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are "american values" the same as those implied in the spread of globalizing capitalism?
if people in areas being colonized by this developing mode of capitalism find the traditional bases for their identities being ground to nothing, are they being threatened by "american values"?
what is american conservatism but a response to exactly this corrosion of older modes of identity formation brought about by the transformations in the organization of capitalism? a kind of neurotic response to the increasing irrelevance of nation-states?
what better way to shore up a sense of identity in a shifting world than to posit an enemy that is everywhere, that is "our" opposite, and to shift the conflict onto all levels of thinking? particularly if you can make the conflict "moral" in the process....
if that is a way of understanding--in general terms--the thrust of post-911 american ideology, then where does the freedom of expression--particularly of artistic expression--fit into it?
what does freedom of expression mean, really, in the present american context? how exactly is the production of art a political act in this environment? i have been a working musician for a long time and have found that there is nothing necessarily political about the fact of producing work--political in the conventional sense---because the reduction of art to commodity makes political elements into simple predicates of that product--like the color of clothes or the design of a car. in painting, for example, outside the gallery system that is given meanings by journals like art forum, what offense could possibly be generated by the kinds of paintings that sell--the endless series of more or less the same picture of more or less the same executive hitting more or less the same drive on more or less the same golfcourse; of seagulls planing over an agitated sea; of stilll-life images of roses on different types of tables, each indicating a different space of haut-bourgeois leisure; of sad-eyed puppies and dogs playing poker and motif number 1 and on.....and the material in artforumland operates along parallel lines, particular to the "elite" art market and the system of collectors/investors it services...
what art actually reproduces directly the situations that surround its production?
if a work criticizes the existing order in america, and it happens to be visible, then either (a) is passes without particular trouble into the dance of commodities, in which case its political content uindergoes the transformation referred to aboove or (b) if it uses the proper symbols, it can draw attacks from christian fundamentalists--see for example the flap over serrano's piss christ--how do these attacks differ exactly from the kind of attacks noted earlier in this thread that are generated from without by the invisible yet omnipresent enemy?
the questions could be continued almost ad infinitum.....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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