Ashley Skinny
MetaArt: from pataphysics to metamodern
'Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better'
— Albert Camus
PREAMBLE
This book is about nowadays` art. About the sense and his ridiculousness. About the darkest and the most mystical sides of our creativity. About the most pleasents epoch that we ever lived.
THE ART WE KNOW NOWADAYS
Today you can see differnt types of art: from arthouse movies, shot on the phone to masterpieces of surrealism paintings, written by 'basic' people from the internet. The origins of art got their last metamorphose in our present society. The concept of this word has been monstrously perverted beyond recognition, but with what grace!
We transformated the art into the multifunctional and free for creativity shell. You can do everything and name it 'the art'. You can characterize cheap graphic design as geniusly and name 'The Starry Night' an overrated by time drawing, or vice versa. And both variants are true. It`s all dependes on your spiritual feelings and introspection. That`s the transformation we did!
THE ROLE OF PATAPHYSICS. THE BEGINNING OF NEW ERA
Pataphysics is not well known, but a very significant phenomenon (or epiphenomenon to correspond the term), which influenced the metamodern art. This title takes roots from play of poet Alfred Jarry, 'Guignol' (1893). Pataphysics is pseudo philosophical, ironic 'science', which came out of and supported by philosophy of absurdism.Also, comic doctrine of writer found fame among representatives of surrealism.
A vector of pataphysics is in erasing the boundaries between 'logical' and 'illogical', 'subjective' and 'objective' to merging it into a homogeneous mass. If we look on today`s metaart, we can mention, that it is not doesn't need specifics anymore, up to the genre. How it was said, it`s a free shell with no rules, where rules are described by the creator. At one time, exactly pataphysics gave impetus to rethinking and metamorphoses in art as such. It developed the ideas of absurdism, polish them down to absolutism. Eventually, artists began to turn to the new idea more and more, until it became something "established".
You have all the rights to change the history, abstracting from any factual background.
METAMODERN
In their deeds and creations, metamodern people do not refer to any philosophy, but they have some beliefs, which are not absctract at all. They don`t deny the influence of past centuries and years, but not all of them inspired by them: they see old silhouettes and reflections of 80`s (especially 80`s), 90`s, XVII century etc. already in modern authors, whith no idea where they were taking their concepts (at least a general picture regarding this). And they don`t need to!
Narcisstic and at the same time pleasent, sensetive to others people, express their introspective reflections affordable the easiest and useful ways, like an internet. Why do they need to illuminate existential problematics of time, while they have theirs? Cognitive distortions and barriers are their velvet blanket, under which they covered when it gets cold…
AESTHETICS
Visual component in creativity is replaced and in some sense added much more instead of the ideological component. Aesthetics is kind of philosophy, that discribes pictorial art as well, but this practic can be apllied to other practics in creativity. This doctrine is play a linking role in metaart because of it`s expression`s ambitions in it. Through the aesthetic way you can discribe much more and easily, while other doctrines require some more energy and intellect`s skill (but that people are intellegent as such!)
The main aesthetics in nowaday`s art are covered in my postulate: in the easiest and the powerfullest expressions.
ESSENCE: SHELL AND INNARDS OF METAART
Metaart is a quintessence of beautiful and dreadful, ironic and serious. It`s an antipode of sense with new rules, by which metamodern people create their own ideology. It`s a vibrant palette of the brightest colors in a simple vessel.
But didn`t chage and will never change is the direction of art: how the maths is always a system for natural science, and art is a way to express yourself, invariably. The taste of art is endlessly the same, the same tasteful and strong.