Painting (10)

About Postmodernism.

Postmodernism is an old concept used to indicate what follows the modern age but it has been associated with so many different ideas that the concept ended up being foggy and perceived as some kind of metaphysical rareness. I'm using the concept "postmodern" in its narrow sense of "what follows the modern age". Another denomination shall eventually impose itself out of the practice of what comes after modernism but only the future will tell.

1. Preliminaries.

My vision about what comes next in visual arts is grounded in the following premises that I developed in detail earlier:

1.1. About what is art and what is not art.

I expanded at length earlier on the fact that visual art is about the illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day at the attention of all the members of their society. Human history witnesses 3 distinctive worldviews succeeding one another: animism (primitive arts), the gods (religious art) and the modern age (private ownership, individualism and the rationality of the logic of capital). We are nowadays in the late stages of "late modernism" or in the early stages of "early postmodernism". The postmodern worldview has still not taken form it is only starting to shape and the modern worldview is rapidly waning falling into insignificance..

• This is a time of much uncertainties and partisanship for sure but what is certain is that the visual signs of earlier times do not qualify any longer as art subjects nowadays.

• What constitutes visual art today is the expression in visual signs of the worldview of the postmodern age or to be more accurate the rendering of visual signs about the perception of the men of knowledge relating to the shaping of the postmodern worldview.

It should thus be accepted that portraits, landscapes and depictions of religious stories do not, in the 21^st century, constitute valid subjects of visual art any longer. This does not imply that such works have no place in our societies. I only mean to say that, they can't be considered as works of art any longer, they are crafters' products, sometimes industrial products, at the attention of the interior decoration market. The modern age gave us markets and among them the interior decoration, interior design markets. Those thrived on satisfying one narrow aspect of what has been the traditional function of visual arts throughout our cultural history, the usage functionality versus the more encompassing artistic and societal functionality. In other words visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day were incorporated into objects of daily usage like pots and pans in animist times, wall coverings in religious times and interior decoration in modern times. The offers of the "interior decor" mass market let go the artistic and societal functionality and concentrated instead on the possibility to give affordable goods to all citizens that would satisfy the narrow functionality of usage that had been initiated by the aristocracy and the new rich bourgeois since "early modern" times.

1.2. About knowledge, knowings and rationality.

My vision relates to the long haul history. I mean that I look at history from the perspective of the long waves that traversed our societies over long spans of time and for some continue to swirl into the future. My subject is visual art and I posit that art is related to the rendering in visual signs of the worldview of the day or to be more accurate the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day.

Art and worldviews are thus my subjects.

For sure there are an infinity of ways to approach those subjects. One can, for example, take a microscope and plunge into the infinitesimal or a telescope and plunge into the infinite. After much research this approach leads to some conclusions about the workings of the different components of the subjects being studied but it does not give us any clue about the meaning of our subjects into their global environment. Here is the difference between the scientific approach and the philosophic approach. Scientists accumulate knowings in the narrow field of their vertical focus on the constitutive particles, or components, of their subject. Philosophers focus on the horizontal linkages between all subjects and their linkage to vaster constitutive ensembles. Philosophers use the available scientific knowings to gain a better understanding of the inner working of the subjects so as to have a better understanding of the impact their inner working has on the linkage of that subject with the other subjects. Vertically gained knowledge is thus put in good use to gain visibility in the horizontal linkages.

The scientific approach has been derived as an extension of the rationality that seeps out of the logic of capital. The logic of capital is pragmatic and nothing else. It induces the holders of capital (1) to preserve and increase the capital that they invest and over time they develop methods and systems helping them to maximize the preservation and increase of their capital base that's what is called the rationality of the logic of capital. Over time, after centuries of practice of that rationality, capital holders instinctively came to know when an innovation in ideas or techniques would help them to increase their capital base and they automatically invested in the development of such ideas and techniques. It should thus not come as a surprise that capital holders were often the ones who studied a problem and came up with a solution that helped them to generate higher returns for their investments. A better understanding of the impact of ideas and techniques gradually shaped a general attitude of respect for knowledge and the capital holders started to finance institutions that would specialize in the teaching of available knowledge and develop new ideas and techniques. Science as a system to understand reality was born but it was a flawed system for it was subservient to the rationality of the logic of capital. Science was born as a function of that rationality and it is still a slave of the finality that lay at the heart of the logic of capital, it has to serve the preservation and increase of the capital base. Not fulfilling its obligation, as a slave, results in the sanctioning of science through a cut of its financing. Scientists have to eat, as do their families, and they comply with the orders.

But capital forgot or could simply not have thought about the fact that knowledge would eventually develop its own internal logic: "our understanding of what we don't understand" is more and more becoming the motor of our intellectual endeavors. Software developers impulsed the "open source software" trend and today we hear about "open source nano-technology", "open source biotechnologies", and the "commons copyrights movement". Hope is on the way!

Let me reassure you I do not reject the scientific approach, I'm well too aware of the fact that Its knowings are directly enriching the philosophical approach. But it should nevertheless be noted that modern societies cultivated the scientific approach into what appears now more and more as a plague of human intelligence. Time has come for a critical observation, of what knowledge is all about, an observation that should be free of any interference by the logic of capital.

1.3. About the role of the artist.

Starting with Modernity (around 1900) the role of the visual artist was fundamentally altered. In every earlier periods in history the artist's role was to illustrate the given worldview of the men of knowledge and power of the day, the shaman in animist times, the priest in religious times and the bourgeois in early modern times. What I mean to say is that the artist was imposed a message to illustrate that he could not circumvent.

Modernism starts with the rejection of past models of interpretation of reality by some artists following the 1st world war. (Duchamp, Breton, Masson, Miro, ..., Constant, Hundertwasser). Let's not be confused here, from Van Gogh to Picasso the earlier model of interpretation of reality had remained what it was before what I mean to say here is that the first degree image that projects on the retina was what Van Gogh and Picasso tried to render albeit in an evolving style. Form was changing but content remained identical. Starting with Dada and the surrealists artists were after a different content, they did not really care about form. Read Duchamp, Breton, Masson, Miro, Kandinsky and the others there can be no doubt that for them content was the essence of an art work.

But what would content look like, now, that no models of interpretation of reality were imposed, or should I say, no longer accepted? This is the story of visual arts from 1918 till today. Everyone is naturally free to produce his own views. I personally wrote extensively about the culmination of modernism into confusion, into the "whatever" principle that our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" will expand so lavishingly in so many incomprehensible treatises and articles that I confess I don't understand. Let me be clear, I understand the words and the sentences that they write but I don't see where the logic that they express leads us to. After living a decade and a half in China I learned something about pragmatism and the idea that change is our reality. I must say that I just don't see how all the present discourse about reality, about art will resist the tide of globalization and our changing tomorrows.

I personally think that visual artists have no other alternatives but to follow in the footsteps of Duchamp, Kandinsky, Masson and the others who made content the central story of art. Knowledge about "perception", about "worldviews and civilizations" about "societal systems", about "systemic complexity" and about so many other concepts was not available to the artists living in the first part of the 20^th century and their understanding of what "artistic content" was all about could thus only be very limited.

