Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and art historian from Mexico. He also was the first Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Modern in London.
Sabeth Buchmann is an art critic and historian who is Professor of Post-modern art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
In this article, Medina suggests eleven theories in relation to ‘contemporary’ art. At the beginning of the article, he states that “contemporary is the term that stands to mark the death of ‘modern’.”1 From my understanding of Medina, contemporary art not only comes after the modern art chronologically but also giving end to the modern era and replacing it by – presenting ‘the contemporary’ – disagreeing the ideas of Modernism. In the article by Sabeth Buchmann, she points out the ‘blind spot’ of the modern. “...revisions of conceptual notions of work that intended to historically illuminate the blind spots of modernist art discourse...”2 and believes the conceptual notions overlaps to modernist phenomena. This is interesting to see the similarities between the two authors’ ideas which are that the contemporary revise the notions and improved the blind spots of modernism. Buchmann says that “…Conceptual art was successful I establishing the idea that instead of being measurable only in terms of the fact of material production, the form of art’s symbolic value should be equally open to calibration using scales of social productivity…”3 Which is in other words saying the idea of conceptual art is being open, symbolic but art as form of communication making the works more public and socialised. This beginning notion of the Conceptual art has made the artists and viewers to value the ‘idea’ and the ‘process’ more as well as the actual finished ‘artwork’. This kind of Conceptual art has allowed artists to use theories or philosophies as a material and also changed the way we communicate with artworks.
1. Medina, Cuauhtemoc. "Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses". E-flux journal #12, 01/2010. http://e-flux.com/journal/view/103, p1.
2. Buchmann, Sabeth, 'Under the sign of Labor', Art after conceptualism, Cambridge, Mass & London: MIT Press, p182
3. Buchmann, Sabeth, 'Under the sign of Labor', Art after conceptualism, Cambridge, Mass & London: MIT Press, p179
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