Art and Difficulty in the Modern World

In a world that has banished the signified and replaced it with an intangible hyperreal, the significance of art as a sieve of reality is relevant to a post-modern epistemology. The simulacrum of the academic as ¿expert¿ is problematic in that the institutionalized aesthetic becomes the model defining or limiting the ¿real.¿ In this work, art is considered a living entity, containing the traces of paradigm shifts and protecting immanent societal contradictions and antagonisms within its essence. The author presents modern works of art as living documents that need to be interrogated as reliquaries of discursive histories and ideas while challenging the reader to comprehend the difficulty of art in the modern world.