Postpostmodernism

The ultimate symbol of modernism and postmodernism in art is nakedness. Yeats used just this analogy for his aesthetic: “there’s more enterprise in going naked.” Duchamp exhibited a urinal as sculpture. Allen Ginsberg stripped to read his poetry. Jim Morrison stripped to sing his songs.

We have tried to reduce art to a bare minimum, or even “deconstruct” it. Poetry without rhyme, visual art without representation, music without tone or scale, architecture reduced to the structural minimum, all girders and glass.

But this is, surely, a dead end. One reaches the point of complete nakedness rather quickly. And once you’ve done it once, what do you do next?

After almost a century, it is just tiresome. Little or nothing has happened in the arts for about a half-century now. This is doubly tragic, for man needs art.

It is time to move forcefully in the opposite direction. For while there is something to be said for clearing the air, ultimately, nakedness is the reverse of art.

Nakedness is nature unadorned. Art is nature perfected by man’s spirit.

Nakedness is not art; nakedness is the lack of art. The clothing we wear—that is art. Art is the clothing of nature.