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First of all, this question arises from the romantic premise that an artist, and here even a theorist, is adorned with visionary capacities. Even more, the question implies that the notion of a "vision" - not some analytical speculation - is the route to the knowledge of art. Trying this route, I see myself devoid of such abilities. No vision, just blankness.
Then, by introducing "the context of contemporary art", the questioner has softened the idealistic and romantic flavour of the requisition, attempting to provide some firm ground in which the position of a seer may be located. Yet, in this context we can speak of only the destiny of contemporary art, i.e. of what will happen to art as we know it. And here we see it: aimlessly sophisticated, relentlessly feeble, dispassionately critical, comfortably crude, invisibly spectacular, insipidly smart, sofa-surfing and screen-diving. It is, at its finest, involved in innovative contradictions - but proportionally dispossessed of any universal goals, as it happens in the contemporary political context, anyway.
Yet, the realistic impulse characteristic for recent art failed again to construct and sustain a strictly materialistic account on art. It has, in effect, caused a need to pose questions as the one at stake. Need of some revolutionary activity has arisen, as it has occurred to many. But there are no traces of this activity. (Except in the www territory that has some rights to claim the maintenance of revolutionary impulses.) To speak of a future "avant-garde" as a utopian desire rather than a utopian project gives way to the possibility of consuming any artistic activity (including sofa-surfing) as artificial, flavoured with revolutionary intent. And to remain nihilistic to the very core. That includes pretentious and fragmentary answers to the question. But do we mean anything by this?
Branislav Dimitrijevic
Belgrade
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