Commentary: Shock Art

 

 Damien Hirst "A Thousand Years"

"Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson 

It's a strange time in the contemporary art world, where this quote is kind of turned on its head. So much of the monotony of post modern art is its lack of decorum. Artists without vision or talent can fall back on creating sterile reruns of the type shock-the-bourgeois antics that rocked Paris around the time of our great-great-grandfathers. Our animal bodies do all sorts of messy things-procreate, defecate, die and decay, that polite society conspires to keep discreet. It's a real shortcut to play in this mud to stir a reaction.This type of work, striving for scandal since it can not offer insight, says nothing about the artist who created it or even the times we live in now. There is not enough substance to inflate disposable trash into greater significance.
In this age where the establishment keeps shoveling out dead end muck, to be strange and extravagant is to be concerned with qualities like skill, honesty, vision and integrity in art. 

 -Richard Bledsoe