Berg finds that mass-culture-market art is more about celebrity and posing than it is about art as such. What an amazing find! Berg has a view and then finds an example supporting it and then, by godly irrationality, he -- or she -- concludes a universal truth applicable to examples. In ordinary syllogistic logic, a universal cannot be concluded from a particular.
The Bravo TV show The Next Great Artist was/is not titled "The next Great Art". The show is about being an artist in today's (actually in yesterday's bubble-up economy) art world. It was not at all about art. the actual criticality and results that were offered as art were in fact merely monotonous and soup of the soup banality. Everyone actually in the art world knows that. It had as much reality vis-a-vis the art world as a TV hospital drama TV has to the real hospital world. Only dummies would think there is a correspondence between TV hospital dramas and the real hospital and only dummies would think there is correspondence between the art world complexity and the exaggerated cartooning it received on the Bravo show. The question that deserves examining centers on the nature of pervasive entertainment and how it might be formulated as a world-view lens to reality. To what extent do the premises of entertainment affect the world of experience where different premises are -- or used to be -- the means to examining reality? This issue affects all aspects of life nowadays. From the classroom to the corporate boardroom, from the home to the church to the state, reality is more and more reshaped according to the interests of entertainment. It is not altogether different from the eras when religious beliefs defined reality or, more recently, when vague notions of individual freedom define social institutions. Now all of it is gathered under the mysterious fogs of entertainment. God is chuckling. War is fun-games. Art is fan and celebrity. Love is erotic play. Philosophy is amusing. News is yelling bombast. You can add to the list of reality as comedy. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, October 2, 2010 5:13:20 AM Subject: "...Mendenhall had reportedly met with a U of M art professor to strategize about the show and craft a persona of a tortured artist that would set him apart and appeal to the judges." Just as I suspected: http://www.citypages.com/2010-09-22/news/miles-mendenhall-shakes-up-bravo-s-work-of-art/
