roachboy

pissing people off is a well-worn commercial option for people who make objects (visual/sonic/otherwise)--many people, mandonna included, rely on the reactionary nature of the public---one can always generate material that riles up the conservatives---it is an easy way to generate publicity---if it works really well, you will have the nitwits on faux news and the radio talk shows, and preachers in pulpits around the country denouncing you as a threat to decency and american values and all that tripe---which come to think of it is not that different in principle from the reactions of the "islamic enemies" that were trotted out in the initial post on this thread---each denunciation is a kind of free advertising---you can see the results---pissing off conservatives has enabled even someone as conceptually tedious and politically empty as madonna to construct herself as something of a hero for free speech etc.--but there is a qualification to all this (see below)

but in order to get to this position, you have to have already produced commercial material--in music innocuous pop tunes that conform to strict genre rules, to a strict conception of how sound should be organized, etc. "being political" is in this case a matter of manipulating associations that come to be bundled around your work. it presupposes visibility.

it is easy enough to confuse formal freedom of speech with substantive freedom--in a market system, the possibilities of introducing complexity into your work and selling that work are pretty limited---markets do not mean creative freedom in anything more than a formal sense---most social systems include an element of state funding for the arts, and that funding enables artists, musicians, etc. to get around the stultifying constraints of the market and its lowest-common-denomenator effects---but the american right has been really active in trying to dismantle such funding as exists in the states under the guise of protecting morality (which again sounds not that different from the fundamentalists that the american right fears so) and as such has done more to eradicate the reality of freedom of speech for artists than any number of threats have done. the result is that an artist is free to make objects and show them to a small group of people--on the other hand, an artist might have more options if he or she has a substantial trust fund, is not forced to do the 9-5 thing to do stuff like eat---anyone who has had to do the combination of holding down a day gig and make art probably knows that there is precious little energy left after a day working for a wage to devote to your own stuff---here we see the implications of conservative actions against the state with reference to cultural production--that the making of experimental art should be the purview of the wealthy, who in general have no interest in generating art that is critical of the existing order because that order is an underpinning for their wealth---wearing down the dissidents who do not enjoy the benefits of economic privilege. if something of their work happens to surface publicly and challenges assumptions about the dominant order, then the right attacks the artist as a person, declares them a threat to morality etc etc etc---and depending on how this is carried out it either destorys the artist (if that person is not already estalished as a commercial brand) or serves the opposite effect--as in the case of madonna.

when you talk about exporting american values, you are talking mostly about exporting the notions of formal freedom. you in the main do not like to think about matters of substantive freedom. it seems often that the only people who confuse the formal and substantive are themselves american, are themselves viewers of the tv infotainment system, in which this confusion is articulated, managed, turned into elements of a kind of endless circle jerk. it seems that people outside the states have seen the seperation between the formal and the substantive particular to american-style "freedom" up close. that is one reason why the export of "american values" is greeted with cynicism.

there is alot more to say on this matter. but i suspect the post is already long enough and i'll stop it there.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite