(A few words about fine arts today)
It is autumn 2007 and I am sitting in my room, in Austria, in the centre of Europe. How did I come to be where I am? Not meaning the place, of course, but rather concerning my thoughts.

Great social, technological and cultural revolutions have taken place in this area over the last one hundred years. We have changed many things and these, in turn, have transformed our lives. We’ve come to know anarchy and - albeit with a different explanation - have given it a dominant role in fine art, in music, in science and in the theatre, not mention our own lifestyle. In the course of this “craziness”, ideals upheld for centuries (or even thousands of years?) have become obsolete and devalued, replaced as it were, in a few brave strokes, with entirely new ones. We have “dug so deep” that the bad, the ugly, and the negative have taken on a new value, becoming part of our aesthetic needs.

Revolutions are always launched by social exiles. Take for example the emancipation movement, the most important revolution of the 20th century, which was in all likelihood started by a few cigarette-smoking women sitting in a pub – but in the final analysis, this does not really matter. The movement itself aimed to sort out the relationship between men and women, its role in society, and the way in which it was viewed, and continues to do so today.

The issue is not a simple one because neither the struggle for equal rights nor modernism and the consequent effects of its various branches have been able to alter the biological functioning of humans. It is precisely this biological immutability that makes society complex. Understandably, the relationship between men and women had to remain untouched by social movements, being the most important permanent need in society, infinitely varied, mysterious and intimate. To put it bluntly: Everyone takes part in it, but no-one understands how it is done.

Moving on...
What does fine art – today (!) - tell us? Everything that is worth mentioning and discovering in the human community. Artists who create figurative depictions model the human form, but expressionists are human as well; they cannot shed their skin. Everything they do is the product of human (biological) intellect. There is no modernism born in a human environment that is able to completely alienate itself from that environment, and there never will be.

Nowadays, upon entering an exhibition, the “unsuspecting” visitor may well heave a sigh and say: “Minimal art again!” As we know, this style is a popular branch of expressionism today and is therefore modern. Taking this into consideration, our exhibition-goer actually said the following: “Traditional again!”

Modern art is one-hundred years old and has functioned throughout several generations, so we can safely declare that modern has also become traditional. There are two traditions in fine art today: figurative depiction - which has grown in popularity over the last two or three years, having never disappeared - and modern, expressive, non-figurative
depiction.

Gusswerk, Vienna, 2007…………….........…Balint<