Art Point .0

We need a new art movement name

Contemporary art is as close as we have come to a name for what is happening in the art world today. But having a moniker that essentially describes what artists do as any art that comes after what has already be done, throws us into two categories that don’t explain what we are creating:

• The from now on until forever category.
• The etcetera category.

What has transpired since the last art movement

We deserve our own category. This art movement category should describe how we have moved beyond — or are at least aware that we need to move beyond:

• the A.B.C, C.B.S., N.B.C airwaves to the world wide web of the Internet
• the rotary dial-up phone, the flip phone, etc., to smart phones
• the jaundiced history books taught in schools, to the history books used now that have been—are in the process of being—rewritten with verifiable, unbiased facts
• careers that were focused on growth in one company, to the multiple career paths that are all over the board, e.g., 1-2 years at one company, move to the next company, create a start up, etc.
• buying the homes that began as starter homes with an eye on a future mansion, to living in smaller houses and condos, tiny homes, sharing apartments, living with the parents, etc.
• wanting to raise a family with five children, to being more conscious of global and environmental issues and parental attention and choosing to raise one or two children, instead
• a time when Tupperware reigned, to realizing that recycling was just a marketing campaign to now, where we are beginning to focus on repurposing what we can with the mess that has piled up and across our planet.
• TV dinners, fast food, microwavables and processed food, to growing our own food when we can, supporting local when we can’t, cooking for ourselves, and being conscious of the welfare and chemical conditions put on our food sources.
• being ashamed of having attraction/love/sex with the same sex, to being able to marry who we want
• being labelled he/she, him/her to being able to choose how we want to be identified
• a world that is Eurocentric to a world that demands to be recognized as equal and beautiful across the multicultural realm
• etc.

See there? That etc.? That etcetera part includes important topics: religion, politics, corrupt governments, space exploration, medical breakthroughs, pandemics, etc.

What techniques have artists introduced during this art movement

We, as artists, have been creating art through all of this change and we haven’t been doing it in a bubble. Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, etc., introduced assemblage, but we have gone further with it. We’ve grinded, ripped up, creatively placed objects into our paint and on our canvas. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, etc., introduced Pop into our art, but we’ve gone further and added those elements of wow and graphics to our assemblages and collages. Cy Twombly and others introduced us to the lovely painted, scripts of words, and Jean-Michel Basquiat went further and added wild, uncontained, child-like drawings on his canvas, and most artists today have gone further with that. We still paint abstracts. We still paint expressionistic figures. We still work on the classics. We still respond to the world with the themes of suffering and strife.

But what we, as artists today, have introduced more than any other time in art history, is the technique of destroying or removing and then recreating on top of that which has been taken away. We’ve brought markmaking (mark-making) or scratching into our canvases—where we create something beautiful, then scratch words, lines, objects into that seemingly complete work, to draw the eye away from or make a statement within the completion. There is no perfection. We rip up photography and add it to the canvas and manipulate it to be something other than what it was. We doodle on paper, then essentially destroy that by taking those designs into the digital world, either adding them to billboards, selling them as NFT’s, etc. We tear apart and put together objects and create mixed media in a way that’s never been done before.

What to call the art movement after contemporary art

I’ve been looking for a name for this time in art. Our art movement. I can’t find one. So for now, I’m going to give it a title. I’m calling it Art Point .0 (Art Point Zero). Why? Because so much of the change that has happened has been caused by the Internet, and even when it has not been the cause, the Internet has been the conduit for opening our eyes to what has changed. And every step of the digital way, we have continued to upgrade our path on the Internet. From the baud modem to 5G wireless, from AOL to cloud computing, from HTML to HTML 5, etc. (There’s that etc. again.) What will be the next upgrade?

The Internet started with beta. Softwares started with beta. Then we began to upgrade to 1.0s and 2.0s. There will always be more upgrades, more .0’s as we continue to digitally grow. So in order to recognize all the upgrades, naming this movement what I propose recognizes the process from beta to whatever the next upgrade is. It gives a nod to where we started with the Internet being the driving force behind the global changes that have affected our art—and it allows us to continue to grow by not giving us an outdated number.

So until anyone else comes along with a name for this period in art, I am calling this movement—today’s art movement—Art Point .0 (Art Point Zero). We deserve our own movement after the contemporary art movement. We deserve our own place in art history.

Art Point Zero Movement Painting above:
Postcard from Riverside Park 10025
 by Sarah Gilbert Fox