So, What is “New Genres”?

When people ask what I study, I answer that I am earning my BFA in Sculpture and New Genres. Then comes the inevitable question, “I understand sculpture, but what does New Genres mean?”

Let’s talk about it.

In short, New Genres is a 20th-century art movement and practice that encompasses installation, performance, sound, video art, body art, internet art, and emerging art forms. Notice it excludes traditionally defined forms of art that we are used to, such as painting, sculpture, and photography (but that one gets a little complicated).

New Genres is a very conceptual and often philosophical interdisciplinary (and transdisciplinary) approach to creating work, where the appropriate medium is often chosen after an idea is formed.

My experience with New Genres includes, but is not limited to, pushing boundaries, radical experimentation, and blurring lines between genre/media to challenge and question the relationship between art, culture, our preconceived notions, and the affect of mediums.

I identify the beginning of New Genres with the early 20th-century art movements, Dadaism and Futurism. Their experimental nature paved the way for new conceptual thought. Namely, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). See here for further reading.

New Genres is not easily defined, but a rejection of defined mediums and our accepted notions of art through conceptual thought and interdisciplinary means.