Many historians have pointed out how similar the current situation
is to that which prevailed prior to World War I. Then, too, global markets had
taken root, only to to overturned by militarism and nationalistic fervor. In
the twenty-first century, China has come to economic power not by dint of Maoism
and quaint calls to world revolution, not by taunting the United States as a
"paper tiger", but by strategic uses of global trade.
Would China sacrifice its gains, overturn the global
applecart by making war on Japan? One would think not, but it's worth
remembering that nationalistic fervor — revanchism, anger, all tied to arms build-up — often overcome
accounting and plain sense. In short, it's hardly unknown for the insanely ruinous
path to prevail.
What are the odds of such a calamity coming to pass? Were I a global book maker I'd say they
are low but far from negligible.
It just today came to mind that another kind of nostalgia
might be in the offing — nostalgia for postmodernism. What, you might ask, is
there about the much maligned,
supposedly abstruse discourse of postmodernism to be nostalgic about? This: postmodernism
and it's ally, cultural relativism, whatever their flaws, allowed all sorts of
ideas, impulses, ethnicities, identities and experimentations to take the
stage, however briefly.
But in a recent NY Times piece ("Lost in the
Gallery-Industrial Complex" NY Times 1/19/14), Holland Cotter writes that: "Roughly since the end
of the multicultural, postmodern 1990s, we’ve watched new art being
re-Modernized and domesticated. . . ". What does he mean by this? Suggestive
as it is, I wish he had taken the time to spell it out. But what he means comes
pretty clear in the course of his piece. He's saying that money rules, more
than ever, fusing together all the art world ways of making it.
What he's saying is that the unmitigated rule of the big
buck in the art world may yet make us nostalgic for Pomo, notwithstanding its darned
obscurities and complexities.
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