Re: Syndicate: UN art

[igor@mi2.hr]

dear ana at all,

Below passages may possibly be of some interest in further discussion on
contemporary (UN) art/artists.

ciao
igor

"Art is not dead: it was never alive, never a living creature or demigod but
a critical function of a specific moment of cultural history. The social and
cultural processes which, for scarcely five hundred years, have been known
under the name of art are not 'dying' but dispersing. The complex unity of
the field of art is scattering and remodulating in new constellations. The
process tells us a great deal about the nature of the changes through which
our societies are passing, about the restructuring and repurposing of the
mode of communication governing our relationships, and about the retuning of
certain key terms in our understandings of what the goals of human activity
might be. Art has been for many the highest expression of what it is to be
human. For the aesthete, art has been the mode of survival, the bastion of a
qualitatively different mode of being in the world. For the utopian, art
provided a guide to the positive virtues of humanity, a signpost toward the
brightening future; or negatively as the antithesis to the overwhelming
darkness of our own times, the fiercely preserved flicker of the last light.
But the concentration of cultural power in the hands of industry, the
corruption and gargantuanism of art institutions, the dispersal of cultural
technologies among the general populace and the self-critical project of
modernist art itself combine to bring even this last negative aesthetics to
the brink of extinction.
.......
Art has become a discipline. To play even the wildest jesterly card in the
game, it is absolutely necessary to know the entire book of rules. This
discipline then becomes a mode of play, but a play no longer legible as the
innocent expression of freedom, but rather the controlled and configured
creativity of a corporate system which needs play in order to produce
innovations, yet which fears creativity as revolutionary. Play is now an
alibi for enduring the present, rather than an inkling of a postponed
future."
The ephemeral future of beauty: art, amateurs and corporations in the 21st
century by Sean Cubitt; Futures 32



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