There is already a long tradition of painting that spills over into the landscape, one that escapes the canonical order with the underground forms of well-known, neglected urban environments. Undoubtedly, apart from the taggings by the desperates, confused by their own identity, there are real works of art on our streets. Compared to these street artworks, the artworks of some of the renowned artists at the Sydney festival look like a pale institutional response to street subversion.

Mark Titmarsh, in The Conversation article of 18 December 2018, noted that many contemporary artists, including some exhibiting at the 2019 Sydney Festival, see and refer to their installations as paintings. Of course, these paintings are far from traditional painting, since they tend to include time-defined performance, as well as the spillage out of the rectangular space of the canvas into an actual three-dimensional space, and they usually extend to architecture and landscape. Since they are a priori defined as concepts intended for specific exhibitions and events, they are essentially conceptual artworks, not paintings. Nevertheless, it was interesting to notice the continuation of mixed media trends in art, which aim to redefine the traditional artistic medium - painting, by exploring the painterly. Of course, it is part of the modernist tradition to try to avoid classification, to explore alternative angles of the media and to affirm the possible. The legacy of the 20th century avant-garde is a tradition of resistance to the academy, resistance to an institution that always tries to impose rigid rules about what art and painting should be. In this sense, the paintings escaping picture frames can be recognized as a literal interpretation of the avant-garde paradigm. The article fails to mention that there is already a long tradition of painting that spills over into the landscape, one that escapes the canonical order with underground forms of well-known neglected urban environments. Without a doubt, beyond the tagging by the desperates, confused about their own identity, there are real works of art on our streets. Compared to these street artworks, the artworks of some renowned artists at the Sydney festival look like a pale institutional response to street subversion.

Someone pointed out that the principle of novelty and the exclusivity of the artworld are the reasons for the absence of art in our everyday life.

Indeed, it could be argued that the opposite is true, that art has become a part of our lives in such a way that we can no longer distinguish it from real life. All around us, aesthetic principles are becoming more important than logic. There is so much room for interpretation, and there is less and less meaningful communication. Everyone has the right to an opinion, and the way opinions are expressed is a measure of their relevance. Just like in art. Filling the void with private meaning.

Politicians invent political problems from insignificant events, avoiding content that concerns us all. The focus on common truth, essential to discursive thinking, is dissolved in our discourses that follow aesthetic principles. Everyone is more concerned with how something is done than with the underlying meanings conveyed. Just as in aesthetic experience, more meaning ends up being extrapolated from the form of communication than from the content. Big Brothers shoot the messengers as the messages disappear. So we have Assange locked up until nobody remembers the message anymore. No one cares about messages, but everyone seems to like to fill the void with their private opinions and private selfies. We define our needs with Christmas bells. In the noise of meaningless data, the absence of opinion becomes the new strategy of resistance. Actors' roles are confused with real people. Let's shoot the bad guys. No one knows what reality is like, but I know who the villains are. All truths are alternative truths. All news can be fake news. And we are not responsible. Truth is relative and we don't care when people suffer. Their truth is not our truth anyway. And everything is so beautiful with a little help from private drugs and TV from time to time, to keep us entertained and happy, forever in Christmas shopping with the sounds of music. Kitsch and aesthetics are combined into a beautiful cacophony. Arguments about the invisibility of art testify that art has become a part of our lives to the extent that we can no longer see it, just as one cannot see the forest from the trees.

Of course, this does not mean that the argument that art is invisible in our time did not point to a problem. Fine art, as an institution of the exclusive artworld, is isolated from the mainstream media; it is as if it does not exist in everyday life. The argument points to a growing schism between culture and popular culture. Mainstream media are not interested in art or culture but in entertainment. Because they are profit-driven, they are guided by advertising, shareholders, and political interests. They sell us eyeballs and impose the lowest denominators of taste.

What about the traditional art world? Since art was turned into entertainment, government grants were usually awarded to politically eligible, potentially profitable projects, gobbled up by art institutions, while the independent artists create artwork for peanuts or for free. That is, theatres often end up with sponsored kitsch spectacles, like The Lion King or some other Disney kitsch endeavours. Once-respectable galleries sell Madonna's underwear, architects are forced, by ignorant but arrogant councils, to design colonial clones, and paintings offered in commercial galleries often look like time-warped orphans of melancholy romanticism or realism from the 18th century. Everything is inflated in size, confusing the monumental with the artistically beautiful. Just as if size determines aesthetic value. When ignorance is omnipresent, size paradoxically becomes a bogus artistic criterion. That's how we end up with big bananas, big pineapples, big sculptures of refugee ships and big-headed portraits of former prime ministers in our parliament. People seriously claim that geography determines culture .

Amateurs and illustrators, without aesthetic ambitions, call themselves artists without hesitation. Businessmen measure the similarity of portraits and award state awards for art, and politicians without any prior aesthetic knowledge and education decide on the aesthetic value and the subsequent destruction of heritage buildings - vandals prescribe our criteria of aesthetic value.

Art criticism in crisis. Lack of value criteria. Kitsch everywhere, framed and sold as art: Mickey Mice, worthless mass reproductions, numbered but uncontrolled editions, picture frames and pop culture. People, having no idea what is an original and what is a reproduction, proudly collect garbage with authenticity certified by fictitious authorities. EBay kitsch creep-show selling under the category art everything artistic, from old artistic failures to illustrations cut from vandalized books. It's no wonder why many people choose to leave their interiors bland and sanitized. The alternative, without the support of knowledge and the lost authority of criticism, is to decorate our spaces with kitsch garbage.

Visual culture disappears into the landscape just like expanded paintings...