Today we are reading Notes from the Future of Art, the collection of texts by Jerzy Ludwiński (1930-2000), a theorist, lecturer, art critic, and an adherent of “notional art,” through which, “instead of creating visual objects, artists were to simply write down texts, on whose basis the pieces could be made concrete in one way or another.” He declared the need to prepare for an entirely new kind of art, which would be utterly non-material and would not require institutional support.
Ludwiński, who suggested that we are living in a “post-art epoch,” and that new experimental artistic practices require a new name and language. He compared the development of art to a snowball rolling down a hill, always growing, collecting successive parts of reality, to finally become the globe itself. Ludwiński outlined the development of art in six phases; we are presently only in the fourth phase, the stage of meta-art, which is collecting all of reality. We still have before us the total phase, which will then take us to the zero phase – art which we will no longer be able to display in a conventional manner, at an exhibition for example, and which can only be “suggested.” Members of the new civilization will communicate it through telepathy.
