![]() ![]() ![]() It has become a characteristic of much (post)modern art to distrust and deconstruct anything that is beautiful and harmonious. Especially in (post)modernity, the artistic depiction of favourable outcomes, sheer beauty and happiness is often suspected to be merely wishful thinking, trivialisation and/or kitsch. On much rarer occasions, art deals with reminiscing, experiencing or praising moments of fulfilment and happiness. It is not only in the Western tradition that, more often than not, art can be traced back to dealing with problematic periods in life, with suffering and conflict. The chapter culminates in a series of predictive statements, which, countering the alienating economic, political and cultural tendencies of modernity, envisage individuals and collectives that ‘have grasped and established themselves without exploitation and alienation.’ And, in what could be a motto for Peter Dornauf’s exhibition of recent paintings entitled The Barberry Days, Bloch’s visionary pronouncements end on an ever so slightly melancholic note about a utopian time and place where ‘there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland’ (1) ![]() In his magisterial 1400-page work about utopian thinking, audacity and progress in art and politics, entitled The Principle of Hope, the Neo-Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch dedicates the last chapter (‘Wishful Images of the Fulfilled Moment’) to visions and artistic anticipations of moments of supreme fulfilment in music, literature, religious and philosophical writing, as well as in visual art. ![]()
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