Contemporary art is a mystery

Towards a theory of contemporary art

For many people, contemporary art is a mystery. This is so familiar that outrage at its oddness feels cliché, and the once-expected heckles from philistine critics have faded away; now they simply ignore it. But it’s not just ordinary folk who don’t get it. Contemporary art is also a mystery to its initiates, including contemporary artists themselves, who are mostly incapable of putting into words quite what it is they are trying to do, but nonetheless make it their life’s work trying to do it.

Academics who study contemporary art, for their part, make it their life’s work to try to put into words what contemporary artists are doing, but they are often looked at askance by the artists themselves, and struggle to define either of the terms ‘contemporary’ or ‘art’, let alone both side by side. Much of the language that they, and their curator pals, have developed to describe contemporary art is rightly mocked for its jargon-heavy impenetrability, a disguise for vague ideas. From the devout to the indifferent to the hostile, everyone’s experience of contemporary art seems to rely at some level on its unknowability. Maybe this is something we can all agree on.

It is a strange thing to do, walking into rooms full of unusual objects, interpreting them, and reading opaque texts in booklets that make claims about the objects, how they ‘explore notions’ of things, or ‘bring focus to the parallels’ between different things; how in some of these objects ‘physical and emotional boundaries are destabilised and disrupted’, while others, ‘conjure the immediate presence of the natural world’, ‘wrestle with social, political and cultural anxieties prominent today’ or even ‘whisper something about the sacrosanct freedom of the individual’. These claims are made with sincerity (we hope), but they rarely specify how or where these actions are supposed to take place. In the objects? In our heads? The artist’s head? The curator’s? How willing are we to accept these claims? Can they be tested? The whole operation seems highly doubtful.

One apology for the dubious but enduring practice of contemporary art equates it with an ongoing conversation. The ideas and practices of art may seem strange now, but that is only because it has come a long way since it began, and if you read the whole transcript back then what people are saying today will make much more sense. This approach can help make sense of contemporary art, since artists constantly refer to other artists’ ideas, but it cannot be the key to it. For one thing, nobody knows where the transcript starts or how far to read back. What’s more, people in the conversation keep talking across each other and referring back to other speakers whom not everyone else has heard. Some voices are occluded while others are amplified way out of proportion with the value of what they say. As conversations go, it is chaotic and dysfunctional, and even if historians can invent some narrative structures to help guide us through, these are tentative, provisional, and always leaving important things out.

The conversational model also misses the point. It does not explain what the conversation is about in the first place. Just because Marcel Duchamp did something a century ago does not mean that what Damien Hirst did last week is any more reasonable or possible to comprehend. Hirst’s behaviour might fit into a pattern, but why do people persist in behaving in this way at all? There must be more to say in defence of contemporary art than that it belongs to a tradition. What is the tradition for, and why do people carry on with it?

I would like to suggest that a large part of the reason contemporary art makes little sense is because, at a fundamental level, it is concerned with mystery. Mystery is not only what it is, but what it is about: the mystery of our lives, of the world, of existence. Although this claim has the double disadvantage of sounding both exaggerated and trite at the same time, it is nonetheless a constituent element that distinguishes contemporary art from other fields, such as philosophy or physics, which may seek to uncover mysteries, but are not mysterious in themselves as forms of human activity. Its sheer flexibility and formal variety adapt contemporary art to exploding the boundaries between things more than its relatives literature and film, which only take place on screens or in books. Instead of these, contemporary art often seems more closely to resemble religion.

Life is still extraordinarily mysterious, even for the non-religious. There is little indication that we know more about the nature of reality than our religious cousins. Arguably we know less, if you take knowing to be an activity that people do, rather than a passive state that people exist in. Religious people know that God made the earth and sent his son to redeem us, or whatever else their tradition teaches. They even have a rough idea about what is coming after death. Secular people do not know anything in the same way. We are pretty sure that the universe began with a big bang, but nobody can say why it happened, except by blind chance, which is to say for no reason at all. From this perspective, our only certainty is physical death, after which a person either ceases to exist or something else happens to them, about which we can speculate but cannot know.

This stance is reasonable, and from a strictly scientific perspective, you can go further still. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman claims that the chances that our evolutionarily-developed senses present to us any of the properties of objective reality are precisely nil. What we see, hear, feel, taste, etc., is an illusion that is adapted to ensure the survival of our species, not for revealing the truth about the reality around us. Reality is as yet completely unfathomed; we are prisoners of our deceitful, but useful, senses.

Hoffman’s claim can be hard to accept, but it affords room to a religious outlook. Religion makes constant reference to things that cannot be seen or touched, but which are nonetheless claimed to exist on the basis of faith, such as God, heaven, hell, spirits, angels and the soul, and which are in fact more real and more lasting than anything tangible on earth. Underscoring the various dogmas of different religions is a concern with making a space in which we can interpret our relationship with the unknown part of life. It fills the void of what we cannot know through our senses and which is, at least for now, way beyond reason’s reach.

While religious practice is receding among the kind of person who takes an interest in contemporary art (middle class, university educated, left leaning) this person still needs a way to confront their profound ignorance of reality; they need something to give it form so that it can be engaged with actively, instead of remaining a somewhat ominous voice in the back of one’s head.

Contemporary art can do this. Since they cannot rely on a common religious frame of reference among their audiences, contemporary artists need exhibition texts to get audiences up to speed with their ideas. Once the audience is familiar with the ideas, our encounter with the art objects is a challenge to our perception of what is in front of us and available to our senses. The exhibited objects have been put into a system of correspondences, intentions, allusion, illusion, metaphor and morality that exist in a different register to empirical reality. You can call it nonsense, or you can accept it on faith and see what happens.

What does happen? Out of the fusion of matter with ideas, contemporary artists capture the attention of millions and attract pilgrims willing to travel across the world and pay to see their work. People devote their lives to it. People are moved to tears by it. Contemporary art now fetches higher prices than any kind of art has ever done before. This is because, in the face of complete mystery, it allows meaninglessness to mean something. It gives shape to our situation as people who know nothing about reality, desire to know about it, but reject the religious frameworks within which our relationship to the unknown makes sense. Considered this way, contemporary art’s role in society today starts to be more understandable, while remaining no less of a mystery.