As a final reflection, I’ve decided that as our Arts in New York City Seminar explored the arts and subsequently, current events, both political and cultural, we’ve learned that the process of an artist is just as important as the final product. Arguably, innovation as an artist is not easy, and even much harder than it used to be. There are claims that everything has been done before. The box has been filled. So, the contemporary artists who maintain vision learn to work outside the already filled box.
I saw a pattern in the art that we looked at and experienced as a class; much of contemporary art seeks significance in the process of creating it. Many artists claim that the importance and value of their piece is during the creation and rendering of it instead of the final product. I believe that aesthetic is not as stressed as it once was and as artists are testing new boundaries on abstraction and unconventionality, art has more than a surface meaning.
To name some examples, Pontus Lidberg’s Faune, which we saw at Fall For Dance wasn’t something I liked at first. It wasn’t conventional and it wasn’t easy to understand. Traditionally, we tend to like things that are easy to understand because the unknown is frustrating especially if we can’t wrap our minds around it. But, innovative artists want to show that art is not easy. That it attempts to explain what we cannot understand and that there is more to it than its presentation or end product. Another example is Aaron Young’s Greeting Card which possessed the ‘wow factor’. Young’s piece proved innovative because of the display of its process. The end product wouldn’t have proven valuable if emphasis wasn’t placed on the process. Contemporary art has proven that there certainly is more than what meets the eye.