OK, we’re so over Post Modernism, aren’t we? Well, if we are, what exactly was it? We think it was the banal coupled with ennui founded on a foundation of money culture, where value was best expressed by the cynical pile-up of wealth, abstract glowing cyphers on a screen. Meaning becomes provisional, no grand ideas save that being was meaningless—images that could have had bearing, sailing away like lost kites in the wind—more coming right along, and then the next and then the next. Things of value gusting off as a confetti so that the only thing seeming to have value was money itself.  Art lost its value as something to help develop the soul, something that could shine into the corridors of the mind, into the dark halls of the body with its feelings, into the joie de vivre of spirit, joining the dance of dark and light. “Well, money is something, it’s a basic flow, and me I am the archetype of jewels and dough,” says “His Highness King Gold” and “Madam Silver” his Queen. “They keep it all a-rustling with their Dollars and Pounds, everybody knows that money makes the world go ’round.” This from The Incredible String Band, c. 1968. In the 60’s some of us were absorbed into suffering the guilt of being among those who had too much in an ocean of those who had too little. All manner of goofy schemes rose up, communes and collectives, the “War on Poverty” as images of money replaced the image of the gods; we’ve been striped of every value save market value. The Trump’s apartment in NYC—a golden emptiness. Nothing to eat as the teeth clink on a wedge of golden pie. Does the name Midas ring a bell?

This Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog is the epitome of value in the age of the twilight of the gods, Götterdämmerung. So that Trump Tower becomes aspirational. BOTH truth and beauty blown away. There is no salvation, no development. The old gods are dead, the new god says, “Get as much as you can while you’re here.” Some smokey whisperer telling ancient truths just doesn’t cut it as we gather ’round the new golden calf of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog. Fetching $160,000,000 at auction.

This scene from the 1956 The Ten Commandments lives in the land of naive kitsch unexamined and soon after, Moses comes down from the mountain hurling the god-wrought stone tablets smack onto the calf. Of course, the ground opens and the calf is swallowed in volcanic flames as the LAW takes the place of the idol in the biblical fairy tale. In our provisional world of get-mine-first the Law devolves from a civilizing energy into a pry-bar opening an abstract advantage over the other. Tacticle delays in court proceedings are about this usage of the IDEA of law and justice, often for unjust purposes…

How can you look at Koons’ Balloon Dog and not think of the biblical calf. When art becomes translated into money there is a garble of meaning. You can’t cynically shrug away the statue of Lincoln sitting in his DC memorial or the near-by Maya Linn Viet Nam memorial as you can the Balloon Dog. It’s the very point of Koons’ dog as an artifact of the Pointless Forest. Memorializing what…?

The flow of history moving to the future finds some wishful thinking and some despair, but if art is to retake a place of real value, meaning beyond money, it will re-emerge. It feels dire these days with “newspeak” dominating discourse, nothing of real value is spoken. But, we remember the only gold worth anything is The Golden Rule.  A revival is being born as we rediscover timeless value. The orange grotesquery occupying the White House is but a tiny speed bump as we navigate toward planetary and cosmic thinking. Let’s dance our way into the mystic, shall we? It’s about time.

We’ve been through the “twilight of the gods” with the Post Modern cascade of nihilism. We see artist Richard Prince, that arch nihilist from the Eighties, coming full circle with his collecting mania focused on archiving the original texts and ephemera of Beatnik, Punk and Hippie eras in leather-bound clamshell boxes. Those three eras reflected the pull of culture to recapture something of lasting value. High atop the Chicago Board of Trade stands the Goddess Ceres (Demeter to the Greeks) holder of the energy of grain and increase.

There may be trouble ahead…but let’s face the music and dance. Let’s welcome back the gods! That’s a future worthy of life.