Beauty where things look bleak: A look at 25 Works

Jenny Holzer, Guggenheim

I occasionally find myself in the contemporary wing of the art gallery, trying to suggest to a friend that whether or not their 5-year-old could make a similar piece is not the point. Trying to suggest there’s a different invitation here than with representational art. But sometimes I’m just as bewildered as my friends.

Such was the case when I read New York Times Style Magazine’s “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age”, (warning, some of the pieces are a bit graphic). It brings together an assortment of works, many of which portrayed pain, violence, and injustice. There is a video documenting the final months of a woman diagnosed with cancer. A shot-though cutout portraying JFK’s assassin. One piece is cut into the artist’s bleeding back. I found them more haunting than beautiful. And yet there is a longing for justice, belonging, and life free from exploitation, death and prejudice. They seem to expose the gulf between present reality and a more beautiful one.

After a talk by installation artist Rob Hengeveld, I had asked about the place of beauty in art today. He suggested that truth - often exposing the bleak realities of our world - has eclipsed the pursuit of beauty. If this is true, and these twenty five works are indeed defining our age, we should probably not simply look away. Perhaps we should go into the contemporary gallery, and the injustices it often displays, with Isaiah 53 in mind. Isaiah describes Jesus, crushed for a broken world, a world we continue to break. “His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being” and “we hid, as it were, our faces from Him”. May we seek Him, and not avert our eyes, perhaps even in such unexpected places.

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“The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age”, New York Times Style Magazine,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/t-magazine/most-important-contemporary-art.html

Photo Credit:

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