Critique of Cultural Populism: An Overview of Reflections on the Western Analytical Thought

Abstract

The postmodern age, which, like the age of contemporary art, is considered by most analysts to have started in the period after Second World War, can be viewed as an umbrella term that encompasses many competing paradigmatic stratagems and diatribe definitions, including the terminologically instable definitions of“postmodernism,” “post-postmodernism,” “metamodernism,” which some critics prefer to consider “high,” “late,” “distorted,” “pseudo-modernism” or “digi-modernism.” In the process of this ongoing discussion, society is periodically informed about the “death” or “end” of art and art criticism. In this context of raging discourses that openly compete with each other, there is one rather significant contextual layer related to the critique of cultural populism, the subject of which is the confrontation between two social constructs: democracy and biopower. The acuteness of the discussion is amplified by the situation of almost total crisis of the modern cultural activity, in particular, of the neoliberal visual practices, which since the millennium have come under the strict patronage of the transnational art business, whose creative projects are corrected by market and benchmarking policies. The latter has completely supplanted/replaced the politics of aesthetics, so all this has a negative impact on the current development of global art, calling into question the future of the national image of Ukraine, which can be annihilated in the “post-ethnic” substratum of global public art. Therefore, in the difficult conditions of resistance to the Russian invasion, Ukrainian humanities and art must thoroughly study this huge cluster of problems, in particular in the context presented by Western European analytical thought, in order to strengthen its own self-identification potential of the cultural and artistic narrative, offering the West its own position and vision of creative liberation activity from the manipulative pressure of the culture industry.