| | Jonathan Lethem describes the postmodern age as a period where artists do away with the "anxiety" that modernism has wrought "across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics,
marketing, imago, and appearance" by tapping new fields (in which "collage" is the nuclear motif) like "futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète,
situationism, pop art, and appropriationism" that prevailed in the 20th century.
He doesn't want to address the 21st century, because he believes the path we've sort of taken in the previous century with surrealism and all the ruin its brought through its prodigality and manipulation of preexisting art, offers really a very few "alternative[s]" but "to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance."
That "tower of irrelevance," I am wondering about, Lethem may attribute to the interdependency that art and commerce share with eachother - that to escape this bind would be "to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance." On the end of the section "The Beauty of Second Use," he writes, "By [artists...attacking the collagists and satirists
and digital samplers] they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to [him] the primary motivation for participating in the world
of culture in the first place: to make the world larger." When he mentions the word "culture," I can't help but to draw the binary of nature versus culture, which would lead me to the question of whether this "ivory tower" he was talking about signifies the nature side of the binary. If an ivory tower is somewhere aloof, where you aren't distracted by the commotion below that must also mean you are alone, at work or in solitary confinement and retreat from the world. Does Lethem mean to say that humans are irrevocably alone, and they need this sort of "commonwealth culture" where they may thrive off of eachother? Is Lethem a propogator of communist ideology? Should his own work be 'isolated and made analyzable,' or would that beautify the second use of his message to much to be reproduced by another?
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| | Posted 11/8/2007 2:59 PM - 38 Views
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