> We do not need perfect art. We need many
> examples of usable art (among which I count Moore's work), because art is
> only meaningful (to the Left, that is) when it is actually used.
I wonder if this is too functional. Great works of aesthetics may be totally unusable in the sense of mass mobilization, though perhaps the question is, what are the politics of cultural consumption generally. This is something the multicultural activists understand very well -- they've insisted that it's not just a question of diversifying a neocon curriculum, it's a question of revolutionizing and democratizing both the kind of works students read and are exposed to, as well as the work (and it is indeed a kind of labor) of interpretation.
> That said, artists on the left must accept that criticisms from left
> critics come not out of malice but out of our desire for better and more
> useful representations. Artists may disagree, of course, with any and every
> criticism of their work that may reach their ears.
Criticism in its deepest, most dialectical sense means comprehending the work of art in its totality, ferreting out its unconscious impulses, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses in relation to other works of art and other artists, indexing the work vis-a-vis its cultural field, other disciplines, the general historical constellation of its production, etc. It's damn hard work, if it's done right, and the immediate process of feedback is just the very first step in this process. I always argue that the model for this process is really Marx himself, whose stunning, triple-decker arraignment of British capitalism in "Das Kapital" has a powerful interpretive strategy running through it -- the notion of the geneology or succession of antagonistic modes of production, which you could apply to the Victorian novels of Dickens: whose urban characters, sentimental or street-walking females, small shops and delightful verbal dexterities turn out, on further analysis, to contain a whole series of extremely powerful x-rays into the heterogenous underbelly of Victorian capitalism. These range from petit bourgeois empiricism (the unforgettable Gradgrind) to Scrooge's legendary miserliness, to Oliver Twist's itinerant sufferings, to the very nascent socialism of a Joe Gargery (the blacksmith in Great Expectations).
-- Dennis