contemplativeIn the mail I received the new Swans CD with a DVD concert.
I have been reading this evening from a book titled, "The Image or What Happened to the American Dream" by Daniel J. Boorstin.
Tonight I suppose I will watch television. Carol goes into work at 2 o'clock AM Tuesday morning. We will all be on the other side. Tomorrow is a Tuesday. Well I suppose I will close to drift into the evening hours. I am trapped.
"This final aspect of modern art, which is even more prominent in post-modernism than in modernism, is implicit in most of the features already discussed, for they all involve disengagement-whether from the aesthetic tradition and the audience, from the perspective of the artwork or artist, or from experiential objects (be they external entities or reified subjective phenomena).
Irony and detachment were certainly far from unknown in earlier periods of art, but prior to modernism these qualities seem not to have been all-encompassing, but qualified by an underlying seriousness of purpose and positive thrust. The "romantic irony" of Friedrich and August Schlegel, for instance, did require artist and audience to be conscious of the fictional or merely imaginary nature of the work of art; but it was not intended to undermine all faith in the ideals of sincere expression and authentic feeling, or in the possibility of redemption through art and the imagination. Modernism, by contrast, is far more caustic and uncompromising-and, as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, it is only in the modernist era that we find artworks whose central attitude is not to communicate or to celebrate, but to pour scornful laughter on the whole of existence. Further, this spirit of ironic negation-of detachment, subversion, and unremitting criticism-has been turned not just on "life" but on "art" itself. In no previous era of Western art is it possible to imagine a figure like the proto-postmodernist March Duchamp, most of whose career was devoted to a series of mockeries, of ironic comments on art and its purported relationship to life; or one like Samuel Beckett, the bard of a condition of nearly terminal detachment, whose dreams of "an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving."" pg. 36 Louis A. Sass "Madness And Modernism"
