>
>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?
Well, like I said, I think I did write just such a critique. In Marxian terms, art is part of luxury production, and it increases in inverse proportion to investment (as H. Grossmann argues, Law of Accumulation, Pluto Press), since both are funded out of surplus value. In my pamphlet 'Need and Desire in the post-material economy' I show that this is born out by the statistics relevant to the UK economy, and is the material basis of the current 'creative Britain' myth. But what does any of this tell us about the substance of art? Nothing. Except perhaps that it is a good time to be an artist, but less so to be an engineer in England today.
When I wrote
>
>> The real inspiration comes from the internal development that comes
>when
>> artists start copying and then overthrowing their idols.
Alec replied
>
>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.
Which, may I suggest only demonstrates that ideas from politics rarely translate well into aesthetics. Yes, Bloom was a social conservative, but as far as the canon goes he is quite correct. The idea that the canon of literature (or of the visual arts) is repressive is a mistranslation of a political idea of revolution into an aesthetic idea of development. No artist can wholly abstract herself from the inherited work of the past, nor should she want to - though of course to merely reproduce what was there would be to fail. The most revolutionary artist is in truth only developing the ideas of the past, even if that development takes on the heady language of over-turning the apple cart. Even when the appearance is one of a total break, as in primitivist or expressionist works, closer inspection shows that this is thoroughly premised in the development of the times.
I really don't know what you mean by 'ideological' in this context. Artistic schools are not engaged in class struggle, and have no need of ideological masking of class positions. You should read the writings of such revolutionaries as Trotsky and Lenin on the arts, and you will see them transformed into what, I suppose you would call conservatives. As Lenin explains somewhere, in reply to one of the more extravagant demands for a revolutionary culture, cherish the opera and the ballet, it is the job of the revolution to conserve the best of bourgeois culture.
>
>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.
Technique and style should be de-contextualised from social and political-economic context (as this sentence should be properly sub- edited). If your subject is art that is. If you are interested in art markets then by all means get on with the political economy. But don't confuse the two. Why do you read who you read? Because they are good, I'm hoping. What could be more dreary than reading what was politically sound.
Conservatively -- Jim heartfield