This is the credo of late 19th Century Utopian Modernism - down to and including the metaphysical promise of accessing the real
These days I look at this proposition in the following manner The cultural shift realized through modernism may be thought of as an affect of individuals and collective aspiring to be free (self-determined) and therefore engaged in resistance and criticality , it can also be ascribed to the relative progress of the practices of appropriation, instrumentality, and subjectivity advanced by the ideology of capitalism. Within such a scenario the mythical acts of resistance, analysis and negation, which appear to result in either the discarding, or the outsourcing of the very object that they had previously been identified with as author and maker, can also be identified with the progress of the means and terms of production under capitalism. As such the critical practices of the vanguardists of the last century and the endgame of modernism, which seemed intent on bringing about social change by cultural means, unwittingly was also complicit in creating the necessary cultural conditions for capitalism's as yet ideological, and practical hegemony over all fields of production. On 6/12/10 1:07 AM, "William Conger" <[email protected]> wrote: Real art breaks society's dingy, stinking casing of banality around reality. It does two jobs at once -- destruction and revelation -- leaving paradoxical debris to befuddle the timid. No utopia. Just the wonderment of reality. --
