In 1912 Frantisek Kupka caused a sensation as he came up with the first truly abstract painting, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors. Yet he did not consider himself an abstract painter nor a cubist, as in fact he was an unhoused loner who fell into relative oblivion in later years. Whereas Kandisky´s Concerning the Spiritual in Art circulated a lot, Kupka´s book Creation in the Plastic Arts went by largely unnoticed. At that time, abstraction was mainly understood as an expression of modernism and a progressive, scientific spirit, Kupka however strongly related to ancient and archaic art and culture and nurtured from the atavistic. To him, the artist cannot create something truly new anyway, therefore it is appropriate for him to try to relate to the glorious cosmic forces. He also says: The artist does not make reference to nature but is rather busy trying to organise his inner material and experiences and visions which are, to some degree, chaotic and consist of perceptions that are unclear, yet, within the process turning it into art, achieve greater clarity – via instrumental composing. The artist is highly sensitive (with a sensitivity that is achieved trough life and not innate), so to say a nerve system that reaches into the cosmos; his self is not a compact unity as his awareness is diffused over the whole body. The artist tells about his privileged inner experiences and visions and, therein, creates new experiences for others (which is, to Kupka, the (rather humble) end of art). There will be no endpoint in art, as the possibilities for visions are endless, likewise, there are no absolute ideals or rules but a quasi-spontaneous combination of elements that makes the primal ground: art is performative. In saying so, Kupka did not make a lot of friends among those who were talking about art as directed towards perfection, wholeness, etc. Kupka was leaning towards the dionysian and the dynamic. – In the Albertina Wien, they have this cool painting Aufragende Formen (Ascent). It is about making cosmic forces and ascension visible. It refers to Hinduism and temple architecture. I like it because it gives you a sense of place. The erectness is appealing. You can communicate with it, but not directly. That´s so fascinating. On the internet I see in the 1990s they had an exhibition about Kupka in Germany, titled Die abstrakten Farben des Universums.

Whereas the unhoused European Kupka, who affirmed that the artist lives in a transcendent or pseudo-reality, was (as they say) otherworldy, respectively, due to his high intelligence, operated at a high level of abstraction respectively overview over the human and the metaphysical condition and was tangential to the man´s world, the Americans were at the same time about to find their own identity and self-assurance in the domain of culture and artistic style. The Great War had shattered humanistic and progressive/spiritual ideals, also those transported by the avant-garde. At the same time the significance of the old world gradually eclipsed and American hegemony gradually solidified. The 1920s were a peculiar decade that brought about rising living standards, liberalism and pluralism, a democratic mass/consumer society and an intrusion of the „mundane“ into high art (the jazz age); alongside a mourning about spiritual emptiness, superficiality, commercialisation as well as that, obviously, under the surface man does not change or improve but may even be hollowed out by stereotypical mass culture. Intellectuals were uneasy about the absence of a grand narrative – in an age where traditions are under siege and society progresses yet no one knows to what end: The usual confusion of epoches of transformation and transition. In Europe, it lead to fascism. In America, the Roaring Twenties were ended by the Great Depression.

Artistically, Precisionism was the dominant style of the era. Pioneered by artists like Charles Demuth, Georgia O´Keeffe, Preston Dickinson or Charles Sheeler, Precisionism combined abstraction with the realisitic representation of everyday objects, particulary those associated with the functional or industrial or urban enviroment. The objects and landscapes are presented as harmonic, hygienic, flat and immediate, new, you have the absence of dirt, decay or human meddling, a rigid geometry, seemingly a „new harmony and order based on function“ that „offered an ideal of stability, eternity, permanency, order and power beneath the chaotic shifting reality of modern life“. You have both culture and inhumanity, a humanity that is probably soon to become obsolete or reduced by the anonymous power of industrialisation, as something both larger as well as inferior to human life. American Precisionists wanted to embrace both „native tradition and modern vision“ (Charles Demuth even said his depiction of modern America tries to relate to ancient cultures and their manifestations and therefore his art relates not to the future but „to the past“). Ambiguous, as it is. Ahhh… Die Welt ist tief/und tiefer als der Tag gedacht. What a supposedly flat pool of meaning, that is yet so deep and obscure. That´s metaphysics. (Quotations from Susan Currell´s book: American Culture in the 1920s)

