>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.
Matrix and the NYT are over-rated bollocks, the other two are just bollocks.
>Almost nobody has an opinion or theory about Caravaggio, Rembrandt or Rubens.
Rembrandt is the best painter the west has ever produced, Rubens wasn't very good at feet and hands and Caravaggio was too taken with carnage on dark nights.
>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.
I don't think Joanna stressed distinction between authenticity and reproduction; rather that between elitism and democracy. Now that anyone who wants to can see Hendrickje, the chinless ponces have come up with another way to keep us out. The aesthetic moment is taken away from us, and deliberately opaque essays conjured up to take its place. Bordieu comes to mind. Anyway, cans of dogshit could be the equivalent of Hendrikje on only the most ridiculous of criteria, yet 'tis the ruling criterion wherever cans of dogshit are sold. That's why exhibitability should be joyfully promoted and cultability callously squashed. It's a class thing.
>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.
This is actually not a million miles from what I think concerns Joanna. They can take the fun out of it - or put up a wall of wank between you and the fun - but Hendrickje's there for us the moment we see her http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/rembrandt/bathriv.jpg.html .
Just like theories of measure and cans of dogshit aren't.
And, anyway, doing art is good for whoever does it - indeed there's evidence about that students encouraged to do it do better at general school stuff than others. That's not a minor point. I owe it to society to destroy mine as I produce 'em (precisely on the exhibitability criterion), but produce 'em I do. Lots of us do.
>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.
Fuck 'em then. As soon as Cultural Studies got institutionalised, it did what institutions do. Twenty years of elitist, exclusionary wank-in-the-name-of-the-masses ensued. Voila; a stinking pile of 'knowledge-as-power' brought to you by the people who thought the idea up in the first place.
You need a PhD in Applied Neologism to equate Hendrikje with dogshit. And a lousy sense of self-worth to want that PhD.
Cheers, Rob.
