I’m more interested in the workings of modernism than that of postmodernism. I’m more interested in the construction of objects than the deconstruction of it. Postmodernism mostly ends up in a deconstruction of unconscious ideologies and therefore leaving the reader in a radical puzzlement where everything is possible. Mostly in this puzzlement the reader becomes a emancipatory person who’ll develop himself, this emancipatory skill is mostly addressed towards groups of persons in the periphery. In this normative relativism there’s no demarcation and every field (in a sense that it emancipates the subject) is therefore viable. Like I’ve written before, this emancipatory move that follows a relativity and anti-elitism is set up by thinkers from the neo-modernist movement. And can be summarized in the  most famous poem of William Carlos Williams “The red wheelbarrow”. Because it’s so short everybody quotes it:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

As in a previous post already Williams said that “it would be better than depriving birds from their song to call them all nightingales”. This poem can be seen as an attempt of it, in his own words Williams wanted to “escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate work from reality”. It therefore can be seen as an anti-aesthetic programme and a celebration of egalitarianism the same way movements like realism, dada and art brut held as programme. From a philosophical point of view this iconoclasm was theorized from thinkers like Getrude Stein which would be a forerunner of the post-modern movement. As I’ve mentioned before; this neo/post-modernist direction annihilates cultural and historical standards and therefore opens new fields. A distinction between high and low culture can’t be made and post-colonial cultures enter the field. From an emancipatory and democratic point of view it seems like a good thing but what happened to the quality? Nowadays even post-colonial theorists criticize the lack of quality of some post-colonial texts.

A modern philosopher, but certainly not a modernist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, came up with the concept Sorge that can be translated by the word care. According to him it was a notion of a human being, or to say it more accurately a Dasein, should develop. What is universal about Dasein is that it dies. It’s a true cliché that Death is democratic and that it plays the biggest role in everyone’s life. If a Dasein realises this knowledge, it realises the concept of Time and its short span of it. Naturally a person would be scared and starts to asks philophical questions about its own purpose in life. It asks questions about the the purpose of conforming to society’s institutions (or as Heidegger refers Das Mann, translated as the They) Exactly this question can lead to authenticity. This because a confrontation to the face of Death makes people make radical decisions about their intentions. Capitalism denies Death, it’s ideology is so set up that Death is banished from the scene because it destroys authenticity and brakes unlimited growth. (That’s why Eli Lotar‘s pictures are so interesting because it documents the depature of slaughterhouses from the city. Therefore I’ve put a picture of his La Villette series above it).

All paleo-modernists refer to a concept as ‘The mind of Europe’. The term is referring to Nietzsche. According to them this mind is dying. Or as Eliot refers (after insistence of Ezra Pound) in his epigraph of The Waste Land to the poem Satyricon.

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:

Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;

respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.

[Translation :For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a bottle, and when the young boys asked her: 'Sibyl, what do you want?', she replied, ' I want to die'.]

If we see Europe as a Dasein and realize that this apocalyptic knowledge leads to authenticity, Europe simple just have to act to realize this. But the same as Nietzsche, the paleo-modernists saw a way out…this way would be a cultural one with references to ancient culture. It would be a rebirth and a return towards a pre-socratic culture. This renaissance would be a better one and the modernists thought that they have the building blocks to open this new era. These building blocks would consist of historical fragments which would be shored against ruins. But new technologies like film editing and collage would also be used…therefore modernists have a huge amount of tools to give shock therapy towards a dying world. Instead of deconstructing it it would construct it and revive it for a new era.

[The young English poets-referring to Pound and the circle of paleomodern poets around him- QM] all consider that they have a right to the same close attention that men pay to the mathematician and the metaphysician. One of the more distinguished has just explained that man has hitherto slept but must now awake.  (..) [Young men]  defend their type of metaphor by saying that it comes naturally to a man who travels to work by the Tube (…) they[the young English poets-QM] have the right to choose the man in the Tube because of his objective importance. They attempt to kill the whale, push the Renaissance higher yet, outthink Leonardo (…) I expect a counter-Renaissance.

