The more I think about it, ,the more I think that art isn;t special in
this regard.
BBC4 doco on classical britannia: notice the switch over from cornelis
cardew to the new generation of composers, Knussen etc. the same
happens in poetry a bit earlier with the Poetry Society. The pull
towards elitism happens across the board.
I think art has a cushion against the pull of demands au courant: an
array of archetypes it can pull on to defends itself against any pull
in a certain direction. Sport has not.
The Leni Reifenstahl films still, unfortunately, provide the
archetypes under which Sport suffers,
Roger
On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> One more and then I should stop...
>
> <snip>
> passivity is less to do with sport itself than with the consumerist
> economies around it (to be like one's favourite sports hero, one just
> buys the nike shoes, etc). Stephen's point about the politics of
> post-colonialism is another issue that plays here. [AC]
> <snip>
>
> I suppose my underlying prejudice is that sport may be more vulnerable to
> those pressures than, for example, the arts. That may seem an odd thing to
> say in an era where some paintings cost the equivalent of the annual GDP of
> one of the smaller third world economies. However, I think that the
> discourse generated and/or constituted by even the visual arts allows more
> chance for subversion.
>
> Stephen's coaching examples are telling, though. (So are Roger's re:
> participation and elites.) None of the answers is simple and few, if any,
> are certain.
>
> As to postcolonialism, the spirit of global capitalism which trawls the
> world sampling earthbows and throat songs in order to set them to backbeats
> would be essentially that of Bartok, albeit in larger form, were it not for
> the machine-like nature of its capture: like a tape-recorder it hears what
> is said, plays back what is said, for money, and promptly chews up the tape.
> Soon molecules of that tape, forcing the initial metaphor only a little,
> will be smeared all over the world like so many PCBs, and I don't think
> that's a good thing. So if you're a small, creative community outside the
> artistic beltway do you make poetry in an indigenous English within which
> you yourselves feel comfortable and private, do you join what's perceived to
> be the English language mainstream or do you write in some sort of bogus
> creole that's been got up for the tourists? (The dilemma here is How does
> one work _within_ that process of capture but against it?)
>
> Globalisation's flattening of difference seems to me a second, related thing
> to which sport is, once again, peculiarly vulnerable: little chance of that
> Afghan game with dead goats making it to the Olympics, for example. And the
> ticket out, as Stephen notes, can be good individually whilst
> demographically destructive: 'it is very hard professionally to go back':
>
> Dozens have gone missing, the decision taken is Elsewhere.
> but yes, yes we remain as poetry, pure immateriality.
> in the name of the 'current state of things' they murmur to us:
> "we went for a stroll, now it's a question of marching!" But this
> stroll of ours has brought us a long way off, and now
> the horizon is behind us.
>
> (from *Materiali*, Metropolitan Indians 1977).
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
> This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
> might call it life.' (Judith Revel)
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"I began to warm and chill
to objects and their fields"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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