One man moving in this human current stopped next to us and asked what we were doing. The man looked at the piece, then at me, laughed, and continued his pilgrimage. The center is not so clear. Neither are the edges. Today, life is more frenetic.
Society is more fragmented.
What is important, may not necessarily be at the center, but scattered throughout. As audiences, artistic genres, and methods of production changed, common systems of external referents that most people could identify ceased to exist. Today there is little control over how final pieces will be interpreted, much less consumed. I looked around me at the paintings, the polished stone walls, the bar, the band, and the hundreds of singles circling the room under the religious paintings. Despite post-modern critiques and the increasing sense of disconnectedness between art, its production, and consumption, no painting stands in isolation.