Jay Heuman's electrons arrived as:

>In my humble opinion, it seems more appropriate to designate
>the early 1960s as the 'start' of the contemporary - if one
>can even designate a 'start'.

I would tend to agree with Jay on the start-point for contemporary.
Certainly, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Post-Painterly Abstraction
peeled away from Abstract Expressionism, but the latter seems more the
apex of Modernism than exactly the beginning of what was contemporary.

But the more fluid issue, perhaps, is when the contemporary ends.  One
could argue that contemporary ended in the mid-1980s with the advent of
post-modern, but if this is true it only spilled into a kind of swirling
eddy where the by-now autonomic reflex toward 20 C. radicalism stuggled
to stay afloat.  Cynically viewed, postmodernism was a kind of medley of
all our favorite old tunes, trying to pose as something new by being
ironic.  And it was new enough, I guess -- certainly new enough for the
auction prices but I'm not sure it was new enough to mark the end or
beginning of anything.   "Contemporary art" still tends to be the
overarching term used to describe what is current, and "postmodern" did
not really provide it with its other bookend.

But I will risk the hazard of a guess by predicting that the end of
contemporary (along with its persistent echoes of modernism) is upon us
with the advent of the "post-analog" -- not only art which exclusively
embraces new-media or technology, but (perhaps more importantly) art
which, whatever its manner of production, is conceived in response to the
shifting cultural context that is a direct result of new technologies.

     ______________________________________________________________
     S t e p h e n    N o w l i n    V.P., Director,
                                     Williamson Gallery

                                     Creative Director, ACCD online
     Art Center College of Design    www.artcenter.edu
     ______________________________________________________________

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