William Butler Yeats ( The major works, Oxford:OUP (2001:388))

In my previous post I was aiming at a modernist theory as a salvation for the egalitarian and conservative viewpoints modern culture nowadays suffers from. This modernist theory combines a good sense of epistemological relativism with some sense of elitism and democracy. (Most of this theory and quotes are based on the lectures of Jeffrey Perl.)

In vein of a great debate under scholars whether there are different movements of romanticism (see Arthur O. Lovejoy‘s “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”[1924]) or just one concept of romanticism  (see René Wellek‘s “The Concept of `Romanticism‘ in Literary History,”[1949]), there is a great debate if there are different schools of modernisms or just one consistent concept of modernism. Without going into this debate I’m following Frank Kermode‘s distinction between paleomodernism and neomodernism. First I’ll start to explain neomodernism. This because in this modernism I don’t see a salvation for art-theory.

I think the main key of understanding the difference between the neomodernist school (early Joyce, Williams, Ford, Stein, Woolf) and the paleomodernist school (T.S. Eliot, later Joyce, Pound) are Aristotle‘s categories in his Poetics. Whereas paleomodernists follow and improve these categories to create a new Renaissance that will bring back a presocratic spirit (with the same similarities of Nietzsche’s Hellenistic utopia), neomodernists attack these categories. Gertrude Stein‘s line ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose‘ in the poem Sacred Emily (1913) can be seen as an attack on Aristotle’s teleology. Instead of a purpose or a plot, Stein is proposing a repetition of propositions. This repetition will serve therefore some coherence in a story.  She also attacks the mythos/plot and mimesis as referring to the action of remembering. This act of remembering was smashed away after World-War II. Williams dislike of action completes this attack on Aristotelian categories. This attack on classicism and love for iconoclasm (started with Walt Whitman) waged a war on high culture. The reason for this war was according to Williams to get back towards an unbound clear thinking, without being blinded by metaphysical concepts like historicity, teleology and other classical concepts.

“It’s the words, the words we need to get back to, words washed clean. . . .  Stein has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean.  .  .  . It can’t be helped that the whole house has to come down. In fact the whole house has to come down.  . . . And it’s got to come down because it has to be rebuilt. And it has to be rebuilt by unbound thinking.”

-William Carlos Williams (Selected Essays [1968]:163)

Neo modernists therefore wanted to come back to some objectivist vision of the world, where objects existed as they are without poisoned by contextuality. This vision is famously quoted by William’s admiration of Marcel Duchamp.

“Thus according to Duchamp…a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ.”

-William Carlos Williams (Prologue to Kora in Hell:improvisations [1917])

A consequence of this iconoclasm is that artists can do as they please because high culture is neglected. Neomodernist followed the adagio: “Everything exists, nothing has value” from E.M. Forster‘s A Passage to India (1924). So without this value of high and low art writers and artists could do whatever they liked.

“There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.”

-William Carlos Williams (Kora in Hell:improvisations [1917])

Needless to say is that Neomodernism is highly influential. We see traces in almost every aspect of society. The explicit love for repetition instead of intentionality posed by artists like Andy Warhol plus his abhorrence of plot.

Of course what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they`re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I`m just the opposite: if I`m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don`t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

The mockery of plot in postmodern literature. The disappearance of the line between high and low art. The need for objective theories like liberalism et cetera et cetera.

If you read for example this story from 1975 from postmodern author Leonard Michaels you’ll see the neomodernistic spirit come in it.

Like I already have said before, as a person working with culture you’re almost always have  two traps you’d most likely would fall in. Conservatism and egalitarianism. If we’re honest we see that an egalitarian point of view towards art is now highly popular and conservatism is mostly a cynical counterreaction towards it.

With web 2.0 and the simplicity to create things we are all nightingales or put it negatively we are all deprived from our song. So people who claim to be an artist aren’t so special anymore(everyone can do it) and should therefore contribute to society. Therefore a whole new army of bureaucrats see pragmatic insights by using Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class to use these artists to spark economical events, upgrade neighbourhoods, give animation lessons, bring people together etc. etc. Suddenly artists aren’t a threat to society or in touch with the gods but instead nice tools to make neighbourhoods better.

