AD603 Critical Theory

Recently in art history class we have been discussing the role of the curator in building an exhibition, and the role of the critic, and ways to create exhibitions that try to break out of the familiar, linear, well agreed upon methods. This touches on the importance of creating different exhibition models in order to force the viewers to remove themselves from the dominant eurocentric mindset and enable them to, hopefully, encounter art from a less pre-decided point of view. And it is Such a Part of that same old view to push everything into its appropriately labeled niche. To decide on categories, and then methodically fill them in. But even if you label something with a term not considered ‘mainstream’, it is still a label, and therefore limiting, to the artwork, the artist, and the viewer as well. It still works of the same old framework, in its very inception, because the ‘fringe’ would not exist without the ‘main’. If you label something as ‘other’, you set yourself in opposition to it, instead of accepting that borders are just separators that we set and the ephemeral, larger realities of life don’t actually restrain themselves accordingly. Meaning and identity and experience are surely affected by categorization, but they don’t reside there.

To decide on even a diverse grouping and then fill in the spots, as in this whitney show, is perhaps a better step than simple exclusion, but it allows for the same flattening of meaning, a sort of labellistic-out for the viewer, just check the box on your checklist, don’t try to see with widened eyes.

(Wright’s type of criticism was also leveled the Documenta 12, that it was a haphazared-global-fest that denied any real understanding of cultural context)

Adrian Piper’s cornered is all about those frameworks and labels and those places in which the labels do not work-they merge, they blur, they exist in a place not easily delinated and packed in a parcel. It is full of that merging-movement: from person to society, from statement to question, from speaker to viewer, from clear declaration through all shades of affect and possibility. And into the corner, where Piper has found herself situated, and where she leads the viewer as well. Such an example of how our categories shape perception and experience, and the culminating realization that it all remains in flux, and full of shifting.

For myself, I have ever had a resistance to the idea of being categorized artistically- as printmaker OR painter OR sculptor OR woman OR mother OR any such thing. Some artists work from that point, some address those issues in their work, and some just do not, at least not literally. But who I am, with all the experience and biology and daily reality that constitutes this self I am right now, it is necessarily in my work, it cannot be separated. How could it? So whatever struggles I have or have had are inherent in my self, my thoughts, my responses, my work, even if not grouped under a heading or identifier.

(file under: dull response, foster)

Extend that field further! Why stop with the interesting table of architecture/landscape and all its niches of possibility? If you want, Krauss, to keep the earthworks and billowing curtains free of the defining shackles of our own agreed-upon histories, which of course leave out (once again) the Rather Large Rest of the Planet, to allow things to be NEW, then why create a structure of understanding which may be your own but still leads to catigorization?

I realize it’s 1979, and all these lovely exciting things are happening in the very MUD and BRINE of this place, and that you want these things to be accepted on their own terms, within their own terms, and by their own terms, with no ballast of precursor/spawner, (although I know someone who may shade that towards the schitzophrenic mode of non-association), but trust me , Krauss, you are Not Helping by creating your own model of corralling and grouping! Let us dig! Let us build! and hollow out! and scourge! and let that field keep a-going- on into the far reaches-yes, even past those dotted lines and arrows! the mind grasps for a ladder-rung, but resist! refrain! don’t try to fit every work into a “pre-conceived world”!

You are noble, and right-intentioned, and I personally am always interested in the connections/intercises of landscape and what I make, but you may shudder, my friend, when turning the pages of an art history text today, to see how easily that cannon you were trying hold at bay has engulfed those glinting bits of mirror in the dirt, those mazes and gouges.

You stepped off the pedestal and into the mighty/monumental framework itself.

