Isn't what the conversation really about is the conditions under which supposedly great art is produced. In other words, the complaint that there is nothing but dreck in our culture -- which someone made in contrast to Michaelangelo I believe -- is really that there are no satisfactory processes through which artists are supported in the production of quality art? I mean, we look back at the era and say, "Michaelangelo!" But how much around in people's daily lives was of that caliber? Was there a lot of dreck around? Or was it that there weren't the social condition available for a lot of people to be able to dabble in 'art' and, therefore, produce dreck?
No idea, but what I'm saying is, the real question is, "What is art?" I'd think you'd have to ask yourself what premises you're bringing to the conversation. Not 'you' Carrol, but everyone entering the conversation. Wasn't Bloom the one who said something to the effect that there is no such thing as some innate, outside-the-social, way to classify great literature but it was always about people -- in what the sociologists call the 'art world' -- deciding what counts as great?
It sometimes seems to me that a lot of folks here acknowledge this notion -- that great art is political/social in the sense that the processes through which art is declared great art is a reflection of social -- human -- determinations, not something ordained by some force outside the social, and is therefore political -- that is, bound up with power. And yet... there also seems to be this really fascinating undercurrent here. That no matter how quickly someone agrees to that point, there is still a sense that, in spite of it, people are still wedded to the idea that there is something ahistorical or transhistorical to great art. That its greatness is somehow outside social, human, political conditions. That fads and fashions, whims, subjectivity, politics, popularity, etc. somehow don't really determine what gets counted in the cannon of great art and literature. That things like the exclusion of women writers from what was considered great lit in the past was just that: an archaic relic of a time when those things happened. But ultimately, I think the yearning is for those who acknowledge this to also want to believe that this was just an aberration, and we can get past all that. Indeed, if we can get past all that in every way, great art will simply reveal itself ... like the word of god reveals itself to the christerteens praying before the xtian rock concert in san fran...
As much as everyone wants to be a good marxist political economist on this issue, there also seems to be a wish or dream ... or something ... that great art is great art on its own terms and is completely free from the human world.
Talk about the ghost of dead religious beliefs haunting a conversation... Where the lefttists have never excised god is in discussion of culture, no matter how agnostic or atheist they claim to be otherwise. :)
(Of course, al lthis makes complete sense from a sociology of religion pov. here I'm thinking about a convo jeff fisher and i had last year or the year before.)
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