Has contemporary art gone soft?

Is contemporary art boring now? I don’t mean that it’s not enjoyable to look at, or doesn’t have an interesting story to tell, even. But when was the last time we were physically gobsmacked by a piece of artwork? Many of art history’s greatest hits began their road to stardom with shock, from Michelangelo’s boat-rocking nudes in the Sistine Chapel to audiences clutching their art critical pearls at Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863) – and its obvious miscommunication over dress code. The game changer was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – one of the first ‘readymades’ that announced that anything – even a ceramic urinal – could be art as long as an artist said it was. Time and time again, our art historical favourites have proven their worth by bursting through an initial hurdle of audience and industry outrage. But when were we last genuinely outraged by what we’re seeing on the main art stages, and does shock as a currency still have any value?

Sure, Banksy’s viral self-shredding moment at Sotheby’s in with Girl with a Balloon (later Love is in the Bin) gave us a little thrill, and Damien Hirst burning all of those paintings when people chose to keep the NFT version in 2022 had our collective eyes rolling, and Maurizio Cattelan’s £6.2 million banana triggered a global debate on economic division. But were we really shocked, or just a bit irked? 

Perhaps this isn’t an art-specific issue: maybe, thanks to the proliferation of digital media, we just can’t be truly shocked anymore. With footage of genocide broadcast live on social media, 24-hour news cycles relaying relentless terror from all corners of the globe, and uncensored sexual brutality available on any device within a few clicks, perhaps we’ve overloaded and crashed our shock receptors. No matter the intensity of the imagery used by an artist, or the taboo nature of their work’s themes, aren’t we more likely to find ourselves leaving a contentious exhibition with our heads hung, resigned to the unpleasantness of the world? The driving force of shock is surprise – and horror no longer comes as a surprise.

From Paul McCarthy’s grotesque sculpture of George Bush, balls-deep in a pig (Pig Island, 2003-10) to Andres Serrano’s photograph of Christ dunked in urine (Piss Christ, 1987), artists have proven there was legacy-defining power in being controversial to communicate a message. McCarthy was still feeling the negative audience reaction to his controversial style 11 years ago when he was beaten up in Paris while installing his 24-metre butt plug Christmas tree. Three years earlier a print of Serrano’s submerged messiah was destroyed by Christian protesters in Avignon. 

But you only need to see one can of human feces (Artist’s Shit produced by Piero Manzoni in 1961) or one sculpture made of an artist’s own blood (Marc Quinn’s Self from 1991) or one goldfish at risk of being blended live in the gallery space (Marco Evaristti’s 2000 installation Helena) before shit, blood, or minced fish start to lose their bite. Because, by its nature, we can’t expect shock, we cannot be truly surprised by the same thing twice. Shock cannot be derivative. One reason why artists no longer seem to be making art that makes us gasp, may be because everything has simply been seen already; shock is a one-time transaction as we’ve used ours up already – a second tin of poo won’t touch the sides.

Performance art benefits from shock’s one-time-only nature: impossible to perfectly repeat, live performances give audiences no time to adjust their expectations or temper their reactions. Marina Abramović shone a horrifying spotlight onto the violence that lurks just behind social propriety with Rhythm 0 in 1974 when she invited gallery-goers to interact with her however they pleased, leaving her with torn clothes, rose thorns pressed into her stomach, and a gun held at her head. At her 2023 retrospective at the Royal Academy, of course there was gravity in seeing some of her most iconic works restaged, but did anyone feel the same impact as that audience in 1974? Certainly not. Valie Export’s infamous performance, Action Pants: Genital Panic, shocked audiences in 1968 when the artist walked into an experimental art-film house in Munich with her genitals exposed, wielding a machine gun. Ana Mendieta, too, harnessed the power of outrage in her 1982 performance Body Tracks, where she smeared her arms in animal blood and pressed them down on white walls, evoking both ritual violence and raw vulnerability in a gesture impossible to truly replicate.

Then there’s social media’s role in our shock-resistance. Now that everyone who wants to can preach from the digital mainstage, sharing their opinions – no matter how unchecked or unhinged – to the world, there is no longer anything that “everyone is thinking but is too afraid to say”. 

It doesn’t seem that a fear of being ‘cancelled’ is why artists are moving away from shock art, it may simply be that there is no longer an audience for it. In a world that openly spews out its innards across social media, perhaps people long for art to offer us sanctuary from its horrors. Like the Hudson River School of the mid-19th century, which painted enormous, sublime landscapes of the American wilderness in an effort to preserve its beauty from a destiny of Industrialism as Europe’s smog-covered cities had been, perhaps aesthetic pleasure has never been more of a priority – both as respite, and as an aspiration to be surrounded by pleasure and joy, not violence, anger and disgust. 

The problem, though, is that without a critical stance on the world, without political bite, and without the ability to disquiet its audience, art retreats further into its ivory tower. When art ceases to do anything but visually please us, we lose it as a medium with which to call truth to power, or spread meaningful messages. In his Harper magazine manifesto on how “politics destroyed contemporary art”, Dean Kissick spoke back to the 2000s and 2010s, when the art world was propelled by a sense of urgency, “it was urgent that the art crowd kept talking about art, urgent that they kept making it, and urgent that they kept seeing it” – an urgency, Kissick believes was extinguished by a newfound “singular focus on identity” in curatorial choices. Kissick’s article suggests that there is an art world party line when it comes to politics, which has killed off contention – contention that is needed to stir up meaningful emotional punches to audiences. 

We can only measure art’s shock by audience reaction, and the way that these reactions are now reported plays a role in subduing art’s power to outrage. Pandering to audience numbers (driven by audience comfort), collectors, sponsors and patrons, galleries are unlikely to commission exhibitions likely to cause genuine upset. I’m not suggesting that exhibitions should be filled to the rafters with triggering content for the sake of controversy – shock needn’t be cruel, or even offensive. But a lack of ambition when it comes to the levels artists are willing to take their art to has a domino effect on the way it’s written and spoken about. Contemporary art rarely makes headlines any more (besides that damned banana); its impact is reduced, and it reaches fewer people. Art can be impactful if audiences are impacted, and without brave choices being made by artists, audiences simply won’t be there to witness. Yes, Marcus Harvey’s divisive portrait of Moors murderer Myra Hindley saw protests outside the Royal Academy because of its interpreted deification of the child-killer, but people were talking about it – it started a conversation.

Art is increasingly seen as frivolous commodity for the out of touch, and a trend towards the palatable and the sellable – visitors to major art fairs post-Covid will have witnessed the return of painting to the spotlight, a far cry from the 1990s and early 2000s obsession with installation. With shock comes art that sticks (like an arrow through the chest) with audiences after they leave the exhibition; the art world has surely signed its own death sentence by succumbing to superficiality and withdrawing into impenetrable aesthetic theory to defend its importance. 

The art world is a multi-billion pound industry, and shock doesn’t sell – shock is antithetical to the nice, clean, pleasant art that millionaires want to hang up in their cinema rooms – is it any wonder that Damien Hirst has swapped rotting sheep heads for cherry blossoms?

If there is a message that our newfound taste for the inoffensive in art is trying to send, then, it is that audiences are not seeking to be challenged by art, but to find some peace. But how will we achieve peace when our modes of expression have been sanitised into submission?