Forward
The narrative of art history seems to be melting. The conceptualization of art drains us of intellectual resources, of art's purpose, its meaning, as if in fear it would come to an end. There is an essential physical reality inherent in phenomena, but (of course!), we do not know what it is. It is palpable. That is all we can know from appearances. It is the difference between what reality is and what we want it to be. It is a sufficient thematic motive for the cultural wing of the museum of all institutions. Based on the original story, as received, it is reducible to the difference between partial civilization, and its completion. Describing it as a legitimate and practical knowledge of individual and social relations, as not only a legacy of myths and power relations, but as the great narrative of events, political accommodations, substitute social systems, and the history of ideas. It is the relations of social conditions, gradually developed from the narrative story type, and the historical process as selective introspection of facticity, including the prehistoric, natural drive, as the spontaneous implementation of history and the historical discursive superstructure, or it is nothing but rhetoric and hidden agenda. It is all very wide of the mark of the real circumstances of past events, explicitly based on the logical nexus of revolution, but operating within a select set of political guidelines. The strategy is simple. If it had nothing else to offer, there would be no sense in pointing to the political motive of the work of art -if it can turn politically reactionary because aesthetically revisionist. History—as such—is essentially reactionary, a return to outmoded means of production, a substitute for innovation, and for positivist notions of progress.