William wrote > This is probably a "conservative" position since the trend seems to be that the genealogy of art is irrelevant to art practices that now engage the broadest array of disciplines and endeavors from anthropology to engineering, from economics to physics.
This reminds me of entropy and dispersed or decentralized authority. There was a time when artists were trained in many skills before they offered their works to the public. It's the guild system, basically, a long apprenticeship of learning and then passing a test. Now, after the changes you ascribe to the effect of Bauhausian Modernism, the line between the artist's skills and the public's viewing, which previously was drawn when the artist passed the test with a masterpiece, has moved over to the viewer's domain. Teachers used to administer the skills and rigors of art, and the products were given pretty much fully-formed to the audiences. The entropy of decentralized canons and non-hierarchical knowledge has shifted the locus of ordering much closer to the viewer. Art, more than any other kind of means of (re)presenting, turns itself inside out so that its own techniques are far more visible *and* offered on a par with whatever the "content" of the work is. Other forms of (re)presenting subsume their techniques to the service of the "content" to a far greater extent than art does, and the means of the delivery and whatever is delivered are hard to distinguish--to order--by the audience. This is another example of what I mean by the effect of "entropy" in the constructing of art. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
