The crisis of the late Renaissance that created a culture of the problematic within Italian Mannerism in 16thC is similar to the 20thC of Modernism and Post Modernism. albiet on a smaller scale. Large empires and city states became split down the middle as with the vast Catholic and Protestant clashes. The birth of sexual diseases on a vast scale helped undermine private confidence and increased insecurity of the citizen. A economic crisis also occurred from shift of investment away from some manufacture to living off rents from real estate. The growth of institutionalisation as the individual became a ‘small cog’ in a large machine of production. There was the notion that entropy and the energy of nature was spiralling downward. Everything seemed to be loosing any ontological  and cultural centre that it once had. Much social and cultural life and was felt to be ‘in pieces’. The domination of bureaucracy over the individuals life and the anonymous death in large numbers of people from armies marching back and forth across the land also added to general insecurity. The destruction and sack of major cities was sensed to be an assault on cultural identity. New research is showing that the persona of artists and writers etc became preoccupied with ‘the stranger’ (Pontormo, Rosso, Beccafumi, Parmigianino, etc as well as the poligraphi writers Lando, Franco and Doni etc) They also possessed the ‘strangers existential sense of exile’ and they each went on to do problematic cultural experiments with eclectic styles and to anti- classical sentiments.Many artists and writers became obsessed with meta-psychological issues and themes, which could be seen as the emergence of a aspect  of modernism. Especially in  pyschological areas of intropection, narcisism and solipsism. Each of the above factors and others reflected much uprootedness,  depression, alienation in social and cultural life and psychological estrangement, which is similar in both the 16thC and 20thC and 21thC and appears to be intensifying expotentially See A Hauser,’Mannerism’ Belknap Press of Harvard Uni, London and USA.,1965.

PS.Notes; Many of the elements of alienation within Contemporary Western Society have expanded dramatically on many levels.World Wars, depressions, recessions,wide spread sexual deseases,ecological crisis and the vast  emigre experience have created a culture of the problematic and of dislocation and displacement. Estrangement within Art and Post modernism often arises in using an aesthetic of ‘the strange or the wierd”  that is reified on one lelel as a phantasmagoric, novel or as formal  principal for recognition among some of  the professional and dissident middle classes(now described as ‘globetrotters,well read and brand aware’) of what is fashionably ‘in’ as against, that which is ‘out,’ but  lacks a demystifying energy.It is an escape from real mysteries.It  fact, it exists ‘to mystify’ and create diversions as meangingless idiolects for the mere sake of ephemeral taste.This is a Contemporary/ Mannerist type art based on eclecticism and pastiche. Recently there has been a move towards creating a novelty art based on childrens supposed perceptions of their world, but this – with its megacultural technologcal emphasis, also seeks to fill an ontological void. The diversions of escape are wide spread and  ubiquitious.Few artists within the culture name the  vast new issues. Abstract theory also comes to dominate creative praxis.Most importantly within this estranged aesthetic unusual  and common things are portrayed as mystifying people and  there is little radical challenge of the big issues  through personalisation, nor via the political precesses  is seen to be possible.

There are also estrangements arising from the extensive world of advertising and its popular images based on cliches and stereotypes They are both opposite sides of the same homeless cultural phenonema. as mentioned above. Cultural fragmentation is rife.The mass media of never -ending utterance  is really talking itself and its readers to death. It is a culture of false idols,empty headed celebrities and ephemeral spectacle.Where have all the real heroes gone that can challenge contemporary fate?

Possibly the unfolding Julian Assange phenomenon is an  important cultural step in a new direction of real challenge against the anonymous forces, that control peoples lives within late Capitalism.

Jamison is suggestive in seeing this abstract,  invisible  energy of extreme estrangement as arising from the totalitarian ‘function of money’ in late capitalism: the mediator and dominator of all things and people.Money becomes ossified  as a kind of frozen desire, that distorts all relationships and processes.In a time of extreme crisis this frozen desire inverts and transforms ends into means, truth into paradox,beauty into ambiguity,presence into things  and the world into surreal dreams etc.

