Art of Now in The Early 21st Century

The search for a new art is always the driving concern of galleries and the media. The artists themselves seem split in to two distinct camps of the insiders relying upon training, skill, contacts, and the vagaries of the system; leaving a burgeoning complex mix of outsiders, inside- outsiders, anonymous street artists, art-activists, and unimaginable diverse groups of people and individuals attempting to subvert and challenge the accepted art and cultural patterns of the day.

The 1990's were characterised by a proliferation of themes of subjectivity about which it is difficult to speculate, and which do not refer to the concepts and forms of history usually adopted by art criticism. This subjectivity seems to refer for the most part to the individual citizen's legal right to be able to live creatively.

Artists today find themselves more and more acting within a reality or a system that is continuously mobile and fluid, and unpredictable chains of events that offers neither support nor certainties.

Today, artistic sensitivity is now based upon a subjective creativity and an innovative language that lies somewhere between fiction and reality, whose content may or may not have something to with social or political problems. Every artist, like every citizen now observes the World within and without.

The Internet allows for a myriad of complex creative interactions and hybrids of traditional art and futuristic conceptions of reality.

Underground capillary networks of friends and random creative liaisons increasingly take the place of legitimate art criticism from institutional arenas, providing the expanding world of the art creative with more intimate criticism that is emotionally and socially sensitive, rather than being subjected to idiosyncratic reasons for rejection, and have work looked upon as banal or lacking aesthetic connection by those in positions of art power, who are not necessarily best set to judge creative work, often relying upon the aesthectic whims of others themselves to legitimize their selections for exhibition or exposure.

For such reasons the reality of art has now become a cause for individual survival of the creative self, a personal manual of individual and universal creativity that encompasses all the previous languages of the avant-gardes, and includes the artist as scholar, and scholar as artist into a complex everyday art of the citizen - artist, an art free from the professional media art magazine machine, it is a new insider-outsider, underground-above ground avant-garde based upon a do-it yourself philosophy. What has now emerged is an aesthetic of art as an everyday adventure in survival understood by the media and wider public as being centred upon creatives often concealed behind a pseudonym or logo producing clandestine art and interactive social experiences whilst trying to speak their individual truths, rather than express those placed within thier heads by art training or the current latest fad.

It is only through these latter contemporary artistic outputs can we hope to understand, and engage with 21st concepts of art and free creativity in relation to the social, political, and economic events of this new Century.

David Augustine