A sketch of the series “From Modernity to After-Modernity” (1)

Art suffers, in Late-Modernity, from a loss of meaning that weighs heavily on the mental sanity of visual artists and it also participates in the weakening of the cohesion of the societal fabric. Looking around at contemporary works exhibited in art galleries, museums, and art fairs one is overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea which explains why most of the people just stay clear of those places. As a thinker and a painter this makes me feel as if I was being plunged into what can only be described as an abyss of incoherence. Art has ended nowadays in the uncomfortable place of being whatever a person who calls herself an artist says it is. In other words we live in an era that inflates the self to the point of equating it to the whole of reality. But art as ‘whatever’ at the hands of egomaniacs is sickening to say the least. This explains why, for the sake of my own mental sanity, I experience a deeply felt urge to clarify the meaning of what art is all about. And in my mind this question can’t find a valid answer by stirring in the details of the present practice of the arts.   

To possibly reach the kind of dept and significance I’m after the object of my inquiry, art, has be be firmly situated in the context of the ‘whole’ story of reality that is available to our perception. By that I mean that it has to be situated in the context of the principle of life that materialized in the emerging and evolving biology of species and later further develops along the path of their societal evolution. Anything less would be dabbling in the insignificance of the details of a sick contemporary life in Late-Modernity.

Read the full article here or here