How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Wed Jul 18, 2012 11:08 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Helnwein

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A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.[2]

Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco explained what makes Helnwein's art significant: "For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today's world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein's works and provided an insightful essay on his art. Helnwein's work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality. Of course, brutal scenes – witness The Massacre of the Innocents – have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein's art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses. Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public. The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society".[5]


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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Wed Jul 18, 2012 11:09 am

Where Is A Goya Who Could Chronicle Today's Conflict?
By Robert Fisk

Goya in Beirut. True. The great master's Disasters Of War – his terrifying 19th-century sketches of rape and torture and execution – are here in Beirut, such trust in Lebanon from the Cervantes Institute, such shame in Beirut that when I went to see them there was only one other Lebanese in the gallery (free of charge, for God's sake) as this was, after all, a display of this country's own sadism and masochism in the 1975-1990 civil war. Or was it?

For I fear that those who visited this greatest of all anti-war manifestos must have looked at these sketches – women dragged off for rape, men emasculated on tree branches, shot down by death squads – and thought not of Lebanon at its darkest hour but of cities 250 miles to the east of here, in the towns of Syria, where such atrocities are now taking place by the hour, where these etchings fit picture-perfect on to the YouTube videos that pop up on our screens each night.

Would that Goya could tramp eastwards and visit Tremseh or Hama or al-Qusayr. Militiamen hacking soldiers to death, women spearing French soldiers in the groin, naked corpses thrown into a mass grave.

"This is bad," Goya has written below one sketch. "This is worse."

I last saw Goya's images of war in Lille, the city occupied by the Germans in the 1914-18 war (until my Dad battled his way in as a soldier) but here in Lebanon they have a far more terrible effect. Do we have any Goyas today, to chronicle this horrific war to the east of us, in Syria?

The Beirut exhibition asks us this question because it suggests that war photography may be the current-day equivalent of Goya; there are photographs of the Spanish Civil War, of mass graves and Republican fighters at the front, and of the French in South-east Asia and of the Americans in Vietnam, picture-perfect again, the very edge of reality, taken by men and women who needed more guts than Goya to spend such time in war.

And a Lebanese friend who was with me, and whose family is in Syria, replied at once. "There is much less interpretation in photographs. But there is a depth of misery in these sketches. You can dive into them. The photographs are real but they only shock you, so in the photos, something is shut off from you."

Wow, I said. Spot on. But that doesn't demean war photography. The dead of Hiroshima, who splash up on a screen beside Goya's sketches, are no less real. The problem is that they are real, and thus less full of meaning. I can't put it better than this. Stare at the Goya sketches – of the Franco-Spanish war of 1808, when Napoleon decided to install his brother Joseph as king – and you realise that as the atrocities grow worse (for this is, after all, an exhibition of war crimes), the faces of the war criminals, the lustful French troops, the militias (call them the Shabiha in Syria) become ape-like, while the martyrs take on an almost religious innocence. A lone woman firing a cannon is beautiful, not because you see her face, but because you see her long hair hanging down her back.

A few days earlier, I had been looking in Paris Match at the photographs of a very brave American photojournalist, Robert King, who spent seven weeks as a secret doctor in a clinic in the Syrian town of al-Qusayr, some of these weeks with the saintly Dr Zein (pray for him nightly, those who still believe in God) and his pictures show a little girl with a mangled hand (her eyes have stopped asking the question, "Why?") and a four-year-old boy called Mustapha, whose blood-encrusted face is uncaptionable.

"I didn't try to hide the morality or to embellish it," King says. "On the contrary, I wanted to show its brutal ugliness. I think it is scandalous to go to a war to make art. To make something beautiful out of violence is a disservice to those whom violence strikes down, especially when they are unarmed civilians."

And there you have it. Goyaesque in his honesty, this Mr King. And so I pad on round the Goya sketches. A priest about to be garrotted, a woman dragged off for rape, men chopped up and pinioned – all meat – on a tree, a man hauled up the steps of a gallows ("the hardest step," says Goya's caption), the man hanging beside a self-satisfied French officer, until you notice the line of other hanged men on other trees in the background.

And there's a well-dressed man – yes, the rich suffer too, as they do in Syria today – begging on his knees as seven bayoneted rifles point from the right of the sketch, and we do not see the hands or the rifle-holders. Eighty-two of these horrific pictures Goya etched, unseen until 35 years after his death. What a man. What a war. And Syria?
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Wed Jul 18, 2012 1:08 pm

"In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive and complex; it will speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox."

- Hugo Ball
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Fri Jul 20, 2012 3:01 am

Thanks B.

I'd read of Helnwein's work before and felt encouraged. I am going to borrow the Ball quote at some point.

I count the couple of times at an opening someone mentioned Goya in speaking about my own work as among the most astonishing, and memorable.

I wonder if I've already posted about these, I'm almost certain I have, somewhere.

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http://www.washington.edu/news/archive/id/26976
...
"I was looking at these images on the Web, and they were very moving," Magrath says. "I thought, 'Why am I not seeing these anywhere else?' Then I realized I was seeing them elsewhere, but because I was seeing them in the midst of others, the effect was washed away. By the time you've seen photo number 15, you've forgotten what the first one was like."

So Magrath tried to think of how he could counteract that numbing effect, and the first thing that struck him was the need to make the images three-dimensional, and therefore harder to ignore. But still, he realized, there would be a dilution over time. Then the Biblical image of Lot's wife came to him. Against God's orders, she turned back to look at the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and was turned into a pillar of salt.

"That struck a chord with me," Magrath says. "You see something and you're transformed by it. It's a moment you'll never forget."

