In 1863, Charles Baudelaire gave an inspirational detailing of artists' and art's potential in “The Painter of Modern Life.”¹ 141 years later, Nicolas Bourriaud may have suggested a revival.

For an individual living in 2004…it has become impossible to take in even one area of knowledge in its entirety, even if he or she is considered a specialist.…We are bombarded by data accumulating at an exponential rate from a range of sources. The sum of our culture's output exceeds both an individual's capacity to assimilate it and the average life expectancy, a completely new experience in the history of humanity.²

What are we to do with the excess of information that cannot possibly be entirely absorbed? If we do not have the capacity or the time to assimilate it, then today we are inevitably creating deeper communication rifts in society, and thus, the highest level of alienation to date. This is where we return to the concept of the man of genius,³ and consequently, the more current idea of artist as DJ,⁴ for a possible solution.

This man of genius can almost stop time by “mixing with the crowds [as] some anonymous person.”⁵ Unbeknownst to passer-bys, this man—“obsessed by the world of images—”observes relentlessly “as he has been on the point of forgetting everything, he remembers and passionately wants to remember everything.”⁶ Ultimately, for the man of genius, “curiosity had become a compelling, irresistible passion.”⁷ Who can compete with the passion belonging to a man with no responsibilities and, therefore, all the time in the world to learn?⁸

The man of genius has the capacity to learn that which you cannot assimilate. Thus, we return to embrace the naïve experience of receiving information, “like a return to childhood.”⁹ However, the role in which the man of genius possesses is a “childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”¹⁰ While the “artist moves little, or even not at all,” and is not aware of the world outside his own bubble,¹¹ the man of genius is still too eccentric an individual for today's postmodern world. But if the artist as DJ fuses with the man of genius, he becomes the new postmodern hybrid of genius and artist—the creative commerce man. He is now the master mixer and controls that flow of information that we felt bombarded by. If the role of Baudelaire's man of genius was to “bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed,”¹² how is it any different from Bourriaud's notion of artist as DJ—organizing and reorganizing experience for us? Both roles assume an authoritative stance, being that each have the ability to decide what to do with the information. Yes, a hierarchy may appear to be re-surfacing. But regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity, or religion, isn't anyone capable of feeling passion in this sense?

With the progressive evaporation of the possibility of recreating the world, the revolutionary mode of consciousness on which the concept [of reification] depends falls into narcissism and obsolescence.¹³

Shall we keep making art to express that the desire to recreate the world still exists, or that we are still living in modernism, or at least a postmodern world with a modern attitude? Does this possibly suggest that even the desire to express is, in itself, becoming myth? The downfall of the latter incurs an inevitable looping in thought processes, making it difficult to see beyond. Nevertheless, if we can agree that modernism is associated with certain stereotypes, then whether we admit it or not, we are still saturated with aspects associated with the most archaic forms of modernism.¹⁴

Most of what we criticize continues to flourish today. We continue to take part in a thinking that does indeed emphasize and celebrate the individual. Everything we do on a day-to-day basis is geared towards a desire for individual growth. Also, people are constantly making attempts to reinvent themselves and believe in its possibility, like plastic surgery makes some people believe they are reinventing their appearance. We support and uphold a society of leisure, continuously striving for automation. We continue to advance our technology, mainly to fulfill the need of autonomy, and thus, leisure. We have not moved past industrialization. It still transforms us as I write. We still have a fascination with the other; namely, celebrities and lifestyles—not to mention the growing obsession with reality television. We still base certain value on originality in many ways; for instance, no one would pay the same price for a Louis Vuitton product as they would for a no name brand. Furthermore, anyone who believes in any form of an organized belief system is still searching for universal truths. There are still driven scientists creating new fields of science—so innovation has not been forgotten. We still work towards discovery of unknown territories; whether in outer space, a virtual realm, or at the atomic level. However, the only difference now is the motive, or an awareness of the motive, behind these attitudes. The motive lays within the economy, and more specifically, capitalism; it always has been to a certain extent. But now, since we are aware of its problematic, we can critique it with a skeptical eye. We are essentially still the same as we ever were but purporting to be conscious of it simultaneously.

Reification is a process that, to an extent, we are all determined by and yet one which, through phenomenological reflection, we may come to recognize and resist. The concept itself is a demand that we acknowledge the fact that…the reality of the world “is given neither in itself nor once and for all” but must be continually realized as actualization and as recognition.¹⁵

According to Bewes, we can come to learn to resist the process of reification by first becoming aware of its existence—of the reification of existence.¹⁶ Once we are aware, we have the choice of disregarding it in our practices. I find this concept to be synonymous with our postmodern predicament. Following this model implies postmodernism and modernism can coexist to our advantage. If we so easily fall into a modern attitude, then we can just utilize our postmodern realization powers to go about being modern, but in a more responsible fashion. Thereby we enable ourselves to re-embrace the attitude of modernity but with a new, broader, perspective. By recognizing that which constitutes modernism we can resist what has proven to be problematic and allow instead the use, multiplicity of uses, or non use of any and all other aspects. In other words, we accept the negation of limits because it is obvious that placing limits has only served to create movements to break from their control. Variations on this have been proposed and concurrently attacked and torn apart, only to leave us with nothingness. There is nothing tangible left to hold onto or that can be discussed, signified, analyzed, constructed, deconstructed, reified, or de-reified, in a fair way.

According to science and applicable to theory, “reductionism works by finding the fundamental rules underlying nature.”¹⁷ Jonah Lehrer explains how “this was the allure of the central dogma: It systematized all of life by describing a common process,” and based on recent scientific breakthroughs “suggests there is no single rule,” that “life rebels against rules [and] strictness is a barrier to diversity.”¹⁸ We cannot even begin to conceive of change if we place limits on what we are and are not capable of, or on how to go about achieving it. Maybe that is the point. We needed to exhaust that attempt in order to realize that nothing will ever be explained or agreed upon. Lehrer reminds us that “Even the brain, that raft of reason, floats on an undercurrent of chance” precisely because the brain is “dependent upon the movement of charged atoms, which are entirely unpredictable.”¹⁹

With a few exceptions, everything in the universe as we know it is made up of atoms. Things do not necessarily need to end in certainty. When we engage in the act of defining something, then we must be clearly aware of the complexities and unpredictability of the world.