David’s Reviews > Against Art and Culture > Status Update

"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."

"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"