This is the sort of thinking that ignores the central theme of modernism: unity of life and art. For over a hundred years, or if you care about the emergence of modernity, at least two hundred years, art has sought to merge with the flow of life, the commonplace, the everyday, and the transient. What makes it different from life in that sense, however, is its intentional criticality. Art critiques as it becomes one with life. This suggests an outsider position, as if art stands afar, secure in orbit, as it were, but it is fused with life as a tempest is with the land.
The quotation below is an effort to equate art with the heavenly eternal sphere of you-know-who. It fails as reality while it succeeds as superstition. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, August 30, 2012 5:09:16 AM Subject: "The aesthetic domain and the work of art seem to offer a plane on which a certain equilibrium can be achieved in the face of a modernized reality which is always already in a state of disruptive disequilibrium. Societies organized economically and s "The aesthetic domain and the work of art seem to offer a plane on which a certain equilibrium can be achieved in the face of a modernized reality which is always already in a state of disruptive disequilibrium. Societies organized economically and socially by markets, the money-form, the commodity fetish, and so on, cannot, by definition, achieve stability or equilibrium, and moreover, are never meant to achieve such a thing. In these conditions of permanent upheaval, there are only temporary moments of arrested development. Art is such a moment in market societies." http://books.google.com/books?id=MWSo04n0Vp4C&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=%22arrest ed+development%22+equilibrium&source=bl&ots=Pcga8VQAFy&sig=Q3s0Yp5yHDjgONgUUp TbKzDW4kc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dTk_UObAFYqzigKox4DwAg&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%2 2arrested%20development%22%20equilibrium&f=false
