/lit/ - Literature

>>11282346
Picture of Dorian Gray

>>11299464
>With the death of bourgeois class and really a leading intellectual society and the rise of the every day man and technology and so on, society no longer needs to sit and ponder on the next artistic movements or art in general. One of its biggest influences it had was political, well that's gone, who needs napoleon riding a horse when we can have 300 million people in a nation reached with a few ads on facebook or TV.
The intellectual class and the bourgeois still exist, but have relocated to mass media, the importance of which you correctly note because technological reproduction, the emergence of the global village, and the flourishing of democracy through the 20th century have made it possible for every man to become his own island, and for every island to have its own constitution. Who's writing it, though? Not the king, that's for sure; it's the entertainers and marketers, the offspring of the bourgeois class and the intellectuals, respectively. When you delineate each individual from the public, you castrate the public's potential to organise meaningfully to do, well, absolutely anything useful, including the creation of a new artistic school. The painting of Napoleon would have been like a fetish item before anyone could go type 'Napoleon on horse' into Google. Now, it's a little memento mori of romanticism since we decided art the consecrates the conquering of nations is best left to the back reaches of the gallery. Which is to say, the mausoleum of decomposing ideas.

And what came to replace it? You gave the answer in your post. I attached an image of Ai Weiwei's celebrated work for the benefit of other anons. It wasn't the muse or the Gods who spoke to him. It was the fucking Guardian newspaper. Art is still political, but only if it represents the correct ideas. Someone like Weiwei can collect his check and save the world in one fell swoop with this ersatz, alienated representation of human suffering. Good for him.

Btw I like your style, reminds me of Sidney Nolan, seductive but also tongue in cheek