well i teach experimental music and history courses and find the concerns i work with are quite different from those, art...even as i would agree with you in terms of what i take to be the bourgeois genius myth (the effects of which you outline to an extent)...what i object to in the ideology you describe is that it frames a way of thinking about making things that shuts out the space for development and does that on the assumption that only members of a kind of hard-wired aristocracy are authorized to make things at all. i try to emphasize the importance of a craft engagement, however that is understood (a function of the medium), the importance of continuing to work over a long time, of allowing yourself to develop, to change, to move.
i understand making things as being necessarily political--even if you work in a highly representational form, that you switch frames of reference, disrupt a relation to the world based on the assumption of immediacy or transparency, is in itself political. one consequence of this is a suspicion on the part of most regular folk of cultural workers (i like this phrase better than "artist") because they cannot be relied upon to be fully present in a given social space--they are both inside it and looking at it from the outside...proust was right about this...it is what drove his narrator in "in search of lost time" to frequent aristocratic salons--which were spaces based on teh assumption of doubleness---which was a residuum of the intertwining of the salons with court society during the late 17th-18th centuries.
i do not see anything "infantile" about this politics---necessarily---nor do i see anything "infantile" about working in opposition to the existing order. for myself, working in opposition to this order is something of an a priori. look around and try to persuade me that this mess is the best we collectively can do. i do think that there are better and worse ways of expressing that opposition--but this is an aesthtic matter, about which folk could argue endlessly without any conclusion being possible.
what i do see as infantile is submission to that order because it is an already existing order--which you can see as deferring to the Voice of the Father, an abdication of active engagement with the world based on assumptions about the nature of power that derive from early relations with dad. on this, i suspect that we are at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
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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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