L'ART DANS TOUS SES EXTREMES

Given its infinite inventiveness, early 21st-century art escapes classification. As such, its configurations are unlimited, it stymies all expectations, infiltrates our daily lives and, as Claude Amey explains it, the extreme is not found in the straight line but in the number of arrangements intended to share "the perceptible."

All those prophesying the decline of art, the Cassandras predicting its scheduled demise, from G. W. F. Hegel — who spoke only of its “dissolution” — to Arthur Danto, were thus all mistaken. Liberal capitalism has managed to invent the “end of the end of art.” It has succeeded in birthing an art in its own image, an art free of modernist inevitabilities and illusions, an art devoid of models, values and ideals and lacking humanist perspective – in short, a “conforming” art, a disenchanted, if not cynical, testimony, a genuine seismograph constantly checking the pulse of an agitated and disoriented world which, itself, is also subject to being reconfigurations.

Let there be no confusion, however ; the art of “non-finitude” has not abandoned that which is beautiful, sublime or ugly. Quite to the contrary, it absorbs the whole, emancipated from any idealism, particularly the illusion that it might again seduce the world. Perhaps this is the message of the 11th Lyon Biennial [Contemporary Art Festival] entitled: “A terrible beauty is born,” from a verse in a poem by Yeats. A terrible beauty that one might also call frightening, abominable, ghastly, apocalyptic, horrifying, catastrophic, Dantesque, tragic, appalling, dreadful, extraordinary, fantastic, savage, ferocious, formidable, devastating, horrible, unbearable, intolerable, intense, monstrous, phenomenal, powerful, fearsome, dark, terrifying, tragic, violent, etc. Lacking any label, today's art can be called anything.
—Marc Jimenez

Philosopher and Germanist Marc Jimenez is an instructor at Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He teaches Aesthetics at UFR d'Arts plastiques et Sciences de l'art (a French plastic arts and sciences teaching and research institute) where he is the Head of the Centre de Recherches en Esthétique théorique et appliquée (Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics Research Center).