With hip aesthetic theories like Relational Esthetics (Bourriaud),theories from Ranciere and Badiou plus artists like Thomas Hirschhorn and Rirkrit Tiravanija we can see that not only on gouvernmental and economical levels these ideas are popular but also on an intellectual artistic level.

So can we for example what writes like Richard Florida (The rise of the creative class) and Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams (Wikinomics)  state that we are entering a new paradigm, episteme or (to stay Althusserian) problematic…in short a new era where egalitarianism is further realised and where we all are winners? Probably we can. But then we have to ask ourselves…is it desirable?

Like I stated before, in my eyes these theories are drenched in an (unconscious) liberal and humanist agenda. Like I shortly mentioned before; these egalitarian views tend to be absolute because egalitarianism is seen as an only right standard. This egalitarianism is for most people a heritage from neo-modernism or postmodernism. In my eyes (and in the eyes from for example an artists like Immendorff and Kelley) egalitarianism is poisonous for art.  Art should be elitist. But if you pose this question you’re probably heading towards a conservative outlook like for example scholars like Scruton do. And this is another trap to fall in. So is there no way out? In my way there is…and it’s called paleo-modernism. Next I will focus on the paleo-modernism of Nietzsche, Valery, Pound and most importantly (the old) T.S. Eliot as good alternatives towards both egalitarianism as well conservatism.

No need to say is that I really hate conservatives on the internet (like for example Roger Scruton who sees him as a mentor) who see T.S. Eliot as someone in their field while he explicitly rejected this philosophy…I then wonder. Did anybody read his early philosophical work, his critics, his essays etc. besides his literary work? If Eliot states that

“The Conservative Party has a great opportunity in the fact that within the memory of no living man under sixty has it acknowledged any contact with intelligence. It has what no other political party at present enjoys, a complete mental vacuum: a vacancy that might be filled with anything, even with something valuable.”(The idea of a christian society (1940))

and you can’t find the ironic critique in it, you’ve probably didn’t understand his literary work.

Both hermeneutics as structuralism and an anti-humanistic point of view. This anti-humanism is very radical, it rejects the notion of a center in  a broad array of theories. This rejection is primary based on an epistemological break which mostly rejects an ungrounded metaphysical principle a lot of humanistic philosophies (unconsciously) share…the notion that man is the centre of the universe. The key in both hermeneutics and structuralism to attack this notion is to see man not as an individual autonomous subject but as an entity that emerges in an encounter with other elements in a system where it functions. So an individual isn’t seen as atomic, but relational. Once adopted this point of view, the door is open for modern sciences  and (post)modern theories.

In Marx, Althusser sees the beginning of this revelation. Marx was one of the first thinker who determined human behaviour as relational instead autonomous, whereas notions of base and superstructure determine a whole new relational form on the origin of this behaviour.

Althusser stays therefore a radical Marxist with a structural reading in it whereas Adorno connects psychoanalysis on Marxism. Even though Adorno underwrites this anti-humanism he sees an irrational structure behind it. Where Althusser sees a very almost empirical surface-structure in Marxism that needs to be ‘decoded’, Adorno puts on an extra layer to explain social structures. This extra structure is borrowed from Freudian psycho-analysis, where also an extra layer is created behind a strictly empirical notion of behaviour.

People who know a little bit of Freund can underwrite that there is a kind of rationality on this extra layer of unconsciousness. This rationale behind unconsciousness is worked out on a structural level by Lacan. Adorno works this Freudian analysis on processes in a society. To accept Adorno is then to accept a certain degree of psychoanalytic theory. A lot of french Marxists see this Freudo-Marxism as a weakness and therefore turn to Althusser. The main argument against this Freud inspired Marxism is that it obscures the theory whereas a structuralist account on Marx is clear and empirical. My rebuttal is this: philosophers like Adorno needed psychoanalysis because they saw the concept of rationality, self-reflexivity and empiricism as problematic, a lot of structuralists take this accounts as (unconsciously) unproblematic. This is the same of Althusser…whereas his theory is lucid it’s always written like there’s a philosopher who lives on a cloud and sees how society is working.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i,e., the class which is ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations…hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one.(Marx & Engels: German Ideology quoted in Ferretter)

