"If you can say it... Why paint it?" A review of the key concepts of Contemporary Art

The result? A huge panic! People packing and leaving massively the cities, numerous phone calls to the police from scared people reporting martian attacks, explosions... A great experimentation indeed!

Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade II

Gursky's world of the 1990s is big, high-tech, fast-paced, expensive, and global. Within it, the anonymous individual is but one among many. Gursky's work draws a picture of our multicultural society from a specific angle, stressing the geometric beauty of the social interactions, of the world we shape. A cult of the anonymous. Another artist whose approach is similar in the sense that he points at the role of the individual among the mass, Spencer Tunick takes photos since 1992 of a mass he controls. By photographing a hundred or more of naked bodies in public spaces, he challenges and questions social, political and justice conventions (he is regularly arrested for photographing his naked models in public spaces). the result is a delicious aesthetic provocation in a strange, unusual manner in my opinion.

Melbourne 2 - Spencer Tunick 2001

More recently, Antony Gormley proposed an interesting project (in the sense of using the crowd as a medium) for Trafalgar square in London. There, is an free place for you, artist, to expose your artwork (after a small contest between shortlisted contemporary artists) which already introduced Wallinger's Ecce Homo for example... Gormley proposed to allow people to be the artwork, one by one, for one complete hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week...

A last example is the appearance of the Chapman brothers on a reality show here in Britain. To quote the Guardian who covered the subject: "It's frightening to think what Jake and Dinos might do to the housemates. Tie them up and watch them have sex with blow-up dolls? Make them act out some nihilistic performance involving Hitler, Ronald McDonald and nursery-rhyme characters? Force them to make toy panoramas of war, cannibalism and the apocalypse? The art world waits with baited breath". Let see what they planned for the TV crowd, it's currently on air.

I guess they may be inspired by the Czech arts collective Ztohoven, who hacked a cam used for the weather forecast in a TV news program. They inserted this apocalyptic image of an atomic explosion, which resulted to a Welles-like nightmare (Station phone calls, Heart attacks...) with the artists facing the possibility of three years in jail.

In Conclusion, there is no excuse in the contemporary context of the art, for you not to be an artwork! But remember that you, and only you are the crowd!