Let's Ask Joan Crawford! What is art?
Dear Joan Crawford,
According to classic Marxist theory, the Artist cannot be divorced from the social milieu of his class, his function in the means of production as defined by the bourgeois elite, and his utilitarian worth to humanity as a whole. However, the prevailing aesthetic, in these terminal days of capitalism (i.e., the proto-fascist, militarist über-state), the Artist stands aloof from the dreck of values-based production as a beacon of individualism. His very isolation from social affairs is seen as a marker of a higher call, and his eccentricities are excused as virtues. Even Hitler, for example, forgave Speer for occasionally imbibing one too many biers at Brauhaus festivals on account of the magnificence of his architectural sculpting of lights at the Nurnberg rallies. So my question is this: What, indeed, is art?
Sally Mae in White Bluff
Dear Sally Mae,
I see that you are still a baby Marxist, taking your first, stumbling steps through the official catechism of our doctrine. You have not yet begun to live it so that reality appears as it truly is, without question. You need only look at the world that you see, and trust implicitly that this is, indeed, art, because what we remember of the world past is based on--art. When I used to make movies, the producers always said, “Make it imaginative, make it different, but make it sell.” So we could never upset the bourgeois, or the ruling class, and in many cases, our scripts had to be passed by military censors. So my movies became twisted but distilled photomontages of the daily, imaginative and unimaginative lives of everyone who contributed to them.
What is art? Art is: dead bodies littering the streets of liberated nations; newspapers of blank pages; every conceivable word spoken, to an audience of hearing-impaired; and oblivion at the fingertips of a drunk man.
According to classic Marxist theory, the Artist cannot be divorced from the social milieu of his class, his function in the means of production as defined by the bourgeois elite, and his utilitarian worth to humanity as a whole. However, the prevailing aesthetic, in these terminal days of capitalism (i.e., the proto-fascist, militarist über-state), the Artist stands aloof from the dreck of values-based production as a beacon of individualism. His very isolation from social affairs is seen as a marker of a higher call, and his eccentricities are excused as virtues. Even Hitler, for example, forgave Speer for occasionally imbibing one too many biers at Brauhaus festivals on account of the magnificence of his architectural sculpting of lights at the Nurnberg rallies. So my question is this: What, indeed, is art?
Sally Mae in White Bluff
Dear Sally Mae,
I see that you are still a baby Marxist, taking your first, stumbling steps through the official catechism of our doctrine. You have not yet begun to live it so that reality appears as it truly is, without question. You need only look at the world that you see, and trust implicitly that this is, indeed, art, because what we remember of the world past is based on--art. When I used to make movies, the producers always said, “Make it imaginative, make it different, but make it sell.” So we could never upset the bourgeois, or the ruling class, and in many cases, our scripts had to be passed by military censors. So my movies became twisted but distilled photomontages of the daily, imaginative and unimaginative lives of everyone who contributed to them.
What is art? Art is: dead bodies littering the streets of liberated nations; newspapers of blank pages; every conceivable word spoken, to an audience of hearing-impaired; and oblivion at the fingertips of a drunk man.
posted by The Reluctant Muse at 4:40 PM
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