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ziggy played guitar
Sep. 11th, 2007 10:23 amthe production of art is made difficult in the post-war, poison mythos world...
it often becomes either empty commodity, or anti-commodity (just as bad almost) when too much concept is applied
the poetic arts fared better, maybe because words can undo words more easily?
the best art of the 20th century is probably that which evades simple conceptualizing, because in that way it punches through to the universal
the next best would be that which is atopical and whimsical for similar reasons, taking iconic archetypes as mere templates for something a bit more mindbending and personal... this is difficult because one has to get to the personal first. but it's on par with the writing arts. one may use archetypes to get past them.
one major project of the post war de/re construction of the human condition was to eliminate the personal, to homogenize people and make them predictable. if one is being charitable one could see why that would be appealing at the time. our fears of the cult of personality made us wish to abstract personality away and create "the new man". Of course that aspect utterly failed, and those who could take advantage of the situation became ever more cult-like. Though in some sense it succeeded because our "superstars" were castrated to some extent, they were themselves mere product, and the few who attempted to actually change anything were eliminated by hook or by crook.
the grave threat that comes to us in this world is systemic, it is that of the vast impersonal machine that has goals that don't really mesh with our personal, individual desires, and in fact wishes to crush out those desires, to allow things to run "smoothly".
so the personal, the individual is actually the only useful means of resistance and change... not an ideology of the personal, but the personal itself.
ideologies can be subverted to the smooth running of the system... but the upsurge of raw human freedom in the heart of the machine, that can never be overcome by it, it has no calculus to absorb it. it can only try to hide these anomalies from the rest of us.
it often becomes either empty commodity, or anti-commodity (just as bad almost) when too much concept is applied
the poetic arts fared better, maybe because words can undo words more easily?
the best art of the 20th century is probably that which evades simple conceptualizing, because in that way it punches through to the universal
the next best would be that which is atopical and whimsical for similar reasons, taking iconic archetypes as mere templates for something a bit more mindbending and personal... this is difficult because one has to get to the personal first. but it's on par with the writing arts. one may use archetypes to get past them.
one major project of the post war de/re construction of the human condition was to eliminate the personal, to homogenize people and make them predictable. if one is being charitable one could see why that would be appealing at the time. our fears of the cult of personality made us wish to abstract personality away and create "the new man". Of course that aspect utterly failed, and those who could take advantage of the situation became ever more cult-like. Though in some sense it succeeded because our "superstars" were castrated to some extent, they were themselves mere product, and the few who attempted to actually change anything were eliminated by hook or by crook.
the grave threat that comes to us in this world is systemic, it is that of the vast impersonal machine that has goals that don't really mesh with our personal, individual desires, and in fact wishes to crush out those desires, to allow things to run "smoothly".
so the personal, the individual is actually the only useful means of resistance and change... not an ideology of the personal, but the personal itself.
ideologies can be subverted to the smooth running of the system... but the upsurge of raw human freedom in the heart of the machine, that can never be overcome by it, it has no calculus to absorb it. it can only try to hide these anomalies from the rest of us.
