Well said, Mr. Druckrey.
Recent book on four philosophers in period
between WW1 and WW2, Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Cassirer and Benjamin, addresses the despair of
Europe, if not the world, brought on by war
devastation of settled acceptance of the way
things are. Silent screams the lingua franca.
Perhaps similar rethinking is worthwhile for the
digital and Covid disruptions of faith in
analogical art and psychological science, the
excessiveness of soothing museums and profitable
market in conjunction with, the willing
construction of terrorizing mass death weapons
and destruction of global climate for mushrooming
wealth accumulation and reduction of income for
workers, artists among them, most hardly able to
survive except with part-time jobs, a few rich beyond their art school dreams.
Are there "thinkers" who can surpass the
Amazon-touted legendaries, the paleo-Einsteins
and neo-Hawkings fabulists, the Triadic
Nuclearists and Space Trash Forces, the factory
manufacturers and marble-pile curators of Big
Tech simulated art widgets, the billions of proligating SMians?
At 02:22 PM 9/25/2020, Timothy Druckrey wrote:
The recent âembarrassmentâ lament has been
responded to in many ways, some hazy, some
forlorn, some pointed. Reminded me of something
a friend said to me a long, long time ago:
âEvery creation is a future embarrassment.â
Always kept this actively in mind while the
heady and often wild media scene of the 90s ran
it course. Never did it seem that the âmedia
artsâ had accomplished anything that needs an
apologia, never thought it was permanent, never
expected it to incorporate itself as some of its
current âfestivalsâ continue to desperately
promote. Nor has its history found a suitable
outlet - but instead futile attempts to salvage
the spirit of the time regardless of any
âsecond modernâ aesthetic presumptions or in
largely bungled museum or written surveys
attempting to formalize or even canonize some
version of non-existent âdigitalâ masterpieces.
Instead always bore in mind the exceptional
explorations (many, many continue) that came
from artists whose works probed and often
circumvented the delirious post-moderns and
offered ways of integrating technology which
broke free from the meager expectations of the
engineers, the mainstream art-worldâs
resistant and imbecile âscholars,â that
exposed mere techniqueâs novelty as an empty
fallacy of modernity, that exploited the very
mechanisms and systems fueling the global
techno-culture (why Netflix is such a vacuous
presence), and that mobilized media without much
regard for whether or not it would become
obsolete, or crash, or outlast the immediacy of
its experience. Some of the artists whose work
continues to reverberate and expand have been
named by others. Surely each of us has a list
and it would be ridiculous to add a very long
list of favorites. Yet it cannot be left unsaid
that a quite insensitive, self-serving
characterization denigrates the work of many,
many dedicated practitioners and confirms that
âembarrassmentâ is a mere opinion utterly devoid of relevance.
So, to Lev and all who share this
disenchantment, I offer this from T.S. Eliotâs Four Quartets [East Coker]:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulatebut there is no competition
> There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
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