We Eat and Drink while Tomorrow They Die

Reading Edward_Winkleman's recent post on pontential future trends in art, he creates this metaphor:

The metaphor I've found helpful in discussing my opinion on Pluralism is to imagine that the widespread efforts in Deconstruction resulted in a vast landscape scattered with very small pieces of artstuff (imagine little building blocks as far as the eye can see).

(...broken bottles under children's feet? -M)

Some artists entered that landscape and got busy trying to breaking down the artstuff further, into smaller and smaller pieces, but some artists, because this is the inclination of artists, couldn't help themselves and began taking the small blocks and constructing things out of them. This new construction was informed by the previous deconstruction (i.e., they could see what each block signified once broken down), but as daunting as building some new "thing" from that landscape might seem, some artists simply had to. The result was an army of highly individualistic, often highly private, efforts...their own, often very elaborate, universes.

The problem I see with this metaphor is that the small pieces are all still loaded with cultural meaning. over the past few years musical mashups have made for popular nights at local clubs and my current favorite re-edit of Bush's state-of-the-union address on Google Video:



Which could be dedescribed as the mashup of capitalism, activism, and popmusic. Perhaps the last few years of amalgamism is the new ism Edward is searching for.

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