reply to self: getting rid of facts and subjectivity: at least rhetorically a more direct confrontation with things as they are.
More reply to self:
Our culture is like any other, only moreso. In any culture there are areas that are in flux and areas that are relatively fixed. It's nearly impossible to even traverse the fixed areas at all in terms that are engaging for most of the participants. Look at what happens whenever I post about Classical or Mayan Art in this subforum. Zero. That's all obviously in a fixed area. There's nothing engaging about it. Kind of strange. It may be that since our culture at least seems to have methods for representing aspects of other cultures (such as the Classic Mayan Art) or cultures that are not quite entirely other cultures (such as Classic Art) this very apparent ability has to be to some degree frozen or fixed or ignored or else this culture would become something other than a culture. A non-cultural post-culture or a purely technical realm with its own very rapidly evolving ways of evaluating things. Well...sort of like parts of the online world already are. Sort of like an Art or a Science at the moment they move into new territory with new techniques.
But what about an idea about re-evaluating Picasso? Let's suppose Picasso is still in a part of some culture that is in flux (but not either in the frozen realm that must be kept at bay if cultures are to remain cultural and not in the possibly post-cultural realm)...how do people manipulate their own cultures without introducing anything from "elsewhere" (the frozen nothing inside or the outside altogether)? I'm thinking there are some well-known possibilities:
Via personal power and influence (say when Saatchi buys some of Hirst's stuff)
Via symbolic manipulations such as myth or religion or purity cults or Ghost Dances
Via entertaining manipulations such as paintings or hallucinagens or online games or writing
Via statelike ideological power (as in the authorities burn all paintings of type x or command a pyramid to be errected or )
Via an address to the structural relations between reality and culture (science and scholarship)
Of course you can mix and match these options and have say an Entertaining Cult of Saatchi or a church with mosaics of the Empress Theodora...but those are the universal options. Individual freedom is a legal theory, not a cultural one.
from:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62444&page=4
And from the same thread:
This "subjectivity" is entirely in terms of what happens to pass through the various contexts of whatever box full of Western Civ you happen to be soaking in. Just to gain a little perspective, I always find it useful to try to look at all artiality as an Art of some kind, where the dreaded capital that signals abstraction to some actually signals an ellided attempt at making the generality and the subjectivity into something concrete with a non-subjective history that asymptotically approaches the incredibly elaborate. For example in a thread below in this subforum (called "A Beard of Mary Beards"), I put forward the idea of Classical Art as perhaps the most instructive case of relatively simple and generally forged and reconstructed objects that illuminate a whole series of Arts all more or less built out of the same repetoire of objects. Mary Beard herself in her book provides a vaguely D. Hirstian context with rooms full of reproductions of casts of dogs that died at Pompeii and so on. So there is a region of symbology (so to speak) where the evaluations that get juxtaposed are definitely aesthetic (at least in retrospect ...but then what musings and mullings over are not retrospective?)...So I think you can isolate some areas of symbolic comprehension and exchange that can only be adequately defined with reference to some objective schema of successive aesthetic juxtapositions and there you have your Art.