Charles Sheeler was both a painter and a photographer, which made his paintings particularly „precisionist“ and proto-photorealistic. Sheeler was also particuarly influenced by Duchamp in finding secret meaning and appeal in everyday objects. What I like is that his forms and industrial landscapes are also ascendant and it is cool to be confronted with/exposed to their erectness, and their rigidity, and their asepsis. The sublime comes to mind, and is then relativised: as it is not unlimited and infinite, but seems to carry the potential for transcendance, even ultra-transcendance. It annihilates the subject and, at the same time, empowers it. It is infra-sublime, as it seems more humble and less competent than man, as well as it may be ultra-sublime, that which is destined to transgress man at all. It seems to speak to you, and it does not. It seems to be empty as well as meaningful as well as overcharged with secret meaning and stuff that surpasses man and human understanding, maybe leads into the transhuman or signifies the advent of the transhuman age. Have we conquered functionality, or will it conquer us? It is both heteronomous and homonomous. If it cannot replicate, it will survive as ruins. It is as old as time itself, archetypical. While hypermodern, it also seems ancient (and Sheeler compared it to religious expression in gothic cathedrals, whereas the new religion is scientific objectivity and industrial functionality that relieves man from hardship and makes life smooth). It, foremostly, signifies that there is stuff out there in the world which has semi-independent existence. It adds something to the world, to totality. An enigmatic ontology (respectively Ding-Ontologie), that philosophers have not exactly figured out so far. In reverse to what Kant says about the sublime (that it transcends the possibilities of our sensual perception but not of our ideas), it does not transcent our senses (as it is clear-cut and contoured, even somehow humble), it transcends our intellectual categories and indicates that our very modes of perception and intellect are going to be transformed (opening the apparent rigidity of Kant´s epistemology a bit and making it more malleable). I like the Upper Deck as, in silence, it speaks to me. In insignificance, it signifies. It is pure meaning and significance. It is a culture without me. It is the Great Other. When Bodhidharma failed to make himself intelligible to the Emperor, he sat in front of a wall for nine years, in silence, and finally invented Zen-Buddhism.

From the 1960/70s onwards, feminist/humanist critique has been articulated against the „notion“ of the „role model“ of the „white male genius“ as the dominant bringer of culture. Leaving this discourse aside for the moment, we shall be inclined to state that the true artist, however, shall not be expected to be as primitively and bluntly gendered as you are (supposedly): It has been noted that creative individuals usually are eqipped with qualities attributed to the opposite gender: Creative females are more self-asserted, rational and aggressive than other girls; creative males are softer and more intuitive and nurturing than other boys. The greater the artist, the more universal the artist´s personality, which means that s/he will possess both „masculine“ and „feminine“ qualities. Virginia Woolf (with reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge) says, the best mind is the androgynous mind.

Meditate about that.

When I recently saw Andres Veiel´s new documentary film „Beuys“, Joseph Beuys also struck me as a being for which „masculinity“ and „feminity“ does not actually, immediately apply. His idiosyncratic head resemblant to a skull, but one that you would not expect a skull(-like head) to look like; Beuys` general appearance is one highly idiosyncratic and statuary and symbolic, though not in a way you would expect an idiosyncratic and statuary and symbolic person to look like. Beuys` appearance is highly emblematic but in a way that comes completely unexpected. A hipster cannot look like that. In his „artificiality“ and his deliberateness Beuys is highly natural and authentic. Beuys was an originator of what would (later) be labelled as Performance Art, Process Art, Body Art, Happening, Social Sculpture, he gave a new outlook on sculpture in general and established a connection between art and politics and the social realm and the human realm, and, finally, about art and life and about what an artist actually is. He was/established a hyperset. Due to his pronounced subjectivity he also transgressed (the impersonality of) Fluxus art and in his endeavour to create a personal mythology he also gave dignity to „mundane“ material (like fat or felt) – as well as he gave dignity to people, in personal exchange, as a teacher, as well as by claiming that „everyone is an artist“ – which means that every creative thought is actually art, therein (and also in his declarative approach, to make something a piece of art by declaration) widening our outlook on art in general. Beuys was an artist in the formation of a democratic age and embodied the spirit of democracy, and his devotion to his students (because of which he finally got expelled as a university professor) was real and not a gesture, as he spent the whole day working in class. He is described as someone who was able to connect to anyone and finding out what the other person needs and how she could be elevated. Due to his high (schizotypal) sense of connectivity he tried to build bridges between East and West, connect man to nature, the ephemeral to the large context of history and the transhistoric, embodied the shaman and a bit of heyoka (though a very polite one). Due to his connectivity, which included also the (so-called) irrational he also had some downsides – but there are worse things around than Anthroposophy or not being able to become a politician (as he was denied to become a candidate for the Green party by the Green party´s other members). He rallied against narrowmindedness and conservatism but not in any obvious way, finally he distanced himself from mass movements, and the fate of people like Beuys is that they are, in the final consequence, isolated loners, whose impact on society is a (seemingly) indirect one, since they do not inhabit the same world as man. Despite his apparently odd figure, in the film a woman spoke to us how Beuys, in their encounters, struck her as completely normal (actually as „the only truly normal person I have ever met“) and as being both a dreamer and not a dreamer at all all alike (that´s a reference to the actual state of hypernormality of the genius). As a pilot in World War II Beuys was not as easily to be unrespected by the rightwingers and conservatives, and one can say that his personal history is one of transformation and elevation (at least apparently). When in his earlier days he had no success, and alongside with the usual pains of a true originator at the beginning, he fell into deep depression, became suicidal and a befriended family had to take care of him (and an elderly woman saved him and reestablished his self-assurance). When he came to America, he elegantly/spectacularly avoided contact with anyone and only (intensely) conversated with a coyote (I like America and America likes Me). His voice was masculine, but elevated and soft, swinging in its own intensity.

