We are just emerging from an era, known as "the 20th century," which rejected mimesis. Arrogant from our growing control of nature (so we thought), we turned to emesis: vomit. For our recently departed century, that art was best, greatest, which most successfully produced a spewing out of waste and sepsis. Shock the middle-class: épater le bourgeois.

The museums and private collections of the world are now filled with emetic art products of the 20th century. Some, only a few, the future will treasure, because even emesis can be touched by genius. Most will be seen for the fecal matter that they are and discarded as trash.

Scholars will want to retain samples of the most egregious stuff, to help them remember and understand. Those samples will wind up not in art museums, for they are not art, but in museums of cultural history.

A reaction to the century of vomit will come. People, learned and unlearned, will forget why we vomited. Humbled by the spilled blood and raped enviornment of the 20th century, we will slowly learn to see that the nightmares that were real for for the 20th century are only savage stories. The art, the music, the poetry, the novels, the drama, and even the politics of emesis will mostly produce a future reaction of, well, emesis. Stomachs will truly churn, not at the disease called man, but at the disease called modernity and so-called post-modernity, the emesis of the twentieth century.

Schoenberg? Barf. Guernica? Barf. Joyce? Barf. Milton Babbitt? Barf. Milton Friedman? Barf. The great dictators? Barf. Schnabel? Barf. De Kooning? Barf. Bacon? Barf. Hemingway? Barf. And so on. Emetics all. The 200 million war-dead, the violent art, the merciless exploitation of free-market capitalism--all of a gorge-raising piece.