Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

At this moment painting is in the process of a massive shift that involves two specific important and deeply intertwined properties- 1 The crisis of the social 2 The crisis of aesthetics. What I am calling a crisis of the social refers just as much to the composition of issues in the social field as to the ways that imagery has been and continues to be modified by technology in the devices that it is made to be viewed upon. While this latter point cannot escape its relation to the various social media platforms it is the after-effect of the usage of imagery through this technology that presents a crisis in the social. This range of imagery is also highly problematized by the seemingly endless vectors of modification that digital imagery can perform which then connect the experience of imagery to a simultaneous experience of doubt. When the veracity of images is in question, a crisis has occurred in the social that is resident in the aesthetic. The crisis that we may perceive in aesthetics – particularly in images – occurs because when image-form changes the aesthetic dialogue around it also has to change and today this dialogue must include the urgencies we find in the social field - particularly from the youth. Aesthetics then is directly defined by the uses and construction of imagery derived from the social field which now freely traverses both a virtual and actual terrain but also includes the problem of veracity in contemporary imagery.