Missed that, but I follow the auctions in the Post some, and the trend is still to favor artists with historic provenance, like Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse. Koons and Sherman, although they have been around for awhile, are still "contemporary".....
Actually, the reinsertion of form occurred almost forty years ago, with the rise of Pop Art. Although there continued to be some serious pure abstractionists, like De Kooning and Frank Stella, a lot of abstraction got repetitive and boring, particularly fads like Op Art (relying on optical tricks). The Pop Artists were themselves superceded to some extent by a wave of what might be called neo- expressionism: Lucien Freud, Balthus, and Anselm Kieffer, for example, who are pretty figurative. Meanwhile, there arose a more propagandistic sensibility among artists, and a tendency to judge art merely by its statement. A lot of that work was representational, but generally with a twist. Anyway, there has been a lot of figurative stuff around for quite awhile, although not exclusively. The real story in contemporary art is the sense of being stalled, which is where the notion of Post- modernism comes in. Increasingly, artists are into ironic appropriation of earlier styles, or exploratory eclecticism, because they are not sure what to do next, and feel like the main lines of innovation have been played out. This has given rise to some things in the direction of neo- classicism, but so far it is more "modernism plus" elements from the past....... |
