When I proposed that "a typical Hollywood movie is carefully crafted to pull in a large audience.", Saul countered with: "And what makes you think art was ever anything other than a carefully crafted artifice meant to pull in its audience"
Several listers then took up his challenge - but please notice that his query omitted the adjective "large", the dominating importance of which only belongs to the last few centuries of modern society. But even now, many artists are still addressing an audience that is very small but demanding -- including, it seems, most of the artists on this list (even Mando, when he's not making toys for a mass market) And yes, some artists seem to be unconcerned with any audience other than themselves. Here's an artist statement that I just copied off a gallery wall at my art club: "Initiallly, I started to paint to allow myself a new creative outlet, somewhere I could lose mlyself form the business of everyday life. In the past seven years, painting has now evolved to be a spiritual expression of how I view life - joyful." This is not say that her painting (which I think is pretty good) does not "reflect the economic and social circumstances in which an artist works and breathes and reveals underlying cultural assumptions and normative values." -- but that can be said of everything that people make from automobile tires to cigarette lighters, whether we wish to distinguish it as art or not. Nowadays, of course, plenty of work is made to "reflect the economic and social circumstances in which an artist works". That's the genre in which Saul is a specialist, and which he would like to privilege above all others I just saw an exhibit of such called "Big World - Recent Art from China" The curators even explicitly stated that the artists were selected for their "ability to portray diverse social realities" But the only social reality I could find portrayed was the contemporary artworld -- and whether any of that stuff ends up being distinguished as art in upcoming centuries -- well, who knows? (most of it seemed to be typical MFA stuff, but some of the painting was just as good as that done by the woman from my art club) I suppose we've wandered rather far from "Heidegger and Singularity" - but maybe not, because the "the economic and social circumstances in which an artist works" is a kind of singularity. Sure, it changes over time, but at any one moment, historicists like Saul (with the encouragement of Heidegger) will attempt to determine it, and then judge art by its proximity to that perceived truth. ____________________________________________________________ Get Info on Mcse Boot Camp from 14 search engines in 1. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/jZBdy9k8x3acmUDtf0IDSg68YlOGXS qQhU2StdpFztqbZ5VBz8QsUy0/