Another element in Marxist- inspired theories is the multi-disciplinary approach towards the object of study. In almost every  Marxist analyses there’s a mix of  history, philosophy, economics etc. towards the object of study. This goes back to the beginning where Marx made critical remarks towards theorists like Adman Smith and David Ricardo. The main critical point was the fact that they treated concepts like property, individuality, rationality, competitive nature of Man as God-given(and when God became less popular it became the natural essence). All these theories unconsciously start with the presumption: suppose that we are all atomic individuals, suppose that private property is natural or God-given, suppose we can all be rational, suppose man’s nature is competitive.

Marx saw these concepts as socio-historical constructed and therefore subject to constant change. The best critiques on liberalism/libertarianism start with questioning the main concepts of this vision. I’ve never seen a good rebuttal of this critique from liberal/libertarian philosophers. Therefore I always find it ironic when liberals/libertarians accuse other ideologies as fundamentalists while their concepts about property, individualism, rationality, equality etc. are the most fundamental ones I’ve seen! They’re not seen as fundamental because these concepts are now common sense in our world with its’ liberal/libertarian vision. This because the economic background, capitalism, supports this liberalism/libertarianism. A critical vision towards these common sense concepts therefore is seen as dynamite behind this world dominated system, once you pick out a fundament, the whole building collapses.

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness

(Marx & Engels: Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy )

Economy and the politics of relations in production form according to Marx a base (or infrastructure) in a society. From this base a superstructure emerges. In the first place, this superstructure consists of the political al legal institutions which structure the economical base and the politics of relations. In the second place the superstructure consists of all forms of consciousness in whose terms the members of the society understand and represent themselves to eachother. This consists in political theories, philosophical theories, literature, art etc. In short: what we can call ‘culture’ in a broad sense. This superstructure defies social consciousness, it’s the common sense of the society. Because of this it’s difficult to question this ideology.  This is exactly what happened to liberal/libertarian inspired ideologies. People don’t question concepts like individuality, private property, rationality and the “nature” of Man. The superstructure constantly confirms these concepts. In other words: all cultural manifestations are unconscious marketingconcepts for capitalism.

It’s very easy to see it right now happening. If we focus mainly on the artworld…the fact painting couldn’t be killed is exactly because it’s the best marketing for capitalism. The fact that artworks with references towards popculture and elitist kitsch survive very well is just because of this connection with liberalism. If you look towards works of Koons, Murakami, Hirst, Barney Eder etc. etc. and the way it’s connected with its economic base you can see that all these works glorify these common sense concepts. All these artists are individuals in such as way that they are almost icons of the artworld, they have rational businessplans to market their work, the work is always very concrete and can be bought and used as private property and it all draws on the very nature of man: a competitive creature where winners outsmart all the others (Hirst outsmarts the art-dealers in a competition, Koons outsmarts other artists by not making work on its own, Murakami outsmarts graphic designers, toy factories etc….and in the end they all outsmart poor artists who didn’t survive on the art-market.  

- Antonio Gramsci (19 December 1929)

I personally like Marxist-inspired theories. The first thing you always learn within those theories is that it’s possible to get a new and better world. All (neo) Marxists know why there’s a need for a better world, but they differ on on the other Four W’s and One H (who, what, when, where and how). Even the most fatalistic neo-Marxists belief in a small possibilities. Be it in avant-garde art, underground action groups or the coming of a new Messiah. Every (neo) Marxist theory carries a promise of a better world or redemption in it…just like every great piece of art. It creates hope (even though it’s small).

That’s why I like Rietveld-buildings. If you compare the Schröder-house

with a commonly popular “jaren 30″-house

You can see why the first one is a piece of art, while the second one is a monstrosity. The Schröder-house carries a promise of a better world and an open positive attitude towards it. It looks towards the future and hopes for an utopia.  The latter looks back  in the past and wants to protect it’s inhabitants. You can say the first one is Marxist-oriented while the second one is conservative.

