Illustration Randrian Panopio

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, I took a weeks-long online course in contemporary art from MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but if you ask me what contemporary art is, chances are I’ll give you a blank stare.

In contemporary art, however, no answer could be the answer, the way Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar’s Lament of the Images is a lightbox or a too-bright white screen that represents how an excess of images is blinding us today, seeing everything and therefore seeing nothing at all.

Ask me when it started and, while I could say the renaissance started in the 1400s, having also completed a course on art history from Universidad Carlos III Madrid, I would be hard-pressed to guess when the trumpets blared to usher in the contemporary age.

Maybe after World War II, say, in Europe freed from the Nazi regime in 1945. Maybe in the late 1960s, the start of the Cold War, the civil rights movement (black rights, women’s rights, gay rights) and Martin Luther King, not to mention JFK, for America. Maybe all the way back to the 1920s when Ezra Pound first found the injunction “Make It New” in some ancient Confucian text he was translating.

At any rate, whereas I could say, owing to my pandemic-driven excursion into European art history, that the renaissance artists, like Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, were at least united in reviving what they could of the lost Greco-Roman glories or classical antiquity, what exactly do the contemporary artists have in common?

All and nothing, you could say, in a world that is as individual (me, me, me) as it is collective (herd/mob mentality), in a world, where, as Mark Zuckerberg is said to have observed in an early memo on the creation of Facebook’s newsfeed, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” What! “Did he really say that?” asks the social justice warrior, aghast and ready to take up (digital) arms.

Well, yes, go ask Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror. Better yet, read her book, which I and Pauline Juan and maybe others in my book club, The Very Extra Book Club, would highly recommend.

But back to contemporary. Is it really now now? No longer modern, because unlike modernism, more than a break from tradition, it is a whole new direction, now moving every which way you could think of, away from painting and sculpture and toward text and audio and video and installations and yarn and paper shredder and computer glyphs and all of nothing saying everything loud but not necessarily clear.

Like all art, even Raphael’s or François Boucher’s or Pieter de Hooch’s or Johannes Vermeer’s or William Hogarth’s, contemporary art to me is much ado about nothing.
But it’s really got to have enough ado to make us stop and look, perchance we see something profoundly beautiful—even in nothing.