tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058072377999486184.post4486355610233262236..comments2023-12-29T18:13:21.495-06:00Comments on pink scare: Why is the new art so hard to understand?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058072377999486184.post-24727083402972503732009-02-17T18:30:00.000-06:002009-02-17T18:30:00.000-06:00Great post. I’d like to expand the scope of your s...Great post. I’d like to expand the scope of your summary by adding an additional dialectical lens to the excellent Marxist analysis you provide with respect to the socio-economic conditions of modern art within late capitalist society. One reading of the rise of modern art you describe is a cog in the previously “continuous, internally coherent progression” (progress in what sense?), which creates a rift between the new and difficult, and the old. This rift, or the modernist discovery, if you will, deserves elaboration of perhaps a Hegelian bent, as the modernist enterprise is not exhausted by an account of conditions of production and consumption within late capitalist society, but requires additional insights into the nature of the reconciliation between art and its function in earlier times. If I can add a Horowitzian perspective, Kant discovered the modernist condition, and it’s through his genius theory of the artist that the internal, self-defeating nature of an art that is easy and conceptualizable is exposed. Easy art glorifies disciplinary culture, insofar as the artist copies the letter, rather than the spirit of the law of his mentor, which is to say previous artists from our history, and those upon whom our dialectical inheritance of this (artistic) history is necessarily contingent. This entails of course, that art engage history; artists are, rather than ahistorical agents, perhaps merely historical, or nothing more than historical. The work of genius, for Kant, establishes a meta-rule (which is to establish, in turn, its own new rule), which paradoxically entails the follower to obey the original by ignoring its command. This is quite relevant to Adorno, whose description of the fetish character of regressive listening addresses popular jazz tunes which are borrowed almost verbatim through arrangements. This easy type of music gives us a quick, catchy tune we can enjoy, and much like having fun, as Adorno describes, is, within late-capitalism, simply being in the presence of others having fun, which translates to simply being in the presence of others, the absurdity of the outmoded judgment of taste is such that to say we “like” these songs in an aesthetic way is incoherent; what we really mean is that we recognize them. This culture of fetishized recognition is a nightmarish threat to my interpretation of Kant’s causality of freedom, but it also calls into question whether the unification of art with social use was EVER the pre-capitalist utopia you suggest. Interestingly, criticisms against the supposed apolitical nature of GH’s work claim that his narrative of the unity between art and social function as ALWAYS false reconciliation (at every point in human history) does not account for the impact late capitalism had in broadening the rift therein. Was modernism simply a Hegelian discovery of the pre-modern’s false reconciliation of nature and Geist? Or, how can a genealogical narrative that accounts for history’s dialectical self-recognition be more thoroughly integrated into Adorno’s contributions regarding the conditions of late capitalism? There’s a lot of great material here, and in addition to these broader questions, I’ll try to address more directly some of the points you make.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com