Thus, within Contemporary and Post Modernist  and Popular art (of  both new kinds of  high and low culture) here is new evidence of late modern  kinds of estrangements at work within a culture of confusion, inversion and waste, that runs historically and roughly parallel to the world of dissipated, disfunctional and imploding finance.

Art is always a  part of culture and is a complex mirror of its times.

Contradictions can be seen on both a global and national level can be summarised as a Capitalist crisis of imbalances of development that begun in 1914. At present a new aspect of this crisis is revealed in credit and debt dilemmas that go back to the Bretton Woods Agreement 1971, etc. From over thirty years ago; the shift from gold standard to the US greenback aided the US at first, but has worked against it later. The manufacturing structure of the US has since been challenged by China , Japan, India and other countries and allowed the US to deteriorate. There has been a shift in real wealth from the US to these countries. The rise of wealth in China and India has been parallel the growth of debt in the US. Unregulated Capitalism has attempted to make money out of other money as ‘fictional finance’ and fictional capital (such as unused office space, etc) Moving from real money to electronic money and towards ever greater abstract finance simulated global finance in the US enjoyed free play across the world. The fall of the USSR and the opening up of China and Asia helped the US prosper with cheap labour and markets and fantasy money and capital has made good use of them. This postponed the US economic crisis for awhile. Hedge funds arose with Investment groups that flew around the world seeking to exploit all markets (they brought down stock market in Thailand).US manufacturing fell further behind and infrastructure declined. Whilst more of the country moved into ever increasing debt that has been hidden. Unemployment affected peoples purchasing power. Living standards in the US are now so bad that the division between rich and poor is now as terrible as it was in 1917; the year of the Russian Revolution .One child in four in the US now lives in poverty. No one knows in today’s world what was real credit and real debt. Pretend money has been used to make finance out of other pretend money. Powerful oligarchies have swallowed up other oligarchies as did corporations. Hedge funds and Investment Groups became ever bigger than banks and entire national economies. Corporate executives replaced shareholders as controllers of corporations and saw their interests as the main ones. Everything began to float on phantom money and capital. No one knew what was ‘real value’ any more. Greed, waste ,excess and a culture of the appertitive dominated everything and still does.

The pyramid structure of advancing Capitalism has been replaced by an inverted pyramid that is ready to collapse.It is the opposite of what is depicted in Bruegel’s painting of the ‘Tower of Babel’. Taxpayer money was used to save capitalism, but this isn’t enough finance to save the Capitalist structure, and little has changed except that a few rivals have disappeared. The injection of taxpayers finances to prop up capitalism can only stimulate the economies temporally and will need inhuman cuts to social programs with each of their infrastructures. This will force the financial crisis onto the backs of all working people is a form of Capitalist blackmail of the public sector .The amount world wide of this bailout and black mail is a staggering $50 trillion dollars that has been obtained by cutting social infrastructure and the peoples quality of life. Most major US banks could go bankrupt in the next seven years (420 are now in doubt). All debts have increased and the debt crisis has not been solved nor problems of toxic assets and their still there. Total financial losses in housing are now $4 trillion and $9 trillion in share markets. This crisis could move into commercial real estate in the near future. About one third of US debt comes from foreign investors in the US, if they decide to take back their own finances, then the US economy will fall apart. No one knows when this could happen on the future calendar .All insiders are very nervous. The system of Capitalist accumulation is totally breaking down. Military conflict and use of war is a kind of trade war conducted by other means, which was and remains a barbaric method that can be used to destroy other nations capital base so that a false regeneration can take place. At present, the Capitalist world economy was and remains like a pack of cards ruled by a ship of fools, and it could be destined to fall in a mighty mess in the near future and could tempt vast, cross nation military conflicts of rival Imperiums as has happen before to capitalist economies in crisis. The aim of this would be to destroy and force open new markets and restart the paradoxical engines of Capitalism all over again.

There are also new factors in operation such as wide spread inequality of distribution of wealth in countries such as the US. Today 1% of the population control over 40% of the wealth. This is bad as it was in 1917. This will lead to large scale alienation within the society of the US which will in turn influence is future culture.

No country should follow the US down that dangerous path to initiate a war regime change (with nuclear weapons) as it will not solve the essential problems of Capitalism. The world has changed since 1914. Basically, Capitalism  and its Nation/Sate in trendy language has by-passed its historic use- by -date! It needs a flexible hybrid green/socialist, mixed model to replace it.

