The need for art: The outlines of individuality in the flood of images

Abstract

The research presented in this paper begins from the time of turmoil in the field of arts and thinking (about art) in the late 19th and early 20th century. The shift from traditional techniques and operational procedures to modern ones, which is followed back from the time of industrial revolution, contributed to the elimination of art as the relevant operational procedure and consequently to the elimination of the values on which the traditional art survived. Although modern art drew its inspiration from the well of resistance to tradition and social reality in which the masses played an important role, the paper attempts to follow the task the art has inherited from earlier times - the artistic display of sense at the level of image, which differentiates it in the recent cultural, economic and intellectual conditions from the mass industrial production of consumable images. The paper examines the possibility of differentiation of artistic image in postmodern period, at the time of excessive expansion of mass media and electronic simulation techniques, following the realisation that the modernist ideal of progress and the exclusivity of art are unviable. The paper presents the arguments of the philosophers who deny the possibility of art in postmodern era. Contrary to that, it indicates that there is a vast area of artistic production which testifies with its exquisite experiential and cognitive value in the field of image to the need for artistic mimesis and its articulation of reality at the time of simulation.