art: politics & value

Their definition of culture was dominated by two large facts. First, cultural alternatives were now multiple, not vertically ranked; they spread across a field of choice generated by mass production and machine reproduction, and did not rise from the corner sweetshop to the Athenaeum Club. Second, books and painting were no longer socially dominant

An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent,

Fifty years ago, junk was junk, not “antiques” or “collectibles.” Almost anything could be had at the Flea Market for virtually nothing. It was like the unconscious mind of Capitalism itself: it contained the rejected or repressed surplus of objects, the losers, the outcast thoughts. There, in a real place, the sewing machine met the umbrella on

Mass media took away the political speech of art. When Picasso painted Guernica, regular TV broadcasting had been in existence for only a year in England and nobody in France, except a few electronics experts, had seen a television set.

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks only to please and amuse, and succeeds?

We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his

In our time, this cult is fed by corporate gold-and-masterpiece shows,

Only a tiny number of people today try to draw what they have seen or what has happened to them, compared to the hordes of those for whom the camera is an everyday tool.

so that the art experience is replaced by the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital.