cris,
I'm not sure how fitting the comparison is, but this puts me in mind of
the "New Brit Art" scene of the past decade. In contrast to the challenge
your work presented to various orthodoxies of perception and reception,
the young Brit. artists avoided charges of elitism while placing their
"transgressive" gestures directly in the oxygenated stream of hype and
dizzy commodification. As it happens, I just picked up Julian
Stallabrass's _High Art Lite_ which is highly critical of the whole
movement, not least because its avant garde posture makes good copy while
also being notably accessible and, he suggests, largely stripped of
political content. These artists, S. writes, "learned about the
debilitating situation of high art in this country, besieged by philistine
opinion and constantly having to restate its most fundamental tenets in
the face of incredulity - not that any of this had mattered when it was a
world unto itself, awash with money. A facile postmodernism, the basis
for a ubiquitous irony, was the foundation of this new art, one which took
no principle terribly seriously, which pretended not to separate high from
mass culture and which, given this relativism, accepted the system just as
it was, and sought only to work within it. The new art would be quite as
dreadful as the philistines said it was - obscene, trivial, soiled with
bodily fluids, and exhibiting a fuck-you attitude - but this time
deliberately so: it would use the philistines' energy and power in the
mass media against them."
Well, I guess poetry has to get along without that warm money bath
and sometimes without the bodily fluids too (plenty of formaldehyde about
though?)...but maybe all this this casts some kind of dim sidelight on the
elitism/complexity equation.
Best,
Jeremy
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