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Contemporary art is art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since World War II.

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, with the advent of Modern and Postmodern art forms, distinctions between what is generally regarded as the fine arts and the low arts have started to fade,^[1] as contemporary high art continues to challenge these concepts by mixing with popular culture.^[2]

Institutions[link]

Viewers of Jonas Burgert's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida.

Contemporary art is exhibited by commercial contemporary art galleries, private collectors, art auctions, corporations, publicly funded arts organizations, contemporary art museums or by artists themselves in artist-run spaces. Contemporary artists are supported by grants, awards and prizes as well as by direct sales of their work.

There are close relationships between publicly funded contemporary art organisations and the commercial sector. For instance, in Britain a handful of dealers represent the artists featured in leading publicly funded contemporary art museums.^[3]

Individual collectors can wield considerable influence. Charles Saatchi dominated the contemporary art market in Britain during the 1980s and the 1990s; the subtitle of the 1999 book Young British Artists: The Saatchi Decade uses of the name of the private collector to define an entire decade of contemporary art production.^[4]

Corporations have attempted to integrate themselves into the contemporary art world: exhibiting contemporary art within their premises, organising and sponsoring contemporary art awards and building up extensive collections of corporate art.^[5]

The institutions of art have been criticised for regulating what is designated as contemporary art. Outsider art, for instance, is literally contemporary art, in that it is produced in the present day. However, it is not considered so because the artists are self-taught and are assumed to be working outside of an art historical context.^[6] Craft activities, such as textile design, are also excluded from the realm of contemporary art, despite large audiences for exhibitions.^[7] Attention is drawn to the way that craft objects must subscribe to particular values in order to be admitted. "A ceramic object that is intended as a subversive comment on the nature of beauty is more likely to fit the definition of contemporary art than one that is simply beautiful."^[8]

At any one time a particular place or group of artists can have a strong influence on globally produced contemporary art; for instance New York artists in the 1980s.^[9]

Public attitudes[link]

Contemporary art can sometimes seem at odds with a public that does not feel that art and its institutions share its values.^[10] In Britain, in the 1990s, contemporary art became a part of popular culture, with artists becoming stars, but this did not lead to a hoped-for "cultural utopia".^[11] Some critics like Julian Spalding and Donald Kuspit have suggested that skepticism, even rejection, is a legitimate and reasonable response to much contemporary art.^[12]

Concerns[link]

A common concern since the early part of the 20th century is the question of what constitutes art. This concern can be seen running through the "modern", "postmodern" and now "conceptual" periods. The concept of avant-garde^[13] may come into play in determining what art is taken notice of by galleries, museums, and collectors. Serious art is ultimately exceedingly difficult to distinguish definitively from art that falls short of that designation.

Prizes[link]

Some competitions, awards and prizes in contemporary art are

• Emerging Artist Award awarded by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
• Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
• Factor Prize in Southern Art
• Turner Prize for British artists under 50
• Jindřich Chalupecký Award for Czech artists under 35 [3]
• Participation in the Whitney Biennial
• Vincent Award, The Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe, founded by The Broere Charitable Foundation and hosted by Stedelijk Museum.
• Marcel Duchamp Prize awarded by ADIAF and Centre Pompidou.
• The Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramists, awarded by the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery
• Ricard Prize for a French artist under 40.
• Deste Prize for young Greek artists, held every two years; funded by Dakis Joannou.^[14]
• John Moore’s Painting Prize

History[link]

This table lists art movements by decade. It should not be assumed to be conclusive.

See also[link]

• Anti-art and Anti-anti-art
• Artistic merit
• Burmese contemporary art
• Classificatory disputes about art
• List of contemporary art museums
• List of contemporary artists
• Medium specificity
• Myartspace
• Plop art
• Reductive art
• Tattoo

Notes and references[link]

Further reading[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Contemporary art

• Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists's Writings (1996), ISBN 0-520-20251-1
• Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh, Contemorary Art and Classical Myth. Farnham: Ashgate (2011), ISBN 978-0-7546-6974-6

Jon Kessler (born 1957, Yonkers) is an American artist. He began college at SUNY Purchase from 1974—78 but left after two years to travel in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He returned to Purchase in 1978 and graduated in 1980 with honors. Following graduation, Kessler took up a studio in Brooklyn, New York where he continues to work today. He was one of the founders of the Bozart toy company and currently teaches at Columbia University. He also plays guitar for the X-Patsys, a band he started with artist Robert Longo and actress Barbara Sukowa.

