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Rather than presupposing genius as an "essential" quality, the genius decision is an activity, which is situated between success and failure — in failing better.
I define the postmodern, with respect to art, as a synthesis of irony and ecstasy: the historical process that is generally equated with the concept of nihilism and the end of metaphysics forms a common starting-point for both the modern and the postmodern. While the modern is characterized by nostalgia for lost meaning, the postmodern is marked by irony and an affirmative ecstasy that resembles Nietzsche's "pessimism of strength".
The concepts of the past and future have made way for a permanent present in which all desires become instantaneously fulfilled with the help of the new communication technologies. The task of art then is no longer to invent fictive worlds but to mediate between the audience and these technologies. The artist replaces, or rather, abolishes the cultural elite as a mediating agent.
(from: The Genius Decision)
Much of contemporary sculpture has been newly engaged in a materialist formalism, one that is based in part on a structuralist analysis of the world that attributes ideological meaning to the materials themselves or inscribes linguistic codes onto them, and in part on a participatory humanism—a renewed involvement in the question of being, transcendence, and the social by way of its materiality—a new variant, which I have chosen to refer to as 'spiritual materiality.
This spiritual materialism ranges from art that either reconstructs or simulates, whether reflexive or poetic, "material" in such a way as to manifest thereby its rules or ideological structure, as do Roni Horn's sculptures and photographs; combines an expressed materialism with the goal of changing social praxis, as do the sculptures by Wolfgang Laib and the installations by Felix Gonzales-Torres; or pushes the existential questions of the Human Condition, embedded in the materiality, towards a new extreme subjectivity, as do the works by Marc Quinn and James Lee Byars.
(from: Spiritual Materiality: Contemporary Sculpture and the Responsibility of Forms).
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