That was when he decided he would cast his figures in salt.
...


http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/21089/art-news-sept-11-memorial-in-seattle-sculpted-out-of-salt/
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Tue Aug 07, 2012 2:58 am

Robert Hughes’s “Shock of the New” documentary was originally seen by 25 million viewers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/arts/robert-hughes-art-critic-whose-writing-was-elegant-and-contentious-dies-at-74.html?pagewanted=all

Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74
By RANDY KENNEDY

Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.

He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.

With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print, over three decades for Time magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist scourge during an era when art movements fractured into unrecognizability.

“The Shock of the New,” his eight-part documentary about the development of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol, was seen by more than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS, and the book that Mr. Hughes spun off from it, described as a “stunning critical performance” by Louis Menand of The New Yorker, was hugely popular. In 1997, the writer Robert S. Boynton described him as “the most famous art critic in the world.”

It was decidedly not Mr. Hughes’s method to take prisoners. He was as damning about artists who fell short of his expectations as he was elegiac about those who did, and his prose seemed to reach only loftier heights when he was angry. As early as 1993, he described the work of Jeff Koons as “so overexposed that it loses nothing in reproduction and gains nothing in the original.”

“Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary,” he summarized, adding: “He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.”

Of Warhol himself, the most influential artist of the last 40 years, he was not wholly dismissive — he once referred to him as “Genet in paint” — and he softened in his judgment over time. But he argued that Warhol had only a handful of good years and that his corrosive shadow over contemporary art ultimately did more harm than good. “The alienation of the artist, of which one heard so much talk a few years ago,” he wrote in 1975, “no longer exists for Warhol: his ideal society has crystallized round him and learned to love his entropy.”

About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right.”

“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”

“The Fatal Shore,” Mr. Hughes’s epic 1987 history of his homeland, Australia — which he left in 1964 and where his reputation seemed to seesaw between hero and traitor — became an international best seller.

And he continued to write prolifically and with ambitious range, on beloved subjects like Goya, Lucian Freud, fishing, the history of American art, the city of Barcelona — and himself — even after a near-fatal car crash in Australia in 1999 left him with numerous health problems. “Things I Didn’t Know,” a memoir, was published in 2006 and “Rome,” his highly personal history of the city he called “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error,” was published last year. In the memoir, Mr. Hughes was as poetically descriptive about his brush with death as he was about the art he loved: “At one point I saw Death. He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian art.”

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes was born July 28, 1938, in Sydney, into a family of successful lawyers. His father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was a flying ace during World War I, who died when Robert was 12.

Mr. Hughes studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney and was associated with a group of leftist artists and writers that included Germaine Greer and Clive James, who described Mr. Hughes during those years as “the golden boy.” He pursued criticism mostly as a sideline while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the weekly intellectual journal The Observer.

After leaving Australia, he spent formative time in Italy before settling mostly in London. There, he quickly became a well-known critical voice, writing for several newspapers and diving into the glamorous hedonism of the ’60s London, an experience that confirmed him in a kind of counter-counterculturalism — not that he didn’t indulge himself during those years. As he related in his memoir, he was so under the influence of drugs when Time magazine called to offer him a job that he thought that it might be a trick by the C.I.A. (He wrote that he contracted gonorrhea from his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, who, he believed, had contracted it from Jimi Hendrix.)

With Ms. Emerson, who died in 2003, Mr. Hughes had a son, Danton, from whom he was estranged after he and Ms. Emerson divorced in 1981. Danton, a sculptor who lived outside of Sydney, killed himself in 2002, at the age of 34.

Besides his wife, a painter, Mr. Hughes is survived by two stepsons, Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett. He is also survived by his brothers, Thomas Hughes, a former attorney general of Australia, and Geoffrey Hughes, and by a sister, Constance Crisp, all of Sydney. His niece, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, was a former lord mayor of Sydney, and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, is a member of the Australian House of Representatives.

Mr. Hughes lived for many years in New York in a loft in SoHo, whose blossoming art scene he often lampooned. In 1978 he was recruited to anchor the new ABC News magazine “20/20,” but the reviews of his first broadcast were so disastrous that he was quickly replaced by Hugh Downs.

In 1999, while in Australia working on a documentary about the country, he was driving on the wrong side of the road after a day of fishing and crashed head-on with another car carrying three men, one of whom was seriously injured.

Mr. Hughes was critically injured, spending weeks in a coma. He fought a charge of dangerous driving, and after a bitter and highly public legal battle, he described the men in the other car as “lowlife scum.” (He was fined and banned from driving in Australia for three years; his anger about it led to his saying in the hearing of a reporter that it would not matter to him if Australia were towed out to sea and sunk.)

The accident slowed him greatly and required him to walk with a cane, a harsh blow for the kind of writer who almost always seemed happier aboard a motorcycle or a fishing boat than behind a desk. But he continued to travel, to study deeply, to appear on television speaking in impromptu sentences almost as accomplished as those he wrote, and to write.

“No critic could have asked for a better run,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in a review of Mr. Hughes’s memoir.

Mr. Hughes’s essential motivating drive may have been expressed best in his own words about Goya, who he said haunted him in the months when he was recovering from the crash. He was an artist, he wrote, whose genius lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby justdrew » Tue Aug 07, 2012 4:09 am

ooo this looks interesting.... thanks PW :thumbsup


eps 1 to 8 are up there
By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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The rush to the box office

Postby Allegro » Sun Mar 31, 2013 1:17 am

It’s no secret that to satisfy emotionally addicted visitors, critics, sponsors, trustees, politicians and, especially, bean-counters assure themselves that too many visitors schooled and self-educated in the Western European tradition of visual and performing arts would be disastrous for the almighty value of box office returns. Museum visitors as well as concert hall attendees are receiving what they’ve been trained to want, which is to “get excited” and “f-e-e-l good” time and AGAIN rather than intelligently contemplate works of art or the music they are listening to. Understanding and appreciating Western European traditional masteries of art and music are ongoingly sucked into obscurity.