The Abbreviated Notes on How Important Art and Culture Functions.

Very early in my travels, I came to the conclusion that important fine arts were essentially part of cultural language and a fundamental aspect of communications between humans. Not a quasi- formalistic or rhetorical relationships to a reified thing (not text, nor form or taste, nor a one-eyed view of history, nor was it a currency like money, a prop to power or prestige, etc) that is somehow apart and separate with all its peripheral aspects. It is meaningful language mediation between real people living in real time and therein lies its vital function. Meaningful art, over time, changes something essential within the imagination of receptive people. Time also reveals arts important dialogue with cultural universality the most important achievement of any cultural movement.

As Kazantzakis writes[1] in his own modern chronicle about ideal time.

‘Learn…that time has cycles and that fate has wheels and the mind of man sits high and twirls them round…’.

In authentic art both subject and object clash together like musical cymbals, or gyrate together like gifted dancers and they resound and swirl as they create internal imaginative models, that can change  the affective colour of human desires, wishes, identities and fantasies at the level of microcosm or macrocosm. Culture is as close to people as the clothes that they wear but is of a more imaginative nature.

But this cultural process can also regress or progress and this can be measured broadly by the types and qualities of desires, wishes, etc, of the people that it influences over a long period of history via the enculturalisation processes.

If we could reverse this vast and epic enculturalisation process, then we might observe in fast or slow motion, how a culture influences the language of  people’s interior life; how affects and concepts are formed over a lifetime, and which ones are reinforced and others left to wither and disappear as whole new sensibilities are created across social relations.

This humongous process itself swings on gigantic and gargantuan hinges across generations, classes ,genders, races, nations and civilisations and selects and rejects many variable outlooks, feeling zones, as it helps create types of people with both different and similar sensibilities at various periods in history.

It was always so with Homo Sapiens.New research is showing that in an anthropological sense the first humans separated themselves from Neanderthals with the aid of language and the arts.With music, etc which other species did not possess.With language and the arts the newly evolving Homo Sapiens could share conceptual recognition of the external and internal worlds with emotions,affects, intutions and perceptions.As a collective tool this gave them the advantage over Neanderthals and others.It aided their adaption.Their evolution could be more holistic and not just a pragmatic hand to mouth existence.

Much later in human civilisation things could become more complex.

When any cultural academy; old or new begins to contemplate its own aesthetic navel for whatever reason, then its language can fragment and become increasingly on the one hand to be formally sterile, or on the other, it can appear problematic and self- regarding. It  can nudge towards the condition of psychological and aesthetic narcissism, solipsism and estrangement. In a way it starts talking or mumbling to itself as it looses focus, purpose and its raison d’etre; Like an aging courtier down on his luck.

The aesthetic then fractures into pieces with either subject or object hurled in different directions and as a consequence living culture shifts house to somewhere else.

This later trend towards solipsism becomes a culture that is increasingly subjective and becomes one of emphatic self –emptying. As its empty idiolects become an evasive, esoteric attempt to move from a certain angle to simulate or deaden language, but fundamentally, in the visual arts it reflects a pseudo culture essentially reflecting reduced human and ontological dimensions without possessing a valid location, nor an authentic or lasting name .It short, it looses essential address.

Art is essentially a special magical gift that humanity gives to itself and cannot really be a commodity.As far as possible, it attempts to address the timeless as instinctively felt and conceptually percieved within the evolving human comedy.

The tricky part is how the aesthetic desires and wishes relate to ideas, as well as to the systematic orchestration of ideas in ideology (as defined by Eagleton).This could be seen in Christianity,Taotism,  Buddhism, Confucianism, Manicheanism, Epicureanism,Stoicism and Atheism, Marxism, Nazism,WASP Capitalism, Individualism, Collectivism,and even today within Green Enviromentalism. etc. Each have had their artist spokepersons in history for these ideologies.

