ABSTRACT
Modernist thinkers and artists dismissed beauty. Not for them the bourgeois charm of “flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello,” as Barnett Newman stated in 1967. Traumatized by war, economic depression, and bewildering social and technological change, they created impersonal, autonomous, self-referential works that avoided pleasing or gratifying their audience. Abstraction was the most obvious expression of this formal imperative, and alienation its mindset.
But after a century of brilliantly original experimentation, these modernist assumptions had run their course. Moreover, today we face a different set of social and artistic conditions: the intrusion of media into every aspect of life, universal access to information and self-expression on the Internet, the destabilization of fiction, fact, and truth, and a new, globalized awareness. These twenty-first-century developments have inevitably impacted art and the aesthetic, as we pass from an era of beauty as form to an era of beauty as interaction.
This change is apparent in the sudden rise to mainstream status of genres such as documentary, nonfiction, and photography, which before were considered sub-artistic. Rather than calling attention to the work as an autonomous structure of language or paint, fact-based art immerses audiences in what lies outside it, the “not art” of reality—and of course, in the process, reality is transformed as well. Similarly, when contemporary artists place themselves inside their installations or cede creative decisions to their models or viewers, the “magic circle” of form is breached, and the work exists as one factor in an ever-expanding relational system. Artists recycle physical refuse or forgotten artworks or marginalized cultures to create dialogues across time and history. Whereas the avant-garde located value in autonomous form, the beauty of interactive art lies in interconnection and mutual influence, indeed, in “warm” experiences of reciprocity, equality, and empathy. In interactive beauty, the line between aesthetics and ethics becomes all but imperceptible.