In a1946 interview Duchamp told "... until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious; it had been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century. ... Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. ... I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter." There was a good reason why Duchamp preferred to be influenced by a writer than by a painter for as he was saying: "I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter". Had he gone one step further Duchamp might have understood why painters were seen to be so stupid. Painters had never been given the freedom to come up with their own content, on the contrary, they had always been imposed a message, a script and their role had thus always been limited to the craft of an image technician. Thinking was thus not their strength.

But with the rejection after the first world war of the traditional model of reality as being the first degree image that projects on the retina, a question imposed itself to all: "what are we to represent as content from now on?" Not trained to have a cultural and scientific baggage painters were at a loss. They tried all kinds of approaches but in the end all those approaches floundered and here is where sets in the responsibility of the "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" in the ensuing degradation of the visual arts into "whatever" and total confusion. Our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" was being corrupted by the gold of the merchants and speculators who succeeding to making astronomical bucks from Duchamp's "ready-made" and other absurdities. They were ordered by the merchants and speculators to impose the stamp of their societally recognized authority on "whatever" so that substantial benefits could be subtracted from the wallets of innocents.

The 20^th century artists should thus not be blamed for the confusion where visual arts landed in late modernity, the blame should squarely be laid at the feet of our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine". Is this machine not composed of high flying intellectuals? If the individuals representing the machine are intellectuals then they should have known better their comments could indeed have avoided the artists falling into such a low. But visual artists have no excuses any longer. When the nature of visual art has been debunked, when its societal functionality has been restored in our understanding, the time has come for the artist community to recognize what art is all about and to search for the constitutive elements of the worldview that is shaping under our eyes in the present.

So where are the men of knowledge in the 21^st century that artists could borrow from to illustrate their worldview? I must recognize that the fog of this late modern confusion is so intense that the knowledge visibility is approximately nil. Are the scientists our men of knowledge? Well if some scientists, taken individually, might satisfy the criteria of knowledge this surely can't be extended to the scientific community as a whole. So where to search for knowledge? I guess that I'm going to disappoint you all. There is no such group in the 21st century that is composed of men recognized as being the holders of the knowledge of our day. So our century is definitely vastly different from all previous centuries. After searching and thinking for decades about this state of affairs the only valid conclusion that I could arrive at was that if knowledge, recognized by all, was not readily available any longer in our times then the only available option was for the artists to participate themselves in the process of knowledge creation that means accumulating knowledge and developing one's own conclusions.

Whow, ... man, what a program. I know, I know but do you have another and better alternative? Was Duchamp not already implying the same conclusion long ago?

(1) Capital: money that is accumulated is sleeping until it is put into use or in consumption or in investment. Money used to consume vanishes while money that is invested transforms into capital.

Painting (9)

Late modernity.

As I wrote, in Painting (6): SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS, the turning point between the age of the gods and the modern times has been engendered as a direct consequence of increased trade combining with the newly discovered desire for luxuries, by the aristocracy and then the new rich, that had been stirred at the contact of more advanced societies during the crusades.
"The values and ideas of the aristocracy and the new rich merchants have mutated.
They now search to establish as rights what their newly found material wealth can buy and individual ownership becomes the center of their discourse. Owning a richly decorated mansion gives them the sense of being different from the masses and this newly found perception of a differentiation infuses their minds with the illusion of their particularism, of the importance of their individualities. The aristocracy and the new rich merchants are driving the new fashion of the day and individualism and private ownership will ultimately take center stage in the European social game. "

This shifting of the worldview of the Europeans towards MODERNITY occurred over a few centuries. Three periods characterize that evolution:

- Early modernity: 14th-19th centuries.
- Modernity: 20th century
- Late modernity: 1975-2020 (arbitrary setting only for the purpose of facilitating the visualization of history on the move)

_____________

Late modernity.

The initial interaction of the developed West with the South has been a deluge of very cheap commodities manufactured predominantly by China. There was simply no way for Western economic actors to compete with the Chinese in the sectors where they succeeded to acquire the necessary technology and management experience. When the average cost of one hour work in the West reaches, let's say $US 25, in China it costs $US 0.5 and China has at least 50 years more to benefit from such levels of low assembly-work costs. Its population is over 60% relying on agriculture to survive presently so it has still long to go before agricultural jobs come down to 5-10% of the total work-force the point when the reserve of low paid jobs will have been exhausted.

The impact of this first wave of delocalizations has been met initially with stupor in the West that fast transformed into anger from the remaining blue collar workers, the trade-unionists, the political left and also the traditional right.
When a trend develops out of real problems in Western societies the political class can never be far to propose answers to those problems, it is their life, if they don't do it they are simply not re-elected.
Big capital holders benefited from increasing returns out of this initial wave of delocalizations and disbursed drops of those returns to wage disinformation campaigns affirming that science and technology would always remain a Western advantage. This had the double advantage to assuage those who were at risk to lose their jobs and to let the State in charge of the payment for the solution that they had envisioned.

Science and technology were now the new ideological leitmotiv so they started to figure in all political speeches and also in all Western budgets. This by the way helps to understand why the States in all advanced economies have budget deficits and increasing debts. But soon it became apparent that there had never been a good reason why the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians and others would not be able to use their own brains to compete directly with Western brains. What a foolish and racist argument it had been to dare presuppose whiteman's intellectual superiority when even Doctor degrees in hard sciences at US universities were in majority issued to citizens from the South. But the Foolishness did not abate and a new racially motivated argument found its road to the mouth of whitemen. This time it was said that life conditions and freedoms in the West were so superior to the life conditions and freedoms in the south that those Southerners graduating, mastering and doctoring in the west would unmistakenly want to live and work in the West for ever. There was some smoke in that argument, I concede, but it was forgetting that Southern countries were also developing not only their infrastructure but also the workings of their institutions. Beijing, for example, is building the most advanced communication system and Westerners assisting at the upcoming 2008 Olympics will be given to experience the fastest internet downloads ever seen in commercial use at the time. By 2008 Beijing will be one of the most modern and advanced cities in the world with world architectural icons illustrating the cover of Western magazines. How foolish was it thus to even imagine for one second that Chinese, Indians and other students would eternally wish to live in the States? The return of students originating from the South to their motherland is only a question of time and, supreme irony, they'll carry in their brains the knowledge that they gained in the West!

Here we are, the rationality of the logic of capital has succeeded to set science and technology on the path of a rolling stone towards financial returns. The rolling steep down-hill just can't be stopped, if anything, it has been set in acceleration mode and nothing can do. Reduction of speed and eventual stop of rolling of the science and technology stone can only be expected at the stone's landing at the bottom of the valley but if I know that there is such a valley I don't know where it is nor when we'll be reaching it.
I have nothing against science and technology.
On the contrary I feel confident that the guys in charge will be able to detach themselves from the diktats of the rationality of the logic of capital and bring us some really useful, albeit perhaps "irrational", tools to make our lives better tomorrow.

