---Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >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.
>
> I don't agree. Consider all those things and what do you have? A
theory
> of the art market, but not of the art.
But wouldn't a marxian critique want to question the operations of "the market" and the place of the product in it? Would you say the invisible (well, not invisible) hand of the art market works regardless of aesthetic trends?
Maybe it would be better not to
> talk of theory at all in relation to the arts (though one wouldn't
want
> to suggest that it is a matter that does not touch the intellect).
. . .
> The real inspiration comes from the internal development that comes
when
> artists start copying and then overthrowing their idols.
This is pretty much Harold Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence." Bloom being, by the way, a conservative, reactionary canon-monger. When I studied poetry writing in college we were taught similarly--to be permeable to the collective effects of various poets' techniques, to assimilate their cadences, tonalities, etc, to find our own "voice." I've since come to recognize such a method as one of many, with its own ideological trappings.
But that tells us little about why we read who we read, and tends to decontextualize technique and style from social and political-economic context. The Bloomian position seems to me lop-sided on the (freudian) subject side of production to the exclusions of other materialities.
Alec
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