Why does contemporary art look so simple? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Featured on theguardian.com

Why do the lights keep going on and off? How is less more? What place does a balloon dog have in an art gallery? Or, as a lot of people have been asking Google: “Why does contemporary art look so simple?”

I am tempted to answer – because it’s idiotic. But first, we need to define what contemporary art means in this question.

Plenty of today’s art does not look simple at all. On the contrary it looks complex, and rewards the beholder accordingly. There is nothing simple about the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, saturated with troubling imagery and made with forbidding layers of ash, wood, straw and pigment. Nor is there anything simplistic about Tacita Dean’s eerie photographic panoramas of landscape and memory, or Cy Twombly’s sensual scrawled epics, tremulous with poetic erudition. Does it look “simple” to quote Cavafy and Catullus as much as Twombly’s paintings do?

Yet we all understand what kind of art the question is about. When artists such asDamien Hirst were taking the Turner prize by storm in the 1990s I used to hear old-timers moan about the triumph of the “one liner”. The essence of contemporary art has come to be seen as a smart, precise, quickly absorbed conceptual masterstroke. An empty room, with some sound art echoing in it.

Art reflects its times. We live in an age of constant visual and conceptual barrage by adverts, TV shows, and pictures that go viral on Twitter. Seriously, what kind of art do you expect the information age to produce? We want information we can quickly decode and respond to and share. As long ago as the 1960s artists were pioneering the reductive aesthetics appropriate to our time.Andy Warhol turned soup cans into portraits and news photographs of celebrities into portraits. The Minimalists created an almost religious cult of unaltered industrial materials. Conceptual art, invented in the late 1960s, denied that a work of art needed to take any unique physical form.

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