Do you think “true” surrealist art is being created here at the beginning of the 21st century?

Contemporary surrealism is expressed in advertising, where art directors have learned how to use the power of surprise, isolate the object and sell a heightened experience. They use the fascination excited by surrealist techniques to develop consumerist desires. These effects are so ubiquitous that most of the public could not recognize their source in surrealist art. Surrealism has been subverted by consumerism — but it is remarkable how in this guise it gives rise to humor, irreverence, and play. The other contemporary surrealist art tends towards the theatrics of supernaturalism, or towards derivatives of Dalí or de Chirico, where psychedelic posters meet high art: “that’s weird, man.”

Simple question: is there any way you can label what artistic era we are in now? Is it still a post-modern age, or is it post-post modern? Are categories like these mere illusions that do not help us understand ourselves as artists and writers in the world?

For me, art must have authenticity. Like music, art is evident only by itself. Explanations of zeitgeist are interesting for scholars and cultural historians, who subsume art or poetry into their own ideas. But, art is also a historical document, incontrovertible, original, and complex. To reduce one’s art to post-modernism might be good for marketing, but it doesn’t make the art live. We are in the age of irony — not a complex irony — a soundbite irony, deliberately offhand. It has an adolescent irreverence, which would be refreshing except that much of it has marketing motives. I would also say that we are in the age of cynicism — a cynicism that makes art an instrument to create a pre-determined, literal position. Such instrumentalism may refer to cultural ideas, but can’t give them the vitality of an embodied meaning. Post-modernism’s stance that everything is a coded language has become thin and lifeless.

For me, art must have authenticity. Like music, art is evident only by itself.

Does it at all bother you that Salvador Dalí was pro-fascist? Or, because he was such a great artist, does this matter? I suppose this poses the question, was Dalí a great artist?

Dalí was the Liberace of the art world. He was called “Avida Dollars” by the Surrealists — referring to his unscrupulous greed and need for attention. This trait also appears in Dalí’s admiration of fascism. The Franco regime tolerated him as a symbol of Spanish artistry and he perversely made statements of support for fascism, perhaps to pique André Breton, who expelled him from the movement in 1934. Dalí was affiliated with anarchism in his youth, rather than communism. In supporting fascism he was rebellious and offensive, following his instincts for pageantry and oligarchy. While Dalí had tremendous powers of imagination and technical accomplishment to match, his content was lacking — more so as he got older. Like Giorgio de Chirico, he was brilliant when young, but seemed to experience a decline in his visionary inspiration as he became older. Breton, that most purist of the Surrealists, understood that lust for wealth and celebrity had consumed Dalí.