All of which returns to my great rant of the 21st century: Where in the world are goals, percentages and quotas not apparent?

This article could also be posted in the thread for paradigm shifts. Highlights mine.

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The rush to the box office | Museums are feeding an addiction for shows that put works of art at risk and allow visitors no time to reflect

By Blake Gopnik. Attendance, Issue 245, April 2013
Published online: 28 March 2013

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^ Crowd control outside New York’s Museum of Modern Art

    In Tokyo, 758,266 people rush to see the treasures of Holland’s Mauritshuis museum; in New York, 605,586 people view the photos of Cindy Sherman, by Cindy Sherman; 487,716 Parisians consider the American genius of Edward Hopper—these are just a few of the staggering attendance figures for recent exhibitions. Could there be any better sign of the health of our museums?

    See also:
    • Attendance survey 2012: Tour de force show puts Tokyo on top

    Unless we’re seeing symptoms of florid illness. Before he retired as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Philippe de Montebello famously suggested that “museums have become so hyperactive that banners furled and unfurled on museum façades do not indicate, I’m afraid, the glow of health, but rather the flush of fever”. The quaint old notion of the museum as a haven for the contemplation of the art it owns has given way to the museum as a cog in the exhibition-industrial complex. Today’s museums are more or less required to put on an endless list of exhibitions, to satisfy show-addicted visitors, critics (mea culpa), sponsors, trustees, politicians and, especially, bean-counters. De Montebello rang the tocsin back in 2003, but exhibitionitis remains as pandemic as ever. Even a quite partial list of the most important shows at the world’s most important museums (in The Art Newspaper’s The Year Ahead 2012 magazine) now stretches on for almost 100 pages. As I sit writing in New York, the Met is hosting 16 exhibitions in its hallowed halls and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has the same number again, all begging for the public’s attention. For today’s visitor, the first question on entering a museum is “what do you have on?”—as though we’ve all forgotten that the most important thing a museum “has on” is the art it owns.

    Almost a quarter of a century ago, Francis Haskell, the late and very great historian of taste, warned in a famous essay that exhibitions “are now replacing museums as the principal vehicles for the transmission of visual culture”, and went on to launch a jeremiad against the change.

    Haskell cited the physical risks run by works of art every time they are moved; as recently as 2008, at the National Gallery in London, a panel painting was dropped and broken as workers took down the great “Renaissance Siena” show. We also have to worry about the wear and tear that will diminish every well-travelled picture or sculpture. (Conservators wouldn’t fill in condition reports on every loan if there had never been a thing to note on their forms.)

    Haskell also complained that the scholarly justification for a show can be camouflage for the “reasons of politics and prestige as much as of finance” that are its actual, proximate cause. He asked a rhetorical question: “Does anything of lasting significance help to compensate for risks that are too painful to contemplate and for energies and financial commitments that must seem desperately misplaced to anyone who believes that it is the duty of public collections not only… to make their possessions known and understood, but also to care for them with the skill and devotion that are now under increasing threat throughout the world?” We know the answer he expected—and which we still need to consider, 23 years later.

    Even conservators, supposed to be the first line of defence against threats to our art, are made to bow to the exhibition imperative. One senior conservator told me about an exhibitions meeting where a show was proposed that would have put works at risk. When she baulked at the suggestion, the curator said that the need for new shows trumped everything else, and that the conservation department would simply have to decide which works would be “sacrificed”. (The conservator quit soon thereafter.)

    Of course, there are exhibitions that do make necessary contributions to our thoughts about art, outweighing the hazards. These include MoMA’s current show on the origins of abstraction and “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-garde,” held last year at the Met and in 2011 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), which gave an insight into another crucial moment in Modern art. The list of worthwhile exhibitions is long, but it’s rivalled by the list of pointless shows now being put on. Exhibitions titled “Treasures of…” or “…from the Whatshisname Collection” are really about spreading the lending institution’s prestige or paying for its renovation, drawing crowds to the borrower and, of course, flattering collectors. I counted more than 50 such “treasure” and “collection” shows in The Art Newspaper’s exhibition listings for the single month of January 2012. (I half-expected to find a show called “Secrets of the Impressionist Pharaohs: Treasures from the Bill Gates Collection”.) Just showing the public some half-decent art is now seen as justification enough for a show—as though the unwashed masses don’t deserve the deep thought their betters might demand.

    “For fear of seeming stodgy and old-fashioned, museums embrace entertainment—and I resist the notion of art as entertainment,” says Alexander Nagel, a professor of Renaissance art at New York’s Institute of Fine Arts (the CalTech of art history). One of the first courses he offered at the institute wasn’t on the art he loves and studies, but on the perils of the exhibition industry. (Disclosure: I gave a guest lecture on that course.) Works are being put at risk because they are being thought of as “frictionless and portable” images, like jpegs flowing down a wire, rather than as physical objects with a presence that makes demands on us. “Works of art are being sped up to the pace of mass communications, but that’s unrealistic and in fact pernicious,” Nagel says. He started planning his course soon after the financial meltdown of 2008, because he saw parallels between a deregulated Wall Street and the manic exhibition industry, both gripped by short-termism and oversimple notions of gain. The exhibition industry has turned art into a tradable service commodity—into a profit-making “event”, like the launch of a Hollywood movie—and jettisoned the notion of art as a durable cultural good.

    As Haskell once pointed out, Spaniards waited for the better part of a day to get access to the mass “event” of a Velázquez show in the Museo Nacional del Prado, even though most of the pictures were normally on view in the Madrid museum’s uncrowded halls.

