A single installation could consist of, say, a laptop with a film playing, a diagram, a piece of model-making – and the broad hope that these bits are going to add up, or at least relate in a sparky way.Ĭonversely, you can be in a room, and not be sure whether it has works by one, two or three artists, and actually things play equally well each way. That old label 'mixed media' now really means business, with this and that and the other co-existing and no attempt to make them fuse. It's an aesthetic of loose, disparate combinations. But most of the artists here are 'emerging' – the children of the late 1960s and the 1970s, and even the 1980s.Īnd if you are seeking trends among them, what's most noticeable is not a cosmopolitan theme but a particular aesthetic. It includes that most ancient avant-gardist, Gustav Metzger, born in 1926, and a veteran of 'auto-destructive art'. It may feature some experienced hands, like Tacita Dean and Mike Nelson. It gives a prominent public platform to a new generation of artists. That's the occupational hazard of a programmatic show.īut this exhibition is not just a showcase for a new-coined movement. Meanwhile, some works are so thumpingly dull (step forward Simon Starling, doing replications of replications of replications) that they can only have been chosen because somehow they ticked the right boxes. And Shezad Dawood's film Feature mixes up all kinds of clichés – cowboys and Indians and Krishna and Wagner – amid a general mayhem. Rachel Harrison has a photo-gallery of miscellaneous heads, an ID parade of cosmopolitan cultural icons Pascale Marthine Tayou does something similar, but the heads are very moulded in semi-3D and V C embedded in tablets. Some of the work fits the polyglot bill so perfectly – the art version of fusion cuisine. Inside the show, though, it can't quite be ignored. It may be misleading, but it is only likely to mislead artists who aren't much good anyway.

But if you mind about art, then a programme like Altermodern is probably harmless.

These agendas make amusing talking points, handy topics for countless art conferences – and many people in the art world would much rather be discussing art tendencies than art itself.

Ruth parasol porn