When thinking about the androgynous artist, also Beuys´ contemporary and friend Andy Warhol comes to mind; a shy, highly schizotypal homosexual who was otherwordly (and frail) already as a child (whithout, however, displaying signs of a miracle child). – When asked about his opinion about the „discontent“ of our age, in 1955 (in a private conversation with Patrick Bowles), Beckett dismissively said that the „discontent of our age“ is „the discontent of every age“: „99 percent of people lack true access to their own minds“. As a genius, Warhol did not lack access to his own mind, and so, at about the same time, passed off mindless consumerism as well as mindless intellectualism (from left, right or anywere) refuting or being dismissive of consumer society (whose formation is one of the great developments in human history) and turned it into art. As a commercial illustrator Warhol had been no slouch, and his immense talent, actually genius for painting and illustrating (and use of colour) had been disovered at the art school (that being said against the apparent simplemindedness or, at least, coolness of his later art he became famous with), in addition, that professional experience gave him an understanding of how creative work has to be designed to reach a maximum audience. When, after unsuccessful attempts to establish his own territory as a „serious“ artist, he saw an early exhibition of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (who would refuse to let him into their circle as well) he decided to use their new found language with greater purity and immediacy – which then, finally, resulted in Pop Art. They said, Warhol had a genius for immediacy – and that´s what he did: present things and art as a „fait accompli“, which either means everything or nothing – respectively, in this ambivalence, actually means everything and nothing. He gave the purest expression of a democratic mass/consumer society, and its ambiguities. While Beuys said everyone´s an artist, Warhol said everything is beautiful, and when asked whether he likes or dislikes the apparently trivial things he portrays he responded that „Pop Art loves things“ – also Warhol elevated stuff. Dali said, genius spiritualises everything, and Warhol did this to things, according to the age he inhabitated, as he „glamourised“ things (reminding us also that „spirituality“ is not a simple and easily definable, but a complex, ambiguous thing, with a sharp as well as an infinitely nuanced and spectral/auratic contour, and that is differentiated in itself). With his technique of repetition he removed emotive potential as well as he investigated about (Benjamin´s) aura (via de- and reconstruction); as he added specific colour to it, he made stuff unique and idiosyncratic again. With his genius for immediacy he apparently removed transcendence, while actually he established an endless loop and an apparently mutual gaze between the glorious human and the humble and inarticulate soup can, which is both so ephemeral and (not least as a manifestation of culture and of the most vegetative needs of man, and also as an object for intellectual reflection) destined to outlive man. In a world full of celebrities and in his relentless drive to be a celebrity, Warhol apparently nullified his persona, which amplified his charme and his significance; by apparently reduing his complexity he added a meta-level to his complexity, by taking himself out, he became universal. In fact, while seeming inexpressive Warhol was highly receptive and aware of his surroundings – to the extent that he „merely“ seemed to draw from his surroundings and exploit people and the freaks at the Factory: but in this seeming reproductiveness and derivativeness there was his originality: as originality comes from immediate as well as „paradoxical“ combination of elements and elevating it to a higher level of signicance. When he said that behind his appearance and his art there is actually „nothing“, it may refer to schizotypal self-experience (as having no clear internal locus), to mastery of Zen, to the artist becoming a „sheer“ medium – or to a correct and precise look at the considerable elusiveness of the self. He was a transperson. His films, consisting for example of filming the Empire State Building for hours, result from Warhol actually being able to look at and enjoying stuff ordinary people find drab for hours and becoming immersed into it. And you had all the stuff in it that makes art, respectively the oeuvre of an artist: the paradoxical beauty of soup cans and Brillo boxes, you have (the ambiguity/frailty) of beauty (and of the Anima: Marilyn), of flowers, you have death, accident, execution, the human portrait, Chairman Mao, etc.

