Omniism

 Postupack is the founder of the Omniist School of art.

Omniism contends that the world is too multifarious a place to be reduced artistically into one or two marketable ideas or a so-called “style”. Omniism abhors “artistic” assembly lines, complacency, and self-censorship, whereas it joyously celebrates experimentation, risk-taking, and fearlessness as integral parts of the process of creation. Omniism promotes the use of unusual materials in the works, such as building supplies, industrial materials, discarded items, and found objects. It features texture and 3-dimensionality; building up surfaces with multiple layers, then revealing the beauty buried within as if witnessing its moment of release. It is fueled by improvisation, as the Muse does not wish to be constrained by the limited imagination or parochial intention of the artist.

 

“We’re going to ask the most of ourselves regardless of the audience, regardless of the public.”

--Clement Greenberg

 

“High, serious, uncompromising art has a disturbing effect, often distressing and torturing; popular art, on the other hand, wants to soothe, distract us from the painful problems of existence, and instead of inspiring us to activity and exertion, criticism and self-examination, moves us on the contrary to passivity and self-satisfaction... The chances of success of important works are lessened by the fact that the new, the unusual, and the difficult have of themselves a disturbing effect upon an uneducated and not especially artistically experienced audience and move them to take up a negative position.”

--Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art (1983)

 

“Major art—the all-out try—opens the future to the continuing production of high art. And it is the sense of the try—the all-out try in the sense of high seriousness—that seems to be a necessity. One could say that the best new art of this time (the only major art we have) does not reach the level of the best art of the past four or five hundred years. But there is still a sense of a try at that level. A sense of the courage and a sense of the ambition necessary to try for that level. And as I see it, regardless of how the best art of our time shapes up against the best of the past, art is moving nonetheless.”

--Clement Greenberg

 

“The inferno of the living is already here, where we live everyday. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many; accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension:  seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

--Italo Calvino