Daniel Benshana
Contemporary art exhibitions have become parasitical while pretending to be revealing, innovative and above all else, new. You will find reviews such as ‘the actions are shown long after the reason for them is no longer relevant’, ‘the revelation is demonstrated by …’ ‘here we see the artist explaining modern norms’ … and so forth. Many artist has been forced to examine themselves in terms of what others have written, filmed, lived, thought. But where is the originality of the artist adding new thoughts, new lived experience that is not revelatory but evolutionary. Where are the works being made today that will still be seen and held important in 400 years from now? – or have those already been made and there is nothing left but the self-consuming introspection of the semi-informed? Can we find one artist who will show you something you have never thought of before in our contemporary arena? Beauty and skill combined with intellect which is its own payment?
Most art seems to have settled into ritual. It is wholly concerned with personal orientation in a chaotic series of societies; and time, that ever present whip on the backs of the living. It seeks either to unbalance people, or provide a counter balance like the only religious person in a state of atheists, or rebalance to some kind of existence that never actually existed but is less stressful.
Commentary is not art and any artist merely commenting mutates into the one thing they hate above all other people: critics. Too many artists are reviewing the world around them, finding the weak spots, finding the same old political bugbears without thinking of a single workable answer. They are bemoaning poverty, screaming for peace in a millennium of war, making statements that fill a website headline for a brief hour … and then are gone.
Artists as a grouping don’t make a difference anymore. They have devolved into design and spectacle. Nothing in the contemporary art arena moves the human race forward; that is left to the chance encounters of writers with political movements which themselves regurgitate the past mistakes of long-dead generations. The artist is left with hope, colour and whatever they can find in the streets. This was done by vast emporiums to the state demanding to be filled by brash voices. ‘Lets hide nothing’, which as a cathartic experience, is the only determinant they are left practicing. Not realising in the imagination, nothing is hidden