    “We’re very cognisant of the energies exhibitions can bring,” said Colin Bailey, the chief curator of New York’s Frick Collection, when I met him at his museum, “and of course we’re aware of the effect that has on admissions.” The Frick is an unusually wealthy “house museum” that was once a symbol of the permanent collection at peace with itself, but has now had an active exhibition schedule for a while. The list includes landmark shows on figures such as the great Renaissance sculptors Andrea Riccio and Antico, and others on audience favourites such as Van Gogh and Picasso, which have little to do with the collecting of Henry Clay Frick but produce the novel sight of queues at his mansion’s gates. Bailey talks about the transformative power a serious exhibition can have—who could doubt it?—but also about how the Frick’s exhibitions “maintain a liveliness” in an institution with a century-old permanent collection that might otherwise come off as static.

    Jeffrey Weiss, a senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, has long worked to restore the balance between collections and exhibitions. At the Guggenheim, his focus is the great Panza Collection of Minimal and conceptual art. “Exhibitions are the tail that wags the dog, now—or maybe they’re just the dog,” he says. Curators know that scholarship, and even art, may sometimes be neglected in the rush to build shows, “but we can’t afford not to do these things, so we look the other way”, he says. “Everyone has to stop feeding the industry, or no one will.” He explains that the condition is so systemic that it doesn’t even rise to consciousness as a “hot-button issue” when curators meet—especially because curators, too, have come to be measured, and to measure themselves, by the shows they put on and the crowds they draw.

    Kerry Brougher, the chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, once told me that museums, now presided over by corporate board members and professional managers, have come to be treated “like a company that somehow needs to always be growing in order to appease its stockholders”, with exhibitions as the sole fuel for growth, and attendance as its measure. (One director has referred to shows as his museum’s “product”.)

    Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, describes the “permanent state of emergency” that museums suffer once they are seized by exhibition frenzy, as shows spawn infrastructure that demands further shows. He cut his own museum’s exhibition programme by a third, he says, so his staff could refocus on the slower, more sustained business of tending the collection.

    I think the damage done by the exhibition-industrial complex is even greater than any of the specifics mentioned so far. The utter dominance of exhibitions in our museum culture has profoundly changed the act of looking at art. When a great art object is doing its best work, there is a difficulty, an imponderability, a resistance to language that can force its viewers to do the hardest thinking they’ve ever done. A wander through a great permanent collection is a spur to that kind of experience, because the art just sits there, daring you to match wits with it. (My future as an art historian was sealed during a week spent in the Prado’s collection in my teens, in utter ignorance of what I was seeing, and in ever-growing fascination.) Permanent collections let you discover a work you know you’ll come back to again, Penny says, “and when you do, you expect to find something else in it”. In a special exhibition, however—or in exhibitionised permanent collections, which are becoming the norm—the art comes prepackaged around a theme or conceit to which it does obeisance. As a visitor, you’re asked to figure out where the art fits into the show’s argument, as though each work is part of the solution to a larger rebus. Once you’ve done that figuring out, you’ve finished with the work and can rush on to the next, or on to the next show on your list. The museum as library, where you choose what and how you will see, is being replaced by the museum as amusement park, with visitors strapped into the rides.

    “It is a terrible thing to feel that you can never sit quietly and contemplate a great work of art,” Penny says. “What some people understand by excitement can be a problem.”

    The writer has been the staff art critic at the Globe and Mail, the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, and publishes his Daily Pic at BlakeGopnik.com and TheDailyBeast.com. He is at work on Andy Warhol: A Life as Art, to be published by Ecco for HarperCollins
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Wed Apr 03, 2013 1:49 pm

Thanks for the article Allegro!
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Fri Apr 05, 2013 4:17 pm

So much for obscurity, in this case. :basicsmile

http://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-entertainment/culture-fiend/articles/at-87-artist-david-byrd-is-just-getting-started-april-2013

At 87, Artist David Byrd Is Just Getting Started
With a lifetime of work to show, the New York painter and sculptor makes his gallery debut this week at Greg Kucera.
Published Apr 2, 2013, 10:11am
By Laura Dannen
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Image: Courtesy Greg Kucera Gallery
David Byrd, Sack on the Table, 1986, oil on canvas, 33 x 42 in.

David Byrd has a biography that reads like a Hollywood screenplay: Raised in three foster homes. Shipped to Europe and Asia as a merchant marine from 1943 to 1945. Attended art school on the G.I. Bill, but worked most of his life as an orderly in the psych ward of a veteran’s hospital in New York. Retired to upstate New York and lived in a shack for four years as he built his own home. Through it all, he sketched and painted, amassing some 400 artworks that—until now—were a life’s story untold.

Byrd's work may have gone undiscovered if not for his neighbor and fellow artist, Jody Isaacson, who put the 87-year-old in touch with her representation, Seattle gallerist Greg Kucera. Now, for the first time, Byrd will lead outsiders down the Hospital Hallway, where life is fragile and stability seems to fade like the color from his palette. Roughly 100 works will be on display in Seattle—oil paintings, drawings, and wood sculptures—and the artist will make the long trip across country for the opening this Thursday.

Before his arrival, Byrd chatted with us from his home in upstate New York, allowing us to unravel the stories behind some of his paintings.

"I worked as an usher at one of those movie houses for a couple of months. You get tired of looking at the movie onscreen, so after four of five times watching it, you begin to look around for something more interesting. This was the result. I was about 19, 20 when I was an usher. I was in art school and some of those jobs were short lived. On the G. I. Bill, the tuition paid for schooling and they give you $75 a month, I think, for living, which wasn’t enough. You took any little job you could get. I was also a bus boy."

