Art About Art: Pretencious Clicks, One Liners, Or Reflections of the Times

So what is going on with art about art. Sure it has existed for quite some time. Artists have been apprenticing and referencing artists before them for years throughout history. Even in the sixties and seventies with conceptualism, situationism, fluxus and many other movements artists seem to be referencing other artists before them or even artists of the same time.

So what does this all mean? Why it started I'm not really sure. Why it still exists I'm not really sure. I am so interested in it because I am able to connect to contemporary art that references, pokes fun at, or just plain works off of other contemporary artists and recent art history. If i have formally educated myself for six straight years in Fine Arts, so i can comfortably state i have build quite a vast knowledge of contemporary art and a solid art historical context of the past one hundred years or so. What conflicts me is, the notion that a plethora of the public viewers will not understand the references, then not fully understanding the work. Does this help contemporary art's cause, or hinder it? It's going to hurt it.

(This is what i began in summer of 2007)