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Art is dead for a lot of reasons that mostly come down to the complete in-ability of anyone interested in doing art to live off it, get it in a show, or even teach it. And what is worse in my mind, is the disappearance of an audience who has any conception at all of the tradition or its world, or is even interested in developing such conception. The combination has effectively disappeared the traditional visual arts. And on top of all that, there is the total embrace of other visual media that have utterly replaced it with a world of video, digital, and photographic images.
About the only thing that exists as visual art, is the idea that it once existed---and even that has been under attack for some time. In this erasure, the disappearance is accomplished by a scheme of aesthetic and politically repressive value judgments that such traditional visual arts are merely elitist instruments of propaganda, that compose nothing more than a world of visual accouterments for the reigning bourgeois sensibility in power. I am not sure, I disagree.
It seems almost at exactly in this junction that you can find both an apparent embrace and rejection of the assumed bourgeoise sensibility in question---and it might be that ambivalence is all that remains of art even as a conceptual project.
The only aesthetic critique of Powerpoint that I would consider a critique pure and simple would be a wave of B-52 strikes using a full palette of daisy cutters, FAE's (fuel air explosives) and standard ordinance in saturation delivery on Redmond, Washington. Then I would understand, ah, a critique of the bourgeoisie order is at last under way.
Citoyen Grimeaux, pour un nouveau thème d'actualité met en relation les arts et société.