Jameson is most interesting to me when ruminating on how language becomes more material as it is loosed from it’s - well, its word presentation, I suppose- and becomes image. Becomes of the temporal, and containing time. But I think Flaubert did this as well- the one part in Madame Bovary when Roudolph is sitting to write his cruel note to Emma and Flaubert describes even someone passing on the road, far out of view, his blue cap, perhaps, the clatter of the wheels on the cobbles, and even the music he heard–violin? viola? –filtering down from a high window. A world, here.  And its great indifference, as it continues bithely on- as in John Ashbery’s at the museum- (I think it’s called), his poem about the unnoticed and paltry splash and demise of Icarus - the temporal is contained here. Or the possibility of time, the necessarirness of it.

(but I am put of by his manner of popping a big “secret” on us when he tells where the China poem sprang from-So What? How does its inception belittle its own presence-especially if you are talking of things in a schitzophrenic presentation of immediacy and experience. we will find unity where we will, and thank you.)

Speaking of words and their materiality and so forth brought this Robert Hass poem to my mind, as it addresses this same miraculous property of language-

MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

1987 Robert Hass

This Foucault is interesting in such a pervasive, salient way. Your mind grabs in and keeps reaching, associating, grouping. I will write in response by principle as organizer, and try to concretize this influx of images and brain-links…

first : all cultures create heterotopias. focusing on the site of the cemetery as a universal type of heterotopia, it is interesting to consider the difference in the traditional western burial grounds and the Parsi Zorastrian methods of disposal of the body. The western way seems to lend itself to the idea of enplacement, especially now that the soul and its release are not a unanimously held posit. Fix it up, file it away, go an visit. A final rest. The Parsi way, by contrast, is a true example of extension. the body is left , in a “Tower of Silence” (western term), open to the wind, sun, rain, and the birds who will devour the remains. A final act of giving. These sites were usually located on the outskirts, but with the encroaching cities, have come to be surrounded by forest gardens, a heterotopic buffer.

second:function can shift. this makes me think of the rural washhouses of france. first conceived as a simple site for the washing of clothes, a heirarchy of filth came to emerge, due to spread of disease during the plague years. later, they they came to be social centers for the rough and tumble lot: those lorelai laundeusses. in an attempt to lend them respectability, they were located in the centers of the town, and sometimes even built into the municipal buildings themselves , and struck with curfews and fines, but to no avail. (look to the opening chapter of zola’s l’assomoir for a rowdy washhouse brawl). their use declined over the centuries, and now they are often preserved as historical landmarks, or used as galleries or other more modern sites of social interaction.

third: can contain several juxtaposing sites. in cao xueqin’s epic Dream of the Red Chamber from the 1700’s, a major site of the story is the Prospect Garden, a massive, enclosed space created to welcome a lucky relative who was chosen as an imperial concubine on her ever-so-brief visit home. every aspect of life, weather, season, fortune and view is carefully planned and included, no matter the season, there are blooms and seeds, the full cycle of a year in a moment. there are rivers and streams, and even mountain is built. (sadly, a mad search has not unearthed my copy of volume 1, so I cannot pull out text to discribe it.) here, the youth of the family recline and write lines of poetry, and drink warmed wine, or perhaps tea made from melted snow collected and saved by adamantina, a nun residing in the garden’s necessary abby. a world to itsself, containing everything, an existing and unreal utopia.

fourth:connected to a particular bit of time. this is where there is a clear connect with working as an installation artist. it is the aim. to create a space that takes you out of your normal plod-along of life. when you step inside, you are transported to ye olde other. usually up for a particular run of time, these heterotopias are surely linked to the “most precarious aspect” of time, like festival, like carnival, like the county fair: when the show comes down, the empty room remains. (below:ann hamilton)

fifth:both isolated and penetrable. the american democracy fits the bill here. if a system can be a heterotopic, a site of political manouvering, then this fifth principal applies well. the notion that all voices can be heard and counted, that anyone can be president, that the freedom of information act means what it implies. you can enter in, but the family room is off limits.

sixth:

(sabastiao salgado)

I

there was a small scarring of the earth, next to an older scarring, not known since its inception, and always remembered, and found only the night before, measured it was, paced out, and marked, the new gouge placed in relation, deep dug, and small-throated, in the morning we gathered, clutched and some tottered, the one of the warm red bowls, thirty years past, still doppled with butter and swum with sugar, and the brightness of the sun all magnified, hot-spliced to this one spot, this one gouge that reaches far deeper than this scumble of root, worm-eskered and rife, and here we tip her, ashen, particulate, unknowable but through the primordial bloody manner of we as her issue, perhaps she is winged, perhaps she is here, in this fist-sized cloud of dust, dispersing and absorbed, lifting.

