AT THE beginning of this critique of ART NOW VOL: 2,  I said that most of the artists featured expose or express their reactions to the world, or the societies they live in today. Such reactions may be sufficient to make their works important to audiences of their generation or peer group, since the experience these works evoke may be shared by such a non-artistic peer audience. The incredibly intellectual and convoluted titles of the group exhibitions with such works, put together by various contemporary curators, certainly show how art and the artist’s role today is presented as a speculative theme, demonstrated in a sort of freak fair, akin to a circus, but a serious one. No wonder some of Cindy Sherman’s recent photographic concepts involve her dressed as a clown in numerous multi-cultural costumes!
Perhaps it is equally necessary to react to those artists that are left to discuss in the volume by referring to the themes or topics they repeat, rather than speak of most of these artists individually.

Recurrent obsession
One of the recurrent obsessions of the artists is a desire to show how art itself is an often corrupted, meaningless exercise in a world swiftly usurping everything creative into mere commercial advertisements for consumer culture.
A lot of the artists are aware that a larger flat, or level commercial popular culture of inventions posing as creative ‘art’ has made their profession seem obsolete, or at least just a perfunctory convention, a side show to the ‘big’ event, which is really assumed to be only economic evaluations of raw materials, capitalistic investments, government policies and political ambitions, technological experimentation, etc.
Their reaction is often a disgusted ‘slap-in-the-face’ to art as an ‘established convention’, and curators in a similar cultural cul-de-sac understand where such a reaction is coming from; hence the freakish shows they increasingly put together.
Behind the actual material presentations of these artists is the influence of literary or philosophic communication theories, the best of which have been written by 20th Century French thinkers, and which no truly educated artist today should pre-judge or dismiss.
It is such influences which bring the various ‘unconventional’ works of most artists in Art Now: Vol: 2 to our attention, consideration, and even repulsive reaction. One of the most popular artists in this vein in the volume is Jeff Koons, the 65- year-old American artist who, following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, the famous early 20th Century French intellectual artist and accomplished Chess player, mixes up commercially manufactured objects and toys, as well as food, nudes, comic book graphics super-realistically painted etc –all such items and styles already loaded with second-hand social significance — to make social comments. The Koons effect is therefore not imitative or plagiaristic, but satirical, ironic, and also critically humorous.

Caribbean exclusion
It is interesting, at this point, to sidestep and wonder about artists from the region and societies of the Caribbean, particularly the Anglo-Caribbean, from which there are no representations in Art Now: Vol: 2. Their exclusion is not arbitrary or unusual, because certain inherited and perpetuated traditions, conventions, stereotypes in the region — call it any of these terms — abound, helped by uninformed unprofessional directives generated by a huge drop in literacy and disinterest in up-to-date publishing in Art, Literature, Film studies, etc.
This is also helped by the long closed public American and European libraries which were once attached to Embassies. In any case, in the Anglo Caribbean/Guyana area, the very term ‘culture’ apparently is not interpreted according to its definition in dictionaries as: “To cultivate, to improve; refinement the result of cultivation,” but rather conveniently re-interpreted to mean whatever familiar customs, habits, the masses grouped into various ethnicities, already possess, or assume, or perpetuate AS IS already perfect apparently.
Such a definition leaves little space for ‘culture’ to mean a refinement or improvement by means of specific artistic works, which can only be made by individuals, or small creative collectives like film crews, dance troupes, etc. The dominant Caribbean/Guyanese definition of culture seems to want individually created works of art to be the servant of collective ‘mass’ customs, not an original work of art with a voice of its own.
Social ideas dependent on collective support seem to be more respected than such an individual expression of culture. But culture as refinement is arrived at by perceptive and intuitive exploration. In a collectively dominated cultural scenario, it would be difficult therefore to even recognize the cultural value of individual works, if they move ahead of ready-made inherited customs and styles defined as ‘culture’ in advance. Whole refined creative works would therefore remain invisible or unpopular, because they are not ‘un-original’ enough!
Without recognition from its own society, such individual works would remain  unable to achieve the initial recognition which is a prerequisite for international recognition via books like Art Now: Vol: 2. This typical regional ‘topsy-turvy’, or ‘vox populi’ definition of culture is similar to the example of a barrel with 100 apples, 99 of which bear a rotten spot, while one individual apple remains without this blemish; such an apple then would become the bad apple, while the 99 would be good apples, because of their shared collective blemish.
Yet no one well informed, well read, or interested in continuous education would deny that individual creative writers, for example the Guyanese Edgar Mittelholtzer, Wilson Harris, Denis Williams, E.R. Braithwaite, and David Dabydeen define and represent Guyanese culture by a refinement that does not pander servilely to any prescribed, predefined collective definition of Guyanese culture. It is their works’ exploratory, critical nature which represent at least one full and balanced activation of inherited Guyanese habits, based now on contemporary creative rearrangements of those same various inherited customary values, which some are content to define forever as Guyanese culture, like a stagnant prefabricated destiny.
More to the point, those contemporary Guyanese painters who advance the structural lessons of the nation’s three most distinct and prolific painters of the previous generation — Phillip Moore, the late Cletus Henriques, and Frank Bowling — remain unknown to the international art world, not because their works are lesser than many of their peers in Art Now: Vol: 2, but because their abstract refinement remains promotionally unusual to a customary figurative bias which, both within the Caribbean and no doubt outside, no deviations are expected from by individual creative writers, and visual artists especially, who are supposed to act like its porters and baggage handlers.

