Steve wrote:
>> whether treating one's life as a work of art is somehow
>> inherently linked to seeing oneself as a member of "a small elite".
> This strikes me as an important question, but not necessarily a
> difficult one.
Heh heh, to me it seems utterly excruciating, which will undoubtedly
manifest itself in the inchoateness (to say the least) of my treatment of it.
Maybe I'll start by requoting:
> MF: "What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become
> something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or
> to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done
> by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a
> work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but
> not our life?"
First of all, to speak here of "the house" or "the lamp" seems to gloss
over the fact that it is not _most_ houses or _most_ lamps. To live with
houses and lamps that are art objects is a privilege of the few who can afford
the few houses and lamps that were made, for them explicitly, as art objects.
What does it mean for a house or a lamp to be an art object? One approach
is to pitch oneself against what I just said above, and insist on seeing
every house and every lamp as an art object. A house incapable of sheltering
its inhabitants from cold and disease, a bare lightbulb that ruins people's
sight -- they are each seen as having their own beauty.
When one decides to make these things an object of aesthetic perception,
one in effect dissociates aesthetic perception from issues of human living.
It becomes a specialized perception which brackets out most of what is
vital in our lives. And perhaps this "becomes" is wrong; perhaps
aesthetic perception _is_ something that is always already dissociated
>from issues of living, of vital human concerns. Let me leave it at that
for now.
Another possibility is to say: to be a work of art is a very special
quality which has to do with specialized conditions of production
and distribution that are part and parcel of a historical system of
privilege and domination. Aesthetics is part of the intellectual
endeavor through which the system justifies, legitimates and perpetuates
itself. Outside of such systems, concepts such as "art" and "aesthetics"
have no meaning.
Another possibility: these notions -- "art", "aesthetics" -- do have
some kind of meaning outside of systems of domination, and this meaning
is profoundly tied to vital issues of human life. The fact that we don't
treat them that way, that they are not a vital part of our everyday life,
is a sign that there is something very wrong with our culture.
This is, of course, in no way an exhaustive list of possibilities; just
an impressionistic sketch.
Now the economic reality of artmaking is that it is a monstrously
labor-intensive endeavor which produces something not seen as having any
use value. Financial support for it comes mostly from philantropies,
institutions and individuals that associate it with prestige, collectors
of monstrously labor-intensive things which they trade among themselves
in kind of closed-circuit, or maybe not so closed-circuit, economy.
It this economic setup the perpetuation of the notion that art is
something done by experts, by seers, by rare individuals who have a certain
je ne sais quois -- or by particularly bold con artists whose con artistry
is in itself a kind of specialized genius -- is very much in the interest
of all involved.
What, then, is this other trend, these other modes of thinking that
claim that art and aesthetics are, as it were, the natural province
of everyone? I don't mean here the movements that advocate "making art
for the people", which might be seen as part of a project of domestication
of the unprivileged by giving them access to the "superior" values of
the privileged. Rather, I mean the modes of thinking that insist that art
should _not_ be a specialized endeavor, that aesthetics is something other
than a glorification of this specialization and an attempt to sanctify
what is essentially, on all sides, a circulation of parasitism.
Do they stem from bad conscience? From the irreconcilable conflict between
wanting to support a "democratic" perspective and the stark elitism of being
a contributing member of the so-called "art world"? From the despair
of isolation? Of being vitally nourished by, and obesessed with, something
that society has absolutely no use for?
This obviously needs to be continued into the Foucauldian ethics question,
but it has become a long post and, I think, wants to be an installment
and an unfinished question rather than a complete thought (which it will
never be anyway).
-m
>> whether treating one's life as a work of art is somehow
>> inherently linked to seeing oneself as a member of "a small elite".
> This strikes me as an important question, but not necessarily a
> difficult one.
Heh heh, to me it seems utterly excruciating, which will undoubtedly
manifest itself in the inchoateness (to say the least) of my treatment of it.
Maybe I'll start by requoting:
> MF: "What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become
> something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or
> to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done
> by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a
> work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but
> not our life?"
First of all, to speak here of "the house" or "the lamp" seems to gloss
over the fact that it is not _most_ houses or _most_ lamps. To live with
houses and lamps that are art objects is a privilege of the few who can afford
the few houses and lamps that were made, for them explicitly, as art objects.
What does it mean for a house or a lamp to be an art object? One approach
is to pitch oneself against what I just said above, and insist on seeing
every house and every lamp as an art object. A house incapable of sheltering
its inhabitants from cold and disease, a bare lightbulb that ruins people's
sight -- they are each seen as having their own beauty.
When one decides to make these things an object of aesthetic perception,
one in effect dissociates aesthetic perception from issues of human living.
It becomes a specialized perception which brackets out most of what is
vital in our lives. And perhaps this "becomes" is wrong; perhaps
aesthetic perception _is_ something that is always already dissociated
>from issues of living, of vital human concerns. Let me leave it at that
for now.
Another possibility is to say: to be a work of art is a very special
quality which has to do with specialized conditions of production
and distribution that are part and parcel of a historical system of
privilege and domination. Aesthetics is part of the intellectual
endeavor through which the system justifies, legitimates and perpetuates
itself. Outside of such systems, concepts such as "art" and "aesthetics"
have no meaning.
Another possibility: these notions -- "art", "aesthetics" -- do have
some kind of meaning outside of systems of domination, and this meaning
is profoundly tied to vital issues of human life. The fact that we don't
treat them that way, that they are not a vital part of our everyday life,
is a sign that there is something very wrong with our culture.
This is, of course, in no way an exhaustive list of possibilities; just
an impressionistic sketch.
Now the economic reality of artmaking is that it is a monstrously
labor-intensive endeavor which produces something not seen as having any
use value. Financial support for it comes mostly from philantropies,
institutions and individuals that associate it with prestige, collectors
of monstrously labor-intensive things which they trade among themselves
in kind of closed-circuit, or maybe not so closed-circuit, economy.
It this economic setup the perpetuation of the notion that art is
something done by experts, by seers, by rare individuals who have a certain
je ne sais quois -- or by particularly bold con artists whose con artistry
is in itself a kind of specialized genius -- is very much in the interest
of all involved.
What, then, is this other trend, these other modes of thinking that
claim that art and aesthetics are, as it were, the natural province
of everyone? I don't mean here the movements that advocate "making art
for the people", which might be seen as part of a project of domestication
of the unprivileged by giving them access to the "superior" values of
the privileged. Rather, I mean the modes of thinking that insist that art
should _not_ be a specialized endeavor, that aesthetics is something other
than a glorification of this specialization and an attempt to sanctify
what is essentially, on all sides, a circulation of parasitism.
Do they stem from bad conscience? From the irreconcilable conflict between
wanting to support a "democratic" perspective and the stark elitism of being
a contributing member of the so-called "art world"? From the despair
of isolation? Of being vitally nourished by, and obesessed with, something
that society has absolutely no use for?
This obviously needs to be continued into the Foucauldian ethics question,
but it has become a long post and, I think, wants to be an installment
and an unfinished question rather than a complete thought (which it will
never be anyway).
-m