The imperious need of the contemporary

Contemporary art, beyond our attributes as artistic proposition so bland, capitalizes our positioning, according to me, in digital revolution, which brought democratization in the use and generation of content through digital media, socio-cultural phenomenon that has generated radical changes in all culture environments.

In the case of Mexico and Latin-America, in general, the digital revolution generated a void in the ‘traditional critic’, which used to control and represent the academy of capturing traditional spaces from where the national art scene was regulated, which was also circumscribed to the center of the country; in this sense, if you weren’t trained as a painter or exposed in the city of Mexico, you didn’t exist.

With the coming of digital media and the so called Social networks, nowadays, the contributions of the traditional actors mentioned have diluted, hence, this cultural revolution presents us new actors, which have infiltrated in the art critic and generated an irreconcilable fracture with the academy; this led to one of the most disruptive art movements in contemporary art history, which has as one of its main motivators to discredit the ‘establishment’. This has been possible, in great part, for being armed with a strong voice, which has allowed the dominance of the national scene space of plastic arts; all of this thanks to its brutal expansion and profitability to great digital audiences. 

This is an important fact since all the previous art currents had their validation in a traditional way, hence, their audiences, though more qualified, where much less and their evolution was slower. In other words, the dominating entities were moved aside by Contemporary art, which presents as its sole valid argument that a person must be anointed as plastic artist only if promoted by a socio-cultural elite, which, almost indistinctively, calls ignorant anyone who resist to it.

I have never believed in rejecting a certain art current and that is what thrills me of not embracing contemporary art, because by not doing so, I learn from it, it helps me keep defining myself, recurring to more information through research and analysis, in addition to knowing that working honestly is fundamental in finding a voice of our own in Plastic arts.

As part of life and generational change, the new generations give credit to those that preceded them, and not only that, they are also bloated by the ready made culture and an addiction to immediacy, which has created one of the biggest generational breaches, pretending to reject all knowledge that’s not validated or spread in a digital context.

In this sense, our space to action consists in adapting to this digital era without giving up our generational experience and warn about the implications entailed in invalidating thoughts through a presentation, writing a book, or validating our contribution in an academic environment, meaning, to let ideas and currents plunder and, on the contrary, simply throwing them to the digital immediacy of a hyper-changing reality allows us to make truth out of anything or even a plastic exercise, or simply an artwork.

With these words, I try to dissipate the sour sensation produced in me when confronting such sense-lacking and expressions with no fundaments or plastic merits, which form, in most cases, contemporary art.