! I'm not familiar with Kenneth Burke's work. Thanks, I'll look at it.
My throat is full of hyperbole. Bubbly words are boiling and blathering at the rim of my mouth. Ostrow and Brady are right to say I'm being too modernist (Ostrow) and too romantic (Brady) but that's exactly what I am, a romantic modernist or maybe a romantic post-post modernist. Sorry guys, you gotta be screwed up to be an artist. You gotta be driven to repair your wound and stun your adversaries. Day and night. I'm the first to admit that any one of us is of a time, fixed in some values by a boundary that wiggles, expands, shrinks, but never keeps up with the expansion all around it. What others see as a a rather backward view to be rejected in favor of something far more agreeable to an imagined future, I see as heroic and battle hardened realism in the face of total capitulation to the enemy! Who is the enemy? The Artist? Not yet. Not just yet. Soon, yes. When the current path is trod by the hordes of little artists with little ideas memorized from effete French writers there will be art that reflects the status quo of exploitative society. Everybody will be an artist and nothing will be art. All will be at peace in the land of monetized Banal. Real art breaks society's dingy, stinking casing of banality around reality. It does two jobs at once -- destruction and revelation -- leaving paradoxical debris to befuddle the timid. No utopia. Just the wonderment of reality. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: "Groce, Gary" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, June 11, 2010 8:51:03 PM Subject: RE: "'What makes one an artist?' This issue is never raised in the post-art world..." Mr Conger, thanks for the information re: Detroit. I've always wanted to see that museum. What you're saying about artists reminds me of Kenneth Burke's book Counter-Statement (1931): "In so far as an age is bent, a writer establishes equilibrium by leaning" (vii). And, in his "Philosophy of Literary Form," he writes of the artist's work be motivated by "burdens." Are you familiar with these? Are there no examples of contented artists producing significant works from positions of power? Or was that possible at one time, but no longer? -groce.
