Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 15:51:15 +0000
From: noel douglas <n.douglas-AT-rca.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: avant-garde failing-fortune


Hi all,


>> 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
>[snipped to reduce size of message]
>
>	Yes, capitalism always gets a bum rap from artists and
>intellectuals! ;-)
>	Actually, what this sort of analysis neglects is the fact that our
>society isn't simply "capitalist," that is, entirely controlled by
>commodity exchange.

Well I have a problem with that because capitalist social relations
penetrate far deeper than mere commodity exchange, but maybe thats another
discussion...

>Sociologists, like Pierre Bourdieu, have emphasized
>that there are other institutions, e.g., educational institutions,
>artistic and literary, etc. that are based on principles that run counter
>to the principles of commodity exchange. The struggles of the artistic
>avant-garde take place in these other arenas, the art world, which is
>established at a distance from the economic world. The relationship
>between these two universes is complex, although the former (the artworld)
>is clearly dominated by the later (economic world) though it is *not*
>reducible to it.
>

Of course, Gramsci's notion of Hegemony, Debord's 'Society of the
Spectacle' etc all deal with the complex nature of the relationship between
ideas what I would describe as the superstructure and the economic base,
and whilst they can never be reduced to just economics, they emerge from
and are determined to some extent by them....What I was trying to argue was
that the commodification of most of the earlier forms of the avant-garde,
because of the so far unsucessful attempts to rid the world of capitalism,
means that art itself becomes retreads of the same ideas....this is NOT the
same as saying that individuals cannot express non-alienated forms and
produce interesting, challenging work, just that it becomes much harder
because there is less room to manouver because of the encroachment of
business into the 'public' sphere, if a Tango ad uses the strategies of the
situationists where do you go from there?
I'm not trying to be pessimistic, as I'm myself involved in attempting to
work in progressive ways, and I'm sure that as global capitalism becomes
more unstable art that seeks to disrupt, and change the world, will again
become more powewrful than it currently is.

Laters,

Noel

+ 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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