Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This traffic in ambiguity has been built into the art world as a whole style of relating, a style of casting doubt. This style is a slippery thing--you can't attack something that uses ambiguity as its Catch-22. The rejected artist was playing a practical joke; the successful artist affects ambivalent seriousness. Having been involved, you don't want to call it nonsense; having seen through the gag you don't want to call it art. Or say you don't find it funny, so you look for political allegory; but you find that far-fetched...
...find it everywhere--thought was relative, logic false, final truth non-existent, morality but a plague produced by the intelligence, art meaningless. Duchamp's bottle rack read "art is junk" and his urinal "art is a trick." Nothing was real or true except the individual pursuing his whim, the artist bestriding his Dada. Dada overturned any object, mocked it and displaced it as an experiment in apprehending it. Yet beneath the Dadaist irony lay a desperate protest. Dada was an act of rebellion against a world believed left in mad hands, a completely mad world. Dada was a labor...
...realm of its own, of art as responsible for bringing about a new existence through a revolution in consciousness, as something to be treasured while it mummifies in museums, as something that can accrue priceless value, or, for that matter, be bought and sold at all, and of the artist as a uniquely gifted individual. Instead the dominant assumptions about art would be that it has nothing to say, art is of no consequence, art is play, art is everywhere and anything that can be tampered with or fetishized, everybody is an artist. "Why," asks John Cage, "is a truck...
...hand in hand with the apotheosis of the new in art came the elevation of the artist to the status of national hero, the rival of TV and movie stars as part of a culture boom that heralded American art as prestigious commodity for export. But the point of these artists was the lack of point...
...real thing--Bergman's The Passion of Anna. Ingmar Bergman is one of Sontag's very favorite directors, and that judgment is much to her credit. But if you happen to see both films in the double bill, you will quickly understand the difference between the original artist and derivative craftsman...