The whole endgame of modernism is to displace the artist, to parse and outsource any object, if any object is involved, to end "making" in the sense of "handmade by the person who authors the idea" and to take all ideas and imagery from the mass popular culture, not history and certainly not from any high culture, whatever it once was and no longer can be.
It's a pointless and absurdly romantic view to think people making little so-called aesthetic things, as if such things can embody art, have anything to do with the now universal concept of art as symbol of obscene materialism and total oppression of individual human value. That an auctioned Warhol portrait, which did not require the artist in any step of the process other than posing for a clownish photo, would fetch dozens of millions of dollars and be presumed art as a result reveals two illusions: one, that the image is a valued work of art; and two, that real money was actually spent for it. The reality is that no object can be art in and of itself except as a symbol of art if the artist says so (like the dollar bill being a symbol of monetary worth just because the issuer says so) and of course the money "spent" on the Warhol portrait was not spent at all but just transferred from one symbolic form to another. It's just exchanging one clumsy pile of money to another single sheet of money with a middleman, as always, skimming off a share. Nobody imagines that the cash symbols, the dollar bills, would actually be worthless, but awe is evoked by the carefully constructed belief that an artwork may in fact be utterly worthless, thus putting money at the same risk. In truth, however, with the Warhol one worthless thing was exchanged for another worthless thing and the aesthetic excitement is centered in just that possibility -- that both money and art are worthless in the face of a suspension of disbelief that their having equal real "gold" value exists. The real story behind the auctions is not the accruing value of some "art" but the increasing worthlessness of money, so worthless that it takes many millions to equal one silly billboard ad for Andy Warhol, called a self-portrait. Real inflation, the increasing worthlessness of money, begins at the top, in big transactions, and then trickles down to destroy and economy and create social havoc and wars. Coming your way from the dandies running the auction blocks is an auction featuring, let's say, an ordinary manufactured screw, to be knocked down for 100+ million dollars or maybe a billion. That's also the day you'll need a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread. So the more the pooling of money enables a few to exchange it for the Danto-istic "commonplace" the less you have, the poorer you become. Every big-time art auction is stealing from you, far more than it is the idle rich exchanging money among themselves as an aesthetic experience of making it more and more worthless -- a sort of musical chair game with no chairs. It's happened before, of course, when kings and pirates played the game, but at least their aesthetics involved real gold. They hedged their bets. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Fri, May 14, 2010 6:45:53 AM Subject: Re: "More good things in life are lost by indifference than ever were lost by active hostility." (Robert Gordon Menzies) In a message dated 5/14/10 1:33:49 AM, [email protected] writes: > NO, because there are more individual artist doing art, > which improves the odds of "good"work, > > > It doesn't improve the qulity of anything else when millions start doing it too. Kate Sullivan
