John Waters

I love watching and watching John Waters "Some of The Best Art Is Deadly". I enjoyed watching all three, but the things he says in the first video really sums up the difficulty of Contemporary Art. It becomes frustrating because even those who are in the art world do not have a vocabulary for contemporary art, even those who are a part of the art world don't know how to digest it. The plethora of artwork being produced and exhibited doesn't help either. Every other artwork does something new and shocks the viewer in a different way.

What John Waters really touched on and really stuck with me was the idea of contemporary art controversy. The first line of the first video frames the controversy: "Contemporary Art's job is to wreck whatever came before it". After the old masters, he says, each generation afterwords wrecks that. Each generation of art tries to out-shock the generation of art before it. The end result: nothing surprises us anymore. Contemporary Art has reprogrammed the way we respond to things that usually disgust, anger, or repulse us. Though art may disgust, anger, or repulse us, we appreciate it doing so, and now we actually are disappointed when art doesn't disgust, anger or repulse us. We seek out things that surprise us and if it falls short in doing so, well, why are we looking at it. Things that are pretty don't do it for us anymore, Waters remarks, unless it's so pretty it's actually nauseating.

At the moment, I feel like there's only one sure way we know how to digest Contemporary Art: how well and to what extent does an artwork surprise us.