"I worked at the veteran's hospital from about 1956 to ’86, about 30 years. I remember the man facing the wall. There were other patients in the hallway. One was hearing voices. People would ask me about the one facing the wall, talking to the wall. I would say, He’s bedded, he’s fed, he’s medicated, but he’s not cured. That's the story of the building I was in."

"You were kept busy but it was a boring job. The day-to-day was taking the patient count, and making sure everybody was there who was supposed to be there. There was meal time—I usually worked on the union shift—and there were suppertime duties you had to observe. And then there was the television that was always on. There was nothing much to do after bedtime. Once in a while you’d have to get some of the patients to the bathroom, because they’d otherwise wet the bed. It was the same thing, day after day after day, year after year after year."

"You had to be careful. Sometimes there was a new patient you had to get acquainted with, learn about. A patient could be dangerous or unpredictable. And so it went. I wondered if painting kept me from going crazy. I’m trying to figure out why I painted them. They were good subject matter and I think any artist would get something from that, as people are."

"After retirement, I moved up here to the southern Binghamton area and bought some property that was available for anybody who had a little money. I built a house on it. That shack was where I lived for about four years when I was doing stonework on the foundation of the house. ... [The cabin] was barely livable, but I guess for hunters it was a good kind of thing. It’s gone now. I was happy to see it go. I live in the same house now. The winters up here are rough, so I have some cabin fever I don’t enjoy too much."

LD: Are you looking forward to your trip to Seattle?

I am. It’ll be nice to see the paintings again. I haven’t seen them for a while. I had too many pictures around here though and I’m glad to see some of them go. But I’ll miss them. It’s a mixed up kind of thing.

LD: Do they feel personal?

I try to depersonalize them. The good ones are in there. The indifferent ones are there, and the ones that need more work are there. He’s got a lot of selling to do. I hope he sells them all—most of them, anyhow.

David Byrd – Introduction: A Life of Observation
Apr 4–May 18, Greg Kucera Gallery

Image
Image: Courtesy Greg Kucera Gallery
David Byrd, Hospital Hallway, 1992, oil on canvas, 43 x 52 in.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Sat Apr 06, 2013 12:05 pm

^^^ YYYYes! Bring on the gentleman painter and sculptor. It’s his turn, thanks to gallerist Kucera, to find people who’ll appreciate and want to own. I would think PW knows.

Thanks, PW!
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Where were you yesterday? | Jessica Duchen, author

Postby Allegro » Wed Apr 10, 2013 12:46 am

Ms. Duchen, an English author, writes about the arts in general and a bit of her philosophy of it in her article, below. I’ve highlighted selections that I think somewhat stay with the theme of this thread.

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Where were you yesterday? | Jessica Duchen
Jessica Duchen’s Classical Music & Ballet Blog | Tuesday, April 09, 2013

    Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Gone, gone, gone. Where were you when you heard the news? Ironically enough, I was in the reception area of Voice of Russia UK Radio, ready to take part in their culture show ‘Curtain Up’ with one of the first - possibly the very first - Russian pianist who sloped away from the USSR to study in London. The lovely Rustem Hayroudinoff is playing at St John’s Smith Square on Saturday 13 April and is now a professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

    To play devil’s advocate for a moment, this couldn’t have happened without Thatcher. The persuasive diplomatic relationship she built with Gorbachev helped to lead to perestroika, the fall of the Iron Curtain and a new freedom of movement. Rustem came to London in 1992; a decade or two earlier, he’d have had to ‘defect’ instead. Some other Russian musician friends who moved to London around the same time got married in the late 1990s and celebrated by lunching with their parents at the Ritz. And there at the next table was Thatcher. That made their day: they adored her for what she’d done for their country. (Yesterday, Thatcher died at the Ritz, after suffering a stroke. Or, as one major news website succinctly misprinted, a ‘strike’.)

    Many of us Brits felt she did more for Russia than the UK. Newspaper reports this morning expose the lingering and indeed widening divisions she left behind. I was 13 when she came to power and the impact of watching the changes that took place under her rule ran deep. Everything my parents believed in and that had brought them to London rather than the US (escaping apartheid South Africa in the 1950s) was brought into question in her era. The value of collective rights and the dignity of human beings per se was under fire: from then on, all that mattered was the price of something, not its worth. The central bricks that held together the moral fibre of Britain were kicked out of its wall. The mess the UK is in now can be traced back to a fundamental change of philosophical attitude that took place here in the 1980s: it became morally legitimate to put the grubbing of money ahead of any vision of what to do with it to make a better, more beautiful world. I don’t doubt that Thatcher sincerely believed in “the trickle-down” effect - but after 30 years, the limitations of the notion are all too clear.

    The NHS, the Arts Council, school buildings, public transport, which crumbled to shreds through lack of investment during the Thatcher years and reached rockbottom under John Major - everything that required an input of public money was slashed to pieces. In the arts, many of our finest institutions, including all the London orchestras, were sliced to the breadline. Doesn’t anyone remember the later sticking-plaster of “stabilisation funding”? Has everyone forgotten the Hoffmann Report? As for London itself, the GLC was abolished wholesale; the capital city became just a conglomeration of boroughs with a broken heart instead of a full-scale identity, greyness instead of pride, infrastructure crumbling and homelessness rife. Doesn’t anyone remember the South Bank’s Cardboard City in the middle of the roundabout where the IMAX is now? Has everyone forgotten the Poll Tax Riots? And the Miners’ Strike?

    What miserable, shattering, hideous, divisive years those were. How tenderly the British right-wing still clings to them today.

    It’s been left to the country’s fine playwrights to preserve the subtleties of Thatcher: the essence of the character, the paradoxes, the personality and the shadings of good intention that illuminate the person behind the nation’s favourite punchbag (“I blame Thatcher”), though she is probably so with good reason.

