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if all that happened as a function of the museumification of art--which sits on an 18th century project that made art into a series of "things" that can be traded both by collectors as physical objects and by commentary writers as a type of symbolic capital (cultural power is the ability to make and enforce lists, create hierarchies and by so doing demonstrate the relative power of the person creating the hierarchy--pierre bourdieu is right about all this, i think)--was the creation of the fatuous category "masterpiece" then i would probably not agree with artelevision---but it goes further, into the erasing of the artist, of the ways of making things--in the place of making art you get an empty space of projections for critics and viewers, and a ridiculous notion of "genius" according to which art is made by some hardwired cultural aristocracy that communes directly with "god"---and all the cliches about "great art" that follow from this.
it is one of the most debilitating myths that circulates in this society, that "art" is something produced in a kind of divine frenzy engaged in by a kind of natural aristocracy, that it has nothing to do with craft, with sustained engagement with materials.
it is a way of letting people know that they cannot themselves make anything and that they should not even try.
better to buy things.
it is also a way of letting you know that the world in which you operate is totally outside your control and it is therefore better to be passive, do nothing, submit.
the relation of art to criticism is interesting--the function of critics is to assign relative value to pieces of art. it is easy to do in principle, because visual objects circulate as complete in themselves--even"incomplete" or "open" visual object ciruclate as complete in their openness, for example. it is a characteristic and a limitation of the medium. because of critics, who structure demand for the art market, everything has a price, you see.
it is not clear whether people look at an artwork in a museyroom because it moves them or because they like to think about it being really expensive. maybe for some there is no difference between the two.
i think you could make these arguments without destroying the works.
the upside: like a literary or musical tradition, these works are trails of options taken (and others avoided), of ways of combining elements, of processing and reprocessing a sense of being-in-a-history--and they can function as a set of referencepoints for people who make things in the present.
the downside: making this argument without altering how the works are displayed (for example) relies on the system that artelevision denounced earlier, the "cabal of art historians" and critics....if you made the argument within the existing order of things, and found your position becoming influential (for whatever reason) you would become the anti-critic critic, and would probably find yourself doing precisely the same things you criticize others doing, but in a kind of inverted way. which is the way it too often goes with internal critique of this kind. hell, the activity of the "left" academics is full of this kind of move and results.
recordings do a similar thing to music in terms of erasing process. even a recording of an improvised performance become an object, something complete in and of itself. brian eno was right when he extended the same idea to soundscape recordings--you can listen to a recording of street noise and learn it and by doing that deduce a structure and treat it no differently from any other musical piece.
you should try it.
at the same time, recordings let musicians access a wider public (in principle--recordings are commercials for concerts, really)...so what do you do? not record? issue disclaimers with each recording? play for your own enjoyment? but what happens when your sense of what you are doing gets too big for that hobby status? and on a related note, is it necessarily a bad thing to want to make a living by doing what you love?
in music you have a parallel "cabal" of critics and musicologists who operate in precisely the same way as the critics do in visual arts--they make lists, they argue for their lists, the argue against other lists and jockey for cultural (and economic) power for themselves by doing it. and they too substitute a fantasy for the musicians. and they make the same arguments about these fantasy musicians--the great geniuses, the divine frenzy, the implict aristocracy---all of it. with the same results--dont try, dont engage, if it does not come right away, do something else---buy things instead.
the interesting thing about recordings is that you play them in your homes, in your cars--you dont need a museyroom to access them, to listen to them--but the same kind of arguments obtain for them.
that is why i am not sure that destroying the works would do anything.
it seems to me the problem lies elsewhere.
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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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