One of the cool things about the recent flurry of blog talk in the mags and online is to discover new bloggers to add to my bookmarks:
Dan at IconoDuel
He begins with this in a recent post:
I recently digested SAIC art history smarty James Elkins' What Happened to Art Criticism? from Prickly Paradigm Press, a problematic and at times messy essay (but one that is also thought provoking and often dead right). Of particular interest to me was Elkins' refutation of several proposed solutions to contemporary art criticism's woes.
It was worth reading to the end of his blogpost, this finale:
So it appears that, if I can hazard a bit of commentary at the end here, the attractiveness of detached description extends to the critique of criticism (and, for that matter, to that critical criticism's wholesale regurgitation on some jerk's weblog).
This seems wholly appropriate as, at a point in the ebb and flow of the history of a discourse at which we encounter the sort of knowing self-awareness that now characterizes our discourse (by virtue of triumphs both theoretical and historical), the reserved, descriptive passivity of the reception history has become normative and virtually inescapable. Equally inevitable is the paralyzation of judgment that follows, where we anticipate our judgments' failings even before we utter a word.
Likewise for contemporary art where, in the shadow of a "golden age" and as aware of our predecessors' faults as we are of our own, only a hubristic fool would aspire to the heights they once eyed. The way "out" is not to be found through more theorization or through critical refinement. Self-conscious theorization is precisely what led us here. (Not to be too fatalistic.)
Pretty good stuff.
So I go immediately to Dan's first blogpost, and again there is too much, too good to snip a paragraph from, so I once more jump to his final paragraph (which is an injustice since there are twelve excellent ones that preceeded it. But here goes:
And indeed my interests are ultimately bound to the aesthetic, something which I might define provisionally as that portion of our experience of image, text and world alike which is sensuous in the most positive sense of the word, deep in the flesh of feeling and whose objects are those dense and inexhaustible texts which are neither separable from context nor reducible to it, amenable to exegeses but always exceeding description. The aesthetic experience is that mode (or portion) of all thought and feeling to which experience itself is fundamental. It is in fact at the very heart of experience and is what allows one to hear the continuing echoes of "a voice unutterable, and very mournful, but inarticulate, insomuch that it seemed to have come from the Light"?that voice of the Light heard at the birth of the divine Logos. And it is left to us to give that word Flesh.
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