Work[link]

Kessler is best known for his kinetic sculptures that leave the mechanics exposed for the viewer. His work often combines centuries-old analog mechanisms with digital technology to explore the runoff of consumerist, “post-utopian” societies.^[1]

Much of Kessler’s work from the 1990s examined the interactions and tensions between Orient and Occident. He often presented Asia as a construct of Western Orientalism, while at the same time portraying the West in a steady state of decline.^[2][3] Kessler blended these visions with equal parts humor and tragedy in pieces such as The Last Birdrunner (1994), a kinetic sculpture based on the science fiction movie Blade Runner. Shown in a solo exhibition at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York in 1994, The Last Birdrunner consists of a stuffed bird outfitted in a parachute pack and perched on a ledge that slowly travels up and down while a motor-driven apparatus plays out a haunting dirge on a toy piano. Meanwhile, colored lights flicker in and out of focus against a geodesic dome in the background so that the scene takes on the appearance – though none of the care-free energy – of a Tokyo night club. The Last Birdrunner represents, according to Artforum critic Neville Wakefield, “the nemesis of … utopian dreams in the guise of a lonely cockatoo wearing a life vest.”^[3]

With the advent of 9/11, Kessler’s focus shifted to confront themes of surveillance, isolationism, and war mongering in the United States. Kessler’s most recent exhibition, Palace at 4 A.M., is an “obsessive, aggressive, and handmade” response to the war on terror.^[4] Upon entering the installation through the cut-out crotch of a massive-scale porn image, viewers are surrounded by surveillance cameras affixed to mechanisms that reproduce the lock and load click of artillery as they turn. Cheap color televisions stacked into scattered mounds project the live feed from the surveillance cameras, while images of American soldiers entering Saddam Hussein’s palace loom large on the wall. Here Kessler signals the demise of utopia by depicting the world as a “pell-mell kaleidoscopic mishmash… where all hell breaks loose all the time and human life is twisted as readily as metal.”^[4]

Kessler’s aesthetic has shifted as well: in contrast with the meditative, self-contained sculptures he made previously, his works in Palace at 4 A.M. are raw, sprawling, duct-taped, and crisscrossed with electrical cables. “You spend all your time polishing metal,” Kessler is quoted as saying of his earlier work. “That refinement is like a trap, and it sends the viewers’ eyes to the wrong place and breaks trust with them, with a sense of authenticity. This … show is about exposing mechanisms – of the sculpture, and of our culture now.”^[5] Palace at 4 A.M. continues to tour Europe and will soon open at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

Kessler has recently expanded his practice of drawing and is currently working on a project with Dieu Donné, a papermaking studio in Manhattan, New York.

Exhibitions[link]

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2012)

Kessler was included in the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1983, and took part in the 1985 Whitney Biennial. He has since held one person exhibitions at Carnegie in Pittsburgh, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Deitch Projects and P.S.1 in New York.

His work is also in many permanent collections, including those of the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, MOCA, The Walker Art Center, and the Israel Museum.

Awards[link]

Kessler received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1983 and again in 1985, the St. Gaudens Memorial award in 1995, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, a Foundation for the Performing Arts Fellowship in 2001, and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award in 2000.

