---Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> A theory of art would be an examination of the specific techniques of
> art itself, not a sociology of those who are involved in it.
I think one would want to distinguish between theory as developed by practitioner and non-practitioner.
Schoenberg, if I can return to him again, believed all theory was secondary to inspiration, that true composition was done on inspiration. Yet he developed one of the most rigorous theoretical elaborations on (western) harmony, from the church modes on up, in the 20th century (_Theory of Harmony_). The mistake comes when the theory is taken as a "law of art," which is what, according to AS, the study of aesthetics does. The theory petrifies the practice in this case. AS was pretty elitist when it came to the sociology of art. He wasn't too interested in non-musical society it seems.
In _Theory of the Avant-Garde_ P. Berger, a non-practitioner as far as I know, outlines how the Dadaist movement sought to challenge the distinction between "art" based on aesthetic "laws" and the bourgeois museum culture this position spawned. Unlike Schoenberg the dadaists wanted to politicize the division between "art" and "life," or rather make its politics plain, as the elision of such politics served the interests of the dominant ideology. In the various Dada manifestos there was a deliberate anti-theory, anti-aesthetics approach. They saw theory and aesthetics, any purported "laws of art" as reproducing false divisions in society (which one might draw out as class and race divisions). The example, again, being museum culture, which appealed to a specific class of society (vs., say, the cabaret).
Of course, their works appear in museums today. In many cases it's "who pays the piper calls the tune."
As for me, I think it would be a mistake tending towards the ideal to speak of laws of art. Then one gets into categorical exclusions as to what art is and isn't. And aren't such exclusions basically about the marketing and selling of art? Determining what is fit for the art buyer's consumption, and even producing that art buyer based on taste, fashion, hype, etc.? Shouldn't a theory of art take this stuff into consideration?
Or, for an example along the lines of the Eagleton you mention, what about Monet, who had his kind of factory of helpers (take Warhol's factory as a critique of this)? Here the means of production should be considered into the larger economy of buying and selling art, along with the prestige of the artist, market mytique. The dealers, the magazines, the showings, the universities and art schools, the publishing houses, marketing: the value of any piece of art as commodity is mediated by all this stuff. And I would go further to say that all this stuff mediates the aesthetic worth of the piece for the consumer.
Dang, lunch hour is over.
Alec
> The latter would no more be a theory of art than Marx's critique of
the
> factory system is a tract on engineering.
> Art, as Trotsky and Lukacs argued, has its own laws, that are not
> reducible to the vulgar proposition 'who pays the piper calls the
tune'.
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