Brazil’s André Feliciano is breaking up with contemporary art

If you’ve spent time in New York during the past year or so, you might have noticed plywood signs popping up around the city to announce a breakup with contemporary art. Painted with large red hearts, the signs feature handwritten Valentine’s-Day-gone-awry expressions, like “Contemporary art, we need to talk. This isn’t working anymore”. When images of these boards started to appear in my social media feeds, I was perplexed. Was this the work of an affectionately exasperated New Yorker? An irritated gallery manager? Maybe even a viral marketing campaign?

As it turns out, the plywood signage is the work of the Brazilian-born artist André Feliciano. But more than light-heartedly breaking up with the current art scene, Feliciano wants to declare the contemporary époque over, even dead. His recent performance pieces – which include birthday parties and funerals, all featuring a personification of the contemporary – are intended to suggest the period’s ephemerality in order to make room for his new collective movement, called the Floraissance.