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Of many possibilities here is one which seems already to have come
to pass: that art, ever more successfully reified, has finally become
inextricable from fashion and the public confessional - this, perversely,
is the last victory of Maoism. And even as academia rails against
commodification and issues dire warnings about the protean nature
of the commodity form it produces more and more unreadable theory
and more and more uninteresting art. The contradictions, that is
to say, have been successfully deepened by our own "Shining
Path" of experts. Which is worse, then, the spectacularized
production of spectacle theory, or the "artification"
of "lifestyle" and "nesting", of personalized
mobile phones and designer DNA?
The word "art" only took on the sense in which we (nostalgically)
use it at the beginning of the Enlightenment; in this short history
it describes an autonomous, self-critical, essentially cognitive
object or activity. An as yet unknown art, then, could easily be
conceived in these terms as an inversive, negative or recursive
possibility: an object or activity already produced for which there
is either no critical language, even no definition as "art", with
which to approach, process, categorize, and embalm the work. A new
understanding of reflective cognitive practices inflected by, say,
communal music-making - hocketing, listening, corporeal resonance
- might require that we pass from one to the next the activating
"art coefficient". An art that reconsiders consumption
the way cooking reconsiders eating; a revitalized tongue. An art
that doesn't sell itself - or anything else. An art that gives up
the bloody prose of faux analytic purity, that opens its veins.
An art of mayflies and locusts. An art that reinvents itself in
the hands of each individual who encounters it. An art of gracious
dialogue. An art of knots and air.
A friend, a photographer, tells me about the tiny island nation
of Tuvalu, in the South Pacific. Tuvalu, he says, is sinking into
the ocean. Tuvalu is being abandoned by its citizens to the rising
waters of the Pacific. The seas are swelling, and we, with our terminator
neoprimitive accessories and our optimized, globalized theoretical
ascesis, are implicated. He was going to go there to take damning
pictures of it, of the island and its disappearance, an environmental
catastrophe inextricably linked to melts and exhaust, to bitstreams
and tanning booths entire oceans away. Tuvalu has two primary sources
of income: since its net address ends in ".TV", selling
usage of this address to entertainment conglomerates has proven
enormously lucrative; and since the nation has one of the last and
least-used telephone codes it licenses use of this code to multinational
corporations. "Oh", I said, "It's like registering
your boat in Panama. Only there's no boat. And soon there'll be
no geographic Panama". The photographer cancelled his trip;
there's nothing there, he said. But I'm waiting to see what - or
who - gets smuggled off with the cargo.
Judith Rodenbeck
New York
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