Academic Regulation of Research: Human Subjects restrictions

[Gordon Fitch]

Chuck Grimes:
> ...
> I'll use art, since that was my field, before I discovered my only
> future in art turned out to be an endless series of blue collar shop
> jobs. Painting from about the 30s-50s was dominated by various
> movements ending in abstract expressionism and part of their signature
> of authenticity was a hands on, blue collar ethic of craft and
> expression, as opposed to a managerial world of slick professionalism
> and mechanical artifice. With the arrival of Pop Art and other
> movements in the 60s, blue collar true grit, drinking and painting
> your guts out was a cartoon of integrity to be laughed at, and
> everything was all polish, finish fetish, no hands, professional,
> slick, ironic, etc. In short the art world became what it had claimed
> to resist, nothing more than a designer accouterment to the corporate
> world. Art is now entirely wedded to developing an never ending parade
> of interesting and wonderful imageware for the visual expression of
> the wonders of capital: everything you associate with the word Logo or
> Brand. It is interesting to notice that many art students decamped
> this program and form part of the new wave in political movements
> like the anarchists and street theater crowd.
>
> In any event these turns in the art world lead me to wonder was art
> ever a virgin? Certainly the mother of all whores, must be a whore.
>
> It has taken the humanities and social sciences a decade or so to
> catch up with art and then follow a similar arch from
> anti-establishment critique to whole sale sell out, right on down to
> pure instrument, as in sex slave.
> ...

Postmodern art is then less a pose than the art of Modernism,
because it doesn't pretend not to be commercial.  As for the
humanities and social sciences, while clearly some can get
off the leash at least temporarily here and there, it seems
to me that, as with art, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Was it ever any different in the past?  If so I missed it.