What people know is largely defined by the market, which is largely defined by CEO's trying to guess what the next trend is going to be and often also deciding how trends develop: rap into gangsta rap, etc. How people know also matters. You know art one way when you consume it and another when you are capable of creating it. You know art one way when you enjoy it alone and another when you share it with a group of people. We are largely consumers of art; art education has been eliminated from the public schools, and the social setting of art is now limited to the concert stage or the earphones. So, I see a great narrowing and a great polarization of people's experience of art to the detriment both of low and high art.
I have already described the devolution of folk art into commodified mass market art: gospel/jazz/blues into rock for example. One consequence of that is that when artists working on a grand scale turn to what is now folk art (mass marketed commerical art) for insipiration, they do not find very fertile soil. Matisse anchored a high-art corpus on Romanian peasant blouses and french textiles; african sculpture influenced Giacometti and Brancusi and others; Oriental rugs gave Gaugin his palette; the folk music of eastern europe gave Bartok a new harmonic vocabulary....but what can a "classical" artist get out of rock and roll?
Joanna ********************
Great analysis. Should be a fine book someday. Bourgeois culture is bankrupt.
A little more cheapness please. How else will we sell out commodities? The captains of the culture industry demand it--heavy on the quantity, 'lite' on the quality.
Regards, Mike B)
Read "The Perthian Brickburner": http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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