``First abolish the work of art, then claim that `our art' is the totality of artistic production, then deny its aesthetic value while trying to understand its function. Yes? You've set us quite a task, there, Chuck...'' Joanna Sheldon
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Well, why not? Seems reasonable to me.
I apologize for just taking a detour on what you posted. Let me explain my motivation and perhaps that will make it clearer.
My primary motivation for changing the subject is that whenever there are discussions about art, it seems to me the discussions leave out the one giant dead toad in the room, i.e. mass media and the mass produced arts of our time.
Almost everybody has some opinion or theory on the Matrix, Terminator, the Brady Bunch, or the NY Times. Almost nobody has an opinion or theory about Caravaggio, Rembrandt or Rubens. Most people couldn't tell the difference, except maybe to say that Rubens liked big tits, Caravaggio was queer, and Rembrandt's wife was Jewish. In other words the world of visual forms that most people understand, because they are totally emersed in them, is composed of mass produced art forms. So, instead of getting into the nuances of authenticity and reproduction, which I think are somewhat meaningless distinctions that artists like Goya overcame (first lithos) long ago, I changed the subject and context so that hopefully the art world we discussed would have some meaning to people who have had little or no contact with traditional art.
Also art discourses because they focus on what is now a private practice that rarely breaks into the public consciousness, such discourses appear remote and seemed to have little to do with our world. It is as if I tried to get someone on the list to explain the theory of measure, and sets of measure zero. It is just too specialized to engage a larger audience.
And there is the problem that academic cultural studies departments seemed to have sprung up in the art vacuum of the late Seventies and then blossomed in the Eighties and consider themselves the final arbiters of so-called popular culture, without ever having spent much time in the art history library. Such omissions are a matter of principle, the principle being some form of anti-elitism and lip service to la gente, when of course these are college level courses taught to the elite. How is that possible? Their discourses and theories seem to completely ignore something like twenty or thirty centuries of related cultural activities along with whole disciplines and analysis.
So those are some of the motivations.
You write ``I don't have clue what you mean by a `localizable objective armature''. What I meant was that there are few objects to point to. A video of a movie is an object, a reproduction of a reproduction and popping it into the vcr is a experience of a different sort than going to see the movie. In a broad and loosely material sense there is no art work as such. Going to a concert and listening to a tape are different--vastly different experiences. In either case there is no localization into a single objective armature. Part of that is their dependence on time. Let me put in a different way. Imagine the great California black out. No computer, no movies, no concerts, no tv, no radio, no vcr, no stereo, nothing but the room and its objects, many of which are essential dead pieces of plastic junk--the objective armatures stuck meaninglessly in the corner.
The experiences that supposedly constitute the aesthetic-sensual effects are delivered at the point of sale as consumption. Capitalism obviously has no problem with this transcendent mode, in fact it is a perfect sort of product for capital. On the other hand, it puts curatorial methods, historical and critical understanding and analysis in a strained position, bordering on the absurd and irrelevant. In some sense there are similar problems in dealing with any ritualistic mode of expression as a cultural-artistic medium.
I think that there is a profound misunderstanding of how cultural is constituted and how it works and what it depends on. Much of this misunderstanding has to do with placing idea of a mythological system of thought into some imaginary primitive culture and treating it as if we are beyond all that sort of nonsense. In fact we are never beyond all that any more than we are beyond skin and bone, thought and language, social relations and expressive forms. However, just as we have vastly extended the articulation and power of our physical bodies through various social and technical means, we have also articulated, empowered, and sophisticated our mythological systems of representation and expression. The arts are part of that mythological system, but so to are just about all social and cultural formations.
I consider the Greek's mythological system of gods on Olympus and their attendant tales as an archetypal squabbling family toward which Greek society constantly addressed their rituals, arts, literature, laws, ethics, and social relations. What that squabbling and sorted family of child molesters and murders provided in all of its articulations in the arts, ritual, law, social custom was primarily an enveloping unity (completely imaginary) and vast extension of the social unity that shared language and custom provides. In short the Olympus crew were the Greeks, made the idea of being a Greek possible, and provided the conceptual frame of collective identity as a people.
It turns out that as I was getting a prescription filled for some codeine to kill the pain from gum surgery this afternoon, I saw an issue of Time on the racks, called, `America Legends'. It is a perfect example of the art forms that constitute part of our media/mythological envelop, our olympiad.
The cover shows FDR, Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, and Ronald Reagan in place of the usual dead presidents on Mt Rushmore. Inside are their legends among many others, cataloged into subtopics: Leaders and Revolutionaries [there are no revolutionaries actually listed], Heros and Icons, Builders and Titians, Great Minds of the Century [there are none actually listed], Artists and Entertainers. There is only one poet, TS Eliot, one musician Louis Armstrong, there are no painters, film makers, composers, sculptures, photographers or writers. Sorry the composers are Rogers and Hammerstein, And of course everyone is from the US. In any event, this issue of Time can hardly be distinguish from an illustrated version of Robert Graves, The Greek Myths.
The point isn't so much that I prefer my list to Time's, but that in either case such a catalogue gives us a glimpse into the makings of a collective identity as a people, and helps to illustrate that such constructs are an enveloping and living unity of mythological form. Arguments about the historical and concrete fact that there was an FDR are irrelevant in this particular context because FDR functions as an icon, as a god of sorts and could just as easily be replaced with Zeus. The meaning and significance would change with any replacement, but in culturally functional terms, Zeus could be used just as well.
``How many times have we heard people say they went to an exhibit of modern art but `didn't understand'?'' Almost always of course. However the reason is simply that many audiences don't know to which theme in our now vast histo-mythological collections, the objects and the experiences they provide are supposed to engaged. Their ignorance is simply a product of the often purposeful omissions of mass cultural productions that have left the missing pieces out. In short, such exhibitions are directed at the lore of artists and art affectionados. If those tales and their thematic history are part of mass culture, then they are shared and accessible. If not, then they are an enigma.
The relationship between the developments of capitalism, nation state, and multi-nationalism and globalized capital---and the configuration and compositional elements of their mythological systems of representation and expression is a whole other diminsion to this discourse. Obviously writers like Jameson and lbo-er Dennis Redmond work within this general area. Needless to say, our mass arts are intimately interwoven with these more concrete and explicitly defined and determined systems.
Chuck Grimes