All, Many interesting new ideas today in response to other postings.
Of course an artist, poet, anyone can make art without attending to all this cultural scaffolding. I wager none of us here are really outsider artists however much we may scribble in the corners by ourselves, but we are quite aware that only certain work gets critical attention and acclaim, much of it really good, some of it kind of puzzlingly not so, and much that is derivative as well as much that is mediocre or wonderful or fashionable or enduring. But so what? I'd rather see good money go to bad art than bad causes. But I'm intent on addressing the rhetoric that accompanies the high art high stakes game--because that's where the greater disconnect occurs between what I perceive as good faith and bad (faith, not art). I use the term "academic" to suggest a critical practice based on a set of teachings that are passed through the academic environment as a kind of consensual code that cannot be questioned. I don't mean it to refer to scholarship or all critical study, but to a particular vein of belief premised, in this specific case, on a 19th century analysis of capitalism and its cultural manifestations (Marxism), revisited through a particular set of ideas about the demonic effects of mass culture and the necessity for art that resists that culture through difficulty (that, in a nutshell, is the Adorno position). I'm all for alternative spaces, for the creation of possibilities of thought, expression, experience, that the mass culture by its industrial nature rarely offers, but the attachment to an aesthetics of negativity and resistant difficulty seems counter-productive when produced for its own sake and on claims of serving a political end. I think GH makes a good point -- who outside the academy cares about Agamben and Adorno. Who, indeed, inside the academy? And why? I can't read Agamben. Sorry. I haven't the patience for the convolutions of his text. I spent a summer reading Adorno's aesthetics and translating it into the vernacular, distilling and paraphrasing, to get at the ideas, knowing full well that this was heretical practice to the critical community committed to expression as substance. But remember, I come from the realm of Language Poetry, was schooled in its teachings, and so know up close how close the relations of self-justifying obscurity and imaginative experiment can be. Artists should make what they want. But when we get to the critical discussion of the cultural role and function of aesthetic objects, the claims for the work often come out of a need for critical discourse to find suitable objects rather than out of an engagement with the work. I don't mean this to sound reactionary. I think it is radical to suggest that art has a purpose own its own terms, and that the engagement with those terms might unseat some critical assumptions that have held sway for a long time. My favorite example? Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, which I think is a splendidly complex and inexhaustibly interesting aesthetic intervention in communal civic space. Complicit? Kapoor has no conflict with being a crowd pleaser. Why should he? If an essay appears in a critical art journal discussing Cloud Gate as a work of negative aesthetics, I think only a fool will take that stance seriously. What I think is useful to learn from Cloud Gate is the way an aesthetic artifact succeeds by not being difficult and by sustaining a complex and open-ended experiential relation to viewers. Johanna _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
