Marcel Duchamp, creator of the "Fountain," a sculpture of a restroom urinal, insisted that art is ultimately conceptual.  Tradition is less important, he says, than the ability of the artist to produce work that is uniquely his or her own.  Hence, art does not so much reflect the patterns of the past, the aesthetic patterns in which artists have traveled to this point, but rather the judgment of the individual artist, standing, rather like Nietzsche's Uberman, alone and apart, braving whatever currents of creative expression are running through his or her mind.  A world all its own.

    No real argument here.  By its nature, art is interpretation, the artist's interpretation of how he or she views the world.  On the other hand, to say that one is forging one's own aesthetic path quite apart from all that preceded it is a stretch:  every work of art builds on what came before it.  Yet Duchamp has a good point:  why should art not be a concept, a concept from which the viewer can wonder and wander?

    It reminds me of the coherence theory of truth:  we construct truth on the basis of everything that, at this particular point, we know and experience.  Transcendent standards are therefore meaningless.  The present concept is the only thing.

    Fair enough.  But we really live with a fractured reality?