After 500 years of gestation and incremental growth the logic inherent to capital finally succeeded:

- to impose itself to all the citizens of industrialized nations. This logic has indeed succeeded, in the dying 20th century, to impose its reason, its rationality as being THE exclusive, inevitable and superior truth about reality. Not following the diktats of capital has been described, and is now largely perceived, as being irrational and dangerous for society.

- to impose itself to the whole world as the only true path to economic well-being.

We are being taught that one dollar plus one dollar equals two dollars. But what about this addition eventually having the perverse effect to poison the health of those who are in charge of its operation?
In other words where is the cost of that poisoning being acted ?
I know this is an abstract question so let's reformulate it. What, for example, about a society investing in the car industry? Sure enough shares in the capital of car manufacturers generate returns. But what about the "negativities" engendered by the use of cars in a society? China started manufacturing cars beginning of the 1990th. Much capital has been invested and annual returns go to their owners. But what about the 100,000 people who died in car crashes in 2003 alone? Where are the costs related to the death of those 100,000 people impacting on the figures published by the car industry or for that matter by the State? Nowhere? No, not really, they are added to the GDP figures as part of the activities of the medical sector, of police, insurance, funeral and other activities. But the cost associated with the death of 100,000 people is only part of the problem. What about the pollution generated by the cars that are sold by the car industry? Well they are poisoning the atmosphere and adding to the causes generating climate change, but who cares, after us the deluge is it not? It will not be the deluge but it will be miseries that we inflict upon the generations that follow us who will be the ones who will have to pay the price for our stupidities.
That is what I call the irrationality of the rationality of the logic of capital. Now one should be conscientious that you are presented as a heretic if you dare question that rationality and the logic that supports it as I'm doing here.

Notwithstanding this sad state of affairs let's now set our sight further.
Where is the rationality of the massacres committed during world war 1 and world war 2 in the name of the capital game ? The artists of Cobra were categorical, they were saying loudly after the 2nd world war that this kind of rationality was simply not their cup of tea. This was barbarism in the words of the Dutch painter Constant, nothing less, and in consequence the artists' mission was to search for ways to generate a better tomorrow for all souls on this earth. Constant's words seem somehow to have been heard about by some courageous European policy makers who instigated the build-up of the structures that would eventually unite all the nations of Europe and thus avoiding the children of Europe to endure another barbarian war on its territory between its component faction-nations.

In the meantime, by the end of the 20th century, US capital investments in art purchases were directed towards formalism, towards the form of art. Denying the role of content in painting was now sanctioned with financial value which was an easy way to marginalize those who had something to say for sure while gaining more bucks in the quietude and utter safety of the gray, flat and straight lines found in the patterns of industrially produced goods. I don't want to say that all this has been orchestrated it would be recognizing far more intelligence to the vulture speculators than they really have. The question is not if all that was orchestrated but well if the outcome was worth it?
Where did this lead?
If painting is left a-content then form, for sure, takes center stage but what does society receive from the form of paintings? An artistic acknowledgment of the colors, lines and forms of our present day industrial reality? Yes that is undeniable but may I suggest that this adds nothing to what is already there in our societies. Such a "laissez aller" is simply an abdication of the societal function of visual arts. Ha Ha Ha, how could visual arts add something to our societies will be the question addressed to me by the members of "the all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine". I see already their words in their "art blogs" but most probably they'll ignore what I write until the day a recognized authority starts to refer to my arguments and then we'll see the word machine rushing into action repeating "ad nauseum" what some authorities have written about that question earlier.

To come back to this question of the present societal functionality of visual arts let me say that I do not recall one historic example of a society that succeeded to survive such a large set of problems, so deeply ingrained in its citizens daily ways of life, than what we can observe today. But that is not my argument. All problems have solutions is it not? And these solutions are not given to us by venerating a god or a dictator they are given to us by the men of knowledge of our days who are the ones who think about how to solve our societies' problems.
Solutions exist to any problem. The only question that to me makes sense in our present predicament is "will the populations of our societies, whose daily lives are so profoundly shaped by the commodities and beliefs that are causing the problems that have to be solved, accept to change their ways in time before there is simply no way any longer?" I'm not speaking here only about environmental or climatic deteriorating conditions, they could be determinant for our survival for sure, but I'm thinking about the whole range of problems that humanity is confronted with and more importantly I'm thinking about how all those problems interact among themselves.

So here we are my friends; in a maelstrom.
Don't you think now that visual signs of the emerging worldview of our men of knowledge could be the decisive factor rendering possible the acceptance by all citizens on mother earth of the views of those who have the best knowledge about how to solve our problems which could then lead them "to change their ways in time before there is simply no way any longer ?" This is not a question of publicity nor of propaganda. We nowadays just don't know what is the worldview of our men of knowledge,it is in the forming stage , and furthermore we even don't know who are are our men of knowledge. Are they the scientists? Some scientists could be men of knowledge but scientists as a group surely not. Science breeds knowings, vertical observations inside their their own field of specialty. Knowledge is the combination and interaction of all the available knowings and their confrontation with philosophy. See my anterior posts on the subject for a more elaborate presentation.

How to say? I have often the feeling that the last 35 years, as a modern Don Quichote, I have been fighting against wind-mills. Painting and thinking have been what kept me from falling, as many people I have met along my road, into dementia and non-sense and sure enough Xiaohong often pulled me back when I had one foot over the line. Every artist will understand that creation is followed by doubt. Only imbeciles or ultra self-centered individuals could believe in the fallacy of their absolute genius. As artist we have moments when we find what we do full of interest but we should also acknowledge the doubts that submerge us the moment after. I think that it is this tension between certainty and doubt that is pushing us always further on the road of the unknown on the road of the future .

In this late modern age visibility is minimal. The fog of confusion is everywhere hiding reality and the daily discoveries of new knowings are not helping, it's as if we ate too much of them and had difficulties to digest. Only the time of digestion will bring us quietness.
In my next post I'll try to have a peak inside what comes next hoping the words will accept to lead me there.

Painting (8)

Modernity.

As I wrote, in Painting (6): SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS, the turning point between the age of the gods and the modern times has been engendered as a direct consequence of increased trade combining with the newly discovered desire for luxuries, by the aristocracy and then the new rich, that had been stirred at the contact of more advanced societies during the crusades.
"The values and ideas of the aristocracy and the new rich merchants have mutated.
They now search to establish as rights what their newly found material wealth can buy and individual ownership becomes the center of their discourse. Owning a richly decorated mansion gives them the sense of being different from the masses and this newly found perception of a differentiation infuses their minds with the illusion of their particularism, of the importance of their individualities. The aristocracy and the new rich merchants are driving the new fashion of the day and individualism and private ownership will ultimately take center stage in the European social game. "

This shifting of the worldview of the Europeans towards MODERNITY occurred over a few centuries. Three periods characterize that evolution:

- Early modernity: 14th-19th centuries.
- Modernity: 20th century
- Late modernity: 1975-2020 (arbitrary setting only for the purpose of facilitating the visualization of history on the move)

_____________

Modernity

This is basically the story of 20th century industrialized nations that can be summarized in 6 points:
- Double market expansion: more consumers and a wider range of goods.
- First instrument of that expansion = science and technology.
- Second instrument of that expansion = globalization
- Growing irrationalities out of the rationality of the logic of capital.
- Speed of changes + irrationalities unleash a deep cultural shock.
- The search for sense by the visual artists.

