Comments on: What is contemporary? 508,000 results

By: Juha van 't Zelfde

Juha van 't Zelfde — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:42:32 +0000

Sorry for the late reply, your comment left us gazed and confused…

By: meh

meh — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:36:47 +0000

“self-aware protagonists of art”
you realise how soaked in irony that is?
(apart from the personal irony, being a champion “extensive (yet eloquent) self-gazer ” yourself…)

- out of the 8 comments on this thread, 7 of them are yourselves, rereretweeting/gazing at yourselves…

come on … pull up, refocus…

By: Juha van 't Zelfde

Juha van 't Zelfde — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:42:17 +0000

Thanks for your thoughtful answer Xander. In the non-monetary blogosphere attention and commitment are our currency, and this is a generous amount you just donated. I like your fetishism, and it might invite the ever present question ‘is this art?’ along to justify the transactions.

More food for thought, much obliged!

By: продажа бумерангов

продажа бумерангов — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:24:19 +0000

Вот это пост!

By: Xander

Xander — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:53:59 +0000

Interesting observation. I think much can be said about the inflation of the term ‘contemporary’ in, erm, contemporary discourse, but it’s not exactly clear to me what you mean by ‘contemporary music’. What does this term in- and exclude?
Still, one of the things you touch upon in your post (‘the art market vs other markets’) is very relevant in this regard. Contemporary art is a highly commodified product that is traded in a large global market, in infinitely more physical variations than contemporary music (which is distributed, broadly speaking, in two different guises: as live music and as recorded music – there are no other ‘things’ to buy here. While in art, it’s all about object pluriformity, and is therefore subject to a kind of object fetishism that is more or less unknown to the field of contemporary music (apart from special record editions, etc.). This makes for a fundamentally different relationship between consumer and product). The attraction of the volatile speculative market value of art – the auction records, the hypes – is a force not to be underestimated: it lends it an aura of sexiness that consists of a unique blend of intellectual-critical superstructure and market capitalism substructure, to put it in Marxist terms. Everybody wants to have a piece of that! Or to at least sit next to the guy that gets a piece of that!

To go back to the numbers: there have always been much more art students than music students. That should account for the difference, too.