Re: <nettime> Pollock, Art History and Cold War [was: Wikileaks is old hat]

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Sartre, among others, claimed that lumping "the arts" into the
term art diminshes them all. Each art is unique, he said, and by
extension each art work is unique even when executed by among
the works of a single artist. He was uneasy with the term artist 
due to its generalizing suppression of the individual into a 
category.

Hypostatizing into art, and worse, in the art world, quite granular 
single works, in some cases of performance art a singluar event 
not repeatable, some intended to be such, is the madness of
bad-art aggegators, whether curators, critics, gallerists, historians, 
aesthetes, collectors, donors, publicists, agents, inheritors,
the lot of confidence artists, the number of which surely outranks
those they demean in general and glorify in genius.

Recitation of the names of famous artists is a sure sign of
incapacity to grasp a singular work, unfinished, unresolved,
contrary to conquest, a snarling bitch of materiality, sound
and fury utterly resisting the human grappling with self-deity
certain of failure, condemned to continue. No art work is ever
finished it persists incomplete into another struggle. Damn 
those demanding closure, deadline up, show is opening, the 
crowd abaying, critics bloodthirsty.

High art, elite art, famous art, the best art, the award winners,
classical art, left-footed art, one-eyebrow art, art for the ages,
eternally beautiful art, priceless art, mansions and warehouses
of art, feh.

Sartre cited Dewey in claiming the un-special art work, free
of Art, a democratizing mundane work along with cooking, 
farming, machining, child raising, schooling, and should not 
valorized over the others.

To be sure, these others have become valorized into high-profit
enterprises, most of them kissing up to be art of cooking, art of
this and that. Feh art.


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