Boreas Fine Art offers a carefully chosen selection of conceptual art, artist books, and artist projects.
At the end of the last century, critic Rosalind Krauss described the evolution of art into what she called the post-medium condition, doubtless a play on the title of an earlier book by François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir. Sentiments similar to those of Ms. Krauss’s were expressed by Lucy Lippard in her book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. This and other work by art historians and aesthetic theorists would portend a sea change in the way art was created.
The post-medium condition signifies a world where artists can create art without being confined by the attributes of any particular medium, e.g., painting, sculpture, or photography, in contrast to a previous period where the medium chosen had been seen as critical to understanding and evaluating an artist’s work. More particularly, the idea that any given medium has unique characteristics that differentiates it from any other medium was part of a broader theory of aesthetics most famously articulated by Clement Greenberg as part of a strict formalist theory of modernism. In the hands of Greenberg, this formalist theory devolved into a formidable intellectual force that drew the attention of the art world away from what was represented in a work of art and towards how it was represented, i.e., how well the medium was deployed by the artist to make an artistic statement.
Krauss argued that Greenberg’s views had become irrelevant in the post-medium environment: it is not sensible to evaluate art or an artist through the lens of a particular medium if the artist is free to employ any medium or many different media in the creation of a single work. Much of the art produced in the last three or more decades, such as conceptual art, mixed media art, installation, appropriation, aggregative media, artist books, and performance art, does not have a single or even any material support.
Our collection reflects this unconfined view of today’s contemporary art world in the West. In choosing what to offer, we are guided only by our own expansive view of what constitutes art in today’s world.
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