Meta-art - the book
‘Meta-art is the most astounding development in the arts ever. But she keeps her astounding qualities carefully hidden from us behind her seemingly perfectly innocent character.
Contrary to much modernist art Meta-art does not jump into our eye as something being different, something being entirely new. Still she is different and more new than anything has ever been in the arts.’
From the chapter Meta-art, by Mick van Schooneveld
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon... Fountain... Black square...
Works of art that once turned art inside out, upside down, pushing it over its limits.
Where are they today, these kind of works of art?
In Amsterdam. Where Meta-art is made.
The very limits of art today are to be found in Meta-art.
In Meta-art Mick van Schooneveld considers no idea, no artist, no movement sacred. Using a crystal clear language, with a very refreshing literary twist, he takes on the overwhelming influence of the modernist idea of freedom and shows... that the Meta-art made by Meta-genius Marianne Schuit from Amsterdam is the thorn in the flesh of an overpowering line of thought that shaped our contemporary society hugely.
All things sacred in the contemporary arts, all things taken for granted, are looked upon with the brightest of lights, from the perspective of Meta-art, and turn into something we did not yet see in them. There was something, modernism, that was not at all fihished yet, despite the fact that the whole of the art world believes that it is already living in a post postmodernist era. Mick van Schooneveld shows that art is finding itself in what he calls the era of Meta-modernism.
But Meta-art is not only ‘a book of ideas’, it is also a (sometimes painful) book on the personal involvement of Mick van Schooneveld in Meta-art. In between unfolding what Meta-art is, he tells the story of this involvement form the inside. With all of its wondrous twists and turns. From the early beginnings, when he saw the first Meta-paintings as very unwelcome intruders in the figurative oeuvre of Marianne Schuit, untill his realization that he - and he alone - would be the one who would have to ‘take this insanely complex Meta-art to the international art world’.
There are books on art and books on art. And not one of them compares to this passionately brilliant, poetic, forceful, daring, honest, surprising and challenging book on this most incredible phenomenon, Meta-art. It is the bomb-shell-like-intellectual-product you’d expect something like Meta-art to find by its side. And now it is here, it seems it never has not been here. Indeed, the book we’ve all been waiting for. The arts in the first place.
Immensely important.
Joost J. Ligthart
