Truth is the issue for art, but in a peculiar weave, an embedded truth deep in the art through a serious gaze comes the curious bits of insight we name truth. When you first try to understand the riddle of modern art you are led about as if by a nonsensical game. So many strains so many different paths taken, how is one to know things when the things themselves are subject to change without notice? I made some sweeping judgements most especially regards DADA that have paid off in a sort of theory of inventions, what was the greatest aesthetic invention? Maybe it was destruction of the former regime, this is to say the 19th Century was an awfully academic period and even in DADA time the ridicule of things military was the critique of a sort of militaristic society that viewed a military as modern and essential to a modern state like say France.
This military social model put the societies in the aesthetic deep freeze. Modern art as in Bolshevik Russia becomes a symbol of revolutionary change, the world had never seen a Malevich geometric before, non-objective abstraction is a product of these turbulent times. DaDA also brings an art that is also original and threatening to the old militaristic - aristocratic order. It's as if the new way of seeing things is also the new form the world is taking. Film in the 20th century is what painting was in the centuries proceeding. The great filmmakers are auteurs, painting becomes a subset no longer the whole story of art. Many visual artists realised that the function of art was changing, the new art was finding new form, like the Futurists Noise machines and concerts. Now 100 years down the line ever new technological devices change the shape of our experience again and again. In the past I'd write an artist friend and enclose a couple of color slides now I can post my pictures on my web site and show what I'm doing to whomever deigns to look. It's such a different situation that one wonders if truth has changed as well. But I truely believe that people can discern beauty on an almost intuitive level something beautiful has a ring like a fine goblet that tells you is so.I 'm not saing that truth is capricious and subjective but in the arts one can't always have the difinitive truth of science and math. The artist strives to produce a work that is true to their own experience. And they submit their work to posterity in hopes of a good verdict over time. While certain works just shine, certain works of genius which thrill us and give us the fear. Early modern art is one of the most exciting events in the long history of art and it was what made me me even in the 1960's because the idea began to rule the world of art. Duchamp more than Picasso, Mondrian and Malevich and a world of possibilities that flow from those days. Truth is the main course of Modern life.