Reconfiguration of Artistic Power in the 20th Century

The bourgeois art style (e.g. in painting) cedes to what Kondylis names the “analytic-combinatory” program. In the “bourgeois harmonious” synthesis, nature (Euclidean geometry) was represented to the best ability of the artist (artistic techniques were articulated for medical illustration that served a medical epistemology of disease-as-difference-from-normative body). The study of such techniques permits atomization—form divorced from color—and the free combinatory program of creation extends to novelties—time bent the exigencies of the creator, i.e. film montage (Kondylis 1991, 87).

Where beauty and virtue (public concern) once fenced art in,¹ novelty and provocation came to be the values by which art was evaluated (Kondylis 1991, 61–62). Thus the artist is granted decision (Kondylis 1991, 70–71) but cedes relevance (no longer having any stake in virtue or life) (Kondylis 1991, 65, 247, 252, 257).

Whether this is unrestrained amorality or beautiful and free I can hardly guess.