II

Song of Childhood
By Peter Handke

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child,
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,
and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child,
It played with enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement as then,
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child,
It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread,
And so it is even now.

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so,
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

III

That, having drawn their art from the realm of freud, and his dreamy ideas, and creating works which could be examined and dissected for its meaning in a psycho-analytic way, and how these were accepted, even at their most fraudulent, that the surrealists would see a psychoanalitic theorist turn the tables, reverse the flow, take those images and try to use language in a way that seems to amount to a sensual perception, and see him struck from the roles of respectability and expelled and discredited, and slowly re-assimilated, and finally to have his influence felt in some of the very arenas in which the surrealists first experimented…

IIII

Strictly speaking, an enantiomorph is a pair of asymmetrical figures, usually two three-dimensional forms, that are mirror images of one another.

IV

ed ruscha sex at noon taxes

V

why not?

While reading all this Freud, there were some things that have gained a sort of generalized accostomedness through years of peripheral contact, and some things that snagged my brain and held on.

One of these was the idea of a single, decisive moment: when a thing becomes part of the preconscious, when it is connected or associated with a word-presentation and moves on up towards the surface. This idea is so intriguing, I may call up Matt B and let him know. That a thing, revolving about in your unconscious, may revolve there forever, unglimpsed, unknowable, ungathered into the web of associations that create our conscious or perhaps one day conscious minds, unless it is associated with something attached to the external. Somewhat like an eternal psycic game of musical chairs, some things get a spot and some are Out. Really out.

Freud says that anything arising from the internal (here he excludes feelings) must transform itsself into external perception, by means of memory-traces. This all makes sense. But, when Freud says that the association is made with a word presentation that is the residue of memory, I wonder about other forms of external associations, and their power to call something from the unconscious into the preconscious .

What about smell? Or touch? Or taste? Does he mean to say that unless something has been associated with a word presentation and is already in the preconscious, we will not know it? He cites the possibility of things becoming conscious through visual associations, and yet he relegates tis as a secondary and somewhat limited happening. He says it will call up only the concrete subject of a thought

and Not the relations between the various elements of the subject matter

which is what truly charactorizes thoughts

And Cannot be given Visual Expression!

Okay, so he had never seen and Anselm Kiefer or a Cornelia Parker 9I am not including the titles to exclude the word presentation of these works)

but I think such things DO call forth that abstract stuff that exists within the concrete subject matter of a thought, what exists BETWEEN the words in a word presentation of a thought, of a memory trace. What of the deaf and mute? or a pre-speech child? Children, at least, are not even governed yet by the adults preconception, they have the boon of original sight. Are their only pre-conscious thoughts simply the concrete subject matter of a thing? Can this be possible? (I think Not.)

Perhaps Freud addresses this elsewhere, but for myself as an artist, All My Senses seem strongly involved in my thought processes, and strong signposts of memory rich residuum, and it is this that I imagine pulls stuff up into my pool of possible consciousness.

