Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> joanna wrote:
>
> >I have already described the devolution of folk art into commodified
> >mass market art: gospel/jazz/blues into rock for example.
>
> Hmm, well, that can work backwards too, with the jaded looking to
> gospel/jazz/blues for the dreaded "authenticity." Me, I spent the
> afternoon alternating between Glenn Gould playing Bach and Lungfish.
(1) I don't see how commodification as such tells one anything at all about the quality of art.
(2) There is no reason to see "folk art" in and of itself as providing any guidance to the quality of the art produced.
(3) It is also deucedly difficult to define folk art; I don't see how the early rock bands were any less or more folk art than the Border Ballads or Gospel music. To start with the category ("folk art," "gospel," "commercial rock") and from that beginning imply that any judgment of quality follows is (I think) closely analogous to ad hominem arguments in a debate. There is a tremendous quantity of really vile art produced by the folk, most of it perhaps thankfully lost in the debris of time.
(4) Shakespeare certainly tried hard to commodify his work -- and as far as we know he seems to have succeeded in doing so.
(5) I agree with Doug (perhaps going beyond his point) that "authenticity" is an obnoxious standard for any kind of achievement. In fact until the world was pretty well commodified no one worried about authenticity. It is a category only important to bourgeois intellectuals under reasonably advanced capitalism.
(6) The world is oversupplied to the nth degree with great art (not just good but great, great meaning it can be equaled but not surpassed). As a result great art is no longer a shared experience, since almost everyone makes his/her own selection out of the surplus of great art. But that means that great art is no longer great art, because the _use_ of great art is as a shared treasure, through which people share their understanding of the world, not a merely private experience through which one nurtures his/her sense of living a richer life than "those others" do. True wit is nature to advantage dressed / what oft was thought but neer so well expressed. The two greatest European novels, in _my_ experience, have not been on any of the lists people have been posting: _Mansfield Park_ and _Charterhouse of Parma_. Each is far more illuminating of life within a capitalist world than (say) _Ulysses_, _War and Peace_, or _Moby Dick_.
(7) And what good is the Iliad in a world in which 99 out of a 100 of those who read either think Achilles is a thug or, if they see him as the tragic figure he is, see his tragedy in Aristotelian terms, a tragedy grounded in an error. But the poem portrays how he stands up under a tragedy not brought on by anything he did but imposed upon him from without.
Carrol