``...All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them." -- made me think of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (lit: The work of art in the era of its technological reproducibility), 1935. It's very possible WB read the Grundrisse.
``...Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon....''
Joanna Sheldon ------
When we talk about art these days, we can't really still intend to indicate the private practice of art as painting, sculture, printmaking, no matter how advanced or retrograde their particular styles or which small collection of people produce them, see them, or are effect by them.
Art today in its larger sense of meaning, as in an art of a particular culture or period, is no longer comprised of these predominately historical and private practices with canvas or metal or hand presses.
The art of today is actually a vast envelop of media that has no single medium or style or format or even a localizable objective armature of any sort. Or rather it has one of every sort and completely encapsulates our senses and sensibilities of time, space, and memory. The television is of course one example, but then there are all the other visual media, not to mention all the audio formats, and all their combinations. In other words our art is the totality of these mass media we are surrounded by and through which we both receive and extend our perception and knowledge of the world. We are literally drown in these arts. So, that the ideas about the singularity or uniqueness or value or reproduction of art are completely irrelevant.
There is no work of art as such in our age of mass mechanical reproduction and electronic media. Rather all these productions and media are our art. So, instead of evaluating this envelop as an aesthetic experience, or attempting to critique its artistic qualities or lack of them, it seems to me the primary direction for an analysis to take is to attempt to understand it's function. That function which is predominately social, ideological and propagandistic has in fact been vastly augmented by this multiplicity of means of production. In comparison to this media envelop, what makes the traditional practices of art important is not their identification with unique and potentially valuable objects available only to an elite. Instead, these practices represent probably the only means that still exist to produce art that is available to any one, especially the marginal and dispossessed. However degraded our own view these practices in themselves and however little we value them, they still contain at least the potential for mass access to the production of art, although they are of another era and completely excluded from the universal commons of mass media.
In any event, we should realize that this media envelop, or universal virtual commons, encapsulates a vast mythological system in which all history, experience, and memory are melded together in visual and dramatic terms and taken together constitutes our world. In many respects we can not see or hear or feel or think the world without it. This goes to its socializing function and goes a long way toward understanding how it is possible for completely disjointed communities to share similar views of the world and themselves, when in terms of any material or concrete assessment, they have nothing in common.
For example it is the envelop of mass media, as a totalizing mythological form, and a kind of universal art medium that makes it possible for say Chinese kids in Oakland whose parents might not even be functional in English to imagine themselves in an episode of the Brady Bunch (or its current incarnation and equivalent, whatever that is). While doing so, they therefore live the illusion that the world is actually constructed and ordered as it is in a family situation comedy. We need to remember that the original Brady Bunch was produced specifically to ignore or erase the war in Vietnam, the political turmoil of the era, and the disappearing post-WWII dream: the single income nuclear family living in the suburbs. The extreme disjunction between the Brady Bunch world and the material world of that era, illustrates what I mean by the mythological totality produced by mass media.
Perhaps more important is the question of how to escape this media commons, at least remove ourselves from it temporally, in order to see and understand its mythological totality---and perhaps change our relationship to it and reliance on it. Mere empirical rationality isn't quite sufficient in itself, since there is no definitive object of analysis. One gets lost in statistical surveys that can hardly characterize its enveloping and perceptual aspects as a conceptualizing totality. What is needed is an alternative world, perhaps no less mythological, but at least different and disjointed from it that also provides a means of comparison and contrast. Practice in some form of traditional arts is one way to establish at least a conceptual basis for such a disjointed position, but these need to be augmented with a host of other activities which mostly involve reading and writing.
Chuck Grimes