THE GROOVE - Can Art Still Shock Us?

THE GROOVE

Welcome to the 222nd issue of The Groove.

I am Maria Brito, an art advisor, curator, and author based in New York City.

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For centuries, art has been a disruptor. It has enraged the establishment and sparked riots. Works have been censored, banned, and even destroyed.

The term avant-garde, borrowed from the French military, originally referred to the front line of an army, those who moved ahead into uncharted territory. In art, it came to define radical movements that sought to challenge aesthetic, social, and political norms.

While artists have always experimented and pushed boundaries, the avant-garde as we know it emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries with movements like Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism.

These artists, whether it was Berthe Morisot defying the Academy’s strict rules of representation or Marcel Duchamp declaring a urinal to be a work of art, rejected tradition and forced audiences to reconsider what art could be. Avant-garde movements continued through Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art, and performance-based practices that blurred the boundaries between life and art.

The avant-garde was not just about innovation, it was about breaking new ground, provoking thought, and sometimes even causing discomfort. But today, when rebellion and irony are mainstream commodities, can art still claim to be truly avant-garde?

The internet has changed how we process provocation. A bold artistic statement that might have once been debated for months in galleries and salons now burns bright and fast in a social media cycle before disappearing into irrelevance.

Instead of causing real discomfort or shifting paradigms, most “shocking” works today are absorbed into the endless churn of content. One moment, a work might go viral for its audacity, but within days or hours it’s just another post buried under the next trending outrage.

The expectation for controversy is so high that attempts at provocation often feel performative rather than genuinely disruptive. We no longer ask, “How dare they?” but instead, “Is this just another stunt?” The shock value that once propelled avant-garde art forward now risks feeling formulaic, like just another marketing strategy rather than a cultural rupture.

It’s not that artists aren’t trying. Some are using AI and deepfake technology to question reality itself, while others affix a banana with duct tape to the wall. Yet even these efforts often struggle to cut through the numbing effect of our media-saturated world. The audience has changed. We’re too desensitized by the sheer volume of sensational content and the 24/7 news cycle. Today’s viewers expect transgression rather than feel jolted by it.

If the avant-garde is dead, what comes next?

Maybe this exact time in art isn’t about shock at all. Perhaps its power now lies in skill and talent, not in gimmicks. We are looking for the mastery of ideas, form, and execution. For the truly sublime.

Think about Kerry James Marshall, for example. An artist who has mastered landscape, portraiture, still life, history painting, and other established genres since the Renaissance. Without resorting to anger, grievances or victimhood, Marshall, who’s 69 and has been painting for more than 45 years, is not focused on portraying Black suffering. Instead, he highlights the fact that the Black experience in America has always encompassed more than just hardship and injustice. Despite all the challenges, Black lives have been, and continue to be, rich, varied, and filled with moments of joy.

With his gorgeous, detailed paintings, KJM does not produce for the market. He is a slow and deliberate artist whose work, according to him, “needs to have reason to exist”. In the recent crossfire of dismantling D.E.I. and the backlash of wokeness, Marshall seems to be the real revolutionary who will be featured in every American art history book, all while enjoying a successful and lucrative career.

The artists who will shape the future are not those who rely on provocation alone, but those who understand the moment we are living in, who can challenge us with both compassion and subversion. The true avant-garde may no longer be found in spectacle, but in those who create work that lingers, that is skilled and beautiful. True masterpieces demand that we return to them, again and again, because they refuse to be consumed in a single, fleeting glance.

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TEDX TALK

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