WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON … in museums of contemporary art
When referring to the most controversial works of art ever made, Gustave Courbet instantly sticks out for his “Origine du Monde” boldly depicting the female sex in 1866. The realism of the work was shocking at the time, making many people fantasize about the identity of the model. It was not until 1995 that the painting was brought to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it was exhibited in broad daylight.
Many similar pieces are exhibited in the very well know Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
However, yesterday’s taboos are gradually becoming mainstream. Nudity is no longer enough to create controversy, thus comes a rise of the forbidden and provocation in museums : Death, blasphemy, incest, pedophilia, or anything to do with human excrement are becoming more subject to artwork although most remain problematic themes for most people. Contemporary art has therefore specialized in spectacular, monumental, and sensational pieces through the transgression of one or more taboos.
But what do these “taboos” represent in Western societies where freedom of expression is considered a pillar? These considerations lead to wonder whether art can ever be subject to any form of limits.
One of the biggest revolutions of contemporary art is the fact that it spared the living a spot in museums and grand expositions without abandoning traditional work made by more ancient artists. This movement has created real controversy with brave ideas and illustrations, a great example to mention is plants or food-made art work such as Maurizio Cattelan’s banana, not to forget that animals and people have also gradually been put on display in cultural spaces. Damien Hirst’s main goal in the 1990s was to make art “more real than a painting”, but is this a reason to exhibit animal carcasses? Ditto for Marco Evaristti who wanted to protest against “the brutality that permeates the world” in the 2000s by leaving goldfish in self-service plug-in blenders (spoiler: several viewers pressed the ON button).
On a related note, while human performed art is often limited to some sort of strange, metaphorical choreography (yes, yes, you know what we’re talking about), some have demonstrated that brutality and cruelty don’t stop with animals.
While in the Neapolitan Morra studio in 1974, the artist Marina Abramovic decided to “surrender” herself to the public for 6 hours, taking responsibility for everything that happened during that time. The audience had access to 72 objects: objects of pleasure and objects of destruction. The first three hours went smoothly before her clothes were torn off, her body cut and raped, and the conclusion was that men easily give in to destructive impulses when allowed to.
Even if the performers, unlike animals, have chosen to stage themselves in this way, we are entitled to question the artistic significance of these representations…
What is the next step, you may ask? We don’t know, we are not *unfortunately* owners of a magical crystal ball.
In the meantime, here are our top 5 most intriguing modern works, illustrating how art today is making what was once despicable into something mainstream, and sometimes quite ridicule as some may say.
McCarthy put his inflatable sculpture at Place Vendôme in Paris. Some people have not been thrilled about it, no wonder regarding the shape…. Yet the artist said it was a simple Christmas tree. What do you think? Plug or tree?
2. Fontaine — Marcel Duchamp :
Marcel Duchamp exhibited his Fountain in Centre Pompidou in Paris. His work marks the birth of conceptual art, and because of the vulgar aspect of the subject, people have been arguing to know if it deserves to be considered art or not. Not all artists are made to be loved by everyone…
3. Comedian — Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan, known for his humorous and provocative art sold his banana at the Art Basel fair in Miami for $120 000. Yes, yes you heard it right. The man that bought it, ate it at the end… Oops!
Moral: honour your hunger at all costs.
Damien Hirst wanted to explore new forms of art by exhibiting dead animals (sharks, cows, butterflies, fish, flies, and more) in boxes. Your vegetarian cousin is not going to like it.
5. Artist’s shit — Pierro Manzoni
Piero Manzoni exhibited his excrement in 90 cans, each one containing 30 grams of human faeces. His goal was to show that an artist with a well-known name could make anything famous and people will call it art, even if it was a can with poop. The value of his “work” after his death went to $300 000.
To push this a bit further and understand more of how the above pieces are viewed by people, we went out and asked students in GEM business school what they thought about some high value relatively known artwork, and tried to compare them to other artwork made with Artificial intelligence (called Midjourney), to see if they had a preference and if they could guess the value of the pieces made by historical famous artists and the ones made with AI.
The outcome of the experience was very well expected, as most interviewees had a slight preference towards artwork costing near to nothing compared to paintings and art pieces costing thousands of euros, which leaves us to think : What really is art ? What determines its value? or whether or not it should be exhibited to the large public ? Does this make art subjective ?
If you want to follow our adventure on Medium and be the first to read our content, please follow us on Medium and on don’t forget to subscribe to our social medias Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Tik Tok
Please leave you comments bellow, we can’t wait to debate with you regarding the subject !!!
About this article
This article has been written by students on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation project, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminating the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
