Artysta w kręgu mitów późnej nowoczesności

The author – referencing the thought by Chantal Delsol – uses the term “late modernity”, recognizing in subsequent after-the-Enlightenment peri- ods subsequent phases of modernity. Among countless myths of after-mo- dernity he chose two: about acquiring the knowledge of the world and im- mortality, which, in his opinion, influenced the condition of a modern artist in the strongest way. In conclusions the author notices that the biggest weakness of modernity (in contrary to its self-assessment) is impossibility to build a consistent image of reality, which is a result of lack of originality. Creators of modern culture specialized in theft of ideas of their predeces- sors, and out of context foreign fragment may be presented by them as a fruit of their own reflections. The weakness of modernity, displaying in its morbid tendency to reduction, became its strength: it is impossible to build a whole from the fragments, but with small fragments a whole may be infected. The success of modernity turned out to be, then, a success of a virus spreading from period to period