic for themselves.

The lie is far too profitable to investigate or accurately report.

 

The Modern Day Art Manifesto

 The Modern Day Art Manifesto - (a work in progress)

Modern Day Art is an evolutionary succession away from Contemporary Art.

It can be referred to as #mdArt, #mdA, #notContemporaryArt, #nCA, or #modernDayArt.

Two aesthetic subsets of Modern Day Art are #postContemporary and #newModern. Both refer to esoteric Modern Day Art ecosystems. These obvious manifestations do not preclude more existing and future sub-genres.

All art creation exercises additive, subtractive, transformational, spiritual, temporal, theoretical, cognitive, and other forms of artistic agency.

In the case of Modern Day art as an aesthetic ecosystem, it subtracts from Contemporary Art - Identity Politics and the hubris of toxic academic entanglement. Consider its relationship to Contemporary Art's Art World as an orthogonal social entity wholly disengaged from those trappings and expectations. The creation, quality, and intent of Modern Day Art is not to satisfy an Art Market but rather an Art future while mindfully acknowledging the importance of providing the artist's means to a dignified living.

Modern Day Art promotes an exclusive Art for Art's Sake aesthetic.

The subtraction of political identity virtue signaling neutralizes holding galleries and art patrons hostage to the discriminatory tribalism of gender, age, moral superiority claims, "saving______" platitudes, and so on. The Art is intended to feed aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual hunger.

- Frank Krasicki, May 2021

Guerrilla Girls 2020 EOY Cumulative Body Count

This year's Juried Art  shows numbered 14 from CT, VT, RI, and New York.  All shows whose counts are used here were previously cited in earlier blog posts most of which provided audit trails.

This year's Juried Art Shows come in two categories:

In Juried Art Shows that I have no piece count for, 4 shows accepted the work of 95 male artists and 181 women artists.  That's approximately a 65% acceptance rate for women in those shows.

In 7 Juried Shows in which piece counts are available;

236 pieces by 163 men were accepted
380 pieces by 305 females were accepted

38% of all pieces were by men
62% of all pieces were by women

34% of all accepted artists were men
66% of all accepted artists were female

In all 11 2020 shows represented, 35% of all selected artists were male,

For 2020, more than 63% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 

Only three of eleven galleries in 2020, featured juried shows that accepted more men than women.

In 2020, politically obligatory, women-gender-only shows were routinely scheduled at almost all of the galleries studied.  No such male gender specific gallery shows exist to my knowledge.