Hear ye, hear ye, even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day :)
But more seriously, this is an important contribution to this discussion. It differentiates between active creation of art and passive reception of art. The transformative power of active participation in the creation of art is obvious and does not need to be repeated here. Some theorists of art (I believe Husserl and some of his disciples, if memory serves) argued that every work of art or literature is actively recreated each time it is perceived by the audience, so there should be no such a thing as passive reception. But that was before mass media whose contents leaves very little to be re-created and re-interpreted by the audience.
So while the transformative power of art participation - either in the form of active creating art or re-creating works of art created by others - can be treated as given, the real question is to what degree the dumbing down of the art by mass media and reducing it to passively consumed "background noise" has any effect other than desensitizing and switching off people's attention and cognitive abilities.
Wojtek
Tolstoi sees the shouting of such things at the right time
> by some soldier as the turning point in great battles. Such things can
> make slight changes in the preformed attitudes of the singers, chanters
> themselves. I saw it happen to some of the people in an Ann Arbor bar
> with me at the 1968 Peace&Freedom national convention: we got to singing
> variations on "We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, and by the
> end of the evening it was "We'll hang the capitalist system to a sour
> apple tree." But note, we were all left activists who took the trouble
> to drive or fly to Ann Arbor for the convention. So the change was
> merely a change of emphasis.
>
> AND, I'm not sure but what you call didadactic art (e.g., Brecht) often
> operates, if it operates at all, as such marching music. I think that is
> in part how both you and I use To Those Born Later; it reminds us where
> we are and why we are there.
>
> > or a political cartoon.
>
> A political cartoon _may_ operate as agitation -- that is, reaching out
> to an audience and urging them to take cognizance of a position.
>
> > Or Dylan's own "Masters
> > of War." Didactic art, like most of Brechts, has a
> > point to make, but there's more to it than just the
> > point. Brecht's ThreePenny Opera expresses lots of
> > sides of bourgeois (and other) relations and emotions
> > as well as exposing the essential parallelism of the
> > criminal organization and the capitalist state. And
> > then then art like Tolstoi or Beethoven, which embody
> > political tendencies but mostly don't teach them --
> > when Tolstoi goes preachy you see the artist turn off.
> > When he _shows_ you the randomness of war, he's much
> > more effective at undercutting the myth of the Great
> > Man.
>
> Now you are getting to what I sometimes call the _indexing_ power of
> reasonably good literature. And here the artist doesn't even have to be
> remotely on the right side. An epic is among other things an enormous
> index to cultural positions, questions, etc., and the index is powerful
> even when the reader takes a contrary attitude to the writer's
> attitudes.
>
> > Now, are people persuaded by art? W, you have
> > practically the entire weight of Western though
> > against you -- high and low. That's why Plato wanted
> > to ban the poets,
>
> So far as I know, Plato had no desire to ban the poets _from Athens_,
> the world in which he actually lived, but only from his 'ideal'
> Republic. And I think what he feared was what I call the indexing power
> of literature. It raises possibilities.
>
> But while all this is both interesting and important, it really doesn't
> touch on the issue I have raised over and over again: how do you write
> agitational material for an audience that doesn't know you exist;
> doesn't even know that the publications you work for exist. What
> replaces the leaflet at the factory gate?
>
> Carrol
>
> P.S. Max's "nasty joke" may well constitute a really powerful
> agitational "work of art." Jan discovered today at work that asking
> where the Louisiana National Guard was really evoked interest among
> those not usually interested. But again, it works mostly in
> word-of-mouth situations.
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