Creative freedoms
No similar restrictive definitions of national or regional cultures determine the recognition of diverse individual artists represented by Art Now: Vol: 2. Indeed, it is the creative freedom of the artists which illuminate aspects of the various national cultures from which they emerged. This is the success of a publication like Art Now: Vol: 2.
At the same time, looking at many of the volume’s artists allows us to see how the world is being thought of today by new artists, and also how the works of these artists differ in conception, disposition, and human significance from the works of a previous post-war generation.
For example, one of the first artists in the book is 47-year-old Franz Ackermann of Germany, who is concerned with installing drawings and paintings as mental diaries of his international travels in a highly technical world. The paintings are as technical as the architectural, electronic, urban and geographical detail that triggers them. The only real evidence of human sentiment, however, apart from the artist’s illuminated portrait at times, is the artist’s tactic in one piece, where a ledge with a TV, magazines, books, and a sleeping bag is attached to the bottom of the wall-painting, which shows abstracted shadows of aerial maps, and a photo of a highway leading to the horizon.
This style is rooted in the 1960s masterpiece ‘combine’ paintings of one of the 20th Century’s greatest artists, the Texas-born Robert Rauchenberg, who pushed assemblage and collage to its most emotional and memorable limits by painting on half a bed and exhibiting it vertically, attaching a turned-on transistor radio to a painting, or a stuffed eagle on another, also using old nostalgic personal photos, fabrics, etc, on works, echoing felt experiences in any viewer’s life.
Ackermann’s works, though suggestive of Rauchenberg, lack the common human depth of touch of the late great post-war artist. Similarly, the 46-year-old British painter, Mathew Richie’s nauseous, information-obsessed paintings are like an overloaded mind, spewing out what it was not particularly healthy to reflect on anyway. Richie’s huge black wall drawings and haywire flat baroque perforated sculptures also seem like anomalous rejects of the unique, firmly accomplished post-war Italian abstract painter, Achille Perilli’s brilliantly original abstract graphic 1960s comic book cosmology, and theatre décor for plays like his 1965s ‘Mutazoni’.
Perilli has a firm mental and physical grip on his work’s justification, which is evident in his essays like: ‘Manifesto of the Crazy Image’ of 1971, and ‘Theory of Geometrical Irrationality’ of 1982.
Forty-six-year-old Sarah Lucas, working out of London, fares better, with simple yet profound works like ‘Aunty Jam’, where a large circular ribbed metal cage with a trousers stuck at the top, and boots at the bottom, humanize the assemblage in a profound constructive statement. So is her wonderful collage, ‘Geezer’, which gathers together the pleasures this world still possesses in a human, portrait-like a beautiful, positive, youthful role the world needs. Lucas’s statement says it all: “I have a preference for a lack of style.” This preference yields tangible truths.
The perfectly technical, beautifully arranged paintings of 43-year-old British artist, Sarah Morris, on the other hand, wants to capture the gloss and glamour of Los Angeles, like the images of her better 26-minute film does. But Morris’s hard-edge perfect paintings end up being swallowed by the beautiful real utilitarian qualities of the urban spectacle she reacts to.
The late great Richard Diebenkorn’s  spaciously tricky geometric abstract paintings, on the other hand, in his outstanding ‘Ocean Park’ series about California’s architecture and coastal landscape, refuse to be seduced, limited, or consumed by the spectacle, and takes the viewer beyond into a bigger, less suffocating self-conscious cosmic space.

Murakami et al
We begin to understand the inability of these new painters to extend painting beyond the increasing ability of the planet’s material progress to act as a colossal ready-made art-work, which affects them, and threatens to make them obsolete.
The new Japanese painter and manufacturer of glossy Japanese toys, 48-year-old Takashi Murakami understands this predicament when he says: “The gap between high and low cultures is now almost gone.” His amazing, staggeringly perfect detailed paintings want to reflect this mad relentless development, and they do, even though showing strong traces of traditional Japanese cultural symbols and comic book illustration.
But his staggeringly detailed painting technique reminds us of another even more critically original painter, the late Oyvind Fahlstrom of Sao Paolo, Brazil, whose work, like ‘Sitzen’ of the 1960s, can be found in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The 36-year-old Indian painter, Raquib Shaw of Calcutta but working out of London, goes back to classic detailed works of Oriental tapestry and the famous Japanese wood-cut printer Hokusai’s, showing the antique tradition behind his perfection of detail. The result is technically awesome, but not imaginatively fertile, or intuitively surprising.
In general, most paintings of Art Now: Vol: 2 reflect the depletion of the artist’s receptive perception of the world’s organic survival today; a crucial necessity at this point in time and history.
What do they offer us? Only spectacle, shock, black humour, disgust, etc! What seems lacking is the revelation, the exploration or engagement with an experience beyond, or even before, the temporal restraints of the material, even biological world we are trapped in for a mortal lifetime.
For this experience, we have to revisit the abstract painters, especially of the post-war era, and their protégés today, who apart from contemporary painters like Wool, Milhazes, Mehretu, or Grotjahn, we will not find in Art Now: Vol: 2.