<snip>
I guess that in the arts, as in cosmology, in just matter of what way
you look at Gresham's Law [DB]
<snip>
Are you perhaps suggesting something about the relative *quality* of R or of
D?
All creative practices tend, I think, to be subverted either by their
recognition as Art (the work is occluded) or by their incorporation into
commerce (the work itself is replaced). This is one form of debasement.
The readymade and its cousins are anomalous because their content is
denatured. The variables common to art, craft and commodities by which we
judge both their status and their quality (skill, labour and materials on
the one hand, and the balance of exchange value versus use value on the
other) cease to function. You can't use a urinal that's an artwork; on the
other hand it has none of that Benjaminian *aura* which artworks are _meant_
to have. When Klein sold zones of 'immaterial pictorial sensibility', on the
other hand, there was no material functionality and yet, equally, the
*auratic* was quite clearly out of place in a transaction based upon *use*.
This is another: the 'debasement in their turn of oppressive (ie reductive)
categorisations.
One might argue in similar vein that categories such as *working class* have
really very little currency except to constrain and occlude the subjective
feeling of how on earth one fits in. It wasn't always thus, but it is now.
Rauschenberg, I should add, belongs in a different kettle altogether: the
use of choice as a weapon against imposition, certainly, but in the context
of *junk* (as with Cage and *noise*); also the sheer lusciousness of the
object; plus the articulation of different levels of perspective that is
owed, in part, to Hofmann.
CW
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'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
(Harry Partch)
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