During the 20th century different factors intermingle and interact upon one another: economic factors, social factors, political factors and cultural factors. One set of factors is only bringing answers to its own very narrow field and is totally incapable of making sense out of the global systemic reality. Market expansion is about economic realities, science is basically about thinking in a rational manner which is modern culture in action while technology is the application of science to practical uses inside the economy. What I just described here is like a storm (market expansion) putting the waters of the seas into motion (science) that shape relentless waves (technology) that break down against the hard reality of the land. The seas (societal realities) are driven into life one storm after another. Market expansion is followed by a storm of social instability that is followed by a storm of cultural build-up that is followed by the next storm of market expansion.
Societal change is unmistakenly more complex than what I describe here but I think that to approach this complexity in a valid fashion the best way is to use analogies describing simple but well known patterns.

All the ingredients came into place around 1800 that exploded into the mass marketization of cloth and socks. It took nevertheless some time for capital owners to find out that a mass market of cheap stuff could eventually reap for them extremely large returns. After the explosion of textile we'll have to wait over a century for the next boom. The textile revolution muddled through the 19th century expanding geographically (first wave of globalization under the guise of free trade and open borders) and pulling behind it the steel and machinery sectors that first gave trains that broke the barriers of speed and than cars that broke all financial records of mass marketization.

This economic reality of the textile storm through the 19th century has been accompanied by a social reaction that culminated with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The principle of social reality exploded in the hands of the class of capital owners that landed in a face to face struggle with its opposite polarity the working class. An incredible quantity of energy has been unleashed at the contact of those polarities. Unfortunately the story of the class wars has always been presented in the medias and then in history books as a kind of pest that was to be avoided at all costs. But, and that is what amazes me most, the clash between those 2 polarities of industrializing societies has in reality been one of the most fertile moments of mankind's history. The drama of modern societies is that the ideologies that were derived out of the steaming actions from both those polarities have come to blind their holders to the deep reality of societal evolution.

What we call democracy today is one of the outcomes of the contact between those 2 polarities. It is no accident of history that the "one person, one vote" principle has started to be legislated after the 1st world war only, just at the time, when it became evident that the future political reality would be democracy or social revolution and "communism". 1917 has acted as an awakener and the 2 polarities made a deal. It would be "one person, one vote". The vote has then been supplemented by policies guaranteeing a minimum of social security to the weaker pole as if to balance the repartition of material goodies. Time passing this system has proven its resilience and its utter flexibility in situations of economic, social and cultural change. But there is more to it. The acceptance of this polar nature of our modern societal system has also solidified the idea of individual freedom that is so central to a mass market consumption society. If there was to be a mass market there was indeed a need for freedom to chose what to buy and political freedom of choice appears thus to have been a natural extension of economic freedom. Let me repeat this unspoken modern reality: the two poles of our industrializing societies need each other. The capital polarity needs the demand engendered by the consumption power of the working class; blue or white collar does not change this basic societal reality that is driven, let us never forget it by the rationality of the logic of capital. The working-class polarity needs the offers brought on the market through the financing by the capital polarity and vice-versa. Take one pole out of the game and there is simply no game any longer to speak about. All this seems so simple but in daily realities this principle is nevertheless mostly forgotten leading to drastic consequences that make up the substance of our news bulletins.

This process, that I here describe of economic realities engendering their own set of social realities, does not stop with its political conclusions.

Along the road of this process the perceptions of the participating individuals are stirred in the same manner as different liquids being stirred into a cocktail by a barman. Chance, randomness but also the will of the individuals is what makes the taste and coloring of their perceptions. The ingredients that are poured in our perception glasses are not only taken from our own free-will. We are born in different social, cultural, geographic and civilizational environments from which we'll each inherit a specific set of perceptions, ideas and values that make us unique. This random uniqueness does nevertheless not forbid us to grow the necessary elements or ingredients that later could unleash our free-will. Yes it takes an effort to build-up those ingredients of free-will and it is easier to speak about the necessity of such an individual effort than to do the right thing and to make the necessary effort. I know this all too well but, how to say, nature perhaps does not want all of us to have a free-will; we would indeed all be weighing on the same arm of the balance of reality and as a consequence we would be creating for ourselves a very messy and imbalanced social, cultural and political reality. We are thus confronted with this basic societal reality that we are all different individuals different atoms, in a very massive reality, who are searching to bond with similar individuals or particles. Whatever we are we'll in any case bond with similars. But we still have the choice to be what we want if we accept to make the necessary effort. What I want to show is that, in finale, we have the means and the freedom to do what it takes to bond with the ones we decide to bond with. Oh la la was that difficult to spit out.

Artists are no strangers to these different layers of reality. The economic and technological realities of the 19th century impacted directly on the perceptions of all and the introduction of speed and long distance communication sort of broke the early modern vision of reality that was given as a representation of space from the perspective of the single-viewpoint of the eyes of the observer. Furthermore the social realities of the times were never absent from artists' minds and the new scientific ideas were seen as a confirmation that reality was changing and that past certainties had to be ranged in the closet. From mid 19th century till the first world war visual artists searched something new in the form of their creations. Brighter colors were being used and different techniques were experimented in their application. Gradually the single-point perspective rendering was abandoned and artists were attracted for a time by the primitive-arts' layering of multi-stories in one creation. Cubism proposed the intellectual exercise of decomposing the reality projecting on the retina in its basic components, triangles, squares and circles, and then to re-assemble those components into a visual approximation of the initial image that had impacted the retina. But one thing is certain: visual artists did not reject the representation of the first degree image projecting on the retina, before the first world war, they simply tried to give different renderings of that first degree image. Coming out of the first world war the idea of rationality had received a deep blow and many perceived rationality as another absurdity. The first degree image that projects on the retina was not trusted any longer to be representing reality and that image as well as all other signs of past certainties were now rejected. Those artists felt that form was unimportant they were concentrating all their efforts at understanding the meaning, the sense, the working of reality and thus the content of art works was now taking center stage in all their debates and writings. In the meantime, the expansion of the market was draining always larger amounts of unused capital to the fringes of the economy where exchanges take the form of speculation. Making an easy buck in the purchase and sale of paintings was becoming like pack-hunting, the same rush of adrenaline and fresh air, the prize was only infinitely larger. In this process the product that was the object of the art market mutated from an art work to a market work for the art speculator. All artistic considerations had vanished in this market game for a level playing field of market operators served by an "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" and "whatever" thus eventually became the object of the art market.
But deciding to be an artist does not mean to be able to do "whatever". From the perspective of the creative and of the artist art has a meaning and a specific societal function to fulfill. "Whatever" has thus no place in art but if "whatever" is the only thing that one can do one better try one's hand at the art market where the actors are not concerned by art's societal functionality but by marketing with an eye on a quick buck.