    As Michael Billington writes in today’s Guardian, part of her legacy is thatwe are still having to argue that subsidy of the arts is a fruitful investment rather than a frivolous expenditure”.

    We’re all human. That’s the only lesson, in the end. But we should be making the best of that, and helping others to make the best of it, too. That should mean expanding minds, not shrinking them; broadening lives, not narrowing them; bringing people together, not dividing them; opening us up, not closing us down; singing, not silencing.

    Now I’m off to the BBC Music Magazine Awards and am happy to leave anyone who doesn’t already know with the happy news that Natalia Osipova is joining the Royal Ballet right here in good old London. We must be doing something right.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Thu Apr 18, 2013 1:43 pm

http://nplusonemag.com/too-much-sociology

Too Much Sociology

We live in the emerging mainstream moment of the sociology of taste. Think back to the first time you heard someone casually talk of “cultural capital” at a party, usually someone else’s inglorious pursuit or accrual of it; or when you first listened to someone praise “the subversion of the dominant in a cultural field,” or use the words strategize, negotiate, positioning, or leveraging in a discussion of a much admired “cultural producer’s” career. (For it was always careers, never single works, that were being considered.) You might have thought that you were listening to Wall Street bankers detailing mergers and acquisitions, but these were English majors! Then there appeared those charticles at the back of New York magazine, weekly guides to the rise and fall of tastes, which derived directly from Bourdieu’s maps of the field of power. Few things are less contested today than the idea that art mostly expresses class and status hierarchies, and only secondarily might have snippets of aesthetic value.

This spread of sociological thinking has led to sociological living — ways of thinking and seeing that are constructed in order to carry out, yet somehow escape, the relentless demystification sociology requires. Seeing art as a product, mere stuff, rather than a work, has become a sign of a good liberal (as opposed to bad elitist) state of mind. This is why you must support upper-middlebrow Terrence Malick one day, and the next spuriously shock everyone with a loud defense of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Too often, being on the left tasks you with a vigilant daily quest to avoid being tagged with snobbery. In sociological living, we place value on those works or groups that seem most likely to force a reevaluation of an exclusive or oppressive order, or an order felt to be oppressive simply because exclusive. And yet despite this perpetual reevaluation of all values, the underlying social order seems unchanged; the sense of it all being a game not only persists, but hardens.

The initial demystifying shock of the sociology of culture in the academy partly accounts for its popularity. Thanks to the dead ends of certain kinds of European hermeneutics — the realization that repeated analyses of Balzac novellas might not shake the foundations of the subject, let alone those of capitalism — it became more promising to ask why certain classes of people might be interested (and other classes not interested) in Balzac at all. No more appeals to the inexplicable nature of genius. Seen from the longue durée of social change, individual authors or works were less important than collectives or status groups, cities or systems. Like latter-day Northrop Fryes, armed with data, the critic-sociologists converted writers back into “literature” as a system, and from there into refractions of codes, institutions, and classes.

The effect on a sector of the professoriat, at least, has been liberating. It has led to a new wave of semi-sociological studies of institutions instead of works. Many of these, such as The Economy of Prestige or The World Republic of Letters, are, if we permit ourselves a value judgment, among the best works of criticism in our time. The overpowering influence of sociology outside its own disciplinary borders was recently verified in a list of “most-cited” intellectuals in the humanities. Sociologists varying in methods and political affiliations from “third way” liberal (Anthony Giddens) to radical (Latour) hold seven of the top ten spots: Foucault, theorist of institutional power, and Bourdieu lead the pack, six hundred citations ahead of the first nonsociologist, Derrida, whose posthumous cultural capital isn’t what it used to be.

These would be footnotes, but what happens at the university doesn’t stay in the university. The generation taught by these sociologist-citing literature scholars has now graduated and is attempting to make a place for itself in the arenas — once blandly uncontested “areas” or vague “spheres”—of cultural commentary, formerly known as “criticism,” and cultural production, formerly known as “the arts.” Not everyone can be a professor. But without thinking too much about it, most of us, especially on the left, would agree that our cultural preferences (what used to be called “judgments”) are fundamentally influenced, or even determined, by a number of external factors, not just the trinity of race, class, and gender, but also nuanced subfields: urban versus rural, regional, sexual preference, professional versus entrepreneurial versus proletarian. The sociological view that both the production and consumption of culture originate in institutional environments, subject to power but also subject to changing powers, offers its own deterministic counterweight to the trending, neurology-based literary studies of “cognitive literary criticism” and other evolutionary psych–based attempts to argue that humanity is hardwired to enjoy marriage plots.

With the generalization of cultural sociology, however, the critical impact has vanished. Sociology has ceased to be demystifying because it has become the way everyone thinks. Discussions about the arts now have an awkward, paralyzed quality: few judgments about the independent excellences of works are offered, but everyone wants to know who sat on the jury that gave out the award. It’s become natural to imagine that networks of power are responsible for the success or failure of works of art, rather than any creative power of the artist herself.

We’ve reached the point at which the CEO of Amazon, a giant corporation, in his attempt to integrate bookselling and book production, has perfectly adapted the language of a critique of the cultural sphere that views any claim to “expertise” as a mere mask of prejudice, class, and cultural privilege. Writing in praise of his self-publishing initiative, Jeff Bezos notes that “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. . . . Authors that might have been rejected by establishment publishing channels now get their chance in the marketplace. Take a look at the Kindle bestseller list and compare it to the New York Times bestseller list — which is more diverse?” Bezos isn’t talking about Samuel Delany; he’s adopting the sociological analysis of cultural capital and appeals to diversity to validate the commercial success of books like Fifty Shades of Grey, a badly written fantasy of a young woman liberated from her modern freedom through erotic domination by a rich, powerful male. Publishers have responded by reducing the number of their own “well-meaning gatekeepers,” actual editors actually editing books, since quality or standards are deemed less important than a work’s potential appeal to various communities of readers.

