Art Reboot

67 11 post-revolutionary banality Revolution is a temporary process; ‘perpetual revolution’ is an oxymoron. Revolution is against something, and once it is suc- cessful, its purpose is served. In both politics and aesthetics, one order is overthrown and replaced by another, and then we shift from conquering new realms to inhabiting and ‘farming’ them. In political terms, this is cyclical. But in aesthetics there should be no need to revolt again unless a new tyranny develops. Problems continue to arise, such as a tendency towards stifling orthodoxy, but these are surmountable without further funda- mental upheaval. All that it takes for artists to participate in and contribute to the newly-conquered realms is personal creativity; there is no need to keep reinventing the wheel. The western artistic revolution was largely over by the second half of the twentieth century. The constant discovery of the new had pretty much run its course. It was time for revolution to give way to revelation, through personal creativity within the newly expanded modes of artistic endeavour. The revolution enlarged the possibilities for art, it didn’t cancel any of them, even if some seemed temporarily eclipsed. Judge the art of the modern revolution as you may, it redefined art in the West, captured the