art has always been food for my soul, i however keep on returning to the historical representations; they seem richer and less demanding or perhaps just more familiar.
i was hungry, but it wasn’t lunchtime yet. who was the creator of the mealtime convention anyway? i decided to blame it on the fact that i had an early breakfast. the café had just opened. 10am; they were busy setting up the market across the street and it was getting busy outside. still, i was alone in the café except for the waiter who was busy wiping down the counter. the smell of beer and cleaning liquid filled the air. i watched him watching me watch him. it’s quite common in amsterdam to find an entire establishment, regardless of size, with only one person serving drinks, taking orders, cooking and washing up. so i waited, signalled and waited some more; eventually in a very heavy accent he asked what i’d like:
‘i’ll have a croque monsieur and a coffee please’,
he replied, a frown forming above his ice blue eyes; ‘ok, coke zero and coffee, anything to eat?’.
my idealist expressions seem at war with my romanticist conceptions.
navigating the plethora of conventional constructs that forms part of art theory, is becoming seriously complex. even while the auction prices for those unattainable works soar amidst the mechanics of the art market, the value and meaning of art in social consciousness has taken on a very un-unique element not dissimilar to the initial effects after the invention of photography.
the function and philosophy of art has reached a certain stalemate which arthur c. danto describes at length in ‘after the end of art’; his twentieth century conjecture on hegel’s ‘end of art’ theory.
the end of art doesn’t mean there won’t be anymore art, in fact i suspect there’ll be much more, since the formal constraints of practice and purpose have been lifted in both the object and the meaning; a democratisation has given way to a plurism.
the effect now however seems that with such an abundance of art, it gets diluted to an extent in which it becomes difficult to evaluate.
in his face there were many pages; half written scribbles and some badly drawn pictures. there were no photos or numbers to incriminate him. exactitude faded into ambiguity; facts became interpretation, empirical evidence only intuition.
from an art historical point of view i would have to agree that we have perhaps reached the end of a chapter in western twentieth century art. i believe duchamp left the door open; thats how the reason escaped.
