A day after I posted my question, I came across the following passage in "Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde" by Georgina Born: However much an avant-garde attempts to produce work that is unclassifiable, shockingly different, it is a truism that in order to be meaningful [sic!] it must, by definition, ultimately be classifiable as "art" by an audience; or it may be understood as the negation of art -- the reaction that the avant-garde typically sets out to provoke in the "Philistine" audience. The latter "against art" classification appears, historically, to be particularly permeable, so that by the intervention of critics, "against art" comes eventually to be undersood as "part of art." There remains some avant-garde art that is unacceptable to all but small and "knowing" audience. But as long as "anti-" or avant-garde art is recognized as legitimately "part of art" by the dominant institutional apparatuses, it is granted the status of art and becomes a negational statement within the field of art: a powerful agrument for the ontological priority of the institutional over the aesthetic. So there. But what can she mean by meaning can only be found in art? -Josh Ronsen http://www.nd.org/jronsen ------------------------------------------------------------ --== Sent via Deja.com ==-- http://www.deja.com/
