Trapnest, Lyotard

One of the things that stuck out to me about this article is when Lyotard discussed the notion of taste. It reads, on page 43, “Taste, therefore, testifies that between the capacity to conceive and the capacity to present and object corresponding to the concept, an undetermined agreement, without rules, giving ride to a judgment when Kant calls reflective, may be experienced as pleasure.” This quote stuck out to me in particular, especially when the discussion continued on to illustrate how artists can know something, or have a basic understanding of it, but are unable to illustrate it. Many artists I believe face this dilemma, of knowing what they want to produce, but are unable to do so.

The proposition that modern art as the medium in which artists reach a middle ground of what they wish to produce and what they are able to is interesting. However his later argument of, “The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself…” Is this an argument proposing that postmodernism is a further elaboration of modernism in which there is a calm state reached between the “unpresentable” and presentable? It is also a bit confusing how this would apply to actual art, for me personally.

Then there is the notion of nostalgia that is brought up throughout the text. Is this nostalgia something previous artists have been striving for that has been unable to reach? I think it all translates to we are attempting, often times, to describe something that is intangible for us to describe by normal means available to us. Though this it is a sense of nostalgia for previous artwork that achieves this. However, as art has evolved this is becoming, and has become, less possible, therefore postmodernism has stepped in to fill the gap and reconcile the difference.