What is experimental art today?

Many institutions seem to think experimentation with process is not a priority, causing artists to fall into two categories.

One group is made up of artists who do not experiment with process. For example, take graphic designers making a product in a way that is taught at schools and commercially sold through products and in galleries. Making a computerised design and printing it out is a simple process involving a computer and a printer, which is not an experimental process by itself. 

The second group is comprised of artists who take traditional processes like  graphic design and experiment with them by adding other steps, technologies and materials or they create a process that is entirely new.

Perhaps the majority of artists, and I include myself personally, do a bit from each category, differentiating their experimental art from what some know of as 'bread and butter' work.

Even artists in this second set may automatically assume that experimentation is not what they're doing because there is a history of experimentation in art, notably during the modernist period at the turn of last century, which continues today. This tradition packs the word 'experimental' with so much pretension that it intimidates them into thinking they can't improve upon the past. They say, 'It is a postmodern world, everyone is experimenting with process, so why make it an issue?'

Yet the difference between these people and graphic designers is like the difference between night and day; one that deserves praise, and rarely gets its due.

Experimentation may sound hackneyed, but actually offers an unending potential for new ideas.  Experimenting with artistic process is making art in a new way, so that it is possible for the curator to make an argument that the work was made with a process that is not usual or commercial.

Often, because the unusallness of the objects or materials being used, or the way they are used, is the experimental part of a work, the best way for me as a curator to say that the work is experimental is to say what it is or how it was made in a clear, normal way rather than referring to the work in terms of abstract concepts. 

The reason to write in this way about it is because the experimental process rather than the abstract meaning of the work is the focus of an experimental work, since the meaning shifts people's attention away from 'What am I actually seeing and is this something new" and towards a relativist interpretation of 'well, it can be all these different things' and these meanings have generally been explored before.