"When I was a student, it was Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg who were clearly the most important artists," said Thomas Lawson, a painter and dean of the School of Art at CalArts. "Them and Andy Warhol. Everybody agreed that they were the ones. Now, because there are such diverse possibilities, it's much harder to say."
Of contemporary art today, two things, and maybe only two things, can be said for sure.
First, there is more of it -- made in more styles and materials, by more artists who live, work and have exhibitions in more places -- than ever before.
Second, it doesn't fit into neat categories or hierarchies. Thanks to the Internet, the ease of travel and the growth and globalization of the art market, the days of a single dominant style are long gone. Despite the proliferation of electronic media, many hip young artists devote themselves to drawing and painting or defy classification by dipping into a mixed bag of materials. The notion that an artist must live in a particular place to be successful is also a thing of the past. If there's such a thing as a prevailing trend, international eclecticism must be it.
"If you talk about local art, you sound like a Luddite," said John Baldessari, a pioneering Conceptualist who has been based in Los Angeles for decades but had his first success in Europe and is still in high demand there. With big museum shows in Germany and Belgium this fall, he's planning a retrospective at the Tate London in 2008.
To see his point and get a fix on contemporary art's big picture, consider the fall openers at Los Angeles area galleries. Painting, sculpture and photography coexist with new media, often in the work of a single citizen of the world who may be a visual storyteller, formal purist or social critic.
Among visitors from abroad, Joao Louro, a Portuguese impresario said to choose media "as a director selects the musicians for his orchestra," shows paintings and wall reliefs related to the film industry at Christopher Grimes Gallery. Henry Coombes, of Glasgow, exposes violence and domestic distress below the surface of British middle-class life in paintings, sculptures and a video at Anna Helwing. "Sea Change," an international group show, explores "ideas of three-dimensionality" in painting and sculpture at Roberts & Tilton. One artist, American painter Jimmy Baker, gives a surreal gloss to the evening news in highly refined but bizarre images drawn from popular culture.
