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Being Contemporary

Being Contemporary BEING CONTEMPORARY One of the essential concerns of visual art, performance, and critical thought is the idea of the “contemporary” or the “new.” We are part of an era that had cast forth great themes, and complex ways of organizing society and culture, while also being challenged by many received ideas. How does one take the measure of one’s work in the zeitgeist of the times? What makes a performance, a play, a piece of music, or an essay contemporary? What does the search for the contemporary or the innovative mean to the arts and to the public today? How is it recognized or understood? Consider your own work, or another artist’s work, in this context. BaBette Mangolte What does it mean for an artist to be “contemporary”? Does it mean sensing what is current and thus able to reflect one’s intuitions about the “now” in the work produced? Is doing what everyone else is doing a mark of being contemporary, or the opposite? Can one become contemporary by inventing something new that retroactively, at a future date, comes to signify this past era? And to what degree is contemporary art contingent upon the specifics of a historical http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art MIT Press

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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2012 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
Subject
Being Contemporary (Part I)
ISSN
1520-281X
eISSN
1537-9477
DOI
10.1162/PAJJ_a_00073
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

BEING CONTEMPORARY One of the essential concerns of visual art, performance, and critical thought is the idea of the “contemporary” or the “new.” We are part of an era that had cast forth great themes, and complex ways of organizing society and culture, while also being challenged by many received ideas. How does one take the measure of one’s work in the zeitgeist of the times? What makes a performance, a play, a piece of music, or an essay contemporary? What does the search for the contemporary or the innovative mean to the arts and to the public today? How is it recognized or understood? Consider your own work, or another artist’s work, in this context. BaBette Mangolte What does it mean for an artist to be “contemporary”? Does it mean sensing what is current and thus able to reflect one’s intuitions about the “now” in the work produced? Is doing what everyone else is doing a mark of being contemporary, or the opposite? Can one become contemporary by inventing something new that retroactively, at a future date, comes to signify this past era? And to what degree is contemporary art contingent upon the specifics of a historical

Journal

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and ArtMIT Press

Published: Jan 1, 2012

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