Date: Mon, 5 Jun 95 10:18:52 EDT From: ma-AT-dsd.camb.inmet.com (Malgosia Askanas) Subject: Re: Fascism Whit wrote: >> Disparagement, impatience, attack are not quite _it_: it is >> when they combine with the view of art as religion, the artist >> as priest who links "the people" to a higher order of reality >> - then, it seems to me, the mix begins to resemble fascism. > Shamanism then must be divorced from art because it is "archaic" and because > historical fascists made some use of its forms? This seems an argument that > anything which has been used badly cannot then ever be used well. It also > seems akin to imperialist rationales for destroying shamanic societies - or > at least smashing their idols. Why? Where is the link? First of all, we are talking about art now, here, not in a shamanistic society. Secondly, the passage you quote explicilty talks about a specific _mix_, not about shamanism or archaicism per se. > Art, anthropologically speaking, largely derives from shamanic practice. > Perhaps the weakness of art in the last decade or so comes from a pomo > renunciation of this link. Art may derive from one thing or another, but it is my feeling that people who invoke these derivations as a foundation for their artistic position usually do so for political purposes, as a kind of legitimizing myth for their disparagement of the social order. I wish you'd stop picking on one side of my argument and reducing it to absurdity; it would be much more productive if you either helped refine the argument, or tore into it as a whole; I am sure it could benefit from that. - malgosia --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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