It is also this that I reach for in my own work- not the literal, not the concrete, cut the shades and veils of meaning that reside in Adorno’s “higher order”, outside the very concrete that Freud claims as the visual’s pre-conscious province. The abstract flavour of a thing, that which William Carlos Williams wrote of when he said “You can’t read the news in a poem, but men die every day for lack of what is found there” (or something very much like, you see I can’t quite remember the words, but I can see it on the page in the letter from my friend, his even hand, the blue ink and yellowed paper, and again on the doorjam of my studio, copied out in my own scratch and scrawl, already riddled with staple holes from many moves, tattered a bit, but I just can’t

quite

recall

the Exact words…)

(here’s a little something for freud)

and something else…(Parker again)

Oh mercy! I wish that every debt-slogged, plastic-storage-container-hoarding, counterfeit-life-leading , explicit-value-lovin’ sucker out there would have this fed (via brain shunt, preferably, or perhaps in tasty grape flavoured capsule form)-directly to what small part of their co-opted self still remains authentic - a mere flicker in the face of the floodlights of the spectacle, perhaps, but still a flicker.

That in reasonably recent history such a writing would be able to spark up real actions-from students to workers- is wonderfully heartening. I wonder at the response such a tretise would elicit in today’s world…what conversations would echo through the empty livingrooms of foreclosed houses, seep under the closed doors of the bail-out-financeers offices, or be passed, in note form, down the lines of plaintiffs at the bankruptcy courts. Would the students, so enamoured with the spectacle themselves, take heed or bother enough to listen and understand? Would the workers, so courted and fully maxed, credit-wise, in support of the pseudo-use of life, be able to take time off in a strike?

I am reminded of Laurie and Joe, my four-wheel-driving, Gold Rush swigging neighbors a few years back. Joe had a high wage factory job, Laurie stayed home with the kids, and they did more for the spectacle than anyone else on our block. Every day they would haul home bits of plastic trash in one form or another. Just mountains of it! Water guns, trampolines, fake stoves and iceboxes, a pavillion to sit under, inflatable chairs to sit on. The spectacle’s spokescouple of 1999.

But then the plant downsized and Joe was laid off, and it was with a real, and perhaps valid, sense of betrayal by the system that they took part time, low wage retail jobs and went, not for the first time, bankrupt.

The four wheelers, the travel trailer, the remote-control cars, the endless supply of cheese whiz- all the trappings of pseudo-use were no help without the bank to roll them. And the hollow structure of the spectacle was felt, but the spectacle turned away and took no note. There’s always a new crop coming up, hat haven’t reached that point of oversaturation that Debord spoke of.

The idea of surplus survival and augmented survival are such motors of this culture- and I wonder when we became content with that. When we were willing to be known not by what we create-cooper, weaver, smith, but by what we consume-consumer. I would imagine that at one time that term had a derogatory stain on it, a bourgeois taint. But now we find power in our consumer status- there is a whole network of call centers and reporting entities that exist simply to cater to us. All part of a ruse, these devices that imply a discernment of quality where quantity rules. There is a website that claims to have 2000 links to other consumer sites: Everything Consumer!

Among the casualties of this world of explicit value are the arts, aura bound though they are, which must struggle in a pseudo-life that is not interested in real human expression, and the poor word itself: spectacle. What baggage! In its origins we find a seed of what it has become, for the term (according to wikipedia)”was borrowed from the Roman practice of staging circuses…to maintain civil order due to the an inability to solve underlying social and economic problems.^“

A long life of patronization and subjugation.

So instead of feeding the spectacle, I think we should do a Paris 68.

I am writing this in the house where my grandmother has just died, my stylish grandmother, my grandmother who always wanted everything just so, my grandmother who worked for years in the fabric department of Marshall Fields in downtown Chicago, and sent us boxes of trimming and fabric when I was young up on the mountain. We are all here: my folks, my cousins, all the great grandkids, my aunt and uncle, and my Grandad.

But not my Grandma.

Then someone finds it-her old yearbook from 1939-there she is –so young! So much younger than I can imagine-but it is her, picture after picture-her smile just so, her hair in the most fantastic rolls and curls, all gleaming, her blouses trim and neat, her eyes just the same as always.

