Manifesto of Vandalism

This discussion concentrates on visual art as representative of the remaining fine arts, albeit with a chapter on contemporary poetry. (The book's publication is accompanied by that of the author's long poem "Tombstone Confidential," soon to be available from the same publisher.) The author's presentation builds upon the critical rationale he established through a series of painting exhibitions he originated as Curator of the Las Vegas Art Museum, exhibitions which bore the general title Art After Post-modernism. His reasoning includes a clear and well-defined use of the term Post-modernism itself, a highly specific denotation not previously advanced.

The wholly new aesthetic Mann identifies and defines represents a clear break with the most prominent art of the recent past, which is still engaged in the intellectually diminishing effort to fully dismantle and destroy the cultural tradition out of which it is created. In contrast, the new art which this manifesto recognizes is involved in the innovative reconstitution of art, and accordingly it represents a distinct new frontier in the development of contemporary art. Since over the course of the last two centuries, Western art broke down and discarded, via analytic dismantlement, all its former historical attributes, all the characteristics of its now former tradition, fine art therefore can only be reconstituted by emerging anew as part of an entirely different, far broader cultural context, one which can rightly be considered global. This new art rises in the wake of Post-modernism as a total exploitation of expressive resources and potential, an entirely emergent aesthetic for incorporating many different kinds of artistic manifestation from the widest practical range of cultural levels and cultural origins.