I suggest Berg and others read Donald Kuspit's new essay on www.artnet.com It's not an especially easy read but it does trace out the dialectical relationship between art and commerce. It adds substance to the issue that Berg's sources oversimplify. Kuspit is no fan of art fashions and degraded conceptual art, or corporate efforts to create surplus-value for use-value products, and he's especially critical of the replacement of the real self/real world by postmodern simulacra and virtual/digital technology. Yet he perceives a strange inversion, a product of dialectical confrontation, that will enable a renewal of genuine aesthetic experience --- and for him that's the central marker of human identity. I can't paraphrase his essay very well. So read it and then reflect on the complexity of the "crises" in today's art. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, February 10, 2011 12:42:54 AM Subject: Is finding quality art becoming so much more difficult because creating art is becoming so much easier? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:puqLZRgzXZUJ:http://www.justinkownacki.com/2010/05/09/the-paradox-of-quality/+%22need+gatekeepers%22&ct=clnk#
