Response to "What Time Looks Like at the Moment"

One of the most fascinating aspects of modern art is the range of forms in which the art itself can take. Predominantly, contemporary art seems concerned with ideas over the actual execution of the art object. The artist themselves are very keen on making relationships and connections between ideas. Because of this, it seems that the objective of making art is changing, at least for some people. Whereas, the traditional goal of an artwork (classically) was to make something beautiful and charged, nowadays it seems more about simply being ‘radical’ and throwing really random things into a collage.
However, it is not until one flips through an ‘artist book’ that execution becomes just as important as the ideas contained. I believe that this is due, in part, to the sequential nature of the artist book. Each page is dependent and connected to its previous and successive pages. So in that way it becomes the artist’s job to develop a creative solution that connects each page. In Michael Snow’s Cover-to-Cover, he essentially mirrors the book and draws the sequence of pages towards the center rather than the end of the book. To me, this is extremely clever, and also a cool idea. It is not an artwork that simply describes an idea. Instead, it can inspire creativity in execution and teach artists how to view sequential artwork through a new lens.