>From the lack of breathing on this list one would think that aesthetics is a dead idea. But I think not. Aesthetics has just slipped from object to artist. It's not an idea anymore but someone. Don't you wish you were that someone?
The art world, deeply immersed in oily decadence is due for a frantic swim to cleaner waters. The nadir of contemporary art is not marked by the banality of particular artworks but by the eagerness of artists to embrace the strategies of mass marketing that define popular taste. One of the most heavily used strategies is to link the ordinariness of an idea or product with the rarity of celebrity. By doing so the ordinary actually acquires the unique effulgence of celebrity and its presumed magic, rivaling the transubstantiation of the host into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Nothing new in that, certainly, and it's the staple of mass selling since the earliest days of Wheaties and and Ivory Soap. You have noticed how the beautiful actress on TV sells her new perfume (remember, it's polluted water) by holding the little bottle with the tips of her fingers right next to her cheek. So it has finally come to art, now naked and unlovely in its new identity as the "everyday" and "commonplace" as explained by steeply aging art critics who will not need to witness the future they define. Art may indeed be the everyday and indistinguishable from the the glut of material banality but, ah, those artists, and oh, that wonderful delight of their celebrity, fame, genius, fashioned instantly, seemingly from nothing, by the metamorphic magic of electronic media and behind-the curtain manipulations and money, money, money, that's the thing. So we have Bravo, the Next Great Artist ready to concoct another winning TV season. Similar forms of art as mass entertainment/celebrity made to the reality show template, are being pitched even as I write this on an early Saturday morn. The artwork now is incidental, like the little pile left on the sidewalk by your odd breed doggie (with Yale or Columbia MFA) and of course the doggie's the prize, not the pile. Some people have discovered the depressing fact that not only are artworks like doggie piles but the artists, too, very often look and act like doggies. They are ill bred, uncombed, bad mannered and poorly trained. They need to be transformed into slick celebrities. Here is a whole new business for failed art dealers and plaid-jacketed sales-promotion folks and smart MFA theorists who have run out of metaphors. They are conducting seminars and courses designed to turn shy, introspective, marginalized artists into the sort of people who can hawk wares like a door-to-door Fuller Brush man and be mistaken for a movie or rock-band mega-star. Hey, if you can't make art, be an artist! Be a business-artist, be "Professional", be sucked down the drain of mass marketing. Never mind the old-timey moralists. Align yourself to the entertainment game world. Forget about that hard stuff, aesthetics, ideas, content, meaning. Focus on the commercial. (Who hasn't noticed how TV is just one long commercial after another with boring pauses for the so-called program?) So it has also become for art. Art is just the boring pause between episodes of entertaining, charismatic, celebrity artists. Aesthetics? Who is Aesthetics? Is she here tonight? Is Mr. Aesthetics with her? Wow. wc
