A Meditation On Endings

Steve Winn ponders endings: “Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what’s come before — in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It’s a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off.”

The Temporary Contemporary

What is with contemporary art’s fascination with disposable art? “Our age is obsessed with the glory of spent materials: we love scattered detritus, piles of old tyres, dirty beds surrounded with rubbish. The Young British Artist is part of a dumbshow now, each of them a performer too hung up on the joke of disposability, too unintelligent about language and image to avoid becoming poster campaigns for their own boredom.”