In the past our choice of being an artist would have meant to become a craftsman polishing our skill at illustrating the religious creed or later at rendering three dimensional perspectivist landscapes or ratio determined portraits for the aristocrats or the bourgeoisie. Today art has still the same societal function of illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge but what has changed is that men of knowledge are very rare nowadays and artists are thus no longer automatically given a worldview to illustrate. Whow what then ? Well if art is to illustrate the worldview of the men of knowledge and if men of knowledge can't be found then the artist's only escape is to participate personally in the creation of today's knowledge. This is undoubtedly a revolution in the artist's role and position that I propose here. But did Marcel Duchamp not say long ago his frustration at being addressed as being dumb as an artist ? Duchamp was one of the most creative of his generation. He tried Cubism but tired of it then created one of the founding paintings of Futurism "Nu descendant un escalier". He could have made a career in futurism, as Picasso made one out of Cubism, but Futurism tired him as much as Cubism. He told that "Futurism was an impressionism of the mechanical world. It was strictly a continuation of the impressionist movement. I was not interested in that. I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting. ... I was interested to put painting once again at the service of the mind. ... In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century. ... I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than to be influenced by another painter. This was the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre', stupid as a painter."1
Duchamp was right in thinking that it is not enough to be randomly unique and different from the other individuals to be a painter. "Whatever" was never on his mind he clearly was in search of meaning to reproduce in his paintings but he seems never having been quite able to define what direction his intellectual quest should take. While having understood that painting had always been at the service of the intellect he did not pinpoint what was the nature of the intellectual quest that the artist was after, that he himself was after. Surely enough the concepts of worldview, of culture and of civilization have only taken much of their substance later and this question of the nature of the intellectual quest that the painter is after is undoubtedly easier to apprehend today than it was early or mid 20th century.
All the great painters of the 20th century were running after the same question of the meaning or the vision of reality as if they somehow intuitively were conscientious about the role the artist had to fulfill, their role, as illustrators of that vision.
Picasso devised his Cubist approach as a perception of reality that he gained at the contact of his mathematician friends but he imprisoned himself in that cubist rendering. He never tired of his tricks, as Duchamp, and seems to have fossilized in the easy financial returns that his tricks procured him. The same can be said about many other 20th century painters who did not even come clause to Picasso's initial intuition.
Miro, Kandinsky, Breton, Masson, ... , Constant, the members of Cobra and later Hundertwasser had the same questions and followed the same quest for sense in the visual arts.

Much water has flowed under the bridge of time. Much economic and social change has occurred along the 20th century. Two world wars have helped to destabilize the certainties of the past and, later, liberalism abdicated from the principle of reality finding solace in this easy idea of relativism engendering the illusion of total tolerance and the belief in absolute rights. We Westerners suddenly could afford "too much food on the table" and within one generation we fattened physically and our brains ended up like clogged in the certainties of "whatever".

In the meantime the logic, that is at work inside capital, pulled capital holders where an easy buck could be made with the least of trouble. Surely enough they perceived trouble as coming from those ideas of absolute rights in the West. Those rights gave incomes to all and thus ample demand but they were also menacing the growth of their returns. Formulated in that way we understand that the answer was automatic. "Why not keep supplying that demand and just transfer the productions where there is less trouble and more margins to make from lower costs ?" That's exactly the program that was devised by the "Trilateral" organization during the 1970th and that has been imposed as unique political macro-economic policy remedy on all the governments of the world through the ideology of "la pensée unique" unidimensional market thinking (UMT). Big capital delocalized a big chunk of its investments from the North to the South while Western governments initiated the break-down of all social security policies that had been devised in earlier times. Delocalizing investments had a sweet impact upon returns to capital holders: the market expanded geographically unleashing its tentacles towards the South and simultaneously the costs of its offers in the traditional markets of the North were reducing. Applied for some twenty years now this UMT strategy is having unexpected consequences that, I'm certain, even its promoters could not have imagined. Capital holders have seen their returns go up so their first preoccupation has been satisfied but in the process a sleeping giant has awakened that Napoleon had advised, 200 years earlier, should be left sleeping for fear of being swept out of power if he awoke. Those who initiated the UMT could not have thought that they were devising their unseating but so it appears now is well what is going on. We are assisting at a formidable worldwide rebalancing act of the powers between economic actors. The iron curtain came down with the fall of the communist idea and for a short time Westerners were left dreaming about the end of history. But the awakening of the giant nation whose population is over 20% of the world population gave ideas to another giant nation whose population is also in the area of 20% of the world population and this in turn gave ideas to a series of mid sized nations that among themselves represent another 20% of the world population. The North remains dominant in terms of capital accumulation that makes no doubt but for how long ? Furthermore, are we so sure that, the capital holders from the North will always feel compelled to side with Northern policies in the future ? Asking those questions is sufficient I believe for everyone to sketch his own idea about what is going on. What is evident is that white men's hegemony has reached a threshold from where their influence can only go waning while the vast majority of the people on this earth, by now awakened, are stressing their identities which is the instant just before they start to assert their cultures into influencing the rest of the world.

That's where we are now: in late modernity. More about that within the next few days.


1. Marcel Duchamp, "Painting at the service of the mind", from an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in "Eleven Europeans in America" in the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern art (NY), XIII No. 4-5, 1946. Cited in Herschel B. Chipp "Theories of Modern Art". University of California Press.

Painting (7)

Early Modernity.

As I wrote, in Painting (6) SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS, the turning point between the age of the gods and the modern times has been engendered as a direct consequence of increased trade combining with the newly discovered desire for luxuries, by the aristocracy and then the new rich, that had been stirred at the contact of more advanced societies during the crusades.
"The values and ideas of the aristocracy and the new rich merchants have mutated.
They now search to establish as rights what their newly found material wealth can buy and individual ownership becomes the center of their discourse. Owning a richly decorated mansion gives them the sense of being different from the masses and this newly found perception of a differentiation infuses their minds with the illusion of their particularism, of the importance of their individualities. The aristocracy and the new rich merchants are driving the new fashion of the day and individualism and private ownership will ultimately take center stage in the European social and political game. "

This shifting of the worldview of the Europeans towards MODERNITY occurred over a few centuries. Three periods characterize that evolution:

- Early modernity: 14th-19th centuries.
- Modernity: 20th century
- Late modernity: 1975-2020 (arbitrary setting only for the purpose of facilitating the visualization of history on the move)

Early modernity (14th-19th centuries)


1. 14th-15th centuries:

Everything starts with the aristocracy and rich merchants of France, Flanders and the Italian city-states whose desires have been fired, during the crusades, by their envy for the richnesses of Middle-Easterners. This small group will gradually expand geographically towards England, Spain, the German Lander and the Northern countries. Trade will establish an early network of relations from the British Isles, through France, the Italian city-states to the Middle-East and the financial instruments of trade will impulse this network to adopt the logic of capital as the driving understanding between its members.

