That's right. I think our idea of 'art' is very artifical, finding its basis in more general principles of specialization that have a really corrosive effect on our lives. Think of a carpenter and a composer (or painter) living in the Baroque or medieval period, for example. There actually wasn't a whole lot of difference between what these two craftsmen (craftspeople) did. In their work, they exercised creativity, autonomy, self-expression and skill. They planned the work out from beginning to end, performed just about all of it themselves, and did their best to make sure it was the highest quality they could produce, learning and gaining skill with everything they made -- all in all, they investing a little bit of themselves in everything they produced. But at some point art separated completely from craft, ordinary work, and ordinary life, and we evacuated all of the creativity and spirit out of the ordinary things we do, leaving art as some sort of sacred, magical thing that only 5% of the population ('artists') get to do, or that the rest of us get to do it with 5% of our time (a 'hobby')... the rest of the time our work and what we do leaves us no space for creativity, autonomy, self-expression, etc. Lame.
What I'm trying to say is that the way you made music and made a chair was basically the same before the Industrial Revolution (which relied on an extreme division of labour) ... the maker would get to exercise quite a bit of bit of creativity, autonomy, and skill. Today, most chairs are made by factory workers who are left bereft of such things. Their work is repetitive, boring, uncreative, fragmentary (a worker contributes only one tiny action to the creation of a chair), and entirely determined by others above them. The ideal worker is a pre-programmed drone.
In a lot of ways, the modern divinization of art is an attempt to retreat and escape from the effects of industrialism, but paradoxically, all it does is support the dehumanization of work by saying that creativity, independence, and self-expression is reserved for 'artistic' activities. The pursuit of 'pure art,' 'art for art's sake,' often involving an indifference bordering on antagonism to any potential audience ('I don't write/paint/create for people, it's just for me, and the more people I offend the better' -- the cult of the maverick, revolutionary artist) seeks to remove these values even farther -- as far as possible -- from ordinary life.
(And for the record, there is no such thing as 'pure' art. All art is functional. Even the most abstract art of art serves the function of reinforcing certain values, and delineating social groupings -- at the very least, between those who 'get it' and those who don't. 'Coincidentally' those who 'get it' tend to be the economically priveledged and well-educated).
Sunday, November 16, 2008
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My friend Will Staunton e-mailed me the following comment after a blogger automatic update turned off commenting. (I love it when automatic updates screw with your settings). Anyways, here it is:
ReplyDeleteI think Tin Pan Alley would be an interesting case study along those lines of thinking. I think that art (and by that I'm just referring to music right now) followed the same path as carpentry, to a certain degree. That kind of mechanical, crank-em-out songwriting process is closer to factory work than the creation of sacred art. Also, I think that a composer that sees himself as really "artistic" would look down on a TPA composer in the same way that a master woodworker would look down on IKEA.
It always seems to circle back to definitions though, when you're dealing with something as broad as "art". Undefinable as it may be, could you say a TPA composer is more artistic than a factory worker who exercises the same amount of creative control over his product? (An unlikely equivalent, I agree.)
I suppose the ideal TPA composer is creative, though.
I hope you follow where I'm headed with this, because I'm not sure I do myself.
Will