In doing so, Beuys and Warhol were defining geniuses of their age and a bit of a negative mirror image of each other. In their apparent superficiality (that is to say: immediacy), they were deep (and gave a new perspective on depth). They were, however, not ultra-deep thinkers of art (hence their relatively immediate success). The ultra-deep art genius will, metaphorically, rest on the ground of the ocean or so these days, and maybe even for the rest of days. He will not really know what masculinity and feminity is, neither will he know about androgyny; he is constantly calculating the universe anew and, by shifting perspectives, creating the hyperset of high order.

In my infancy I used to say that what Francis Bacon was doing in painting, Samuel Beckett (Comment c´est) was doing in literature and Swans in popular music: Showing that the body/the subject/the individual is constituted by forces/flows/streams (of desire) that are older than the subject, that distort it in its compactness and that trangress it (with or without elevating it to catharsis) and that remain after its demise, i.e. the body/subject as a condensation/force field/way station/relay of forces that come from the outside/primordial chaos/nature/culture, constitute some kind of semi-self-referential loop and then, after demise, fall apart and combine anew – the entity formed by/being a way station for streams of desire crawling through greater streams of mud, decomposing: that´s How It Is. A reading of Lacan (and Schopenhauer) favors such a perspective – and of Deleuze who wrote a cool book investigating how Bacon´s art is about making invisible forces (that stem out of „the virtual“) visible. The subject/body as a force field … Numerous other connotations come to mind with Bacon: A „sinister“ painter (contrasted by the personal appearance of a jovial hedonist) who seems to make existential horror and crucifixation explicit – respectively (as an ultimate mode of being affected) vulnerability / and who establishes „zones of indistiguishability“ between man and animal (suffering, tormented man becomes animal / suffering, tormented animal becomes man) and, possibly, a communion of living creature. The erection of (apparently frail and multidimensional and enigmatic) figure within a historical context dominated by abstraction. A figure ghost-like and robust like the artist himself. References to van Gogh by a similarly intense painter, who solitarily creates out of himself. The idea of the body that wants to get „rid of itself“ (most notably exemplified in the Scream motif) and wants to transform into something else (but, obviously, can´t quite). A novel depiction of contour (in an interplay with occasionally violent brushwork). – David Sylvester complains that the relationship between motif and background is a bit unpleasant with Bacon: But herein Bacon is also some kind of originator: The background is nothing the figure emerges from or whatever: The background isolates and depicts the figure: You can also ruminate whether it is meant to express the neutrality of the many forces of the world with which the figure will never interact – at any rate: What a fabulous background! What beauty of colours! (You have to see the paintings in the original to get adequate idea.) Great Monoliths.

Francis Bacon, Lucian Freund and Frank Auerbach were friends and influenced each other and were dominating figures in the english art scene of their time. Cross out Francis Bacon, and there remains Lucian Freund and Frank Auerbach. – Lucian Freud was a grandchild of Sigmund and, as a chaser of girls, produced numerous offspring of his own. He was described as „electric“, „breathing like an animal“, and „feeling free to do whatever he liked“. As a figurative painter he rose to full maturity when he combined the violent brushwork of Francis Bacon with sharpness of contour and immersion into detail. Freud gets intensely close to his sitters, has an invasive gaze, often portrays them in unusual, and frail, positions. He himself claims that he would like his portraits to actually be the persons portrayed, and that his colour functions as skin – and at any rate, the portraits seem close and the skin seems so thin that you think it could tear apart and the body mass could fall out – while at the same time it is stabilised by the many folds and brushstrokes. However, his paintings seem quite ambivalent, and actually more uncanny than Bacon´s. Freud´s personnel doesn´t exactly deliver a spiritual impression. Their individuality derives from peculiar looks (at the verge of oddity) and unusual gestures. They´re individual but appear relatively empty (and stupid!), they usually look down and seem uncomfortable when confronted with the invasive gaze of the painter at their supposedly innermost secret (note however that they´re captured in the way sitters look like after long sessions – silently annoyed and fatigued). When they´re together in a room there seems to be no true bond between them, respectively that the bond between them seems to be one of shame or guilt or a dirty (though not sensational) secret that has to be hidden behind closed doors. Isolated individuals. – As a child, Lucian liked to be alone, and he preferred animals (horses) over people. He did not treat his first wife good and was a controlling, maybe sadistic husband (who could not, however, dominate his second wife so easily). When painting others he „wanted to see the whole animal“, and he said a lot of his sitters „are girls who have some sort of holes in their lives that is filled by posing for an artist“. He had a difficult relationship with his intrusive mother but could handle her and painted her when after the death of her husband she was a shadow of herself. – Sylvester asked Francis Bacon whether he would provoke feelings of ambiguity in his sitters he did not portray so favorably – but with Freud this seems to be more at hand. Freud´s portrayal of man provokes empathy and  remind us of taking the other as an individual (maybe even in a Levinasian sense), but they´re also humiliating, even if that´s a portrayal of the human condition. When Freud painted the Queen (over a period of 19 months), the Queen was not amused about the product (although it is actually one of the more favorable portraits in Lucian´s oeuvre).

