tropple:
i was referring to this:
Quote:
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The lesson here is to please the audience and the sponsor. The youngster didn't please the gallery owner. Unless a person is self-sufficient or has a trust fund from their family, the only way they're gonna eat is to please the public. There are no young, controverisal figures who have to work for a living. It's a fact of life. Here, France, Italy, any place you want to name. If you are making trouble for the establishment, you are either poor, rich, or whoring yourself to a rich sponsor. You don't "have permission" to be controversial until you've earned enough of a reputation to warrant people putting up with your attitude.
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which i simply rephrased in a polemical manner---basically where you wrote "please" or a variant, i substituted "grovel"--two perspectives on the same social situation, that's all. you could see what i said as retaining every feature of your argument above, with a code switch.
((and a rather snippy tone, which i see this morning but did not see yesterday, and for which i apologize. it was not necessary.))
behind this, two general matters:
-i talk from a particular, split experience on this kind of question. on the one hand, i do not buy any argument that invokes phrases like "the test of time" or a position like yours about which kinds of artwork surface as legitimate, as if the features that motor selection of one set of artworks over another in art history (which is contemporary critical practices written back into the pat, in the main) inhere in the object itself and are not a function of particular sociological situations.
second, as a working musician operating in a kind of "experimental" form, i have been in a position of having a venue shut us down--but music is an abstract medium, and we are not making overtly political statements with the kind of sound we manipulate--even as i tend to see making things as necessarily oppositional and continuing to be engaged with a process of making things as in itself political in this environment. so we do not have the option of being advised by our agent to issue a press release that could turn being shut down into a moment of political martyrdom, which is what i suspect is at work in the article at the origin of this thread.
it should (maybe) be obvious by this point that this experience informs some of my reaction to this kind of situation. maybe less obvious is that there is a direct link between the more academic position on how cultural value is produced around works of art and the experience of working for years in an underground type of music. and between these two and a contempt for what i see as privatized bourgeois censorship.
as for the matter of "authorization" to be controversial: you are right in principle, but for all the people i know who work in various types of cultural production, the politics of their work follows from their own sense of being in the world, not from the desire to cultivate a tendency in their work that could be used as a wedge for publicity. the link between ones work and ones committments entails risks, however, and every one of us assumes that risk from the outset, and knows, one way or another, about the consequences of assuming that risk. it is an obvious fact of everyday life.
however, what you seemed to be saying was that if you were not socially authorized--if you were not already assimilated as "the person who dissents" into a normally operational cultural space--and thereby perhaps trivialized---you should make nice. that would perhaps make sense if behind all this, unspoken, worked the assumption that cultural markets are rational and that the best stuff being produced at any given time is somehow assimilated into them. but this assumption is manifestly false---just look around.