Contemporary Art Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Contemporary Art - Essay Example The essay "Contemporary Art" talks about the Contemporary Art. In introducing the concept of ‘ready-made’ art, Duchamp began to establish that an important element of art was the meaning that the viewer brought to it. â€Å"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists†. Greenberg (1939) illustrates how the avant-garde movement was an attempt to move away from what it was not in its search for purity and the absolute. In discussing how the avant-garde as modern art has explored art from the inside and provided the ruling class with the means by which they might explore the ideas of the new age, Greenberg introduces the necessity of a rear-guard action to this general repudiation of exterior reference. This rear-guard is kitsch: â€Å"popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc. etc†. Avant-garde art presents the cause, leaving it to the viewer to inject effect while kitsch presents the effect, making the art immediately accessible to the viewer without requiring any effort from the viewer at all – the art is already interpreted for him.