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jj: you point to a divide that i argue about with my brother alot. it turns on the cartegoy of the pleasing. for him, this is central. for me, it isn't. behind that we're talking about the same things, but in ways that are particular to the genres we respectively work with.
so--and i may add more to this later (i'm running late again)...
at the level of process, of making stuff, the person who makes stuff, who engages in the processes of making stuff, defines what it is that is being done.
the object (whatever it is) is a collapsed act--so from that viewpoint takes it's meanings from the process of making it.
socially, the object/outputs are the starting point, not the act of making: so socially what gets defined as art seems to me a function of the spaces in which it is encountered. (bad sentence)....the spaces are themselves social functions (controlled by networks of people) so access to spaces amounts to a type of social legitimation--be that space a loft, a gallery, a theater, etc.. this social legitimation repeats at the level of such wider reception as someone's work may get--the defining is done by the intermediaries that shape it's reception (and who legitimate themselves as intermediaries in the process).
audiences occupy a complicated role in this process---because i'm writing quickly, i think the above sounds more machine-like than i mean it to, but for the moment i'll live with that--audiences encounter what they experience in the way that experience is framed. so if the go to a gallery, by definition what they encounter there is "art"...whether they like what they encounter or not isn't terribly important from that viewpoint-->insofar as the definition of what is art is concerned anyway. at least not directly (they come in via another route, by generating demand, which feeds into this system)...
that's all i have time for at the moment.
the cage remarks above point to conceptual art practices, which are great fun to talk about, but i can't sit in my livingroom any longer right now.
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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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