Status Updates From Against Art and Culture

"The motivation [for writing this book] was not simply pathological negativity, nor was it the poisonous jealousy of the pathetic non-creative, nor a general suspicion of pleasure."

Shame

"While it is important to emphasise that the autonomy of artists both high-professional and low-amateur is an outcome of political economic structures and not simply some emancipatory spirit, this freedom is real and a space for struggle."

"Audience development includes education programmes to try to teach children to ‘appreciate’ (i.e., properly consume) and love art/culture"

"Fortunately for the gatekeepers of artistic qualification this process of filtering representation through subjective experience is not so inscrutable that it cannot be measured against a ‘skill set’, ‘competency’ or ‘learning indicator’."

Ha ha
I love this

"While small children paint, draw, sing and act as part of amorphous play these activities only really become introduced as ‘art’ in the process of hav- ing the play drawn out of them. So even as pre-schoolers, children are taught that colouring outside the lines is wrong."

"We have already noted how ‘aesthetics’, as an anachronistic academic discourse of ‘art appreciation’, still maintains some credibility as insight. While this status is predominantly maintained by metaphysical hot air, the fact that this ‘aesthetics’ is essentially subjective feelings looking for substantive justification means it is inevitably entwined with psychology."

"Because of the persistent ideology of art/culture as a timeless human attribute it is assumed that underneath the shallow cacophony of arbitrary cultural variation there are constant ‘aesthetic values’."

"The drab insecurity of working-class life continues to be compensated for with shiny bling and the art/culture of happy endings and just desserts. Alternatively you can have the illusory rupture and discontent of contro- versial art/culture if it is the banal sameness of the everyday you need compensation for."

"...art/culture is perfectly situated to provide the necessary spectacle of vital resistance to ameliorate the spectacle of happy consensus. Your French nihilist novel, social-realist television show, torture-porn movie or minimalist techno allows your sensory network just enough crunchy, squishy, or stripped-back authenticity to mitigate, but not move beyond, the chirpy background hum of ordinary life."

"Contrary to the assumption that realist or nihilist art/culture snaps people out of psychosocial delusions, it can be just as anaestheticising as any feel-good potboiler."

"Art/culture is like the survival rations of food and shelter that Marx ([1867] 1967, 572) identified as the means of subsistence that allow workers to replenish themselves for the next day’s exploitation. To the extent art/culture feeds the imagination of workers it is not enough to nourish the rich fantasia necessary to overcome a tedious quotidian"

"The one important exception is pornography, except this is not really art/culture at all."

"The pathology of the obsessive gamer is such that computer game addiction is recognized as a mental disorder, while poetry addiction is not."

Computer games are not art/culture?
Pornography is not art/culture?

"Even removed from exceptional events like the Olympics or the World Cup, sport provides a regular outlet for collective ecstasy that touches more people, more often and with greater intensity than any combination of concerts, premieres and gallery openings."

Sport is not culture?

"Is there seriously a piece of art/culture, unfettered by constipated aestheticism, that is so tempting one would have to be tied up in order not to fall under its spell? One need only experience the representation of the Sirens in art/culture, usually some generic synthesiser-backed choral music, as likely to occur in a shopping mall as in a cinematic epic, to answer that question."
Listening to This Mortal Coil

"The radio in Officer Slager’s patrol car is a long way from the salons of eighteenth-century Europe. But the dumbfounded reaction to the story of Slager listening to a song against racial violence moments before shooting an unarmed African-American mirrors the faith that Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers had in music, poetry and other fine arts as the height of rational and emotional persuasion."

"While artists have been challenging the metric of artistic skill since the early avant-garde they still have managed to maintain and even increase the prestige and value of their work. During the same period a large swathe of the working class has suffered, rather than provocatively initiated, de-skilling that has not seen an associated rise in rewards for them."

'Hey, life sucks and that is precisely why art/culture needs to be sepa- rated from it, so at least something special can be preserved out of the beige, oppressive muck of the rat race. And we can all get a little taste of this ambrosia if we respect the borders that segregate life and art/culture.'

"Indulging in the refined appreciation of fine art or the gentlemanly pursuit of poetry or paint- ing could make someone from a common background feel noble without having to buy an aristocratic title. In this way you could express born-to-rule affectations beyond raw wealth and political power."

"This is where an anti-humanist shadow to the individualism of art/ culture can become apparent. In its most toxic form the failure of the majority to become self-actualised artistic souls is put down to the sub- humanity of this majority and the super-humanity of the artistically gifted."

"But with the focus on irreducible individual creativity as the marker of the modern self how do we reconcile the fact that modernity is also marked by the move away from immanent making to abstract factory-level production and individuals being more controlled by the made environment than making it?"

'Indeed the mystique of the creative process, nurtured in the cult of the inscrutable artistic genius, shields it from any sustained critical scrutiny. The point, in fact, is to disingenuously valorise the irrational side of capitalism, represented by both artists and entrepreneurs.'

'No puritanical left moralist ever actually claimed that art/culture is fun- damentally compromised by capitalism, because that kind of killjoy ascet- ism is unimaginable. So let’s imagine it.'

"Contrary to the denunciation of capitalism as a system of straightforward idolatry, the material products of capitalism are constantly destroyed, ‘renovated’, thrown away and generally ‘turned over’ as a function of use, obsolescence and fashion. The idolisation of the commodity is not so much for the thing itself, whose life is often brief, but for things in general and new things in particular."

"...an artwork not only maintains its artistic mystique throughout economic exchange but frequent exchange highlights the potency of the mystique. Not only does the artwork survive the trip through the economic digestive tract fully intact its irreducible aura has a laxative effect that speeds up commercial circulation."

"This sense of art/culture eliciting divine awe...has carried on despite the contradiction of a fundamentally modern, secular phenomenon being treated with mystical credulity. One way this is achieved is by toning down the explicit theology of Jena Romanticism, but still venerating the spiritual depths of art/culture in more neutralised psycho-philosophical terms."

"The Romantic re-conception of aesthetics as pure sensual feeling, excited primarily by fine art, appealed enormously to the more idealistic bourgeoisie. This emergent modern ruling class was looking for a realm where their much-vaunted ideal of subective freedom could be said to flourish; the other bourgeois spheres of politics and economics having failed to really manifest much sensual liberty. "

the consensus that the relationship between art/culture and the sensory- emotional is so close that the latter can almost stand in for the former.
"Such a relationship goes back to the Romantic highjacking of the concept of aesthetics, where a concept previously linked to sensual epistemology was made the sole preserve of fine art, which then sucked all the visceral life out of aesthetics and left it to desiccate."

'...the catechistic core of art/culture is a structure of multiple affirmative qualities worth suspending your disbelief for. The most notable of these are that art/culture is fundamentally beyond commercial value, that it touches deep emotions in a manner comparable to religion, and that it is, by nature, subversive.'

Oh nuts! I suppose Dee is now going to kick that all to pieces.

'... the figurative use of ‘iconoclasm’ is so broad that, much like similar terms of radical change, it covers even the most lukewarm critiques of threadbare traditions and thus reduces the negative charge; no one is an iconoclast because everyone is.'
Could you equally say that now no one is an artist because everyone is?
The value is now in the platform not the content?
Or perhaps in the curation of content