The clergy will consume the same goods transported through trade but will also acquire new sources of knowledge from the Greek classics and the works published by the Muslim universities. The first areas of activity that will be influenced by this influx of knowledge are the activities of the clergy itself. Clergymen are indeed the only ones who are literate and they'll apply the lessons learned from their reading first and foremost to their own activities :

- Creating the message and enriching the creed: priests philosophers will try to adapt the Christian vision to the new ideas they read about. Thomas d'Aquin, the greatest among them, has linked Aristotelianism with the Christian philosophy inherited from saint Augustine and defends the idea that creed and reason cannot contradict because they both originate from God.

- Diffusing the creed to the flock of followers: painting and sculpture are playing a decisive role as instruments for spreading the Christian worldview and they will thus be the first activities to benefit from newly gained knowledge. The Greek ratios and Muslim scholars' mathematics are going to efface a thousand years of conceptions about time and space. Visual artists will be asked to absorb the lessons recently gained by the clergy in new commands of works to adorn the walls of churches. Gradually artists will produce the forms expressing the spirit of the new age. Giotto is the first to represent a scene from a stationary point of viewing representing an instant of reality, a snapshot, rendered in three dimensions. Piero della Francesca later introduced shades in zones of the image that had been left out of the path of light.

Displayed in sacred objects of veneration (paintings) the spirit of the new age diffuses slowly within whole the social body. A new vision of Space, time, light and the the logic that is inherent to capital is starting to take roots. The church will react and eliminate all deviances from the canon of the creed but it will be overwelmed by the new worldview in the shaping.


2. 16th-19th centuries.

The initial small volume trade in luxuries results in intensifying greed and desires and the will grows to discover new lands to plunder. The logic of capital brings capital holders to pull their means in big stock-companies established for the conquest of new lands that will procure them gold, silver and precious stones. As a result of the discovery of the Americas Europe will be inundated, in the 16th century, under an avalanche of gold and silver transiting through Spain. The newly gained richness of Spain is envied all over Europe. In a first time, English, French and other privateers and pirates will loot the loaded Spanish ships on their way back from the Americas. In a second time, the capital accumulated through piracy will be invested in new stock-companies to undertake the conquest and plunder of ever more lands. Asia is the next on the list that will give economic dominance to the Dutch from 1600 to 1750. Bankrupt the Dutch East-India Company will be succeeded by the English East-India company that will be one of the most potent instruments giving Britain a world empire for the next 150-200 years.

The story of capital is foremost the story of its logic. Accumulation of capital and profit generation is engendering gradual cultural shifts:

- The capital owners want establish the principle of their difference with the mass of the people and this ultimately materializes in the building of mansions and castles that have then to be filled with luxuries. Mirrors, tapestries, paintings, sculptures are the most important commodities to be produced in the 16th and 17th centuries and France will establish its cultural hegemony through its State Manufactures churning out such luxuries at the attention of the European aristocracy.
Until then paintings had been used as illustrations of the Christian creed that became sacred once they made it to the walls of a church. This sacrality of paintings will be hitchhiked by the new rich. They want this sacrality to reflect upon their own. They want their new values and ideas to be immortalized and thus their local landscapes and their portraits, they think rightly I must add, will be perceived as containing something of the sacred character of the paintings hanging on the walls of churches and cathedrals. This is a crucial turning point in Western painting. Till then painting had been a craft exercised by image makers who were poorly paid which shows how little appreciation they were recognized by their society. With the secularization of their works, in the mansions of the new rich, painters at once were recognized a status of exceptionality that continues to this very day.

- Paintings were coming to be seen as sacred displays of the veneration of the spirit of the new age and thus the Greek ratios, Muslim mathematics and astronomy, that painters tried to emulate metaphorically on their canvas, became a central source of inspiration for the early generation of scientists. Physicists as Leibnitz and Newton started experimenting with the rays of light two centuries after Piero della Francesca. In those days science and technology are not a systematic affair as today. Chance and necessity are the most important guides of the thinkers of the day.

By the end of the 18th century the flow of gold and commodities into Europe had taken such proportions that the whole of society was under its spell. At the center of dominance Britain received much gold, from the less advanced colonial territories from America and Africa, that was used to purchase the commodities that Asian nations were rich of. Only gold and silver were accepted as means of payment in Asia for the good reason that Europe had nothing to sell that interested Asians... Along the 18th century the situation was such that Britain had to disburse most of its reserves to pay for its imported goods. Necessity and opportunity combined. Spinning and weaving techniques allowed for very cheap productions in Britain self and political power forbade the Indian cotton weavers to weave cotton locally any longer. The raw material had now to be imported into Britain and cheap mechanically woven British cotton fabric and other cotton commodities as socks were then exported back to India. This mercantile policy, combining with technical advances in the processing of cotton, built the first marches towards mass marketization that would in turn unleash a huge demand for steel, machinery, faster transportation and distance communication.

The story of the 19th century is the story of all those novelties coming together. For the first time in their history, with trains, humans could go faster than the gallop of a horse, for the first time they could communicate at a distance through the telegraph.

All those changes impacted on traditionally slow moving societies and resulted in a deep cultural shock that is best observed in the paintings of Van Gogh and his fellow innovative painters.

Painting (6)

SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS:

.....= a society is unified and stable when a large majority of its citizens make
........theirs a given worldview.
........*....This gradual and evolutionary process follows 2 tracks:
.................--> the road of humanity. [05/14/02: Painting (4)]
.................--> the path given by the civilization's axioms. [05/02/17: Painting (5)]
........*....Humans are social animals who, historically, assembled into larger and
.............more complex groupings
........*....The unification of larger groupings and their preservation necessitates
..............the sharing of a similar understanding of reality by all the members of
..............the group = view of the world = vision of reality = worldview.

________________________________

I my 2 last posts I dwell on our human "founding" background conditions.

- Organic compounds present in the universe assemble into more complex molecular systems ....that evolve some basic properties leading to the emergence of life.

- All living organisms are driven by their physical properties. Among those the search for more ....complexity, that is written in the genetic code of all cells, gives the general direction of the ....changes life is undergoing.

- To our best knowledge, on our earth, the human race constitutes the most complex form of
.. life. Being social animals our collective organization underwent successive changes leading
....to vaster assemblings of local groupings.

- .The assembling of those groups was always very fragile and to assure its survival it was
....in need of a binding glue that took the form of belief systems accepted by all individuals.
....Over time those belief systems translated into coherent sets of axioms gaining their societies
...a unified interpretation of the principle of reality. Such unquestioned axioms form, the
....roots, the foundations of all civilizations.

