Mona Lisa's Moustache: Making Sense of a Dissolving World

IN the eighty years since Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, the dissolving of cultural forms has intensified to the point that there is no longer an absolute, a "proper" form, anywhere. This generalized breakdown is evident in social & moral codes, in gender distinctions & personal relationships, in politics & economics, in literature, music, dance, painting, & architecture, in our concepts of reality itself. Is there any sense to be made of this seeming chaos? And if so, can any single theory adequately account for all aspects of the phenomenon? Physicists & mathematicians have informed us that reality is irreducibly complex & plural, unable to be exhausted by any one system of description. Following their lead, Mary Settegast has explored several different ways of looking at the reality of dissolving forms, seeing it as the result of: global consumer capitalism; environmental deterioration; the end of a cycle of time; the beginning of a new cycle; a shift in the evolution of human consciousness; & finally, seeing the dissolution of form as a cause for celebration. Each of these six perspectives is theoretically "correct" in its ability to explain the breakdown, & each can be supported by the work of twentieth-century artists. Readers are asked to forego the impulse to choose which view they believe to be true & encouraged instead to practice the simultaneous holding of multiple perspectives: "Like the Cubist painters of the early twentieth century, who were among the first to recognize the error in a single point of view, we will be trying in these pages to portray our subject from all sides in hopes of capturing it whole."Mary Settegast is the author of 'Mona Lisa's Moustache: Making Sense of a Dissolving World', published 2001 under ISBN 9781890482909 and ISBN 1890482900.