Paradigm Shifts in Personal Symbolism in Contemporary Art

Abstract

Considering the characteristics of contemporary art—most notably the simultaneous emergence of numerous schools, styles, and movements, which makes historical classification in contemporary art nearly impossible—and the increasing importance of personal symbolism by artists, often intertwined with pre-established collective symbols within a particular culture or the global cultural context, the issue of paradigm shifts in personal symbolism in contemporary art becomes especially significant.This article seeks to address the following research questions: 1) How do paradigms shift in personal symbolism in contemporary art? and 2) How does personal symbolism relate to the denotative and expressive concepts proposed in analytical philosophy? It focuses on the denotative and expressive concepts in the process of personal symbolism in contemporary art. Accordingly, all human actions, including the creation of artworks, derive from one of these concepts. To identify the underlying concept, the motivation or driving reason for each human action must be considered. If an action is motivated by an individual’s intention to communicate with an audience, it belongs to the category of expressive concepts; conversely, actions without such motivation fall under denotative concepts.It should be noted that in this study, the artwork itself is considered as a whole unit, with attention to both analytic approaches—from part to whole and from whole to part—within the artwork.In this study, using an analytical research method and library-based data collection, it was concluded that, with paradigm shifts in contemporary art, what transforms a human act into a work of art is the discussion and exchange of ideas that occurs within the accepted cultural framework of each country or the global art world—without requiring consensus among all members of the art world to recognize the work as art.