Francis Bacon, Lucian Freund and Frank Auerbach were friends and influenced each other and were dominating figures in the english art scene of their time. Cross out Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and there remains Frank Auerbach. Like Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach was a (German) jew whose family had to flee the Nazis, and they settled to England, where he would study under David Bomberg (who had been a celebrated painter in his younger years but, due to his intellectual and creative versatility, annoyed and overcharged art critics and so became “the most brutally excluded artist in Britian“ – described as the most intelligent man of the academy, Bomberg was „certainly no one who deliberately wanted to impress someone“ but an authentic man). Although Auerbach´s individual works are often highly different from each other, his general style (or: stylistic approach) has not changed much over the decades. His motives are sparse in variety as he mainly paints scenes in London/Camden and portraits. He maintains a small circle of sitters who he may portray over and over again. Although his intention is to get to the „essence“ of the sitter, the portaits of the same sitter are often extremely distinguished from each other – and often he would work on a painting for a very long time, painting layer over layer. Auerbach´s ability to create a comprehensive portrait out of blunt brushwork and colour fields is amazing, yet often the density of layers is what is most striking (making his paintings occasionally very heavy and difficult to exhibit) – through the layers the paintings gain haptic quality, and remind us of the multiple layers of reality/perception as well as the sheer materiality of the physical world. – Bacon rose to fame (relatively) early (in the 1950s), Freud in the last quarter of his life, Auerbach is the least popular of them. His constant investigation of painting and his high versatility seems to have prevented a signature style or his stuff becoming iconic. – I mean, if you have an intelligence for the arts you will understand that in a virtual painting there is a fluctuation and a vibration/vibrating intensity between different layers respectively between the actualised and the virtual. That brings stuff into motion. This is how an artwork „lives“ and is brought to life. And that´s how you have it in Auerbach paintings who takes this eventuality of getting a grasp on art to very extremes. Auerbach eventually/primordially sees the world as chaos, and the task of the painter as to impose order. Auerbach is interested in „raw“ perception, and, so to say, in an immediate dialogue with the audience which forms the image partially on own terms. A „continuum of perception“. He solidifies form which carries the possibility of its dissolution within itself and offers perceptions that include their own variations. – In this radical approach, Auerbach considers himself a loner (within schools and trends in painting) and a workaholic who seemingly never stops adding the next layer.

„When I saw Frank Auerbach´s works for the first time, I thought that there was really happening something new and extraordinary, and that´s what actually happened … Wonderful portraits in dense colour – but he could not sell any of them at that time. I often ask myself how many people have an eye for art at all. They buy when an artist is famous – and probably does not create his best works anymore. But when something wonderful and innovative happens, they don´t see it.“ (Francis Bacon, Interview with Michael Peppiat, 1897; translated from German back to English by me, fuck off)

… were artists and/or theorists who had something to say about art and who were important/conductive in intellectually institutionalising a discourse about art and aesthetics – as an autonomous subject – in Germany in the 18th and 19th century, respectively at the time of era-defining genius Goethe. Their writings are largely out of print. What did they say?

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), offspring of a shoemaker who loved art and especially the ancient Greeks, had a difficult life for many years and he had to live in humble circumstances. The hardships he faced as a scholar (shittily equipped libraries which were, in addition to that, accessible only one hour a day) are beyond our imagination: Acknowledge the effort behind his undertakings and bow down! – Notably in his main work Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums he lay the foundation of regarding the ancient Greeks as the most perfect people and their art as the most perfect art – and indeed ancient Egypt or the Etruscans, which he also discussed, weren´t exactly of such caliber. He attributed this to specific climatic and geographic conditions and to the Periclean democracy and, in doing so, tried to understand the emergence of art out of a greater social context. According to Winckelmann the end of art is beauty, and the ancient Greeks were the most harmonious of men. – Winckelmann´s legacy, and his work itself, was ambiguous. On the one hand he said that the ideal of Greek art could never be reached again, on the other hand he lay foundations for classicism which tries to imitate the Greeks. This was to come in a more formal, and anemic, fashion, but also fresh, original and abyssal-ethereal as e.g. in the case of the good Hölderlin. While Winckelmann resented anemic academic pedanticism his writings seem hard going by today´s standards. Originality and genius were, more or less, foreign categories to Winckelmann, but he also lived before the Geniezeit in Germany – his thoughts were more revolving around the collective genius of a people and about conditions under which great art can arise.

Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) was an eminent classicist painter and nicknamed as the „German Raphael“. His Gedanken über die Schönheit und über den Geschmack in der Malerey (1762) was used as a „textbook“ in many academies. Also Mengs says that the end of art is beauty – as beauty is a tangible expression of perfection (which is, in itself, intangible and only to be found in God). Beauty is achieved as the artist tries to imitate nature and as the artist is carefully selective not to display more or less in his paintings than nature would require. By careful selection, he may create art that is even more beautiful than nature! While also affirmative of the notion that the Greeks are the apex (because they had direct access to the ideal whereas all others only can have an indirect access to the ideal), Mengs is discussing three artists in detail: Raphael, Corregio, and Titian, and he announces that, on the whole, Raphael is the greatest of them (while the others may be the leaders in specific areas e.g. Titian concerning colour) because Raphael is the greatest and well-rounded of individuals, including the „downside“ of Raphael only being able to confront also malice and triviality in the human realm with generosity and greatheartedness (i.e. a bit inappropriately). – Mengs himself confronted less criticism than Winckelmann or Sulzer and, as a great artist, also appeared as a somehow more monolithic figure. His notion of the true artist imitating nature is somehow understandable as true creativity appears natural, stemming out of itself, relatively immune to the diktat of culture and the expectations of the audience, and powerful, overflowing and diverse. Therein, it creates its own harmony.

Johann Georg Sulzer (1720-1779) was a theologian, a philosopher and a man of stupendous erudition. His Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (1771-1774) was designed to be both a theoretical work as well as an encyclopedia about everything related to art and aesthetics, it contains ca. 900 articles and ranges from music and poetry to architecture and garden art. Sulzer says art is about adding beauty to things (stemming out of an aesthetic drive in man) and that the end of art is moral purification and betterment of mankind – he dismisses a cult of pure reason and says that the (educational) power of art lies in its sensuality and the power with which it adresses the senses and the emotions i.e. the whole of man (although Sulzer does not seem to have a well-formulated theory about that). Sulzer speaks of the genius and says the chief characteristic of the genius is enormous sensitivity and ability to be affected by and to get immersed into things. – The most prominent critique directed at Sulzer came from Goethe: Goethe dismissed the notion that art can be a main vehicle for the betterment of mankind – art originates from the „fire within the artist“ i.e. from the artist´s self expression and happens relatively independent from the (self-unconscious) audience. Of course Goethe was not entirely dismissive about the audience, but – in contrast to the democratic Sulzer – he favored the conaisseur of art over the general audience (which may be natural and unspoiled but, in fact, neither very understanding nor commited).

Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), who called himself Henry Fuseli when he was an emigrant in England, was a painter, poet and professor at the Royal Academy of Arts. His Aphorisms, Chiefly Relative to the Fine Arts are condensations of his lectures. Confronted with the French Revolution and its aftermath, Füssli became dismissive of the notion that art could do a lot about true refinement of humanity. While he was a fan of the ancient Greeks (as the only people who were able/lucky enough to truly authentically relate to ideals), he was also aware that art is also/mainly about reacting to the challenges posed by the contemporary. As a painter Füssli often made reference to nightmares, horror and otherworldly stuff, as a theorist he emphasised the importance of expression in art (Winckelmann said that an artwork is/should be about expressing beauty/ideal but also about expression (Ausdruck) i.e. the emanation of the (beautiful) subject within circumstances – and he somehow favored the „static“ element of beauty/ideal over the „dynamic“ (quasi-contaminative) of expression: Füssli was inclined to think otherwise). The Aphorisms are a cool document, and they´re insightful also concerning the genius whose qualities are discussed at length. Füssli also thought the highest instance is (not a classicist ideal but) nature – in its infinity (i.e. also containing supposedly nasty elements), and that the genius is someone who is able to profoundly understand/imitate certain aspects of nature (where beauty and the ideal is one element but nothing art should be restricted to). Claims about the „death of art“ or cultural decay prominent at, more or less, every time, can be effectively countered by proclaiming that with every great genius art starts anew (and that due to the infinity of nature there is acutally no competition between them, just an ever ongoing growth and illumination of infinite nature). Hahahahaha! That will feel good.

