Speedrunning the 20th century as an art student
Simply entering art school, that is, becoming an art student, is like a meta-crit. You arrive with some ideas or feelings about what Art is, you want to make Good Art, and you orient your efforts along a line from bad -> good -> better Art. Then you get there, and, because the 20th century happened, you find out that what you call Good Art is just that – what you call it. Everyone else has their own idea, and some of them are even more popular or talented than you. So you’ve lost your straight line. It gets crossed with other students’ lines, curls back in on itself, seems foolish at times.
Sometimes students’ ideas line up with historical ideas about Good Art, like academic painting or photorealism. Sometimes you can find a mode of creative production that feels comfortable to stay in, like comics or fashion. Any accepted form can give you wayposts to either follow or spurn as you blaze a new path.
And since the 20th and now a slim quarter of the 21st century has happened, we don’t need to debate whether genre art is art, or whether historical forms of art can still be valid or not. But that freedom comes at a price. It means that, when you make, share, or talk about your art, you have to either knowingly accept or actively deny that all the other art students around you are working with the same infinite degrees of freedom that you are.
Knowingly accept
Everything’s equal and nothing matters then, right? No, because, remember, everyone’s trying to make good art. Within their universe of art, they can succeed or fail. Multiverse movies, however unoriginal at this point, still have plots. They just require you to care about what happens inside one universe and across many universes at once.
Actively deny
Your art is the Good Art, other arts are degenerate, and the last 150 years have been a horrible mistake. You best find people who agree with you, and repel the others.
This is why we call it ‘contemporary’ art
I’m not going to split hairs between capital-P Postmodernism and Contemporary art. I’m still under 500 words here and there are 5 million words available out there on such things. I just want to lay out the contemporary conditions of becoming an artist in 2024. This is just how it is. People don’t agree about art enough anymore to even disagree in predictable ways. If you start making art in any way by any means and put it out there, you will encounter this condition. I think that makes you more like a contemporary artist than not, but you can always actively deny.