The Death of Doctor David Kelly, 2008
Keyword – what does ‘critical’ mean?
- Work as revelatory – revealing as a critical value
- Everyone (artist, audiences, society etc.) is ‘colluding’ on where art lies, its critical value
Dexter Dalwood
- Heavily politicised work, engaging with the socio-political work
- asking questions about what the status of painting is/and may be?
- more then noting of spectacle, enteratinemt?
- what is the responsibility of the artwork and how they relate to tother artworks – must he be oppositional
- Must art challenge its own status as art
- What is the role of the artist/ What is the role of the critic?
Doris Salcedo
- Framing narrative around the work – positive way of engaging with negative socio-hostorical values
- Exposing a fracture in modernity itself – literal translation of…
- **noble sentiments but how is the crack itself such a literal translation…is all assumptions around it just empty rhetoric
Clement Greenberg rhetoric:
How the Avant-Garde have moved away from radical politics in general, observed them and put them into the works of art themselves
Avant Garde and Kitsch:
- Wanted to elevate the masses to higher pedestal of art and now lower art to the taste of the lovely masses
- Kitsch = the popular = Kitsch culture
- work does it own job f=of trying to find its own critical value
Art has to keep itself from decaying, resist the commercial (kitsch) which is essentially a raw simulation of culture
Avant-Garde
Art copying/emulating (every other) empty art rhetoric – everyone has been seen before!
How can art have ay value when there is so much of it?
Duchamp – Fountain, 1917/1964
Failure creates space and then opens up that very space that other artists can then use
***The Perverts Guide to Ideology
John Carpenter – They Live (1988)
Christian Boltanski
The Swiss Dead
- ‘The Culture Industry’ – Everywhere and inescapable, money orientated and reproducing the order of things by perpetuating itself
- Order from the top-down (riling classes) – reproduced by culture by the rich and powerful that is reproduced and disseminated.
- In music, movies, opera, culture, art, high literature – inescapability
Can art resist such things?
Foster/Adorno:
- A struggle to understand the work – the work must make itself difficult and hard to understand, thereby slowing down ‘The Cultural Industry’
- Autonomous artwork and the committed artwork
- Committed Art – tires to engage with social reality and show the violence and suffering of the world (memorialisation). No, instead it allows allows user/artist/audience to participate with the culture that made the suffering possible in a form of entertainment in a form of entrainment of the image of sufering.
- Resistance from a difficult of/in understanding the objects form
- Autonomous Art – potential sign of resistance of the the forces and interested of ‘The Cultural Industry’
High brown can only be seen as a distraction for sentiment:
Stylisations are the appearance of form appealing – committed art appears to oppose art but could not be more apart of it. Only leads to the degradation of the sentiment
When a work is merely itself and no longer a thing, it becomes bad art. It instead needs to provide a critique of itself (Adorno)
Form as socio-political rather hone just conveying a message – sign of the Committed Work
Art with a message as a collusion in all that it seeks to oppose
The artist function is to question their own position in the world they work, every assumption should be questioned. So to must their artwork and its position own the art world.
Maybe the new function of the ‘gallery’ is the it just allows you to escape…it is just distraction. The work is just ‘distraction’