It’s Only Art?

Contemporary art is becoming more popular. I’m not in command of all the statistics or demographics but attendance and sales are up generally. Why is that?

I can’t say it’s because of our public schools educational regime of the last 20 years. I believe it has at least a little to do with the availability of the media to everyone - and indirectly a more sophisticated populace when it comes to images. More sophisticated in the sense that people see at least 10 times as many images as they did 30 or 40 years ago (rough guess).

Just think what could happen if the educational systems used the internet for something more than a reference sourc. The net could easily serve as a repository of each student’s work and progress, including standardized test preps, in almost every field of didactic learning. This goes double for the visual arts.

Here’s some of the words that curators have to say on recent contemporary art exhibitions. The articles links are listed just below:

Paul Dorrell of Leopold Gallery

Ellen Bradshaw of Pleiades Gallery

Connie Wolf of Contemporary Jewish Museum

Jason Hall of AAM

These people have a good vantage points on the interests of the community in contemporary art. By the way if you know a curator or gallerist who would like to talk contemporary send them my way.

- Daniel Ferris