As everyone knows, banality (focus on the mundane, everyday, non-heroic reality) is finite. Materialism has limitations based on the very nature of the physical realm. No one wants money, for example, but they may need money to obtain things that are hoped will bring happiness, peace, and satisfaction.
We are now seeing a global backlash against banality.
While the art world focused on the mundane and the hedonistic for quite a few decades, especially during the greed driven 1980s and the cynical selfish 1990s, there is now a strong push to abandon such insanity and return to the Metaphysical.
Bright colors, pleasing shapes, interesting combinations of images, the spiritually surreal, the happily weird, the comically cosmic, the amazingly mystical, the triumphantly bizarre--these are collectively the Next Big Thing in art.
Americans in particular, perhaps the most wealthy, self-fulfilled, and comfortable race of beings who have ever existed on earth, are fed up with "the pursuit of [self-centered] happiness" and are now reaching mightily for "the pursuit of other-focused spirituality."
Not a vague "goody two shoes" legalism or religious bigotry.
Rather, the ascent of the human spirit into its higher realms where, like Buddhists with Bibles, each consciousness desires massively to practice gentleness to all sentient beings, and to discover alignment with the Eternal, the Uncreated, the Uncomposed, the Undefiled, the Ultimate--the Source of All That Is Happy, True, and Genuinely Good.
Atheism and Materialism are dead.
Long live Spirituality and Immaterialism.
Steven Streight
www.arttestexplosion.blogspot.com
http://fulldigitalart.com/@/stevenstreight