still, it's really bugging me that you dismissed the US sense that art isn't for the working class so facilely. i simply do not understand how you could type what you did.
art is not "for the people" and there are many ways in which that message is purposefully promulgated. it is not accident that people don't go to museums or understand art and associate it with the elite. it was and is meant to be that way7
Kelley ---------------
There are several issues entangled in this thread that need to be disentangled. The artists and their means of production, and the distribution and dissemination of the arts.
I dismissed the idea that art is not for the masses on the basis of who produces art--the working class, almost by definition. There are and were of course exceptions like Sargent. In any case, it was a skilled working class who possessed the traditional craft skills to make the visual arts. As the means of production changed, those producing the art changed--yet almost all the artists that I've known started off in working class backgrounds. Virtually all the major American artists from the Thirties were from working class backgrounds, at least until the move of visual arts into colleges and universities, after WWII. (Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, Krasner, Gorky, Smith) Once art move into academia the entire system became professionalized as an accepted set of bourgeois occupations.
But the crude outline of the people who produced art at one time, was more or less a Bohemian off shoot of the working class. The same general outline was followed by those in theater arts and music. It is pretty easy to support this contention with plenty of examples from the African American traditions in music. The arts have been one of the roads of escape from all sorts of oppressions of class, race, and gender by a bourgeois world.
What was produced is a different story. The intended audience was almost always whoever paid the bills, which was either the bourgeois or high bourgeois. On the other hand there was plenty of class resentment. It's almost impossible to separate the continual aesthetic assault on a bourgeois value scheme, from its potential origin in the lower class status of the artist, however that status was defined. These assaults come from all directions and attack the bourgeois from both above and below. And, since there are no rules in this context, much of the arts also promulgate and express dominant bourgeois value schemes as well.
In any event, what you were considering was not the artists or the art, but the distribution and dissemination systems. Flat out, no argument. Your right. The easiest example that comes to mind is somebody like Duke Ellington who could perform in the Cotton Club, but could not walk in the front door, sit down, order a drink and watch his own show. And of course all distribution systems and their managers are masters at separating the artists from their wallets.
About my only defense of the public museum system would be that without it, there would nothing left of the traditional visual arts in the US. The public collections would instantly be transformed into the pre-eminent objects of capital that they hold in a private auction system. That is mostly likely their ultimate fate in any case. So in that sense, the masses are definitely not invited. And it is an awareness of this capital value, almost the last source of concrete value left outside of real estate, that makes public museums pursue the policies they do. They are ministers of a public treasury and they act like it.
I haven't mentioned writers because they don't easily fall out in the same way that the visual artists do. In some sense writers, because of the nature of their practice, seem to arrive within the bourgeois. Sure there are plenty of working class writers, but the kind of work writers do, the sorts of distribution systems they have to engage, the sort of skills background required and the kinds of aesthetic positions they can take within their forms tie them more closely to the bourgeois world. The novel as a psychological study of individual characters, their conflicts, and struggles to realize themselves is still the premier art form of the bourgeois--although it seems to be increasingly threatened by the self-help racks.
Chuck Grimes