References[link]

1. ^ Webel, Peter. "Jon Kessler's Post-Utopian Visions." Jon Kessler's Asia, catalog essay. 1994.
2. ^ Friis-Hansen, Dana. "Jon Kessler." Frieze. September–October 1994. p. 63-64
3. ^ ^{a b} Wakefield, Neville. "Jon Kessler." Artforum. October 1994. p. 100
4. ^ ^{a b} Saltz, Jerry. "Clusterfuck Aesthetics." The Village Voice. December 2, 2005.
5. ^ Madoff, Steven Henry. "What Has 300 Eyes, 40 Whizzing, Whirring Arms, and Opposes the War?" The New York Times. October 23, 2005

External links[link]

• Jon Kessler official website
• Jon Kessler at ARNDT Berlin
• Jon Kessler at culturebase.net

René Burri (born 9 April 1933, Zurich) is a Swiss photographer known for his photos of major political, historical and cultural events and key figures of the second half of the 20th century. Burri worked for Magnum Photos and has been photographing political, military and artistic figures and scenes since 1946. He has made portraits of Che Guevara and Pablo Picasso as well as iconic pictures of São Paulo and Brasília.

Career[link]

Burri studied in Zurich, Switzerland at the School of Applied Arts from 1949 to 1953, where he worked under Hans Finsler, Alfred Willimann and Johannes Itten. From 1953 to 1955 he began working as a documentary filmmaker while completing military service. During this time he also began working with Leica cameras.^[1] Then he worked for Disney as a cameraman until 1955. From 1956 to 1959 he traveled extensively to places including Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Brazil, and Japan, which led to publications in Life, Look, Stern, Paris-Match, Epoca, and New York Times, as well as a photographic essay "El Gaucho" which appeared in Du.^[2] In 1963 he was working in Cuba when he was able to photograph Che Guevara; these images of Guevara smoking a cigar have become iconic.

Burri first began working with Magnum Photos in 1955 through Werner Bischof, becoming a full member in 1959 and being elected chair of Magnum France in 1982. His first report "Touch of Music for the Deaf" on deaf-mute children was published by Life. In 1965 he assisted with the creation of Magnum Films which lead to his work on the Magnum-BBC joint production of, The Two Faces of China. In 1967 he produced a documentary on the Six-Day War in Jerusalem for German television. He produced the film Jean Tinguely in 1972.

Awards[link]

• 1998—Dr. Erich Salomon Prize by the German Photography Society-DGPh.
• 1999—Canton of Zurich cultural prize.

Exhibitions[link]

• 1966 « China », Galerie Form, Zurich
• 1967 « René Burri Retrospective », Art Institute, Chicago
• 1971 « 50 Photographies de René Burri », Galerie Rencontre, Paris
• 1972 « René Burri Retrospective », Raffi Photo Gallery, New York; Il Diaframma, Milan
• 1980/1981 « Die Deutschen », Folkwang Museum, Essen; Galerie Rudolf Kicken, Cologne; Galerie Nagel, Berlin
• 1984/1985 « One World », Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich; Berner Photo-Galerie, Berne; Centre National de la Photographie et Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Musée des arts décoratifs, Lausanne (1985 - 1995 also in New Delhi, Havana, New York, Bratislava and Ostrava)
• 1987 « Dans la familiarité de Corbu », Le Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne. « An American Dream », International Center of Photography, New York
• 1994 « Dialogue avec Le Corbusier », Museo de arte moderno de Medellàn, Medellàn (1995 also in Curitiba, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Lima)
• 1995 « Le Paris de René Burri », Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris 1997 « Che », Fnac-Forum, Paris; Galerie R. Mangisch, Zurich (1997 - 2001 also in Barcelona, Lille and Lisbon)
• 1998 « 77 Strange Sensations », Villa Tobler, Zurich « Die Deutschen », Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt (1998 - 2003 also in Kaufbeuren, Velbert, Toulouse and Burghausen)
• 2002 « Berner Blitz », Galerie Karrer, Zurich
• 2004 « René Burri - Rétrospective 1950-2000 » Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Musée de l’Elysée, Paris.
• 2005 Lausanne (also in Milan and Zurich) « René Burri: Utopia - Architecture et Architecte », Hermès Gallery, New York; Leica Gallery, Prague
• 2005 « René Burri: Photos de Jean Tinguely & Cie », Musée Tinguely, Basel « René Burri: Utopia - Architecture et Architecte », Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel
• 2010 « I tedeschi. La Germania degli anni Sessanta nelle fotografie di René Burri », Pordenone (Italy), Galleria Sagittaria, Centro Iniziative Culturali Pordenone

