What we are saying—that contemporary art is soulless—does not strike many people as scandalous, and such a categorical statement should not necessarily provoke irritation. Indeed, many people fully identify with our position.
We do not believe that a phenomenon as complex as contemporary art can be reduced to our provocative phrase. We are referring, rather, to a tendency encouraged particularly by the art market, which is more interested in money than in social growth and development.
We ask, with a touch of irony: where has the soul gone?
We feel a profound sense of disorientation and emptiness because of this absence.
At times it seems as though the soul refuses to inhabit contemporary works that we find so ugly and absurd. Many of us mourn its absence and often seek consolation in works of the past. We need not go very far back: the late nineteenth century is enough for us to find the soul in art without difficulty.
Complaining about this absence is certainly not enough. Such criticism, legitimate and debatable like any provocation, does nothing by itself to restore what has been lost.
We might venture an explanation: the soul has been driven out by the hunger for money and success. Yet that cannot be the whole story, since these impulses have accompanied humanity for centuries. It seems more likely to us that this loss is connected with the abandonment of certain techniques and a craft handed down through generations, which modernity chose to set aside. That craft may gradually have disappeared, replaced by the “industrialization” of artistic work, in which production has taken the place of creation.
Yet this historical moment seems to call urgently for the growth of a new spirituality, and art can both express and anticipate it.
We do not think it scandalous to argue that contemporary art is experiencing a profound crisis of meaning, or that this process of materialization began in the early twentieth century.
The past century was undeniably a period in which individuals and societies devoted themselves to the worship of money and to unrestrained materialism, known as consumerism—a mindset that left nothing untouched. Not even art.
This is why we understand those who visit major commercial art exhibitions and come away overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness and violence.
>>> Further Reading
Contemporary Art: Art Without a Soul?
Our Sense of Emptiness in the Face of Contemporary Art
The Loss of the Soul: A Process Spanning More Than 100 Years