The danger is that the critical insights of what was called “critical sociology” have been repurposed as the status-quo thinking of “concerned liberalism”—the very thing that it set out to subvert. Thinking of everything as a scripted game show hasn’t led to change. Instead, sociological thinking has hypostatized and celebrated the script. Or to put it another way: hate the players, love the game. Even the sinister David Brooks managed to use (and only partly travesty) Bourdieu, when he suggested that the rise of “bourgeois bohemians” had largely solved the titanic conflicts of the Sixties. In such instances, sociology, which intended to explain in order to criticize the glacial stability of bourgeois society, has passed almost seamlessly into the hands of those wanting to justify that society.

How this happened may have something to do with the ambiguity of the demystification project itself. We can see the problem in the documentary about Bourdieu, Sociology Is a Martial Art, when a passerby recognizes him and tells him that his work changed her life. “I thought I was free, but I wasn’t,” she says, smiling. Bourdieu may have chafed at the enormous simplification, but it’s a relatively accurate conclusion to draw from his work. Yet the political takeaway of such thinking was always unclear. So you’ve learned you aren’t free — good. What do you do now?

The chief virtue of critical sociology, to its American adopters and apostles, was its ability to account for the paradox of greater (cultural) diversity within greater (economic) inequality, without ignoring either. In Cultural Capital, one of the first academic books to import Bourdieu’s ideas into literary and cultural studies, John Guillory made the counterintuitive suggestion that the exhausting canon debates of the 1980s culture wars were really “a crisis in the market value of [the literary curriculum’s] cultural capital, occasioned by the emergence of a professional-managerial class which no longer requires the [primarily literary] cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie.” In other words, the canon debates were not about empowering women and “non-Western” or minority cultures through education, but a sign that these previously subordinate groups already had increased in power to the point where they could create alternate canons, literary or postliterary, which reflected their new status within a capitalist order. Canon formation and reformation being something elite groups did whenever they became aware of themselves as elites.

Guillory didn’t intend to slight the attainments of these historically marginalized groups; he simply wanted to sidestep those annoying debates about whether Edith Wharton was really better for us than Henry James. He focused instead on how eruptions of conflict over symbols pointed to shifts in underlying power dynamics — whether the rise of the professional-managerial classes of the 1980s (which had produced the culture wars), or the bourgeoisie of the 1680s (which had produced the English novel itself).

This insight, radical enough for 1993, now gets a commonplace “fit to print” version in the well-meaning bourgeois paper of record, where the Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan recently took issue with a self-congratulatory tone he’d noticed among educated elites when it came to their global-minded tastes, their ability to channel surf between high and low culture, European and non-Western. “Elites today must recognize that they are very much like the Gilded Age elites of old,” he writes. “Paradoxically the very openness and capaciousness that they so warmly embrace — their omnivorousness — helps define them as culturally different from the rest. And they deploy that cultural difference to suggest that the inequality and immobility in our society is deserved rather than inherited.”

It’s worth slowing down Guillory’s and Khan’s arguments to make explicit certain assumptions they share about the university and the culture it promotes: that its purpose is to train a professional-managerial class or a technocratic elite; that those who attend such schools do so with an intention, no matter how unconscious, of becoming members of either the professional-managerial middle class or the elite managers of those managers; and that such groups need distinguishing markers, the equivalent of secret handshakes, that allow them to recognize themselves as a class, and which, apart from their professional training, are provided by “culture,” which offers, at best, a way for people with shared interests to frame their lives to themselves, and for one another, in ways that are mostly flattering to their self-esteem.

The jaded view of “the arts” propagated by new cultural sociologists is not really different from what the sociologist of America’s first Gilded Age wrote in the 1890s: “The humanities . . . are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption.” Thus Veblen deplored what he called the “regime of status” in contrast to a more puritan and utilitarian “regime of productivity.” Post-Veblen, the contemporary sociologist’s idea of the university’s purpose does not really differ in kind from the neoliberal version: to provide training in a specific field so one may get a better job and have a better life than someone without such training. In the end, it’s irrelevant whether a degree’s additional symbolic value is provided by reading Shakespeare, pledging a fraternity, or DJing a radio show on the blues.

Arguing that an epiphenomenon of an unjust society exists to rationalize that society’s injustice: it’s a silencing maneuver that cultural sociologists have perfected, making them unbeatable on their own terms. The ordinary person, genuflecting before his unfreedom, cries “uncle”—which the sociologist reads as a cry for more sociology. The form of this move can be glimpsed in Guillory’s explanation for the rise of French theory during the period he covers. Theory, according to Guillory, was perfectly in keeping with a “technobureaucratic” turn in intellectual work itself and in the economy overall: “The emergence of theory,” he writes, “is a symptom of a problem which theory itself could not solve.” Well, if theory can’t solve this problem, nobody can. But wait — who’s that tweedy figure in the sky, with his WebCASPAR data sets, coming to save us?

Being no closer to a society free of domination, injustice, and inequality than we were in 1993, we may ask whether the emergence of cultural sociology is a symptom of a problem that sociology itself cannot solve. Anyone who’s spent some time soaking up the discourse can point out that access to critical sociology is now one of the goods people purchase with their tuitions at elite institutions of American higher education. Of course the question and the observation that leads us to ask it turn out to be framed in sociological terms.

