Contemporary art is unfinished. Classical art is fundamentally finished. By this I mean, classical art suffer from the illusion that the artist can represent a portrait, object, or scene exactly. Even modern hyper-realist art plays with reality and illusion, as pose. In  every portrait, even if perfect in a classical sense, reality suffers; because every person or object, e.g. Sir Thomas More or the "flower in the crannied wall", is far too complex. Thus what is to be intimated and represented, and why?

 

Girl on a Chip is such a crannied wall, far to complex to explain. In contemporary art, every work is unfinished; not just in the trivial sense that the technique is imperfect or the painter died suddenly, but in a fundamental sense that a living breathing work of art is an incomplete expression of an unfinished artist.

 

Classically, art is assumed to be a thing; whereas a person art (i.e. is) assumed to be more than a thing (i.e. a being). Well in modern physics, even an object is now understood to be more than a thing; because all of the classical ideas of space, time, matter and such have been rendered inadequate, ambiguous, indeterminant, relative and incomplete. We now view objects (e.g. elementary particles) to be quantums of action rather than classical things. Similarly modern art has regained what its original name impliedm, its art-ness, as in the verb "art", "is", "being", i.e. its beingness. 

 

Classically, most things were considered things; even knowledge and ideas were things. But Socrates proclaimed and demonstrated that he did not know any thing. He showed that there was indetermanancy, confusion and ambiguity at the very beginning, i.e. with the very definition of a thing. In his bones, he understood that knowing is a classical thing, an inadequate or incomplete thing. Thus he denied knowing any thing.

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But Socrates also understood that understanding equals action. And so he observed, questioned, comforted, provoked and drank. And though he died and his words have been set by many; his work is unfinished. In that sense, contemporary art is unfinished. It is not a thing, a trophy to be hung on the wall or garbage to be buried in the ground. Art must be capable of moving us, of being. The luxury item or mass produced item may be art or not, as the ready-made artist show. But if art; it is more than art-i-fact.

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To look at a work of art is to enquire, to observe, to listen and understand deeply beyond the polished or crude thingness to the ambiquity, the indeterminancy, the incompleteness, relativity, the unfinishedness of the expression whispering to us as in a dream. Art is fragile enough to touch; us or it is dead to us, finished, a thing, a pound of luxury = a pound of garbage.

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TNN 7/28/2016

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