It is a long standing convention for Juried Art shows to solicit a call for artists to submit their entries to the show based on work realized in the past, say, three years. The temporal requirement will vary and may be based only years or social event such as the Covid social isolation period.
I bring up this topic because of the assumptions that never are questioned about the practice.
In a society in which individuals are living longer and more capable lives, artists who are older often have a large inventory of material to choose from with the last n number of years representing but a small fraction of their intellectual contributions, curiosities, and development.
Last century which was dominated by the romantic notion of the "avant-garde" - the notion that each professional artist is willingly or unwillingly enrolled in a race that represented progress as establishing a unique stream of theory or practice both different and theoretically plausible than the next artist. Furthermore, the act of being a professional artist was neither as crowded an occupation as it is today nor as fiscally viable. Compound all of that with uncertain health and lifetime expectations and often artists of that time became hostages to the choice of aesthetic rabbit hole "ism" they decided to pursue and call their own.
And as a consequence, galleries, curators, dealers, and patrons became accustomed to uniformly demanding the latest, greatest progress along these lines. The "new", the "cool", the avantiness of the work is what everyone was tapping their foot waiting to be delivered.
By the end of the last century though the avant-garde had largely run its course, intellectually burying with the widely hailed "Death of..." all things Modern. And today with the smoking fumes of PostModernism still fresh in the air, galleries still cling to and promote juried shows whose metrics and expectations are artifacts of a culturally unfamiliar past.
Unlike museums, galleries that solicit calls for art are precisely where local communities can find and freely access the diverse cacophony of artistic talent our political identitarians claim to look for.
Contemporary Art is a big tent that straddles fine art and everything else that somebody/anybody considers "art" and heaven forbid you question any of its worthiness.
The pretension of an avant-garde in the 21st century simply has lost its veracity. Art is less a matter of developing an "ism" as it is a cult like devotion to believing one's identity cohort is in need of a space so safe as to deny any and all forms of discussion or criticism as unwelcome or even an assault on their personage.
And this brings us back - in a roundabout way - to questioning the virtue of requesting that artistic submissions to juried art shows conform to a newness metric - something completed in the last n years.
Today, the result is not a harvest of originality or innovation. The result is both politically correct and politically policed conformity. The galleries are aesthetic echo chambers of empty virtue and antiseptic craft competitions. The temporal constraints on these shows artificially create a bubble of illiberal conformity.
If an avant garde exists today, it is practiced not with ideas but in aesthetic delivery systems - digital, virtual, and augmented technologies abound. What is persistently a vacant opportunity is the ability to present new ideas, thoughtful contradictory musings, or -gasp- original material that has no Contemporary comfort zone.
Let's spitball some alternative curatorial possibilities. How about juried shows that ask for a current piece and a piece from ten years ago to compare and contrast. Or why pursue temporal bounds on show entries at all? Long practicing artists have plenty of unseen and underappreciated work worth presenting.
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