notes on decadence...

below is the beginning of a paper never finished.....just rambles in a lost mind before I found my way.....before I found something that gave me what I needed. namely - hope.

The Death of Gaud: Ornamentation after Postmodernism

The concept of decadence -waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life... A society is not free to remain young. .... The more energetically and boldly it advances, the richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

The issue of decadence in contemporary art is incredibly interesting to me.  I am mostly concerned with extreme ornamentation that is manifested through such themes as sex, death, and food from a postmodern context.  Considering the increasingly global framework that contemporary art situates itself within, I think drawing from both eastern and western artists that exemplify over-indulgence and draconian decorative properties is a really rewarding prospect. The Luo Brothers and the Chinese concept of yansu that developed in the mid 1990’s as well as Pierre et Gilles who exhibit an intensely ornate aesthetic are some examples, perhaps even Nick Cave.  What, if any, ornaphobic art may be signifying the end of decadence in art and perhaps the first phase of a cyclical response to an over-indulgent aesthetic in contemporary art.  Specific exhibitions include the 1988 show at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Against Nature, which takes Huysmans’s novel, A Rebours, as an “aesthetic catalyst” as well as 2008’s Ah…Decadence at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

POMO

Jaded Poignance: Postmodernism’s Decadence

the response.....

Sensitivity, sincerity, poignancy, reaction, excitation, and perhaps a

return to purity.  making our way back from post-modernism's jaded irony.

de-sensitized to the mockery.  jaded by the jaded.  kiki and bourgeois are sincere.  They broke the standards of modernism's masculinity with feminine hands and through feminine eyes.  The sincerity is still there though.  It's beyond modernism.  It's sincerity and originality without egoism and authority.   Duchamp had to break down the discourse in order for it to be rebuilt with different hands, more hands, varied hands.

The demise of art and science leads to doubt and to the structure of the simple human condition.  To life and death

How do keep from getting jaded?  And if you can't, how do you go back?  I want to go back. back to believing in people, back to getting hurt, back to getting excited, back to seeing no flaws at all but when they appear - recognizing their endearment.