Putting a 21st Century Twist on the Past

Required Text: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, University of California Press, 1996.

American entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, once said: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Some people may take a job out of necessity rather than being passionate about their work. You have to love what you do as you spend more time working than being with loved ones. In Studs Terkel’s Working, adapted by Harvey Pekar, the reader is presented with visual adaptations of the lives of ordinary Americans that show how they feel about what they do for a living ranging from farmers, miners, barbers, box boys, and a hooker are some of the jobs mentioned in the novels. The author gives the

In John Berger’s essay “Ways of Seeing,” he shares his view on how he feels art is seen. Mr. Berger explores how the views of people are original and how art is seen very differently. By comparing certain photographs, he goes on to let his Audience, which is represented as the academic, witness for themselves how art may come across as something specific and it can mean something completely different depending on who is studying the art. The author goes into details of why images were first used, how we used to analyze art vs how we do today, and the rarity of arts. He is able to effectively pass on his message by using the strategies of Rhetoric, which include Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.

I believe that Dagoberto Gilb wrote this story to show the readers not to just get straight to the point but try to get to their perspective. I believe that Gilb wrote it thinking of people who were around him that just so happened to be doing the same thing. Al and the narrator seem to be the type of people who will not get along with each other. At times, the characters change from one perspective to another making it difficult for each other to know what the other is really thinking.

This theory provoked my insight about contemporary art itself. One’s observation could be right, could be wrong, this is the etiquette beauty of art. For if one thinks about it what is the norm? We can't possibly apply our prototypes of norm towards art, because are our norms even norm? Contemporary art is a statement, a reaction, an attempt at breaking free, an expression of the issues wrapped up to define the lifestyle of today.

This artwork is a contemporary work which enmeshes various fields into itself. Hart takes elements of the world of fashion, technology, literature and music to create something which could be negotiated as avant-garde work of performance including sculpture and virtual reality. It talks about a world where all

In this essay the following contemporary painters are going to be examined: Marlene Dumas, Wendy Sharpe, and Euan Macleod. Besides, I will analyse the ways in which these artists engages in dialogue with current social or cultural concerns, focusing on specific ways that the medium influences the effectiveness of visual communication.

The people back in the 19th century really didn’t accept Van Gaogh’s truthful and emotionally morbid way of expressing the way of art is to himself. It finally was seen as art through the people’s eyes. This set a stage of art that is now known as Expressionism. It is best characterized by the use of symbols and a style that expresses the artist’s inner feelings about his subject. His style of painting is exemplified by a projection of the painter’s inner experience onto the canvas he paints on. Van Gogh’s paintings are done with his feelings that goes on in his life. (Mark Harden’s Artchive)

Gersh-Nesic (n.d.) claims that “The world was changing rapidly and some artists wanted their work to be about their contemporary environment—about themselves and their own perceptions of life;” however, it is in this lattermost portion of her statement –

The two paintings I am going to discuss are The Sower (Top, Right) and The Gleaners (Top, Left) by Jean-Francois Millet. Both paintings are in the Realist style with The Sower painted in 1849 and The Gleaners in 1857. The Sower measures at 101 X 80.7cm whereas The Gleaners is 83.5 X 110cm. This essay will look at how these paintings are representative of Realism through their social and political context and elements of style. The Realist effect of Millet’s paintings will be shown in comparison with another painting of similar time, The Recall of the Gleaners (bottom image) by Jules Breton (1859).

The relationship between Impressionism and Expressionism can be considered by examining the works of Jozef Israels (1824-1911) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). These coexisting and overlapping artist’s lives and compositions, display the evolution and transition of artistic styles in the second half of the nineteenth century.

the main character, it allows them to impress the audience and widen the boundaries of this type of art. Additionally, Arthur Miller shows the problems of those people who are not able to adapt to the constantly changing environment and live in the past. The author’s claim to the audience to live for today has a strong correlation with the core principle of modernism requiring from artists to break the outdated rules and be concentrated on the current demands of society.

Art for art's sake was, essentially, the 19th century's attempt to secure for aesthetics what the medieval "age of faith" had secured for Christianity: primacy of importance. From 1873 to just before the outbreak of World War I, art began to undergo another shift, expressing at once both a longing for an old world spirit and an appreciation for modern and revolutionary ideas. The century of feeling and realism would culminate, of course, in the irony of Oscar Wilde who understood that all art was "quite useless" if beauty itself had no function in the modern world. Wilde accepted beauty on the virtue of its own merits signaling a transcendental belief (of which De Profundis is the ultimate expression). Yet, the art world after Wilde's death in 1900 had already moved beyond belief. This paper will examine the movement of the art world from the rise of Van Gogh to the rise of Kandinsky.

In a ‘tradition breaking spirit’ [D’Alleva, 2012], that characterised modernist artists, early in the twentieth century, Duchamp abandoned traditional ideas and techniques, to create a new kind of ‘art’, one that the idea behind a work of art is more important that its visual realization, the ‘retinal’. The ready-mades was the product of Duchamp’s questioning what art is.

The 19th century was a time of radical change and innovation in nearly every aspect of society. The Industrial Revolution changed the face of transportation, business, and science. A race for resources and power among European nations led to colonization of the most remote areas of the world. Old political structures stumbled while new ones like Communism took root. The arts were not immune to this climate of change. Literature, music, and fine art all underwent deep shifts in practice and philosophy. One of the most radical of these shifts occurred in the painting world in late 19th century France. Realism, a school established in the mid-1800s and committed to portraying the world in the most accurate detail as possible, gave way to Impressionism, an entirely new artistic philosophy embracing ambiguity and emotion. This profound change can be seen in the comparison of paintings from each period; namely, The Gleaners by Realist painter Jean-Francois Millet and Hay Harvest at Eragny by Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. A comparative analysis of these paintings shows not only the innovative and reactionary elements of the Impressionist movement, but also how it maintained and developed important characteristics of Realism.