(Marx and) Benjamin on art in the technical age

[Carrol Cox]

Joanna, as I said in my response to Chuck, too much ground is being
covered here for me to try to respond to the whole, so I'm nibbling as
it were here and ther. First one general statement. I don't think that
"work of art" and "artist as maker" are compatible. You have to choose
one or the other. Artist as maker (which, as Tom Stoppord points out in
the text you quote, can apply as well to a cook as to a maker of tragic
dramas or a carver of columns) emphasizes the skill with which the
object is made, and says nothing as to the use (including as object of
contemplation) of the object made. The criterion (and there is only one,
though exceedingly complex) for art in this sense is decorum.

But "work of art," not really a concept until the 19th century, isolates
the object, separates it from ongoing human practice, subordinates
"making" to the thing made. Thus implicit in that concept is exactly the
art which Stoppard condemns. He writes:

"Well, it is coherent. From the repudiation of the traditional idea of
value, sprung on us by Duchamp's urinal 84 years ago, we have come to
put
a value on repudiation."

This brings out the incoherence in appealing both to "art" and to "work
of art." What Duchamp did was merely to complete the replacement of art
with "work of art" romanticism had initiated. It would be empty to speak
of the "value of art," or at least I doubt that it would have made much
sense to Horace, Shakespeare, or Pope, but the "value of the/a work of
art" can become the focus of endless profundity ("the profund" or art of
sinking Pope called it). In the spring of 1959 some of us at the
University of Michigan pulled off a hoax called an "evening with the
Beats." It climaxed with a parody of a very bad 19th century verse drama
based on the story of Paolo and Francesca -- at the end of which the
lights went out and all the perpetrators slunk away. The next day an
undergraduate described it thusly to her professor (who had been privy
to the stunt): They gave us the work of art and then, nothing, we were
just left alone with it. (This is inaccurate but gets roughly her
point.) There is a pretty direct line from the 1805 Prelude to a rotting
animal head in a jar -- which is not necessarily to object to either.

Incidentally, both in Dante and Eliot, "better craftsman" makes better
sense than "best 
craftsman." Why do you opt for the latter? Pound tried to make a modern
epic out of sheer craftsmanship -- i.e., he tried to combine "art" and
"work of art." Roy Harvey Pearce suggested that Pound tried to make
decorum provide structure --

	lord of his work and master of utterance

		who turneth his word in its season and shapes it.

"Word" and "Work" identified.

And a comment on Stoppard. This identical text has been written by
someone every 15 years or so for the last two or three centuries. Things
were fine, and now they are different. It becomes rather banal. Perhaps
"Lycidas" was the earliest version. My own preference is for "Epistle to
Dr. Arbuthnot."

Carrol