Manifesto of Vandalism

The Manifesto of Vandalism is essential reading for those interested in understanding the condition of the contemporary fine arts and the nature of their most advanced developments. The author's intention is to identify and define the most important new work in the fine arts, and to establish a critical framework upon and within which to base such judgements. Thus the book proposes, devises, and exemplifies a radically original discourse for the evaluation of recently and newly created works of art, a discourse which nevertheless bases its arguments on a historical overview of art since the Renaissance. The discourse employs new and unprecedented nomenclature upon which it is predicated, including a clear rationale for the term Vandalism itself. The argument initially focuses on the paradigmatic difference between art created before and after the birth of Romanticism around 1800. Demonstrating that two centuries of culturally dismantling activity brought the fine arts by 2000 to a state of complete artistic impoverishment, Mann concludes that the inevitable work at the present innovative frontier is to reconstitute the several fine arts upon and beyond the high-cultural ruins of Post-modernism.

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.