CULTURAL REALIGNMENTS IN THE 21st CENTURY

 

Culture in our modern age is always moving to some extent. Even if it's not moving much, the expectation is that it must move. But when the currents are so muddied and convoluted, it's sometimes difficult to discern the movement of that current at all. So it is with the most recent  stages of art — now "destabilizing" — which once looked so stagnant, reliable, established, and now appears so volatile, doubtful, and formless.

Since 2016 Caesura has explored art in the early moments of its newfound disparity and social disorganization. From ambient music to Opera, Post-Internet art to Meow Wolf, to … Caesura has opened its new angels' wings to an expanding field of cultural production, whose chaotic nebula of artists reared in the 'cultural turn' are as free as they are lost. 

But where will they now go?

For this roundtable, we asked our contributors to consider how and where culture is moving today. Where is it moving from, and where to? What is its direction, motivations, and values? In what ways is the social significance of art being redefined and renegotiated?

—Bret Schneider

 
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Two Photos
C. Philip Mills
Two Photos
C. Philip Mills

There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?

C. Philip Mills
Forgetting What You Know
Patrick Zapien
Forgetting What You Know
Patrick Zapien

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .

Patrick Zapien
 
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