Is Art a ceremonial engagement with the commodified atrophications of a precisely mystified & valorised “creative impulse”, a “creativity”, an “artistry”?
I haven’t read Kant on aesthetics, but could this commerce in signatured trophies hovering around
galleries, museums & other “fine arts” media, desperately trying to stage the Sublime, be nothing more than a profitable shrine to a monolithic myth of creativity, ultimately configured by religious figures of contemplation, even more so when “atheistic”? A culture of endless & involuted classification: a functional mechanics of “emotion”:, ad hoc cartographies of “soul”, “body”, “the (in)human”: is this aesthetic exploration, or the deep conditioning of entrainment?
Is the carefully crafted agenda of aesthetic legitimation, & all its “institutions”, itself a “work of art”: a vast installation of irony that masks & maintains a primal alienation: the exquisite circulation of an ancient anxiety that was always produced, signed, sealed & delivered: the export of scenarios of fear, the import of unease: are such ministrations of calculated empathy the rhythms of an age that no longer knows how to represent itself. Trapped in self-consumption, a self-reflexive burning of its own history on the stages of Debord’s spectacular society, an age bereft of any stable self-image, because it is now purely an industry of the oneiric, a shuttling commerce of nightmares & dreams…
“Andrew Haase: Often you respond to questions with Kostabisms: “Take the
‘L’ out of PLAY,“” “Take the ‘R’ out of FREE,“ “Paintings are doorways
into collectors’ homes,“‘ “Say less and say yes.“ When interviewers
continue to ask the same questions why change the
answers? These aphorisms seem to be designed to protect Kostabi
from criticism while insuring product recognition in the future. Do
you feel image-production through repetition is a useful marketing
tool?”
(“Rituals of Estheticized Recommodification (An Interview with Mark Kostabi)”: September 9, 1988: p.22)
“Andrew Haase: Kostabi becomes a function‘of the marketplace in an advanced
capitalist society which demands an institutionalized artist while
simultaneously proclaiming the liquidation of the artistic institution.
Both museums and galleries have become not only notches on a
resume, not simply advertising tools, but zones of mass indoctrination
and stream-lined distribution centers for re-processed images
of body, psyche and pocket-book. Not without masochistic pleasure
do we invite Kostabi Inc. to tattoo us with the numbers of our
estheticized recommodification. But how does it feel to be on the
other side of the needle?”
(“Rituals of Estheticized Recommodification (An Interview with Mark Kostabi)”: September 9, 1988: p.20)
“The word people lead the brush people.” Mark Kostabi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kostabi
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/mark-kostabi-con-artist-tribeca-film-fest/