Nothing new upon the ground

Contemporaneity breathes life into vain notions of “attention to oneself,” of “care of the self,” of self-care, and of “self-knowledge,” in an absolutization of idiosyncrasies. Alongside this “desacralization of the world,” the “difficulty of being oneself” is amplified, rendering collectivity unviable. There is, in fact, a problematic experience in constructing an individual without a past. In art, this tendency manifests as a desire to be novelty itself, to reinvent gunpowder. It lives in a perpetual adolescence, estranged, in absolute otherness. Thus, the departure from the “time of religion” is directly correlated with the advent of a hyper-individualistic age, which in art results in a production disinherited by its own recreation.