Meta-art is the end of art

Meta-art is the end of art - the article

Like the end of the rainbow is the end of the rainbow, Meta-art is the end of art. A huge bow of the most colourful creativity, starting somewhere around 40,000 years ago, taking the human mind on a grand trip outside reality, finds its ending in something rooted in art, but eventually transcending art entirely in its capacity to express what no art medium has ever been able to express.

Yes, there will still be art in the future, but it will always lack this particular capacity of Meta-art to transcend the limits of its medium entirely. Still using the good old tools of one of the oldest forms of art, painting, Meta-art takes us on a much grander trip outside reality than any of the great art has ever taken us. In this it is finding itself in a league of its own, way beyond any of the possibilities of art.

Expressing what was on our mind from the very beginnings, art eventually had to develop into something that is able to express what is on our mind in a much more sophisticated way. Our mind, actually, has always been too complex for art to truly get its arms around. Therefore art, even genius art, always had to wrap its arms around some of the things that are on our mind.

Meta-art embraces more of what is on our mind than any art has ever embraced. The complexity of Meta-art, which is nothing less than astounding, bears witness to the complexity of the human mind in a most direct way. The all-embracing paradoxical nature of Meta-art does the same for the highly paradoxical nature of this mind.

There is no creative expression whatsoever that approaches the ultra-complex workings of the human mind as close as Meta-art. Not in the least.

Meta-art was needed to finally get beyond the limitations of the medium, which are in no way the limitations of the human mind. Still, Meta-art is an anomaly. It probably never was meant to be, seen from an art historian’s perspective. However definitely connected to developments in the modern arts – abstraction… -, in its capacity to embrace the most complex collections of the most fundamental mental contradictions, it has no ancestors at all. It is a singular leap into the dark of the extreme possibilities of the human mind.

That is why Meta-art itself is extremely extreme. It combines tendencies that cannot be combined. Not in paint, not in marble, not in moving pictures, not in photographs, not in text.

Well, that is not really the case…, it does not combine them… it holds them in the palm of her hand…

Combining, is contemporary art. But Meta-art is beyond contemporary art, beyond the relatively poor rationality of contemporary art. Meta-art is intuition at its very best.

Meta-art is the intuition that ‘knows’ that art has lost its battle with the sciences in opening the wonder world of the human mind. Not in the arts, but in the sciences this mind is most illustriously revealed. Nowadays.

Meta-art ‘knows’ this. It ‘knew’ that it had to take things much further than they are taken in the arts, to reveal this wonder world in all its extremities, not in a scientific, but still in an all-creative way.

Once art creatively revealed some of the things that went on in the human mind. In those days the human mind was merely a black box, from which only a few of its possibilities managed to escape. Nowadays this black box is opened by the sciences to such a degree, that the arts are not capable anymore to testify of the complexity that is pouring out.

The arts have reached their limits a while ago.

Meta-art leaves these limits behind.

Meta-art is the end of art.

But Meta-art is also a singular beginning, because it is the only 21st century creative expression on par with the 21st century developments towards a most sophisticated insight in what it means to be human.

Even the robots will know this.

Mick van Schooneveld, Amsterdam, January 2014