______________________

The evolution from great apes to the human race is a scientific hypothesis that has received ample verification. This hard fact is confirmed by hard discoveries but what is more difficult to pinpoint is the process setting humans on the road of visual representations of their cultural values and ideas.
We now know that animals communicate between themselves, they have cultures that unify all the individuals in one group to behave according the values of their culture. But what brought the human animal to draw, paint and sculpt? I think that the answer to that question has to be derived out of the act of representation itself. Nature and the process of evolution do not generate unnecessary functions in a specie. Everything that is there is there for a good reason, it is there to answer an existing necessity. So the functionality of visual representations has to be seen as an evolutionary answer of the human specie to a necessity it was confronted with.
We know for a sure fact that human societies were producing visual representations since early on. We know this for the archaeological discoveries of a few of those representations. What we also know is that the societies that produced those early representations had belief systems that have come to be known under the term "animism", a worldview, that had common traits anywhere and at any time. The question that now arises is what did an animist worldview fulfill as function for the societies where it was in practice?

That worldview was one view of the world, one vision of reality, among many possible views. Nonetheless it had similar traits anywhere and at any time for it was based on the realities of human life: nourishing the body, reproducing the specie, harmonizing in one's environment and respecting the power of the sun that creates the days and the seasons. The visual representations of those traits can be observed in the "art" productions of any animist society. (primitive art)
So what was the role of those representations? Again I come back to this idea that if something takes place in nature the reason why it takes place has to be found in the function that it exercises. The only plausible function that I can see is that the shaman who was the man of knowledge of his group, of his tribe, used visual signs to share his vision of reality with his fellow tribesmen. The survival of the individuals was dependent on the survival of the group and this could only be guaranteed through a unity of views shared by all members of the group. Disunity of views would have destabilized the group and impeached its fulfilling of the necessary tasks to assure the survival of its members.

Tribes were sometimes affiliated with other tribes in some sort of loose confederacy sharing some particular values that allowed for a smooth coexistence among them at least in times of plenty.
For reasons that still have not been fully understood, at a given time, one tribe could go on a rampage and by force of arms unify all the other tribes around it within what then came to be called later as a nation. (a modern concept)
Tsongstan Gambo unified militarily the Tibetan Tribes in the 8th century and introduced Buddhism as the unifying worldview of his newfound kingdom. Over the next centuries Buddhism will compete with "Bonism", local animist worldview, for acceptance by the "Tibetans". Buddhism will finally be imposed as the official religion in the 13th century by the conquering Mongols.
In the end of the 12th century Genghis Khan had been on a rampage finally unifying the various Mongolian clans in 1206. His rampage extended then to the adjacent lands and thus Tibet conquered by Khubilai Khan, Genghis' grandson, came under the umbrella of the Chinese empire that Khubilai had conquered and was leading as its emperor. The unification of the Chinese tribes had taken place much earlier, sometime, AD 3000.
This process of unification can be seen at work in all parts of the world. Local tribes, clans, sharing a similar animist worldview were unified by the force of arms. Some will never be unified and continue to live to this day under an animist worldview except that our modern worldview is making us to steal from them their natural habitat. The unification of local groupings has generally coincided with the adoption of:
- a religion (gods)
- a central authority (politics and military)
- the idea of being the center of the world
- a written language
All those elements somehow combined to give the newly grouped nations a new worldview where religion generally took center stage. Competition was now between nations and turned out to take variable forms. If the general traits of animism were globally shared by local groups anywhere around the world things took a new turn with the birth of nations. These were times of differentiation and the observed differences helped to solidify the bonds between "nationals".
The process of change from animism to religions that I try to describe here is inscribed in the long haul history. The worldviews did not change overnight. It was more as a centuries long competitive process where religions borrowed much of animist practices to gain acceptance. The same went for the structures of power. Nations that succeeded to survive over the long haul were affirming and deepening the content of their proper set of views about reality and thus differentiating even further with the other surviving nations. This describes basically the formation of civilizations.

A civilization is somehow like a house. Foundations are laid in the ground upon which the house is then being build and once the house is built the foundations become invisible like hidden in the ground. We live in houses and forget about their foundations and, when a house has structural problems, only building technicians remember about those foundations.

Societies are vastly more complex than houses but basically the analogy stands the test. Their foundations are unknown to most of the individuals who have no clue at all that what they think and how they think is founded in those unknowns. Only a few thinkers are conscientious about the civilizational foundations that formed the ideas and belief systems of our societies and how they continue to shape the formation of our ideas in the present.

If we can understand that foundations are hidden we do nonetheless not necessarily know what our civilizations are all about . Everyone can see a house but a civilization remains largely invisible, indeed, it's not a material construct. We all can observe some of the components of its branches in the form of our cultures but most of us fail to see the tree. For example we all can see that Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African or Muslim paintings do not belong to the sphere of the Western civilization and we all, kind of instinctively, know that the works of Leonardo, Rubens, Van Gogh and Picasso are part of the Western civilization. But what is a civilization, and what is the difference between culture and civilization, remain questions whose answers are largely unknown and ignored. We can abstractly understand the principle of our civilizations having foundations but we have difficulties to describe the house of our civilizations for the good reason that our civilizational house is never completely built. Generation after generation we build add-ons to it and what we are conscientious about as individuals, who are part of a generation, is the cultural add-on we are participating in and not the civilization as a whole. What we all, in various degrees, know something about are the ideas and values that shape our present day culture but how our culture participates in the building of our civilization remains largely a mystery.

A civilization is the building, over its original foundations, of snapshots of the cultural behaviors of the different human generations throughout its history. It is the addition of the successive cultural moments of societies sharing the same foundations. In that sense, the civilization of a given society can encompass a very large variety of cultural values and behaviors. It can even encompass what appears as opposite values: one extreme pole on the ladder of behavioral possibilities at a given time and the other extreme pole at another given time.

Culture is the result of the ways of behaving and of doing by societies and individuals at a given time. For example, present day culture is our present day way of life: the goods and services that feed our consumerism through mass marketization, the merchandization of all that touches human life and our dependence on salary and debt. This implies that culture is kind of a historic snapshot of the way of a society at a given time.

In the past, multiple generations were sharing roughly the same culture over the long haul. A good example of this state of affairs is found in Western Europe where culture, in the form of Christian ideas and values imposed by Rome, was transmitted largely unchanged, generation after generation, from the 4th-5th century till around the 15th century. A turning point is reached with the Renaissance (15th-16th centuries) that establishes ideas and values celebrating private ownership, individualism and the rationality emerging out of the logic of capital. Cultural change will then go accelerating in parallel with scientific, technological and economic changes and the founding values of the Renaissance will be spreading around the world giving hegemony to the rationality of the logic of capital.
Observing China's history one finds identical patterns of cultural change at work. The age of the hundred schools of thoughts (AD500-200) were succeeded by the re-unification of the warring kingdoms under an imperial dynasty and the imposition of Confucianism upon the Chinese society which itself imposed one particular potential version of Chinese culture on generation after generation of individuals from BC 200 to AD 1900. A turn is reached around 1900 after China's cultural certainties had been weakening for two centuries at the contact of more advanced Western canons. The idea that generally was adopted by all Chinese intellectuals at the time was to integrate Western scientific prowess with Chinese traditions. Another turn is reached with the decision to industrialize the country (1960-1990) that will culminate with Deng Xiao ping's "reform and opening" policies.

