From: Michael Healy (mjhealy@kcnet.com)
Date: 01/08/03-04:53:55 PM Z
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Galina Manikova" <galina@online.no>
>To: <alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca>
>Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 1:53 PM
>Subject: RE: what is art yet again?...tired (was: outsider art)
<snipped>
>Art should be always ahead of it's time. Otherwise it will be a replica, a
>reproduction, a comment, a homage.
<snipped>
Joseph Brodsky spoke about this in his Nobel acceptance speech (quoted from
The New Republic 04Jan88). Apropos of writers and literature, but in my
opinion transferrable to other artistic media as well, he said:
"Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the
individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the
material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or
suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own
genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at
best parallel to, history; and the manner by which it exists is by
continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found
'ahead of progress,' ahead of history, whose main instrument is -- should we
not, once more, improve upon Marx -- precisely the cliche.
"Nowadays there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his
work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the
street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and
its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd, and
represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to
history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to
come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language
of the people. Otherwise it is the people who should speak the language of
literature."
Which, while I'm at it, helps me to a better understanding of what it is
that repulses me about the so-called work of Thomas K. Call it
(legitimately) marketing skills. It's just another term for pandering. Who
panders by accident? It probably is not even possible to pander w/o first
possessing a clear understanding of the cliches we carry inside us, yearning
to be played by someone. As Galena noted (perhaps too graciously...),
there's really only one alternative to originality in the arts: replication.
Mike Healy
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