I personally believe that conservatism and Marxism are two sides of the same coin. For me it’s not a strange that conservative thinkers like David Horowitz, Jeffrey Goldberg and Christopher Hitchens once were hard-core Marxists.  Both ideologies attack the fundamentals of  liberalism/libertarianism from an epistemological point of view, while they both differ on the view how to act from this crisis. As a conservative you’ll act protective, defend yourself and like the way how things were before. The happy days weren’t in the seventies but were really in the fifties. Because the example of better days is buried in the sands of time, you just have to dig it up…but you’ve found numerous clues around to show you the way.

As a Marxist you’ll have a much more difficult task. Even though the world is a hell, you should still be optimistic no matter what (or like Gramsci said in his letter from prison…you have to be optimist by will.) Furthermore you should create your new utopia, experiment to get in contact with this new world. This new world shines through the old one from the most hideous places. As an artist I think is essential to choose your path because every ideology has a special way of getting there.

Almost all philosophers are very conservative concerning modern art. They all look more than 10 years back towards the art world. Even the most revolutionary philosophers have the same taste as the average grey haired museum visitor on a rainy Tuesday morning. Deleuze and Lyotard refer towards Bacon, Buren and Newmann while they were writing in the late eighties; Adorno couldn’t accept jazz music in the sixties and Baudrillard makes nostalgic pictures. Even the cultural tastes of Derrida, Žižek and Sloterdijk are at least traditional. I’m the last person on earth who wants to challenge the taste of people who aren’t professionally working in the art field but the point is that all these philosophers are quite successful in aesthetic theory and therefore influences thousands of art students, artists, curators etc. This is especially the case if Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory about the growing importance of Post-production is true.

Jacques Rancière is besides Georges Bataille an exception to the rule. The latter wrote about the revolutionary potential of surrealism in the thirties while it was on its top (even though he was not accepted by the surrealist movement), an exercise Guy Debord would later do in the fifties. Even though he is in his late sixties, Rancière is a contemporary philosopher who makes claims about art. He even brings in a new aesthetic theory  which is based on Lyotard’s later work which could work well with new ways of making art which keeps a revolutionary principle in it. As an artist it’s essential to keep the revolutionary potential in the artwork because otherwise it will fall prey to bureaucrats who will castrate artists and push them as cheap soldiers to upgrade neighbourhoods…as a joker at the king’s court.

In the preface of Richard Florida’s book The rise of the creative class there’s a thought experiment that involves two persons from different time areas in the twentieth century and a time machine. The thought experiment goes as follows: take one person who lives in the beginning of the twentieth century (let’s say 1900) and another person who lives in the middle of the twentieth century (let’s say 1950). With the time machine both persons would be zapped 50 years in the future (so the person from 1900 will be zapped to 1950 and the person from 1950 will be zapped to the year 2000).  Since both persons know the possibility of a fictional time machine (the science-fiction writer H.G. Wells already invented it in The Chronic Argonauts in 1888 and worked this concept out in his famous novel the Time Machine in 1895) the shock and the surprise of time travelling would be the same.

The question Richard Florida then asks is: ‘who would be more surprised in his future life? Is it the man from 1900 who travelled to 1950 or is it the man from 1950 who travelled to 2000?’ On the first sight one is inclined to say that the person from 1900 will be more surprised. He will see automobiles dominate the streets where once where in his time where horses, he will see skyscrapers where once where farms, he will see televisions, big cinema’s, advertisements et cetera. While the person who landed in the year 2000 still see the things he saw on the street but only in a much more improved way. The cars are faster and more futuristic, the televisions bigger and brighter, computers are smaller et cetera. Richard Florida, however, argues the other way around.  He states that although the change for the guy in the beginning of the 20^th century is less big than the change for the guy in the 1950s. Florida states that although the technological change will have a huge impact for the guy who travelled from 1900, the social change wouldn’t be so big for him.  It was just like his time that it was normal to have a family consisting in a woman, a man and some children. During the week the woman stayed at home cleaning the house and taking care of the children while the man got out to work.  The man kept his job for his whole life or maybe shifting once to another company. The scenario is a kind of the same as in 1900 with maybe a difference that the man there would work on a farm instead of a factory.

