What impact, if any, are sculpture parks and gardens having on the art Essay

What impact, if any, are sculpture parks and gardens having on the art world of today - Essay Example Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that realism in art is a form of conformism, and that the task of the modern artist is to produce â€Å"incommunicable statements† which cannot be fitted in to the easy flow of information within computerized society. In his ‘Appendix Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, published at the end of The Postmodern Condition, he wrote that the â€Å"only definition† of realism is that â€Å"it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that art† (1979). It is associated in this account with those who â€Å"pursue successful careers in mass conformism by communicating by means of the ‘correct rules,’ the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it† (Lyotard, 1979, p. 75). This uncritical use of established methods of representation is contrasted with ‘avant-garde’ art, which, he argues, uses experimental innovations in technique and stru cture to attempt â€Å"to make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible† (Lyotard, 1979, p. 78). This â€Å"something that can be conceived but not seen nor made visible† is often referred to as the sublime, a quality of transcendent greatness â€Å"with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation† (Wikipedia, 2006). The presence of this sublime element, then, inspires the imagination in a specific direction based on which elements remain visible or understandable.