She looks just like me. (Dan Graham, are you listening?) My cousin notices and it is true-my gramma looked like me before I ever did. We  pass the book around, around, and around.  We bring all we remember of her to the photos, we talk about her, we create an aura of layers of memory and history that now resides in the photos-

But it’s still not like having her here, so happy for the ruckus of children and family.

I know W.B. wrote of a work of art, but I think the allegory holds.

For some things there can be no replica.

Benjamin talks about the destruction of the aura through mechanical reproduction, and what a good and right thing this is, but I don’t agree completely. The idea that nothing valuable is lost when uniqueness is lost is intrinsically false, for the state of uniqueness itself is lost. It is not simply transferred to multiplicity, which shows but one facet of the original.

There is not just a loss of aura, but of substance, and history (which I know he touches on) and of all the idiosyncrasies and nuances that David Smith wrote of when he described all the ways an apple can be.

If it doesn’t matter that the reproduction becomes something other than the original, that it creates its own meaning and response, than have at it. But those remarkable convergences of place and opportunity and substance that bring forth a unique thing- keep away from it. I like its aura, so back off.

I had planned to write about the reversal-of-aura-accumulation-process that happens in art, for example in Anselm Kiefer’s work, when he uses reproduced bits of text and endless series of photographs in his paintings as part of his inclusion of the empirical on the way to the higher order-as Adorno would say-and thus imbuing these reproductions with aura, though not the exact aura that was destroyed in the act of reproduction. This brings up the idea of the transmutation of aura, and the possibility that aura, like all matter, is neither created nor destroyed but just shifts about in form-which I think has happened in his much lauded world of film, where the actors, originally stripped of aura when faced with the camera, now throw around more aura (thanks to the culture industry) than all the thespians in Britain.

But when I sat down, after this long, long, long day, and I thought of how much we all brought to the photos of my Grandma, and how they still fall so short of her in her splendidness, I felt this example served well to make my point.

And there is no internet here, but if there were, I would link back to last week, when this house felt as it should, and my grandparents would be scooting off in their golf cart for their evening jaunt through the woods, and none of us would need to hunt through boxes for old photographs.

I have not had a TV for twenty years now, and I raised up my kids without one, and I did it because I wanted to preserve their faculty to thinkautonomous of the pack. To have original minds that could think with independce and clarity, and have the foundation of their own logic to rest upon. To develop tastes that sprung from themselves, their own emperical experience, and not from and industry that decides for you what you want and then sells it to you.

I did not do this to keep them “separate” from mass culture, and and therefore “pure”, but to enable them to have that conscience, that ability to critique what the “culture industry” has prepared for them that Adorno writes of in his critique of the culture industry. The ability to move past the thoroughly masticulated and decide for themselves what they feel is important.

In the Culture Industry, Adorno shows how the masses are the necessary object of mass culture, and how they are despised and molded by the Industry. The industrialization here refers to the stanardization of art, wherein all experimentation or newness is avoided in the light of what the masses have been conditioned to think of as Art (hence the same Miro and the same Gaugain showing up in endless corporate offices and livingrooms. Just the fact that, in a world awash with people making art every day and in every country, posters and mugs and cards with the same few images are successfully marketed time and again points to the industry’s success. Conformity in place of conscience, direction in place of discernment.

Einstein had no time for TV. Not that I think we could all be so brilliant if we managed to wrest our brains back from the media, but we could surely all be more brilliant that we are now, fed on a steady diet of easy pleasure and entertainment. Adorno even alludes to the fact that we all used to have the ability to see past the proscribed conceptualization of the world, before we were “enlightened” .

For now, it is a steady stream from one or the other branches of the culture industry, of nicely intermeshed ideas and concepts and, of course, product. When you think of the ammount of hours we can spend in someone else’s ideas, in someone else’s value structure, in someone else’s brain, in neglect of our own, it is amazing.

And what of the art in such system? If the only appreciated, consumed art is prescribed to be just that, how can we hope for work that will step beyond the concepts already concretizing our experience?

