Essay

The twentieth century was characterized as the Modernist period in Western culture.  I have become aware that we, in the twenty first century, are in a new cultural period, which I will call the Neo-Archaic period, where all that has ever been exists here and now, and is known, made and remade in as many different ways as there are minds to think.  This idea itself is not a new idea, and has traveled with all philosophical imaginings throughout time, but previously only as a component.  I claim Neo-Archaism to be the steady state of culture, an umbrella term that encompasses all philosophical, aesthetic, and economic systems, but takes them out of their temporal locators and places them within the eternal perspective of the archaic.  

When everything has been tried, exploited, and is known, and what seems to be new is always revealed as an amalgam of the past, then everything, at its root, is archaic.  What appears new is merely the past wearing a contemporary generational mask. The goal of the Archaic is to identify and focus on eternals and universals, and blur the focus on technique, style, and affect which characterized so much of 20th century culture.