Contemporary art is an art of extremity not because it takes extreme situations as its subject - though much of it does that too - but because the experience of extremity threaten to undermine the very possibility of an imaginative interpretation of reality.
The only art that seems appropriate to such an age, to judge from the recent history of artistic experimentation, is an anti-art or minimal art, where minimalism refers not just to a particular style in an endless succession of styles but to a widespread conviction that art can survive only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision: the radical "restriction of perspective" recommended by authorities on the subject as the survival strategy par excellence. Even the kind of embattled self-assertion envision by [Philip] Roth as a typical artistic defense against an "unreal environment" has proved impossible to sustain.
Thoughts? Opinions?
