STEINBERG, L. (1999) From Other Criteria IN: HARRISON, C. Art in Theory, 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, United States: Blackwell, 948-953.

Leo Steinberg’s ‘From Other Criteria’ is a short essay talking about the way certain people view art and how particular styles of art made presently are not necessarily seen as ‘art’ in comparison to known artists such as Picasso and Warhol.  In this essay he uses the artist Robert Rauschenberg, and compares his strange pieces of work to shed a light on how not all art has to be a neat little painting or at least an aesthetically pleasing piece of work. He references this type of work style as the ‘flatbed picture plane’ and summarizes the essay by saying “It is part of a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories. The deepening inroads of art into non-art continue to alienate the connoisseur as art defects and departs into strange territories leaving the old stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.” Basically, saying that art made because the artist wanted to make it, is seen interesting and more worthy today than that of the artists who produced work in the modern art period and that the standards of criteria of what people view as art has changed from that of the early modern art era.

SERRA, R. (1999) From the Yale Lecture IN: HARRISON, C. Art in Theory, 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, United States: Blackwell, 1124-1127.

Richard Serra’s ‘From the Yale lecture’ is an extract taken from the artist’s Yale lecture in which he talks about his site specific built artworks that are seen as uncanny and controversial. He says in this lecture: “The work does not enter into the fictitious realm of the ‘master’.” And that he is “not interested in art as affirmation or in art as manifestation of complicity.” Essentially, he is making a dig at the attitudes of modern sculpture and how the teachings of the masters are that sculptures should be beautiful Michelangelo pieces of work made from marble, unlike Serra’s curved bent pieces of metal.

You can see the similarities are quite distinct in each of the short writings, whilst both Steinberg and Serra are talking about different elements in Fine Art, they are both saying the same thing. Late Modern art and now Contemporary art should be made because the artists want to make what they want to make in their own creative space. Contemporary artists shouldn’t have this almost burden over their head of having to work in a specific manner because that’s what the masters of art taught.

The Tate modern is an example that you can appreciate the art movements and masters of art whilst also appreciating the crazy creativity and uncanny use of materials that contemporary artists of today explore in their work.