An Unenviable Situation

Friday, April 01, 2011

Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I, 2005

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1984

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.
de Kooning in the end was a mannerist, not a modernist.

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