Dialogue with the Classics | Group Exhibition
Around the turn of the new millennium, many artists and art critics expressed discontent, displayed perplexity, and searched for a path. Signs of these were already discernible in the last decade of the twentieth century, a century that celebrated the notions of avant-garde and modernism. The death of painting had been declared long before, and the penetration of new techniques and technologies (mainly video art) did not entirely fill the resulting gap. The motto: “innovate or perish” on which many artists were bred, especially in the second half of the century, led to radicalization at its end, virtually at all cost. Artists adopted techniques involving “shock treatment” (such as Damien Hirst’s pickled dead animals, Andres Serrano’s morgue photographs, or Boris Mikhailov’s images of ailing, deformed bodies), radicalized personal exposure (such as Tracey Emin’s bed, Orlan’s serial operations, or Annie Sprinkle’s performance during which she invited audience members to come up and peek into her vagina), or breaking religious and cultural taboos (such as Chris Ofili’s Madonna and dung). This tendency culminated with the Saatchi Collection exhibition, Sensation, which indeed brought contemporary art millions of viewers, but at the same time incited a wave of protest, dispute and public criticism quite unprecedented in the history of art. Not only was the public shocked, but also many artists who wondered: What next?
