File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1998/avant-garde.9806, message 49


Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 21:14:11 +0000
From: noel douglas <n.douglas-AT-rca.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: avant-garde failing-fortune


>On Mon, 15 Jun 1998, Ostrow/Kaneda wrote:
>
>>  By the way the claim that everyone is an artist -- ie that everyone may
>> make art does not mean that everything that everyone makes in thename of
>> art is either signivficant or interesting ewither conceptually or
>> theoretically -- its an empty statement up there with everyone is special
>> --  or unique for just being who they are -- achievement  sometimes does
>> make someone more special don't you think because they contribute something
>> to  others
>>
>	I agree. It would be an interesting project for someone (not me)
>to do a history of this idea (i.e., that "everyone is an artist").
>Probably its already covered in the work of some scholars. It is a kind of
>romantic, democratic notion that basically asserts that artistic
>expression does not depend upon a "skill" or "talent" narrowly conceived
>as a "technique" that one might learn, but that art is an expression of a
>common human capacity, an original "genius," that may or may not have been
>cultivated (through a different kind of learning). This idea is quite
>attractive in some ways, though in others it seems to deny the historical
>and social nature of artistic competence by appealing to some sort of
>orginal human nature. ...an interesting, and currently inescapable
>intellectual problem...
>

The notion of 'the artist' and 'genius' are all bound up with the
transition from feudalism to capitalism before capitalism art was closer to
what we would describe now as craft, i.e. part of the fabric of a building
such as a church, artisans who built/decorated such things would not have
been considered geniuses as they were just doing their job....either paid
or in the service of the church, monarchy etc...only with capitalism does
art become 'free' to be about nothing other than itself (by which I mean
formally, not necessarily in terms of content) and is such a reflection of
capitalist social relations, it becomes a commodity in a market, the avant
garde of this century tried either to reintergrate art back into life, or
distance art from life to play up the contradictions of 'art' within
society, it was also generally an explicit critique of art as an
institution, (Duchamp urinal) or the 'genius' artist (warhol, beuys) the
sucesses and failures of such avant gardes are directed related to the
social time that they existed, ie. it is no coincidence that some of the
greatest work this century occured during the revolutinary upheavels after
WW2, the problem that faces us now is that capitalism has recuperated much
of the earlier forms of the avant-garde, in its unrelenting drive to
commodify everything, so montage is something you see everyday on MTV, the
failure of the avant garde is the failure at the present moment to rid the
world of capitalism, but as the New World Order begins to crack, maybe we
are about to again witness a reinvigoration of the lind of spirit that
drove Breton to say 'Change the world, Transform Life'.....art is indeed a
common human capacity, that is one of the defining features of human
'nature' is that we are creative concious animals that can change our
environment, watch how interested a small baby is in everthing, but it
should not be thought as seperate, under capitalism this is true because
this creative capacity cannot be used because of the division of labour,
and thus there is a difference between art 'the insitution' and the
artisitc capacity of our minds.

What d'ya think....

Noel x

+ noel douglas

+ http://www.crd.rca.ac.uk/~noel
+ http://www.dougal.derby.ac.uk/resonance

+ 0171 590 4293

'a past without alternatives,justifies a present without choices'




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