Winckelmann said, in the mid-1700s, that the highest purpose of art is to display beauty and that art has its apex in ancient Greece (under specific geographic and climatic conditions as well as under the conditions of democracy). Winckelmann was, of course, aware that the concept, and perecption, of beauty, is ambiguous. So he said that beauty emanates in the perfect harmony of a being with its intentions and a harmonious subsumption of its parts under the whole. The highest beauty is to be found in God and the highest beauty in art can be reached when man is approximated to the ideal, rounded off and harmonious, resting in itself, somehow innocently and naive as well as heroic, stemming immediately out of himself. „Edle Einfalt, stille Größe“ – Winckelmann was dismissive of the purely lovely, the enjoyable or that which is overly playful or pompous (characteristic of Baroque or Rococo). With this works Winckelmann was highly influentual at his time, and it is true that he somehow intellectually instituted a discourse of the autonomy of art and what art actually is/should be about. What he says was both fresh and virgin but also carried the seeds of institutionalising an empty, overly formal, anemic classicism. Hölderlin and Nietzsche were very fond of the Greeks in which they say an image of perfect humanity – such a fascination isn´t very easy to imagine today. Marxistic scholars claim that Winckelmann´s ideas and ideals and visions of a heroic, natural man, living free from constraints and under conditions of democracy refer to the (half-conscious) sentiments of the (half-)dormant bourgeoisie at this time and, therefore, stand and fall in history with the bourgeoisie being a revolutionary class (and it would be interesting to know how we could approach this when referring to Piaget´s model of the cognitive development of the infant when we try to look at historical stages that way – I hope I can do this somewhere soon). Winckelmann was also influential concerning cyclical models of looking upon cultures/historical entities (e.g. Spengler) and about viewing peoples as cultural units (both in a „progressive“ and a „reactionary“ sense), more generally we can think about developments in art when we try to look at it from a Winckelmannian perspective. That the end of art is beauty, and beauty is, ideally, to be found in God and in free man – well, looks superseded; that this is so because of decay – well: a more filigree perspective is needed.

There is this book „Verlust der Mitte“ (originally published 1948) by Hans Sedlmayr I read a long time ago and now came to remember on that occasion. Sedlmayr makes up a conservative scholar who sees modern art as a process of cultural degeneration (he mourns loss of unity/harmony/completeness that he thinks existed somewhere back in time). – Sedlmayer was a member of the NSDAP and later in his life reportedly had some affiliations to the Green party; indeed, he was hooked on ideas of Ganzheitlichkeit, (reactionary) spiritism and nostalgia for some kind of ideal of embeddedness of man in the cosmic whole; although he is also kind of a misfit within such partisanship and intellectually trangresses partisan affiliations: At the core Sedlmayr mourns the loss of a relationship between man and God. In the modern era, man is cut off from God and becomes dangerously „autonomous“ and makes a mess, resulting not least in dissolution, fragmentation and atomisation of his modes of self-reflection (including art) and developing a mirror image full of self-loathing. Harmony corruption. Definitely no beauty. – Even if you find this unconvicing, „Verlust der Mitte“ is a worthwhile read, many insights and eruditions it carries, and Sedlmayr has a lot of empathy e.g. for van Gogh or Paul Klee.

That the end of art is beauty seems to be quite superseded – although the quest for beauty is inherent to art and has always been there. Since beauty is actually not definable, visionary artists have been aware that what we perceive as beautiful is, to some degree, malleable; and great, visionary artists have expanded our notion and perception about what is to be considered as beautiful. In an accelerating society, within modernity, the quest for beauty also accelerates, and may become overwhelmed by a larger conquest for meaning – as modern art is, as can be said, foremost about locating meaning. Beauty is but an element within meaning.

Illuminatingly, young contemporary German philosopher Markus Gabriel philosophises that art is about evocation of things in a different context, in a context different from normal. By showing stuff in unusual context, meaning is added and transformed (concerning both motif and background), respectively, within such dislocations, meaning per se emanates. The true artwork shows meaning per se (indeed, objects of contemporary art appear somehow fluctuating between being silent and empty and on the other hand so charged with meaning and so uncanny and talkative). It shows how the meaning of things is dependent on context and on interpretation within contexts and that it is linked to the imaginary i.e. to the great wide open. Remember how Angell de la Sierra from Omega Society says that by showing the many facets of a thing in multiple contexts the true artist shows the existential ontology of a thing, and while maybe not showing the „thing in itself“ in a scientific/kantian sense, art shows the meta-noumenon of a thing (respectively „meaning“ as Gabriel says). – It is true that art is highly about displaying intelligence at divergent thinking i.e. at seeing many associations to a given thing which then establishes context and fixation. It is about sensitivity to nuances and tolerance for ambiguity. And the meaning that is revealed in the artwork usually is ambiguous and ambivalent in nature. That is so because art is an investigation of the (so-called) irrational aspects of existence, about man in the universe. Shades of God.