(It is interestung that Adorno writes the Culture Industery in 1975, when the dulling effects of television were already being guessed at but before the media-distribution possibilities of the web were even begun. He speaksif the fact that widespread distribution of a thing does not guarantee its quality, and again, I think he is spot on.)

In this Aesthetic Theory, he writes that “Art negates the conceptualization foisted on the real world”, and of arts ability to “speak in ways nature and man cannot”. In a world where culture is standardized and distributed to a society that expects nothing more, nothing better, how can art still be seen to reside in a place outside of the confines of the myopic view of the citizens?

And this is what concerns Adorno: that art continue to negate this foitsation of conceptualization, which is vital to its being art.

Beware the pap comin’ down the line.

http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/morons/stupid.html

In the readings of this past week, I found much to question and ruminate upon: indeed, the whole notion of critical theory referring to a specific, allbeit amoebic, group of thinkers and their work was a new concept to me, and one that was well fleshed out in the selections. So, instead of a recap, I would rather write about these ideas and their salience to myself as an artist in this society and economy, where I would fit into Marx’s model and it’s surrounding thoery.

If we look at the world of popes, patrons and masters of the Medici’s era as a phase of fudalism, when the individual skill of the serf/artist still played a major determining factor in the artist Having work (although not, perhaps, work of his own choosing) and even into the late 19th and very early 20th centuries as being more localized and therefore more empirically based systems of artistic noteriety, perhaps the idea of the industialization of the artist’s world will equate with the high-dollar, global art market of today.

In this case, the artists are the proletariats, as we are the producers of the product itsself : the art is the product. And so the means of production, or that which is controlled by those with capital, refers directly to the production of the surplus value of the artwork. Dealers, critics, curators, and after them, collectors. These are the people truly in charge of the economics of the art world, which does imbue them with the”fetishism of commodoties”, that “veiled illusion necessary” when distribution and consumption of a product are not easily discerned.

For example, the whole concept and reality of the Kunstkompass http://www.capital.de/guide/kunstkompass/100006894.html?eid=100003842 is built on a systemic recognition and value-adding of an artist’s work as calculated by where and when an artist exhibits in a given year, and what is written about the work, and by whom. (This ranking also seems to be an example of the divergence of the theoretical and the actual, as Hokheimer noted, where”limited phenomena are made the final court of appeal”). This list necessarily discounts any work that exists outside its own peramiters of judgement, and in this way wrests the surplus value from the hands of the proletatriat and into the pockets of those who generate the plinth the Kunstkompass rests on, and who will must profit by its existence.

Which is not to say that I disagree with the principle and the outcome of the list, but rather to point out what seems to be the main weakness in the premise that to do away with the current economic system would return the surplus value to the worker. For if there were noone to convince the supra-heeled oil baron to give three million for a painting, and to convince him with rankings and so forth, why would he give it?

Further, Marx talks of the loss of individuality and skill of the worker in an industrialized economy. (I wonder what happened to those powerful German guilds?). I see this occuring in part, where a certain fad or style of work is promoted through the media and is snapped up in favor of work that may be more challenging, or experimental. (Walking through an art-street-night in Portland I would see the same wee birds on toothpick legs countless times. Homoganization through globalization. ) Or when the value of a work begins to rest more upon the name of the “artist” than the work its self, perfect case in point is the supposed value of something like this. http://www.imagemakersart.com/stallone-01.html

So the idea of the proletariat not owning her own potential is in part supported by our current art hierarchy. And to find a way to make Marx’s idealized version mesh with the actualities of our society is the aim of the critical theorists who followed.

It would be a raucous ride to transform the art world and free us artists from enslavement to the bosses, but I like to think of making my own history, of not waiting around for change and upheaval. And anyway , as Horkeimer wrote, “a philosophy that thinks to find peace within itself…has nothing to do with critical theory.”