Timelessness and the Moment -175

Painting’s history has a remarkable continuity over time. The best is clearly of a long and timeless lineage while the moment, well, just is what it is. This is a question dealing with the new motives in art schools only on the periphery.

In response to Fay

QUESTION: The best art has always been radical, innovative by necessity (the artist’s need to overcome the inadequacy of the existing modes of expression), and extremists (taking something to its extreme).
Contemporary artists honour those of the past by following their example, not by aping their work.
Every artist’s work is ultimately about the experience of now, not the past nor the future. It is made for the present, even if it fails to be recognised or acknowledged right away.
I want my work to bring the present moment to the conscious surface of the viewer’s experience, to make them alive to the present moment.
I think an artist’s work gets most interesting when it is taken to its own inherent extreme.
“... art is a context rather than a medium.”
(On Being An Artist, by Michael Craig-Martin p.281)
*YBAs - the Young British Artists of the late 1980s and 1990s, such as Damian Hirst, et al.,.
Could you give me your views/responses to these six points?
For example, your talk on memory drawing from your rear-view mirror relates very much to point 4 “work to bring the present moment to the conscious surface of the viewer’s experience, to make them alive to the present moment.”
Fay