The avant-garde proclaimed that an entirely new era in art was succeeding the age of the representational easel painting, yet by regarding its own works in contrast to traditional ones it assumed a place in the history of art that it had declared to be terminated as of its own appearance. Avant-garde reductionism arises out of the aspiration to reject tradition and begin from zero, but this very rejection is meaningful only insofar as tradition is still alive and serves as its background or alter-ego.
What exactly is being fought and why? Why must there continue to be this opposition between representational work and so-called abstract work? At best, both are explorations by artists of their respective abilities to present what they "see", their vision shifting and changing as the topic or situation of life or the world demands. We don't see without our minds and we don't think without an image-ination.
What would happen if these two were not in conflict and audiences were not required to like either this or that type of art, but could instead learn to approach pieces individually as we might another person at a party? I may say that actors are crazy, but I am happy to have the ones I know as friends. I wonder what it would be like if I approached art visually instead of ideologically, and tried to understand why the piece was created as a work of art instead of as a poem, film or not at all. I am at such times insistently naive, a friend in an art department told me recently, but that is the luxury of not being a scholar. I don't have to buy what I am told just because I bought a ticket to the museum.
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