External links[link]

• René Burri Biography
• Magnum Photos profile of Burri
• A René Burri portfolio from Le Monde
• Audio interview with René Burri
• Ingrid, Che and Rene Burri - slideshow by The First Post
• Photographer René Burri's Best Shot by Andrew Pulver, The Guardian
• René Burri Retrospective at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam - images and video
• René Burri on The Brander - Creators of Brands

References[link]

Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely portrait by Lothar Wolleh
Born	(1925-05-22)22 May 1925 Fribourg, Switzerland
Died	30 August 1991(1991-08-30) (aged 66)
Nationality	Swiss
Field	Painting, Sculpture

The Tinguely Fountain in front of the Tinguely Museum in Basel

Tinguely's Heureka in Zürich-Seefeld (Zürichhorn)

Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 in Fribourg, Switzerland – 30 August 1991 in Bern) was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics. Tinguely's art satirized the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society.

Tinguely grew up in Basel, but moved to France in 1952 with his first wife Swiss artist Eva Aeppli, to pursue a career in art. He belonged to the Parisian avantgarde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New Realist's manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960.

His best-known work, a self-destroying sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), only partially self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, although his later work, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), detonated successfully in front of an audience gathered in the desert outside Las Vegas.

In Arthur Penn's Mickey One (1965) the mime-like Artist (Kamatari Fujiwara) with his self-destructive machine is an obvious Tinguely tribute.

In 1971, Tinguely married Niki de Saint Phalle.

Public works[link]

• Chaos I (1974), sculpture in The Commons, Columbus, Indiana, USA
• Le Cyclop outside of Milly-la-Forêt.
• The Stravinsky Fountain (fr: La Fontaine Stravinsky) near the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1983), a collaboration with Niki de Saint Phalle.
• Carnival Fountain (Fasnachtsbrunnen) (1977) in Basel.
• Tinguely Fountain (1977) in Basel.
• Lifesaver Fountain on Königstrasse in Duisburg, Germany, a collaboration with Niki de Saint Phalle
• Jo Siffert Fountain (commonly called Tinguely Fountain), Fribourg, Switzerland
• La Cascade, sculpture in the Carillon Building lobby, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
• Métamatic generative sculptures (1950s)

Noise music recordings[link]

• 1963 ‘Sounds of Sculpture’, 7”, Minami Gallery, Tokyo, Japan_[Tinguely’s sculptures recorded by avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi during Japanese exhibition]
• 1972 ‘Méta’, book+7_, Propyläen Verlag, Stockholm
• 1983 ‘‘Sculptures at The Tate Gallery, 1982_, Audio Arts cassette
• 1983 ‘Meta-Harmonie H’ incl. in ‘Meridians 2_ compmqenan ate a pie
• 2001 ‘Relief Meta-Mechanique Sonore I’ incl. in ‘A Diagnosis’ compilation, Revolver-Archiv Für Aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

See also[link]

• New Realism
• Rube Goldberg—Conceptual pioneer of excessively complex machinery

Further reading[link]

• chapter on Tinguely in Calvin Tomkins' The Bride and Her Bachelors.
• K. G. Pontus Hultén; Author of Jean Tinguely "Meta" (English translation published in 1975 by New York Graphic Society Ltd., Boston) Large hard cover, 519 Illustrations. Translated from German by Mary Whittall. Original German version published 1972.

External links[link]

• Jean Tinguely in SIK ISEA (Swiss Institute for Art Research)
• Tinguely-Museum in Basel
• Biography by the Tinguely Museum in Basel
• Art Cyclopaedia: Jean Tinguely
• http://www.art-public.com/cyclop/cyclop_g.htm
• videos: Tinguely's kinetic fountains in Basel and Paris
• Métamatic Research Initiative
• Lecture by Kaira Cabañas (PhD, Princeton University) Homage to New York: Jean Tinguely's Destructive Art delivered November 20, 2008 in New York City at Museum of Modern Art

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jean Tinguely