Art movements, specialization and the attention economy

Holland Cotter in a Times review for an exhibition devoted to the 'Pattern and Decoration' art movement up at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers calls the concept of art movements dead.

We don’t do art movements anymore. We do brand names (Neo-Geo); we do promotional drives (“Painting is back!”); we do industry trends (art fairs, M.F.A students at Chelsea galleries, etc.). But now the market is too large, its mechanism too corporate, its dependence on instant stars and products too strong to support the kind of collective thinking and sustained application of thought that have defined movements as such.

Yes, I tend to agree that the idea of broad based art movements might be archaic in today's attention deficient world, but movements still abound: albeit in a smaller, more focused way. Today's ‘attention economy’ tends to offer something to everyone. Sometimes, the quirkiest of art appeals to a select few while others may find solace in the banal. Access to multiple avenues and their specialized agendas are very much possible in today’s specialized world. This is not a characteristic limited only to art, but of all expressions of our existence today – be it the sciences, religion or sex. Take the case of computer based art where seemingly simplistic art generated from animated gifs have their own following, or take the case of ab-ex video art pioneered by the likes of Jeremy Blake and one sees the definite existence of specialized sub-genres that might have their own select followings. Another example might be the concept of ‘subversion’ where an original concept is subverted to instill current or artist-desired-values while still feeding off the wake left by the original’s aura.
Of course, broad art movements of the type defined by Mr. Cotter might be gone, but in its place are tens of hundreds of mini and micro art movements all around us waiting to be discovered and then either rejected or adopted by the elusive eyeball.

Herbert Simon defined a concept of attention economics in the following (source: Wikipedia):

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

Rephrasing the above with the word ‘art’ taking the place for the word ‘information’ makes for an instructive statement.

"...in an art-rich world, the wealth of art means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that art consumes. What art consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of art creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of art sources that might consume it"

In fact, you could replace the word ‘information’ in the first paragraph with any of the following words ‘religion’, ‘sex’, ‘medicine’ or ‘science’ and still arrive at a coherent paragraph that rings true and pays homage to specialization…

"Gates of Paradise," by Miriam Schapiro, 1980