Lou

According to curators Jeffery Deitch and Dan Friedman, all artistic representations of places, even natural landscapes, inevitably have conceptual overtones that are based on social constructs. "Even the generations of artists who strove to depict absolute truth in their renderings of nature tended to spiritulize it, romanticize, or intellectualize it." Artists today are even more prone to see places through the lens of culture because (like the rest of us) the places they experience most of the time are far removed from wilderness. "The Post-Modern artist now confronts a Post-Natural nature," Deitch and Friedman wrote.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, humans (generalized) are increasingly removed from the natural world. Natural sites are bulldozed to make way for development; we visit the outdoors in the designed environments of parks and playgrounds; we learn about wilderness through the filter of television, video, and film; genetics are turning animals and plants into constructs of human desires; and we obtain our food already processed and packaged. Artists are responding to the artificial environments made by designers, corporate developers, genetic engineers, computer programmers, museum curators, and others for a variety of social and economic purposes. (Themes of Contemporary Art, p.g. 167)

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Liz Craft