abvg,I only wanted to give you a quick reply to your last post - and try to clear up several things at the same time. First, I apologize for any misunderstandings that may have come from my side. I feel that we finally have similar views on Postmodernism, painting, Autonomous Art, etc. - only from different perspectives (which is not all that surprising). It seems that no matter how much one tries to say things clearly, something always goes astray. But you have to keep trying...
I also want to excuse all the typos and spelling mistakes in my last post (I also work late - or very early in the AM) - especially a sentence toward the end of my last post which didn't exactly say what I wanted it to. I should have said: "As the "winner" of WW II, America was already a nation well on the road to world domination, albeit with somewhat different tactics than those of the present. And one of the major - though sometimes neglected - results of this "total victory", was that America's cultural elite felt that it could finally afford to discard its old and not a little embarassing self-image as a culturally underdeveloped class."
"Postmodernism is a punk band from Oklahoma" - New York City cabdriver
(Preface quote from Warren Burt's essay: "Zurbrugg's Complaint, Or How an Artist Came to Criticize a Critic's Criticism of the Critics" in Critical Vices -The Myths of Postmodern Theory" by Nicholas Zurbrugg, 2000)
I grew up on the Arkansas side of the Arkansas/Oklahoma border and this somehow reminds me of the time many years ago when I was driving with a friend on a dirt road just over the border in Oklahoma territory (which used to belong to the Cherokee Indians). We were uncertain of where the road might take us, so we asked a guy we passed if he knew where the road might lead. He thought for a while before answering: "Well ... this here road don' go nowhere!" I've always suspected that the Oklahomans may have had SOMETHING to do with it, but I had to wait a long time before finding the above-quoted evidence. So there you have my "conspiracy" theory over Postmodernism.
On a slightly more serious note, I want to give you a passage from Camus' "The Rebel" (1951) which relates directly to our problem. (As you may have noticed, I am fond of quotes). It has always made me feel better to read this passage.
"One of the implications of history today, and still more of the history of tomorrow, is the struggle between the artists and the new conquerors, between the witnesses to the creative revolution and the nihilist revolution. As to the outcome of the struggle, it is possible to make only inspired guesses. At least we know that it must be carried out to the bitter end. Modern conquerers can kill, but cannot really create. Artists know how to create, but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists. In the long run, therefore, art in our revolutionary societies must die. But then the revolution will have lived its allotted span. Each time the revolution kills in a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the world according to its laws, it will not prove that quantity is king, but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair....
But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may have an end; but it is our task not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of....His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality which is beauty....Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place - far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history - to this living virture on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world that he lives in, and which we must defend in the face of a world that insults it."
One of the revolutions Camus is talking about is what came to be known as Postmodernism.
Best Wishes, David
