There's a peculiar feeling one gets when, after a long time absent, one feels oneself pulled into a familiar orbit. Not that there is an inevitability to it; it's not that all paths lead back to the same place, but rather that some regions are like drains for our psyche, threatening to slowly draw us in from a multitude of directions should we fail to keep our distance. So it was for me recently with a return to electro-swing.
The End of Design
In Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art, he describes his assessment of the state of contemporary art: quite simply, art felt like it had come to an end because it had. Danto is clear throughout his work that by 'the end of art' he does not mean that there is no new art being done, or that this art is not good. Rather, he means something more like what many would consider art history - an overarching narrative under which the large body of 'art' proper could be subsumed1. No longer was there a clear Gestalt into which art could be made to fit, in its place were many small movements: spurious excitations of ecstatic creativity that dissipated with rapidity. What Danto saw in the contemporary art world was one that had followed the trajectory of the art narrative as far as it could go until at last it was extinguished. This is what Danto called the post-historical moment, in which there was no longer a pale of history into which art belonged (Danto, 1997). This is the world of postmodern art - an eclectic mish-mash of styles all with separate narratives. It is a world that we are still living in - no new modernist artistic narrative has come along, managed to take hold and command the art world as was the case in the early twentieth century.
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