Photograph of Eleonora Aguiari's Art Intervention: wrapping a London statue of Lord Napier in red tape

Today's topic isn't about some corner of art history rich with paintings for you to consider and have created. But rather about destroying those paintings...and that being the art.

Art Intervention is the act of intervening with a piece of existing art, either through destroying it or “adding” to it. This genre is often seen as performance art. I consider it to be a very “punk rock” aspect in the art-world. A nihilist “screw off” that often also looks like a practical joke. There is often a fine line between this “school” of art and vandalism. Consider these situations and decide for yourself.

From Dada to abstract expressionism to color-field to contemporary minimalists, there is one type of painting that shows up over and over again. The monochrome, multi-layered canvas. The monochrome painting is an exploration of one color only, though there may be other hues mixed and and textures added to the canvas it is truly a study of one shade. However, it has been said that this long celebrated type of painting (which has been critically upheld) began as simply a joke. One could point to the Dada movement for this, which almost always made art out of a place of jesting, either at the viewer's expense or the artist's.

Why is the monochrome so engaging? It has never truly taken over as a form of art and yet it remains there through decades of art movement, still grasping for life and finding it. The aesthetics of the monochrome painting are still seen as "contemporary." Although the form has been around for awhile. Monochrome paintings first garnered interest as early as 1915 with the Russian Suprematism school of painting. However this was an early start, and the paintings did not recieve critical love until later.

Gerhard Richter

Photo realism is, simply put, a genre of art where a painting is created by copying a photograph. Sound familiar? Photo realism is the school of art that gave respect to painting realistic pieces from a photograph. Yet there was also lots of criticism for it, even though this genre started in the 1960's, and artists had been using the help of photography for centuries.

The photo-realists of this time saw themselves as just as different from realists as they were from abstract expressionists. What photo realism was more closely linked with was pop-art. Does the image of Any Warhol's Monroe come to mind? Think about it, that piece was a comment on the over saturation of images and photos in the media. Photo-realism is another take on the many images we see in any given day.

Photo realism is not to be confused with Trompe-lœil, a french term meaning to trick the eye and genre of art where paintings appear to be part of the surroundings, or to be an actual photograph. In photo-realism the viewer is always aware the piece of art is a painting, there is no trick of the eyes creating three dimensions.

The photo-realist painting is different from other forms of realism, because photo-realism truly cannot exist without the photograph. The energy of the painting is always a moment captured in time, un-posed. The image is projected from the slide onto the canvas, resulting in an image much larger than the original photograph.

Precisonism is a truly American form of painting, a style that could really not have been made anywhere else. The inspiration for the art was the country's industrial landscape. This was close in time to the second industrial revolution. Machines had been a part of the cultural landscape, but now more than ever before, major factories were popping up left and right. The term for the style of art was coined during the 20's, the movement itself is generally said to have happened after World War 1 in the inter-war period.

These factories and buildings were the inspiration for the art, and in a pretty direct way. These artistrs's canvases were filled with images of factories, smokestacks, machines and buildings. They weren't painted in a traditional realist style, but were not majorly abstract either. The inspriation for the style was largely cubism, the images in the paintings became somewhat choppy, depicting in pieces of hard edged, geometrical forms that end up almost giving the illusion of motion, of a wobbly building.

Sculpture 25, by Jen Stark

2010 is upon us! A new decade unfolding before our eyes that will surely bring it's own regrettable trends and revolutionary ideas in the art-world. In the regular-world art is slower, impressionist paintings that were at the time considered to be “not real art” are now revered the world over as true masterpieces. And it seems many people are still coming around to the modern and abstract art of the last mid-century. Art has undergone many metamorphosis in the past century, but one might not know it as the art from a hundred-plus years ago remain the undisputed masterpieces for many people.

Whether or not you thought we'd have flying cars by now, we are living in the 21^st century, onto the second decade—this is the future! We've got cutting edge technology, but in a lot of ways cutting edge aesthetics have not totally caught up. With these thoughts in mind, I'd like to ring in the new year by taking a look at the recent trends in art of the past decade, and where we have really come in the past 100 years.