The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art

A new paradigm of an engaged, participatory and socially relevant art is emerging. If you're out, you're out - you simply don't count," the artist Sandro Chia once declared in an interview in Art in America. Referring to the art world, he said, "Anything that happens must happen within this system," which he went on to describe: "I work for a few months, then I go to a gallery and show the dealer my work. …

…suppose the question doesn't become what art should do, but rather how do we find that which art should serve? Art is already in service, so we could perhaps change that to which it is in service? Suzi: So the question is what could art better serve than the things it has been serving, like bourgeois capitalism, throughout our lifetimes? Hillman: Right! And I think the artist in the river is serving a different god.