Understanding art is like understanding a foreign language. You can go abroad and gradually learn new words for yourself. Or you can buy a textbook or study with a teacher. However, the best option is to combine these methods. In understanding contemporary art, you need to rely on your feelings, and then recheck them by reading annotations at exhibitions, critical articles, texts on the history of art. Having typed a kind of “vocabulary”, it is worth starting to discuss, debate. Good art is always a suggestion for reasoning and discussion.
We can call contemporary artists people who are trying to understand how the current world works, what challenges art, society and man face today. But next to them there are authors who adhere to the tradition of, say, academic painting, which appeared in the 17th century. All Ukrainian art education is academic, it has nothing to do with modernity, it comes from the 17th century.
Despite the fact that we did not live in the 19th century, realism (as the main creative method of that time) seems absolutely clear to us. But this is a superficial sensation, because we only look at the form that we recognize; we don’t really understand the cultural context in which the work was created. So, we just mindlessly consume it. If we want to really understand the art of the 19th century, then we need to seriously approach the study of the features of this era: what people thought about themselves and their time, how they felt, what was valuable to them, for whom the artists created their works, how it functioned the system of art, how society was arranged, and so on. It is much easier for a modern person to perceive contemporary art, because he is the one who lives, acts and feels in our time.
