However much art may be about art, it is foremostly bound to the human condition.
Bartolomeo E. Safc

      The aesthetics of Amnesis reaffirm such an "extra-artistic" dimension.  the allusiveness of amnesia and the lost object, the guiding principles of Amnesis, has an amplitude of resonances pertinent to all ages, and particularly to our present era. 

  Modernism emerged from the belief that the certainties of the past were simply no longer viable.  The modernists proclaimed and glorified this rupture.  They saw that the circle of philosophic universal beliefs was broken; it had become a straight line pointing to an unknown and disquieting future. No longer encumbered by the past, these artists were free to re-create themselves, and the possibilities seemed endless, exciting and foreboding.  Extreme originality as we know, became a primary criterion in judging the value of a work of art.

     The broken circle of past certainties (tragically echoed in Yeats's lines  , "The center cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world") has begun in amost unexpected manner to close again in a universal vision.  Ever since  Hiroshima we have come to understand that all human beings risk a common destiny: now all our thoughts and dreams are surrounded by a ring of fire.  But the beautiful photographs of Earth brought back to us by Apollo mission of 1968 have proved a more positive vision.  Poet Archibald MacLeish proclaimed the significance of that event in his marvelous brief essay "Bubble of Blue Air."  MacLeish reminds us that our concept of ourselves has always depended on our view of the Earth's position in the scheme of the universe.  The Ptolemaic conception placed us at the center of creation; the Copernican theory removed us to a small planetary system in a minor galaxy; our more recent speculations have taken us, in Macleish's words, "beyond the range of sense or reason, lost in absurdity and death."  Yet the image of our planet, seen for the first time from afar as a small, fragile, and beautiful object, can bring us to see ourselves, MacLeish proclaims, as "riders on the earth together, as brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night - brothers who see now they are truly brothers."  Science has given a greater immediacy to the apocalypse; it has also given us a new vision of what it means to be human.  Yet for any hope of our survival to persist, all human beings must share in recognizing our planet's precarious situation.  Our repressed fear of annihilation brings us ever closer to a final break in the succession of human time, to a violent entry into the eternal oblivion that would follow the extinction of the human race.

     Undeniably, the psychic burden of an imminent, humanly caused apocalypse colors every aspect of our lives, including art.  The notion of art as a testimony of past eras to the spirit and imagination of their times is undermined, as Jonathan Schell notes in The Fate of the Earth, by the conceivable termination of human memory.    If artistic creations are to be lost in eternal amnesia, then for whom can art be made? marcel Duchamp's perception that a work of art cannot exist without an audience leads us to confront the questions of why and for whom we create.  Aside from the innumerable personal reasons that induce us to make art and the allegations that artists create only for themselves, undeniably any artistic expression, however intimate, longs to be received by a public. If an artist sees no possibility of such reception during his lifetime, he may continue to harbor a secret hope that someone in the distant future may uncover his work and bring it out before an astounded world.  Poetic justice would then be accomplished: the public that ignored him or her remains buried in oblivion while the artist is resurrected in a new century.  But now that all has changed.  The visionary zeal of the recondite artist, together with the aspirations of any other artist, known or unknown, from any period in history, are all threatened by the same oblivion.  If no one remains, there can be no recognition of past accomplishements, no memory of past events.