It appears thus that cultural change is not following a regular clock-like mechanism. Seismic cultural ruptures seem indeed to have been followed by long periods of "relative cultural stability". Those seismic cultural ruptures correspond to a shift in the worldview of the individuals within a civilization. The term worldview was coined from the German word Weltanschaung (look onto the world) which denotes a comprehensive set of opinions about what reality is all about. Worldviews were only achieving wide and unquestioning support very slowly over time.

The foundations of our present day civilizations were established in pre-history times, by this I mean that, their emergence has not been acted in written accounts and in consequence we remain largely in the dark about their formation. But notwithstanding this gap we can clearly identify their founding axioms. I gave a relatively detailed account of those axioms for the Western and Chinese civilizations in my post "THE AXIOMS OF CIVILIZATIONS = the founding building blocks upon which societies build their future".
It seems that civilizations start somehow with the political unification of local groups and with "the invention of the gods" or with the waning of animism. The transition from animism to the creation of the gods takes place historically at different times for each center of civilization. China and Sumer invent their first gods sometime 5-6,000 years ago or earlier. Other centers will follow up later on and some ethnic groups are still living in animist cultures today. What all this shows us is a deep differentiation between the people of this earth in their levels of societal development. This reality does not imply, in any way, a judgment about the people who live in different stages of societal development.

Animism corresponds to an early worldview giving humans to glorify the elements that visually appeared to them as commanding the phenomena that directly impacted on their survival: the sun, the moon, the animals and plants that nourished them and sex and their reproduction. Because they were not or did not cut themselves from their environment they could directly experience and hear the song of the earth, the song of life and feel being one with their environment. That this worldview was the result of conscientious thinking or not does not matter. What matters is the result or the consequence of this conscientious or unconscientious behavior: a deep respect for everything in nature, a limitation of the species' taking from nature limited to the satisfaction of the primary needs of its members to reproduce their existence.

Visual arts were not perceived in the age of animism nor in the age of the gods in the same light as they are nowadays. They were indeed not considered as art, those productions had a direct functionality, they were illustrations of the ideas and values of the men of knowledge of their day: the shaman in animism and the priest under the gods. The artists were simply image makers, illustrators, publicists of the ideas of others.
The worldviews of the men of knowledge were imposed by the men of power and the artist's job was to illustrate those worldviews. The freedom of the artists was limited to form, content was imposed on him.

Things will start to change with the Renaissance. Towns and cities were developing at the non controlled and wild intersections between manors generating demographic growth and the need for more craft productions and trade. On this particular West-European reality will be superposed the consequences of a brutal and primitive urge to impose the Christian creed upon the Middle East:
- ..advanced Arab sciences and the long lost Greek classics made their entry in the rooms of the literate, I mean the clergy, all others were indeed illiterate including the laymen painters. Clergymen being the buyers of images their reading the classics and the Arab university publications will unleash their demand for change in the rendering of the form of their new image orders.
- ..the aristocracy had a taste for the luxuries of more advanced lands and long distance trade took root to satisfy their needs and desires. Walls that had been left bare until then will now be decorated with mirrors, tapestries and paintings. Interior decoration was born to satisfy the desire of the aristocracy for luxuries.

Here is the turning point between the age of the gods and the modern times. Increased trade combines with the newly discovered desire by the aristocracy and then the new rich for luxuries.
The values and ideas of the aristocracy and the new rich merchants have mutated.
They now search to establish as rights what their newly found material wealth can buy and individual ownership becomes the center of their discourse. Owning a richly decorated mansion gives them the sense of being different from the masses and this newly found perception of a differentiation infuses their minds with the illusion of their particularism, of the importance of their individualities. The aristocracy and the new rich merchants are driving the new fashion of the day and individualism and private ownership will ultimately take center stage in the European social game.
At this turning point in history the Christian church that has been hegemonic for over 1000 years is still the dominating force and it will take another few centuries for its dominance to wane. The sacred images hanging on the walls of the churches continue to illustrate the Christian creed. In this environment of social and cultural change interior decoration luxuries will try to catch up with the sacred character of the images hanging on the walls of the churches. Paintings on the walls of the manors of the aristocracy and the new rich will posit the sacrality of their newly discovered values of individuality and private ownership.
Their portraits and environing landscapes act as a stamp of sacrality adorning their walls. Here is the point when art in Western Europe takes its sacred character. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witness the assembling of large collections of paintings. Mansions, castles and palaces are filled with the sacred character of the visual representations of the shaping worldview. Those investments are not typically capitalistic they are more of the nature of procuring prestige.

Meanwhile the flow of money increases and the surpluses are invested in trading ventures and later in production. In this process something goes largely unnoticed by all the participants. Everything seems to be normal but something absolutely stunning is nevertheless happening: the logic of their invested capital is starting to dictate the actions of capital owners. They are not acting out of their own will any longer, the generation of profits, of surpluses is now what dictates their conduct. One could argue that they freely accept and even search for the consequences of the logic of capital that in last instance is engulfing them into always more opportunities of luxuries. This is absolutely true but the only problem is that the rationality of the logic of capital is thus presented as what is good, desirable and what should be encouraged by societies. And why not will you ask. Well I think that when one accepts to abdicate blindly his own right at free examination of what is to be done for the chimera of a quick buck guaranteed by a mechanical logic, well then one decides to abdicate not only the short term but also everything that comes in the future engendered by the rationality of that logic of the invested capital. I guess that I don't need to make a drawing about what kind of consequences one exposes oneself by following such a flawed logic. But what is more fundamental even is that by abdicating your free will to the rationality of the logic of capital you not only expose yourself to consequences, you expose the whole of your society. Here we are today with poisoned waters, poisoned air, deforestation, climate change, the most brutal of species extinctions, and the steadying possibility of our human extinction... and all this has been dictatorially imposed on all of us by a tiny minority of capital owners who are totally unconscientious about the consequences of their actions. Till when will humanity as a whole continue to accept such a paltry state of affairs?

Modernism concludes nowadays not only on this real possibility of our own provoking human mass extinction but also on the real possibility of a new found control of our actions that could be leading to a radically better future for every citizen on this earth. What will make the balance tilt towards one side or the other? I think ourselves and nothing else. What do I mean by that? Well we sure have ended the 20th century in the most glaring confusion in art no doubt about that and more generally in our cultural behavior but this is not in any way implying that we can't reach out for sense anymore.

Whatever the outcome for humanity, it makes no doubt that we have entered an area of change unparalleled in our history. If we succeed to glide around the obstacles before us the future could be very interesting. Never has humanity seen such an extensive range of fundamental changes interacting upon one another. This is a systemic exception for sure.
More about this in a few days.