aesthetics after art

thinking about em's new piece and the debate on poptimism that prompted it. for me one reason why the high / low art distinction is hard to imagine remaking is that high art itself was partly responsible for erasing it. the futurist assertion that a racecar is more beautiful than the victory of samothrace, the dada and surrealist arguments that art must be destroyed so everyday life could be remade in the image of the same freedom - i think it's completely true to say that despite these claims, the idea of "art" occupied an invisible place of distinction in even the most iconoclastic modernist thought, was never identified completely with "culture" in general. but the strongest claims of these movements survived past them - the heirs of that negation, the henry flynts and jean debuffets, spent years carefully sawing through any remaining special claims that the idea of a high culture was reliant on. to me poptimism begins with paul morley's ZTT, the new pop label named for a futurist sound poem and dedicated, in the most "serious", theory-laden way, to entryist chart success over subculture marginalism. which is not to say i buy into that, either - morley's role as official hype-man and theorist-svengali now feels like a depressing bridge between malcolm mclaren and the likes of shingy or doctor luke.... despite this there's still a lingering sense that to reestablish the category of "high art" is to betray that category absolutely, to existinguish whatever it is that keeps this work from sinking into the museum of dead forms.

em's piece points out the disspiriting way that "there's creativity everywhere~" tends to mean in practice that "it's creativity to get a job copywriting soft drink advertisements~". which also makes me think... to me one of the strangest tendencies of the last decade is that: everyone talks about labour, but the distinction of "alienated" labour never seems to come up. and i get it, because it seems hopelessly naive as a claim when the very idea of unalienated labour is so often used as the prescription for unpaid overtime. "do what you love." it's hard to hear after a while without reflexively looking for the stapler being thrown at some intern's head. and the dynamic goes both ways - if writing advertisements is an "art" then is "art" just writing different kinds of advertisement?

it's as hard to locate unalienated work as it is to identify freedom in an unfree world. when every moment of freedom is conditioned and shaped by invisible limits - does believing it it at all just make you a mark? and yet as theoretically groundless as it may be it's hard not to feel like there is indeed some distinction between the labour of telling a bedtime story and the labour of working in a foxconn plant.

"non alienated life" is i think less a political idea than an aesthetic one - an idea from schiller and the romantics, fourier and the utopians. perhaps that's why it feels kind of embarrassing to talk about, when even the aesthetic content of a work of art feels sort of shadier and less legitimate to talk about than things like sales figures and other abstract bogeys of significance. in both cases there's a sense of furtiveness about simply wanting something, and a desire to launder that desire through more impassive seeming shapes. well, you know, i wouldn't have said anything, but since THEY want it...

my own feeling as well is that the modernist dismissal of art is itself a secret fidelity to the aesthetic, to the swift movements of pleasure and surprise, interest and disinterest that tend to outpace the claims of any particular tradition. it's not exactly the case that we lack "the aesthetic"- it lives on as a kind of sludgy, circulating lymph of public life and discourse: moodboards, image macros, gifs of the guy in the office making a face... maybe what seems missing to me is any sense that the pond slime of our own preferences could mean anything, could act as any counterweight to the heap of graven images we find ourselves saddled with. maybe against a "poptimism without pleasure", we need a "pleasure without pop"?