At a certain moment these ideologies can stimulate the desires,identities and wishes, etc of real people for a new world  (the oldest desire within human reflection ,which often extends its desparate hope for a new world beyond the grave) in art and culture.  Hegel said something about art being ‘the idea made sensual’ and we might take this further by adding that art is the idea made ‘desirable’,ect’). But organised ideas as ideology tend to die and ossify once the ideology losses its address-that is when it is no longer historically progressive,ie, it then fuses  and ossifies into rigid dogma.One cannot go back to Stalinist ideology and make important art from its source.Also WASP Capitalist culture (the quasi bourgeoise / individualism of ‘I did it my way’ modes of  thinking and feeling ) is now undergoing a similar transgressive fate, because of the financial meltdown,etc. There are now no new Americas full of resources and private greedy individuals to revive a dying ideology.

Culture and the Arts functions to create ‘desirable identities’ through the medium of various languages and this involves  the joint interaction of both affect and concept . It also includes undesirable identities as its counter point in the dialectic  (this is the obsession of all cultures with villians,the grotesque, fools and constructs of evil, etc)

As children grow they experiment with both kinds of  desirable and undesirable identities and watch the effects on themselves and others.

All this is modulated by ideology in the enlightenment sense of systems of ideas as to what might be these desireable identities- and these are linked to the enculturalised  needs of the time.

For example, look at the rise in the Italian Renaissance of the ‘gentleman/courtier’ after Castiglioni’s ideas that appear in his writings.

These desireable identities are also selected  within the rainbow weave and stratafication  of sociological function as maniest by social class, race, gender and nationality, etc.

The great new quest is what kinds of ‘desireable identities’ can be enculturalised within  the late modern period in a time of transition from an Age of the Problematic to the Time of Solutions.

A Green/Socialist ideology and Multiculturalism  is now moving forward -towards a new mythology, hence is capable of stimulating artists and cultural workers in the kind  and quality of  the counter -world  paradigms that  they create.

But the present cultural gestures of artistic experimentation from Post Modernism can be seen more critically as contemporary conceits, which are types of ‘mixed conceits’ (known in the 16thC as ‘disadaitoto concetto’) which have in the main become estranged, depersonalised and even orphaned and homeless.

Bigger issues and themes are arising.

The obsessive concern with’ the object’ is what I would call schizothymic dilemmas within cultural production. These both form a whole entity within the precious esoteric creations as well as the general body of the social and popular culture of the time. Jamison locates qualities (not the same as that of its mental illness of the same name and its dysfunctional effect on patients) of schizophrenia within the dialectical extremes of culture, and this condition can be seen in the arbitrary fragmentation of time into a series of vivid and perpetual presents and the transformation of reality into instant images. Both accomplish a dematerialisation of the ideal model of reality and become its substitute in both the high arts of Post Modernism and in consumer advertising for the masses. They are different sides to the same face.This later is a schizothymic syndrome in so far as it fixes the public’s consumerist gaze obsessively on the usually hedonistic desire for the absolute possession of an object. Buy this new four wheel drive or new washing machine and it will change your life it says. The car or washing machine isn’t just a functioning technological machine, but an enchanting, magical image, that exists in mythical time. Look closely at the Coca-cola logo, all you need is finance and a desire for the acquisitive ‘having’ for this magical world’ to be yours!’ It’s really just a crude cash transaction for objects that sometimes created by the cheap labour from third world workers countries.

There are many reasons why this fractured culture could not predict the coming of economic and financial crisis. It was looking and was directed by all the wrong forces Neither the obsession with ‘the object’ or ‘the subject’ bought it within deep range of awareness. The object was generally assumed to be the acquired and desired commodity, whilst the subject had spun away towards the corrupt, subjective language of idiolects within Post Modernism. Both were shallow cultural experiences and could not mature. Within time both were sucked dry by a process of secular self emptying known as kenosis. The pleasures of owning the new four wheel drive would be supplanted by the new desire for a better vehicle, and on the opposite hand the rare esoteric pleasure of experimenting with idiolects of subjective language would evaporate because it couldn’t really be shared and tested.

Within both world viewpoints the real world tended to dematerialise and become hyper abstract. This could be another reason why en toto there is so much narcissism and solipsism around in the high and low culture of consumer societies at the moment.

The result is that the culture cannot  really know itself, nor create great art with all of its overblown resources.