...
>What did I mean? Part of it was that I get a feel of adventure and
>risk out of Shakespeare, the sonnets mostly where it is far from clear
>which gender is speaking to which. Caravaggio plays on a similar
>ambiguity, with the added dimension of the sacred and profane, the
>Catholic and the Pagan (also in S of course).
And many other places. I don't think you can make this argument with reference to themes. The ambiguity you speak of is very popular this century.
>For some reason C took
>on John the Baptist as youth, as man, as tragic figure of torture and
>death. So, C painted two or three of his boyfriends done up as the
>young John, one with his arm around a ram, who returns a curious look,
>as if he were the wooly lover. Finally, he painted the beheading as a
>crime in the darkened streets of Rome with the curious looking through
>iron window gratings. Catherine, you really should look at these
>paintings. Considering the Catholic bit and the sheep thing--I mean
>jesus, they should take you places. Virgin Marys are not the only dark
>corners in Catholicism's rendition of gender.
I have looked at them Chuck. And I'm not saying I don't admire them. (And who said I had a sheep thing, huh? -- that's Douglas, and let's not have any collapse of the Antipodean here please.)
...
>Where to go with this? Okay, the contraction is the limiting of the
>scale and emotive register, the understatement in the style of textual
>narratives, the tight focus on single lines of thematic development,
>the removal of metaphorical complexity--these are all part of what I
>think of when I look at our cultural milieu as compared to Renaissance
>painting, poetry, or Baroque music.
I just don't see it. Now I'm very tired today and it may be that I'm missing something but it seems to me that you are making generalisations that are part of an historical position that isn't nostalgia but is all to easy because indefensible.
>Now, if you consider mass media as
>a totality, then of course there is no constriction but a vast
>explosion. On the other hand, in any given medium, in an single
>production it should be fairly apparent that such a constriction has
>taken place. This is a cultural transformation that has been created
>by the changes in the means of production, i.e. capitalism,
>technology, and mass production methods; and, buttress by a Calvinist
>ideological dimension, which I just dismiss as moral terrorism and
>oppression. The combined effect of these determinations has been a
>contraction in the scope of our aesthetic and emotive expressions--our
>culture, our language, our visual and narrative worlds, and so on.
The combined effects of the changes you are pointing to here is to make a comparison between Renaissance art and contemporary art really impossible. They are not even 'art' in the same sense. Now you could say 'aha! that's what I mean' but what I am suggesting here is that there is no such thing as 'Renaissance art', for example, except as it has been produced by just these changes. Of course there were the pieces, the things, of course. But they have the complexity, texture etc. that you rightly point to because they are 'Renaissance art' for us, across all these weighty years of interpretation and other pleasures, and in direct relation to 'art today' (not just our art today but a few hundred years of conceiving of art today).
>We
>barely keep our aesthetic-sensual lives, alive--we seem to require
>extreme therapies like pornography, load bad music, drugs, and a
>continuous stream of visual tintilations. I consider these therapies
>indicative of a cultural pathology--one brought to us by our reduction
>under a yoke of stupid and meaningless work, aka global
>capitalism/mass production. The pathological aspect is found in the
>reductionist means of expression and overriding simplification of
>narratives--a mirror to the same sort conceptual methodology that
>makes and maintains mass production, industrialization, mass urban
>living and so on.
Why did Coleridge do opium? What's the scene of the Symposium? How come people ever bothered to make visual art in the first place? Where in this is the misery and the stupidity proper to previous centuries? I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with 'the world today' -- of course not, there's plenty. But we won't locate it or move it or address it at all by playing 'decline of the West', and Chuck my friend that is what you sound like.
...I've cut a lot of what you said, not because it's irrelevant or doesn't suit my argument but because having read the post I'm responding to the whole thing in the time I have and pointing to what seem to me to be exemplary sections...
>Capitalism isn't interested in skilled labor--it is interested in
>appropriating the skills as such and turning them into a more
>profitable means of production, say video cameras, stamping machines,
>or computer programs.
or printing presses? you are right as Benjamin is right, but neither of you are right about this costing 'art' an 'aura' it once had. art vs skill was a focus of classical discussions as well, the commerce of art as well. when people turn up to galleries they... ok i'm repeating myself now so i'll just say this narrative won't help anything. we live in contexts which construct art in a whole range of ways that are different from what 'art' might have meant in previous periods. but difference doesn't have to produce a hierarchy and that is what you are doing. that's it, that's my point.
...
>PS. Nice to hear from you on lbo. I only glanced at the huge postings
>today and responded to this one. So, if the points go elsewhere, well,
>more anon. Haven't we had this conversation before?
and yes, chuck, we've done this before. i suspect we are unlikely to convince one another here either.
Catherine