Modern Art is the Art of the Lastman

[Apollonian_Germ]

Hey all! Glad to be here, thank you for allowing me onto this forum... I've been a follower of Free Domain Radio for almost 6 years now and have always really enjoyed the show.

I recorded myself reading aloud a fantastic article by the artist Miles Mathis called "The Art of the Lastman" which takes a very broad overview of Modern Art through the lens of Nietzsche's concept of 'the lastman'.

It's kinda long, but as a community of people who is used to listening to Stef's podcast, I thought that if anyone had the attention span to really enjoy this, it would be you guys. 

This is my first extended reading too, so please let me know if there's anything I can do to improve.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jmLzuZimmo

[AccuTron]

It is long and I have no contact with any art scene, but on first listening, I gathered that the art world, a tricky label, is showing advanced symptoms of what we see so much elsewhere:  vested interests, dumbing down, and denial.

[luxfelix]

Related literature: 

 

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1358748500l/6988014.jpg

[Apollonian_Germ]

Yes, AccuTron, it has basically become a tool of the State, to be honest. Half of it is meant to express weird alienating ideas, like the idea that nobody can really express themselves authentically and that all art is to be interpreted via the context alone... in the modernist view, all art must be a symbol of something else. The art-object itself is secondary to the conceptual analysis of the art object, whether that's an historical or psychological or socio-economic or gender/sex/race identity analysis... it MUST be something to be analyzed.

Art in the past may have been meant to represent certain things, but the ideas behind them were never expressed at the expense of the quality of the art. The art was supposed to be interesting in and of itself, and in good at, the aesthetic pull is there before you could even guess what it might represent intellectually.  

But this modernist analytical type of aesthetic philosophy gives art critics and professors and curators and all kinds of other investors a great opportunity to peddle their political and social agendas. Believe it or not, the State definitely uses art as a weapon, and modernism was the perfect vehicle for it.

[luxfelix]

An observation:

 

Just as the separation of Church and State should not also mean separation of ethics from politics (according to the Deist Framers), the separation of Church and Art should not also mean separation of meaning from form (referring to mind/body;Apollo/Dionysus split).