Modern art renounces mediation in favor of directness and literalism.

Evidence

In the eminent tradition of aesthetic theory, “mediation” means the active process of relating—making sense and making meaning by inlaying into medium; making middles that merge extremes; making available in language and image and rhythm the super-valent abstractions otherwise unavailable to our sensuous perception—like “justice” or “value.” Now, this middling falters. Yoga in the strobe lights, bedpan chair-sits, and metadata liberated from financial reserve institutions: these three incongruous vertices of contemporary aesthetics together illustrate that art is drooping. The medium is the missing. Conventionally, art takes up a discernable medium and takes creative distance from ordinary communication or banal functionality, making an appeal to the senses that reroutes common sense. A painting isn’t an efficient way to send a message or achieve a goal, but beholding its inefficient indirection can stimulate thought. In the current climate, though, art renounces its own project of mediation. Directness and literalism are the techniques; immersiveness and surety are the effects. If we forward-fold, we incorporate van Gogh; if we meet her gaze, we incarnate Abramović; if we buy Beeple, we invest securely. Short-circuiting allusion, a pressure throbs: get it. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 19

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines mediation — the Aristotelian middling process — as the baseline aesthetic category being attacked.
• XREF: Defines mediation in a way inviting direct comparison to Jameson’s concept of mediation in The Political Unconscious.