Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 15:36:41 -0400
From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Subject: Re: art/capital


We're far enough removed from the bad days of USSR and
Nazi socialism to recoginize that those regimes' critique of 
art was not wrong, though it takes a gigantic leap of courage
to ignore their horrible political oppressions and genocide.

But for the sake of aesthetic purity it's time to set aside the 
ideological propogandizing for, as well as against, those
dreadful political regimes and look more closely at the actual 
art done and the artists doing it.

Mixing politics and art: only politics gains thereby, sublime art 
suffers the vulgar association.

Goya, for example, execreable art subservient to ideology. Picasso
the same. Take any art or artist who pretends to support a
political agenda and you'll find a degenerate beneath the skin.

And art schools and academies. God damn the Bauhaus epicenes.
Museums of pedestrian-minds, too, and the chic shitty little storefront
galleries located on, heaven help us, cheap rent side streets. 

Exorcise any national arts program which funds the loathsome Christ's 
Piss, and that subhuman Mapplethorpe. Ugh, shameful, despicable.

Museum Mile, for a distinguished example of how to do it, on an
Avenue, wide, clean, good addresses, people who are clean and
debonair, well, that's the way it used to be before the side street
people were allowed to profane sublimity.

A touch of the cannon would be in order, Herr Hausmann. The pistol,
Comrade Beria. So-called revolutionary artists first in line.

Any artist who does not produce non-political art from 9 to 5, for 
minimum pay, deserves Margaret Thatchering by SAS squads.