The Future of Art—What’s the Point?
Buddha says to the hotdog vendor, “Make me one with everything!”
Do we see the flow of history, the flow of art history, as a developmental gyre always moving in a rising spiral? Having passed thorough the POMO’s (Post-modernism) “end of history” where the smarties of the world often eschewed a directional point as part of their philosophical gravitational pull—Welcome to Derrida’s pointless forest. Whether things move toward a point depends on where you are standing, and when you are standing in the pointless forest of POMO, YOU are the point, which leads to a lot of individuation though often masquerading as narcissism. It’s good to be finding our way out of the pointless forest. Glossing up Harry Nilsson’s animated film The Point where our star Oblio and his faithful hound Arrow make their way through said Pointless Forest in search of acceptance.
No, boys and girls we are not at the postmodernist’s “end of history”because there is no such thing. There is where we find the end of Deconstruction because there actually was no such thing as deconstruction. If we accept that art is a vital part of the human genome in action suddenly the confusions of Contemporary Art vaporize. We come back to our senses even though Deconstruction was a fun mental ride.
Since we’re talking in “Relative” terms here we come back to Einstein who said, “God does not play dice with the Universe.” Since everything in the universe is always in motion, where one stands is always in relationship to everything else. In terms of understanding Art we come back to the idea that maybe there actually is a point being that metaphorical thinking is a part of this human genome thing.
But that’s what we’ve come to, allowing the point of things to return. The arrival at a new devotion to the point we had to give up on coming to the point, wander through the Pointless Forest and back out to where the world becomes full of meaning once again—luminous, brightly revealing itself in endless wonder.
Good to eat, good to think as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out—we are nourished. Point taken.
Good ole’ Aristotle.
Future of Art 