Re: <documenta X><blast> visual commodity
Jaakko Hucklebee (jessec@zipnet.net)
Thu, 10 Jul 1997 11:06:26 -0400
Just sort of off the cuff...
An old stray dog or a ruff maveric exists as artist architype. He isn't
a young pup without workable knowledge of the sexy chicanery needed to
sell his art as commodity. His ignorance of survival skills is more
genuine, a tragic-hero type. He doesn't know how to sell off nor sell
off a spin-off because he experiences life as an unknown. The unknown
is the mystery, as most of what exists exists mysteriously, as art it
is mystic, a metaphysical mysticism. The not knowing of the self is the
not knowing of the system. He genuinely does not fit in and seems to
be a fool when he tries to fit his art into the mold of success.
The art that has become commodity is not indifferent to this unknown.
The capitalistic society has a stake in its prior investments. The
old art, as always, is against the old dog. The paranoia is rational.
This "against" is the old mimesis, the mirror, the representation, the
imitation Plato tried to avoid and Hegel held to be less than the Truth.
Others do onto you as you do onto them. War is a mirror of hate. Thus
the mass media appropriates the technique of mass production.
The mass media artist reflects the mass media and exists in that mode.
The Internet can shatter this mass production of art as commodity, as a
common mentality. Originally, the Mona Lisa was financed by one man.
Now it exists as a mass media commodity centering an international
tourist attraction. The one man or woman can again be like the one
man who financed the Mona Lisa by using a personal computer rather
than a TV or a mass market journal to support an artist. And the artist
will only need ten, or less, buyers. The artist will not need to be a
mass market commodity in order to survive. Without the mirror, without
memitic revenge, without commodification, the visual art is not a visual
commodity. As Robert Browning and then Mies van der Rohe said, "Less is
more." And we may add, also, that the more of this we see, the more. We
have at our disposal the technology to end art as commodity! By being
the stray, the old dog, we become less than the sexy commodity in terms
of the mass market. The paradox, autopoetic, is that this is more
artistic as it deals with a more fundamental unknown or some of the so
much that is unknown. For only the bigot claims to know it all.
--
?_