"Alternative" art first caught my attention a couple of years ago when I visited a small gallery in London that exhibited shit work - literally I mean: sculptures, a lot of them, made by what I recall being a Spanish or South American artist who employs faecis and turn them into art objects. Then there was a dog by the same artist, whom he let die of starvation while calling the process "modern art".

***

The Tate has just bought some William Blake hand-made pictures. The inscription for one of them, depicting a naked man clasping his head in pain as he is consumed by flames, reads: "I sought Pleasure & found Pain." My thought exactly every morning when I go to work; I wonder if I also look the same. The museum paid £441m for these pieces.



Sunday, 24 January 2010

"What Good Are The Arts?" Chapter 2


Is high art superior?

Dissanayake's theory: we have Stone Age minds and needs that contemporary life cannot satisfy; we are lonely. Popular art is receptive and accessible so seeks to restore the cohesion of the primitive hunter-gatherer group. The violence and sensationalism are answers to biological imperatives, a need for novelty and excitement, to evade monotony. p 36

Noel Carrol, A Philosophy of Mass Art: mass art is made and distributed by means of mass technology, for mass consumption, and this is the most pervasive form of aesthetic experience for the largest numbers of people from all classes, races and walks of lives. p 45

With reference to Shakespeare's plays "The fact that they were once popular art, despised by intellectuals, but are now high art, itself suggests that the differences between high and popular art are not intrinsic but culturally constructed."

p. 63
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