/lit/ - Literature

>>17291011
I will repost two posts I've made last week which touch on points related to contemporary art in general - which in my opinion is in very good state. I recommend some artists in order to prove my point. Here it goes:

I stopped paying so attention to "traditionalism", which had seemed somewhat seductive to me at first, after I begun investigating contemporary art and realized that it is in extremely good shape.
With the exception of classical music, which looks half-doomed, half-great, thanks respectively to atonalism, and minimalism/neoromanticism/poly-stylism, the other arts are doing rather well.

>novel
Vargas Llosa, Krasznahorkai, Houellebecq, Javier Marias, McCarthy, Pynchon, Fosse, Lobo Antunes, Peter Handke all belong to the great tradition of the novel and are still alive. Antunes is not inferior to Faulkner, nor is Krasznahorkai much less psychologically dense than Kafka, or Houellebecq less groundbreaking in his exploration of "forbidden" themes than D.H. Lawrence or Flaubert. It's only the fact that they are our contemporaries that makes us see them as automatically "inferior".

>poetry
Adunis, Ko Un, Zagajewski, Simic, Carson are alive. And let us remember that Geoffrey Hill, Heaney and Bonnefoy died only a few years ago.
Poetry has seen better days, such as in the age of Pound, Eliot, Lorca, Montale and Pessoa, but it's by no means in bad condition. Furthermore, it's untranslatable, so great poets take longer to become noticed. How many of us can judge contemporary Russian, Norwegian, Greek or Hungarian poetry? Maybe the country of Krasznahorkai also has some great living poet, but we haven't heard of him yet because translators aren't up to the task... I know that in my own native tongue there are some great poets that are virtually unknown to those who can't read it.

>painting
We have the great neo-symbolism of the Nerdrum school, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, Michael Borremans, Paula Rego, and many interesting photographers. Lucian Freud, Andrew Wyath, Kitaj and others died not long ago.
Painting is doing well. Perhaps better than it was doing in some of the 18th century or in some of the 19th, when all people did was to copy others and try to imitate the masters (although there were always exceptions - such as Piranesi, Blake and Turner).

>cinema
Werner Herzog, Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Paolo Sorrentino, Jodorowsky, Terrence Malick, Polanski have all released works in the past decade. I have a feeling that cinema might actually be doing worse than it was during the golden age of the 50's, 60's and 70's, when we had Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Buñuel and others releasing masterpieces every year. But that was really a golden age, and therefore necessarily an exception.
Still, it could be worse. It isn't doing badly. There are also some Asian directors who are really good and younger, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul (don't ask me how to pronounce it).

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