This diversification of meaning probably has always been prominent in art yet while in more „ancient“ art you have a tendency towards holism and rounding things off, in the most contemporary art the trajectory of production of meaning is permanent evasion and establishment of meta-levels. While the one thing may appear boring and conservative in our time the other one risks losing substance and degenerating into farce and derision. As Francesco Bonami, curator at the Biennale, says: „The great curators had an almost Christian attitude with respect to the exhibition, as though attempting the moral and cultural conquest of the world, while the curator´s attitude today must be more pagan.“ (Likewise, when I read Greenberg or Carl Einstein I sense there is some coolness in the harsh verdicts of semi-ancient art criticism of days bygone, supposedly something that is absent in today´s „anything goes“ tolerance within a degeneration of standards … then, I also probably don´t miss it so much, since lenience and tolerance have some things going for them (if this is a correct idiom at all, I don´t care atm, because I like it right now and people going to understand it anyway).) – “It is – and perhaps always has been – the function of art to take us to the margin of contemporary experience, to try on what seems far-fetched, peculiar, different, and new so as to explore what may be on the verge of becoming essential to know“, it says at the end of „Art since 1940 – Strategies of Being“ by Jonathan Fineberg. – The problem is that, under such a flag, we today seem to be, under the disguise of art, confronted with too many empty peculiarities and „objects that resemble objects of art“ („kunstähnliche Gegenstände“, as the Merowinger says) replacing (true) objects of art. True objects of art are a rare thing however, as you recognise when you gaze back through space and time. Yesteryear´s epochs seem so great and monolithic because only the masterpieces are still around, while we can see a lot of trash and ephemeral stuff of our epoch. Some day we will be equalised along these lines (and e.g. Basquiat or Duncan Wylie will remain).

So, alongside the trajectory of opening, there are the demons of banality. Once, when I was young, I appeared bitter over that, but over time I seem to see it more casually, and I am grateful to live in this fantastic epoch. It is good, and underappreciated, that we are living in great times today! That when we go to the museum there we find the half-inflated rubber raft on the floor, a magnetic tape which displays „Ha Ha“ in an endless loop and a camera which films the scenery supposedly forever, as an artwork called („The Illusion of) Permanence“ or so. Ahh, exciting, ahh, eccentric; the meaning of it rests in a superposition. – Tbh this stuff from ancient Greece is, indeed, harmonious, but also not very exciting. The endless production of meaning (and making it collapse) is cooler. Incipit Zarathustra.

I do not want to throw it under the table that – as it appears to me – this note is not written as good as I would have wanted it to be. It is a bit tattered, I suppose. It was not written as easily as other notes and not in straight line but from accumulation via different spots. Then again, I think it is actually quite okay and nothing to be worried about. Maybe some will think that some of the stuff in here is banal, but it is not; is very deep and I have left out some mental leaps that are probably explicative, but also a nuisance, as I intend to write concise and relatively short notes which are nevertheless very comprehensive; I do not like verbose stuff, I am maybe too lazy to write verbose and I hate long conversations anyway. These notes about art are designed to aesthetically as well as intellectually display compactness – that is the idea.

A conclusive remark about the question of who is right: the Christian priest or the pagan? In art, s/he will be right who carries spiritual truth (and this usually means transcending the supposed pagan/priest opposition and being universal). What spiritual truth is, respectively how it is displayed, cannot be stipulated. You will, however, easily notice it when you finally see it, death to false metal. – The final conclusion of Sedlmayr´s „Verlust der Mitte“ is that there is an „empty throne“ which shall be occupied by the perfect man, the Gottmensch. – I  have also half-erratically ruminated about an Omega Man that will come and will provide a solution to the contemporary art problem and to the contemporary philosophy problem (and that the solution will, likely, come in unexpected fashion and be poorly understood). The ongoing vacany of the throne is probably due to the Gottmensch of today needs to be quite more comprehensive and all-encompassing than even Picasso or Michelangelo – although this may be an erroneous assumption since the times of Michelangelo or Imhotep probably weren´t less complex than ours; and for the Omega Man the complex (e.g. metaphysics, science…) is simple while the simple (e.g. politics or everyday human interactions) seems complex and stuff for endless ruminations to him/her. Apart from that the Gottmensch of today will need, among his powers, extraordinary mental strength, since s/he will have to try to establish connection in a world that is, forever, atomised and very superficial, and old ideas that art or philosophy are going to save us aren´t applicable anymore and the Gottmensch cannot shelter behind such illusions anymore. Technology is the prime mover and, as always, will produce both order and wreckage. History is some form of chaos and will continue to be. In some years I may have a 3D printer and my home will be „smarter“ than me.