As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmodern

theory both reacted to and helped create the forces that eroded

reason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of a

postmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form was

inscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, the

reality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discourse

in such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronic

platforms, all radical, all working class or under class voices are pre

vetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financialized

kitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators,

following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity

with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the

lost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesia

about the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination.

The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imagination

of the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreation

of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by

its ‘otherness’, by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories,

all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness.

And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose can

the artwork posit the direction to which society must look to create

an ‘other’ or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promise

that is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. The

Utopian promise is not kept.