As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmodern
theory both reacted to and helped create the forces that eroded
reason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of a
postmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form was
inscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, the
reality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discourse
in such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronic
platforms, all radical, all working class or under class voices are pre
vetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financialized
kitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators,
following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity
with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the
lost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesia
about the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination.
The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imagination
of the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreation
of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by
its ‘otherness’, by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories,
all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness.
And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose can
the artwork posit the direction to which society must look to create
an ‘other’ or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promise
that is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. The
Utopian promise is not kept.