Florida argues that the person zapped to the year 2000 wouldn’t be surprised by the technological improvements (he would probably be disappointed that there are no flying cars or picnics on the moon) but would be blown away by the great social changes that have taken place in the second half of the century. Florida argues that his head will spin at the huge amount of alternative lifestyles that are normal in the year 2000. We don’t have to give examples of the variety of forms of living together (“alternative lifestyles”) and relationships that are common in the year 2000. Furthermore people don’t work for a whole lifetime by a boss and also change the kind of jobs more radically. Also different religions are being supported. What the last part of the twentieth century brought us was a kind of heterogeneity on the social level. Florida therefore argues that this kind of social revolution is the most radical paradigm shift that happened during the twentieth century.

Following this story we can see two kind of revolutions were taking place during the last couple of centuries. One revolution was a technological one while the other was a social one. My bet will be that the next revolution will be an ecological revolution. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, there were huge ecological disasters while the standard of living for the people became higher. With this higher standard people could concern about suppressing social constraints and rebelled against it. After this social revolution, people will be more concerned with with ecological problems which from an demographic, social and economical viewpoint need to be addressed.

We can see the beginning of this concern take place at the 1960′s where Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, where these ideas would be revolutionized by deep ecology and earth liberation movements. A book with another approach but still a revolutionary impact is  William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things. This book propagates both economical, technological and ecological growth by combining these themes and developing a new unifiable paradigm.

So if I would be transported 30 years from now, I will probably be impressed by the ecological revolution that has taken place in those years. There will be some new technological things and some new social achievements but I’ll have the feeling that those aren’t  as revolutionary as before. I’ll probably would be impressed by the ecological move that was made.

But then the question is: are all paradigm shifts global? Was the Enlightenment a global phenomena? Where shifts in technological developments and social developments global? My guess it’s probably not. The tendency is of most revolutions that occur in the west is they are seen by their instigators as universal.

Critical philosophers and non-western societies don’t see it that way. The non acceptance homosexuals in eastern europe, the position of the woman in African countries and the lack of technological means show that most revolutions are local. The ecological revolution will probably also be local. This because the need for an ecological revolution is big in western countries.  Western people want to live with different lifestyles in high-tech green environments.  The periphery probably doesn’t have the means to get these environments and have much more deeper problems to overcome.

The political artist Jorg Immendorf (1945-2007) claimed that democracy in art equals fascism. If we would make art according to the wishes of the public we will end up with rubbish. We would probably end up with Biedermeier-art, Prada-kitsch, graffiti/street-art, realistic oil paintings and well-crafted artworks.

What interests me is the notion of aesthetics and democracy. Is it possible to become a good democratic artist?  This question is certainly crucial because there are trends in public policy and art (probably every policy-maker has Richard Florida’s Rise of the creative class as their bible), the notion of craftsmanship as an aesthetic yardstick to measure ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art (Koons’ Celebration, dogs, Hirst’s skulls), the mixing with art and design (is Shepard Fairly an artist or a designer?) and interactive artworks.

A lot of defenders of these former trends all play the democracy and egalitarianism card; they say if art serves the need of the public, upgrades neighbourhoods, brings together people from different cultural backgrounds its good art. Democracy and egalitarianism are probably a nice political and economical point views when you try to share scarce goods, but should this these ‘nice’ and rational visions have place in the artwork. Should art be nice and refer to ad populum, ad numerum and ad temperantiam?

I first want to research this ‘liberal’ spill over trend in other areas before returning to the artworld. Then I would want to attack this liberalism as a metaphysical and common sense driven ideology (in the sense of the definition used by Althusser and Gramsci) which even shouldn’t be a yardstick in political spheres and certainly not in aesthetic spheres. Then I would like to look for an alternative approach towards this liberalism and then I want to look for the consequences it has for interactive art.