[lbo-talk] Interesting panel on photography (sorry)

[Chuck Grimes]

Yes I wonder if there are disciplines outside the art world where its
institutions work so aggressively to validate irrelevance and
narcissism (and often flimsy opaque ideas). shrill

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Economics?

English departments and lit-critters also do a pretty good job at this 
trade. The possible exceptions like Fredric Jameson are rare. I shouldn't go 
on, because I stopped reading lit and art criticism a very long time ago.

Basically, it comes down to a crisis of ideas and the inability to 
articulate an intellectual collapse. When the arts ran dry, pretty soon the 
critics did too. There is a link of some sort, which I wish I could creat 
for theory sake between the economic turn to the financial sector ... turn 
into the pure imaginary, and the general turn of the arts where they 
disappeared into thin air.

I've convinced myself that there is a linkage between the economic turn of 
the 1970s and the evaporation of the arts at about the same time. It's not 
that lots of people haven't tried, calling it all sorts of things, the 
postmodern turn, etc. But none have manage to capture the concrete feeling 
of what it was like----to wake up one day and see nothing. The future had 
disappeared into an engima.

I keep trying to find metaphors or symbols. CoolWhip. It is called a food. 
It is sold as food. But it isn't food. Sometimes I would spray this stuff in 
my mouth as a kid just for the weirdness of the experience. It's sort of 
like the ultimate product, a sugary nothingness.

CG