New developments in contemporary art

Modern Art

Old Wine in New Bottles?

One of the most important precepts of contemporary art is that great art cannot be great unless it is fundamentally innovative. Or at least that is the official word. In fact, a certain amount of incorporation of older ideas is accepted and even expected, perhaps most easily filed under the idea that even the most highly innovative artists are supposed to understand and appreciate what has gone before them.

However, the degree to which any truly great artist (according to contemporary standards) can borrow from or be influenced by other artists is fundamentally limited. This is difficult for those of us who have grown up with art that valorizes what is new. But for many art audiences, art that is based on the idea that the new is always better and always necessary would be a very foreign idea indeed.

But while innovation is vitally important to make the reputation of the modern artist, this was certainly not always the case. Rejecting the past (or at least rejecting all but a few fragments of it) is considered to be a virtue today. But in other artistic traditions (both in other eras in the West as well as in other artistic traditions entirely) innovation is not valued so highly. Indeed, in many artistic traditions innovation can be considered a drawback rather than a virtue, a sign that the artist does not know enough about cultural values and the importance of the past and of ancestors.

In the Renaissance, for example, innovation was of far less importance. Despite the fact that in many aspects of society the Renaissance saw significant innovation, in the visual arts there was an emphasis on the recreation of the past. The Renaissance was indeed more of a "rebirth" than a "birth." Renaissance painters and sculptors turned their back to their present and tried to recreate the world of the classical artists. They wished to find a path back to a world that they considered to be a better place, with values and aesthetics that were of higher quality than their own world.

Renaissance artists incorporated the techniques and perspectives (both literal and more general) of the artists who had done their own work hundreds of years before. The Renaissance artists recreated the past in terms of subject and values: Their attitude toward the past was positive, even reverential. They created work without censure of the past or any feelings of irony. This was probably the last period of art (and other aspects of culture) in which this would be possible.

Mannerism, a relatively widespread style of the sixteenth century, lacked a core of innovation that was entirely different from that of the neo-classicism of the early Renaissance. Artists of the early Renaissance were inspired by what they saw as the purity, even the perfection, of the classical world. They felt elevated and inspired by what had been accomplished by the Greeks and Romans and by seeking to follow in the steps of their predecessors, they sought to recreate the world's greatest art.

Mannerist artists, on the other hand, were not similarly inspired. Renaissance artists saw their inspiration by the past in almost religious terms. To them, connecting with the classical world was comparable to a religious calling and experience. Mannerist artists were not inspired in the same way. Rather than seeking to emulate an ideal, they sought instead to cobble together influences, styles, and techniques from a range of different traditions. Relying on what others have created without actually valuing those creations on their own merits is not respectful of either tradition or innovation.

The result was a hodge-podge of aesthetics that is not without merit, but that is criticized now (and for quite a time) for not having a clear focus. Mannerist artists neither venerated the past nor sought to create an entirely new way of seeing. They often did incorporate fantastical subjects and twisted the forms of both of these creatures and of human subjects into sinewy shapes. The effect was not so much dreamlike (or even nightmarish) but distorted.

Even as Mannerist artists borrowed freely from other traditions and so seemed to devalue the worth of innovation and the allure of the new, they did so in a way that might be considered essentially disrespectful. The overall result -- as in Hendrik Goltzius's 1588 The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus and Bronzino's Exposure of Luxury (1546) -- is an unsettling mixture of an artistic era that could not decide whether to move forward or be pulled back into the past.

Modern art in general has had a much more positive regard for the innovative and new. The reasons for this are complicated but may reflect consequences that have arose since the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization brought about two important trends that affected the ways in which artists interact with and feel about the new. Industrialization made constant innovation a social good in a way that had never been true before. The fact that new technologies made it easier and easier to create novel objects in the commercial world bled over to a push toward the innovative in art.