1st blog post

In the Questionnaire on "The Contemporary", the question at hand is, in some regard, what is contemporary art? Hal Foster, who is posing the question, is inquiring if it is only merely institutional or if it is a result of a neoliberal economy. Alberro responds by addressing that, since the Cold War, neoliberalism has become dominant over our culture. Because of this, it has directly affected the fine arts.

One of the most interesting statements I found in Terry Smith's reading was his idea that contemporary art is simply "the old modern in new clothes". This, to me, seems about right. Modernism took place for more than 100 years, all during that period were sub-movements of art including dadaism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, ect. If this is the "old modern in new clothes" then that would imply that the art being made today is reflections of past works but with a new twist on it.
Looking at Smith's idea of contemporary art simply being "passages between cultures", he simply referred to it as, "[work] that seems to have nothing that is contemporary about it, yet it persists. He explains that "irony is irrelevant but anachronism is relevant". I suppose that this style of making work would have to involve some sort of socio-poltical cause.

In the reviews of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Michael Fried and The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay they were seen as two very different books with two very different views on photography as art. On the one side, Fried's book looks at photography in much more of a "contemporary as new modern" style. He addresses that the most successful photographs are the ones that draw the viewer in while at the same time keeping the viewer removed from the actual image, almost as a 3rd person point of view. This takes the same technique used by Manet in his painting Olympia, in which there is the nude figure directly addressing the viewer, while at the same time, painted in a way that is drawing attention to the actual painting itself.
On Azoulay's side, this book is viewing photography as what seemed like a much more "contemporary as the passage between cultures". This is addressing that photography has the power to do much more than just hang on a wall, but that through very realistic, photojournalistic images can influence the viewer to act in a much more social justice sort of way.
I can slightly understand how Fried's way of thinking can fit within the context of modern to post-modern to contemporary, being that he is saying that the photographs need to have an aesthetic that fits within the realm of that timeline, where as I cannot understand at all how Azoulay's thinking can fit in at all.