Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 11:37:37 -0500 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: M-FEM: Beauty's Progress (was On Beauty...) Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: >So the story of Beauty's Progress is that of evolution from naturalized >landscape of social relations (romanticism) to interiority (high modernism) >to surfaces of the body and language (postmodern mannerism)? (I don't know >how Dickinson fits in this plot, though.) I don't know exactly, never worked it all out fully. But talk about interiority! She was 75 years ahead of her time. >This doesn't bode well for the >relationship between Beauty and Marxism, does it? No it doesn't. I've never been terribly moved by the things that historically have been the favored kinds of art of Marxists (at least American ones), like realist fiction and folk music - the sight of a banjo sends me screaming towards the exit. In high art, I like things like Shelley and Stevens, Beethoven and Schonberg, Merce Cunningham. In low art, I like the Velvet Underground and Sleater-Kinney (snobby corners of a downscale genre). Does this make me hopelessly bourgeois? >It looks as though you >are telling a story of the loss of dynamic engagement between art and >society. Then again, you may be simply tracing the fate of the "individual" >in capitalism. Oh, both I think. Now, it seems, the utopian impulse, interiorized in the modernists, has broken completely, and ironic appropriation of the detritus of consumer society is the favored approach, an extreme form of disengagement. Doug
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005