The training was professional, and so was the work it produced. Expertise—or, in the mantra of the graduate programs, “technique”—not inspiration or tradition, became the currency of aesthetic authority.
Professionalism represents a compromise formation, midway between the sacred and the secular. A profession is not a vocation, in the older sense of a “calling,” but it also isn’t just a job; something of the priestly clings to it. Against the values of the market, the artist, like other professionals, maintained a countervailing set of standards and ideals—beauty, rigor, truth—inherited from the previous paradigm. Institutions served to mediate the difference, to cushion artists, ideologically, economically, and psychologically, from the full force of the marketplace.
In the arts, as throughout the middle class, the professional is giving way to the entrepreneur...
The institutions that have undergirded the existing system are contracting or disintegrating. Professors are becoming adjuncts. Employees are becoming independent contractors (or unpaid interns)...
Coleridge, for Wordsworth, was not a contact; he was a partner, a comrade, a second self.
What we see in the new paradigm—in both the artist’s external relationships and her internal creative capacity—is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth...but rather many shifting interests and directions as the winds of market forces blow you here or there...
taste must be developed by a long exposure,...Prizes belong to the age of professionals. All we’ll need to measure merit soon is the best-seller list...
an experience, what’s more, after the contemporary fashion: networked, curated, publicized, fetishized, tweeted, catered, and anything but solitary, anything but private...
---William Deresiewicz.
~~ ~~
Old patterns, barely discerned, continue their after-life in the deep recesses of our minds, like a distant memory brought to the surface by some chance word, some exactness about the quality of the light, though we cannot name it, put our finger on it (is touch our first, our best sense of contact with what is real, which is to say, with something that is other than a mirror? The hands in Rembrandt's Jewish Bride, for example).
Saturday afternoons and the usual tussle over who will get to watch the box. Ubo, rushing upstairs to catch a glimpse of the wrestlers whose personalities he had over time come to believe could be understand by some special insight. Some old, universal gesture or familiar grimace of the face, the world-weary trudging back to their corner, all these were signs that he could comprehend or that reminded him of the old-world (some of his family had been wrestlers). He'd read into the fate of his favourites not the chicanery of the entertainment industry but the vagaries of life itself, as if the wounded were ancient heroes, resilient or malicious, their success and triumphs a vindication of why we came to this bloody country in the place!
And the dougal, dreamily watching the old black and white romances with their brilliant, sharp dialogues, their simple, eternal stories.
And you, of course, out of everyone's way, behind the sofa, where the long windows in this corner house either looked out onto the relatively new and open main street or to the older, darker, back street with its private lives and links to old Wales and the old way of life.It was on the latter that you once saw-perhaps for the last time-the old rag-and-bone man in his cart, one of a number of a dying breed. You'd sit there and catch the latest scores on the radio, follow the excited voices, knowing that everything could change in seconds. Even the dull passages of play were quietly reassuring. Lots of the time you wanted nothing to happen. Buckle down, resist any expansiveness, quietly see it through to the end, past the high times.
No comments:
Post a Comment