It seems there’s no way out of sociology; nevertheless sociology cannot provide us with internal reasons for its ever-rising prestige. Surely we want to be able to say that the sociology of culture is valuable because it’s true or insightful. However, a culture that blithely accepts a sociological account of itself is one that appears to have foundered in the straits that have always bedeviled sociology: the attempt to negotiate the relations between structure and subject, or society and agent. How to account for human freedom and also the determining power of the social world? Can we no longer really provide good-faith reasons for our cultural preferences, reasons rooted in private and idiosyncratic experience but articulated in a common language, and therefore also capable of noncoerced, voluntary change?

In spite of the strenuous attempts by sociologists to preserve some autonomy for the acting subject — Bourdieu’s “habitus,” Latour’s “actor-network” theory — popularization has inevitably resulted in more weight being thrown on the structuring side of things, the network over the actor. The only quantum of freedom left then belongs to the sociologist himself. It is the sociologist who is uniquely qualified to provide explanations for us, which have to do with feelings of status or desire for recognition, sublimated self-interest. Ultimately, there can be no mixed motives, no swerving, no revisions, no “powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves,” as Shelley once tried to define love.

If a work succeeds with a sector of the elite, it must be because the author intended, somehow, to curry favor. The cultural sociologist’s tacit conventionalism and implicit cynicism are offered as an explanation of authorial choices. Only in this way can academic literary sociology preserve the ghost of individual shaping-power. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova claims that Nabokov began to write in English because “he knew the difficult fate of all exiled and dominated writers who, in order to be able to exist literarily and to attain true creative autonomy — which is to say to avoid dependence on unsupervised translations — choose to become, in Rushdie’s phrase, translated men.” The masterly author is preserved; in its biographical rhetoric, this could be a sentence out of On Native Grounds. But society and subject are reversed: rather than interacting socially, the subject becomes an all-knowing manipulator of sociological categories — a sociologist himself. Casanova tips her hand by her association of “true creative autonomy” with control over one’s own literary reputation, as though there could be no other valid kind of creativity or autonomy. Of course Nabokov had good reasons for wanting to write in English — most of his original Russophone aristocratic audience had been murdered — but autonomy is not merely an expression of survival instincts, deployed without pathos, self-loathing, or regret. Not even university professors are as explicitly careerist as the author-ideal that literary sociology puts before us.

A culture that understands its artists only as producers for various niche markets may not need more than this. At this point, however, it’s reasonable to ask whether the diminishment of human “vanitas” and individual agency in the cultural sphere is really an oppositional project. In a 1980 interview with his protégé, Loïc Wacquant, Bourdieu depicted himself as an inheritor of a modernist avant-garde tendency to fight against self-congratulatory, complacent humanisms: “Schoenberg said one day that he composed music so that people could no longer write music. I write so that people, and first of all those people who are entitled to speak, spokespersons, can no longer produce . . . noise that has all the appearances of music.” At the time, and for a nation that considered Bernard-Henri Lévy an intellectual, Bourdieu’s vanguardist arrogance was needed. Thirty years later and across an ocean, however, the spokespeople most effectively diminished by Bourdieu’s influence turn out to be those already in the precarious position of having to articulate and transmit a language of aesthetic experience that could remain meaningful outside either a regime of status or a regime of productivity.

Perhaps sociology of culture has achieved such a dominant share in the contemporary “marketplace” of ideas because it too perfectly mirrors those corporatist and institutional values whose pervasive influence it seeks to expose. We can glimpse the triumph of the sociological view of the university as the credentialing, class-replicating institution par excellence in the positivist counterpart to the critique of credentialism: Are credentials meaningless? Well, now private “degree-granting” farms like the University of Phoenix offer for-credit classes with no content apart from forcing students to memorize statistics about the purported benefits of earning one’s degree.

The more sociologized an institution, the more it seems to accept that it has no purpose apart from the perpetuation of its own institutional structures and hierarchies, and the harder to imagine that it could be, or could have been, otherwise.

As with all projects of “disillusionment” for the sake of greater enlightenment, the sociology of culture can come to feel tyrannical in the way of Plato’s Philosopher King: all-knowing, imperious, he moves the citizens along through a dialectical encounter that will lead them to understand their place. The French aesthetic philosopher Jacques Rancière was the first to point out Bourdieu’s implicit Platonism, and he went on to argue that in their zeal for a regime in which no one could be an elitist because everyone would be a sociologist, sociologists missed out on what he termed benign illusions or “frauds” of culture. There were certain aesthetic practices — classical music, for example — that cut through distinctions and could be appreciated by people — Bolivian peasants, in one instance — as long as they weren’t told that they were listening to “Western Classical High-Bourgeois Music.” There is still, in other words, a space where the aesthetic may be encountered immediately and give pleasure and joy uninhibited by surrounding frameworks and networks of rules and class habits. We would go further than Rancière and suggest that a great part of the appeal of critical sociology itself relies on a similar ruse. Bourdieu’s equating himself to Schoenberg is again revealing, because he’s making an aesthetic analogy, not just one based on equivalent roles in different avant-gardes. The secret allure of critical sociology lay in making certain susceptible members of dominant classes hear an appeal to some transcendent sense of radical justice and fairness — an appeal that might also echo through the realms of art, literature, and criticism. Without this hidden god of universalism, sociology is — to speak sociologically — just a high-culture spokesperson of power. It elaborates rules for a never-ending battle in which there are winners and losers, dominators and dominated, but nonetheless fails to persuade us why we might want to take sides in the first place.


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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Thu Apr 18, 2013 1:44 pm

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Simulist » Thu Apr 18, 2013 2:04 pm

Project Willow wrote:

Holy monkey farts... I loved that. :lol:
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Mon May 20, 2013 11:27 pm

It all must be done I suppose.

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