Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 00:08:27 -0400
From: ostrow-AT-is2.nyu.edu (Ostrow/Kaneda)
Subject: Re: one


>Saul wrote:
>
>> In a changed world the question of
>> art and life can not be addressed in either 19th century terms nor those of
>> the 1930's or '60's, the analysis must be on going otherwise the type of
>> nostalgia, dispair and resignation that seems so prevalent comes to
>> inscribe our vision.  Adorno somewhere assigns to art the role of aspiring
>> to the impossible in order to produce models of what  is possible.
>
>See, this assignment is unpalatable to me, it just rings false; doesn't it
>to you?  Besides nostalgia, despair and resignation, there are also the
>dual daemons of entranched irony and hallucinations of grandeur.  I would
>perhaps like art to aspire simply to the possible -- that possible which
>can nourish it and permit it to be itself.  Ah, but what does that mean?
>

Delusions of Grandeur to the left and slacker art to the right yet on
anothe rhand
aspiring to the possible seeming leads either to the known or to license.
I prefer the formulation of aspiring to what is appropriate, that is
something that is reactive and provocative -- something that necessitates a
response in kind ie an appropriate resaponse.  The Adorno I raised only
because it reflects a view that is contemporary with Nagy. Though I still
hold that there is something in the constructivist view that might now ring
true, for it unlike dada,  futurism or surrealism did not wage a war
against art but purely declared that institutional art was irrelevent in a
society committed to creativity and the aesthetics of everyday life.




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