Artful Dodgers

Professor J,

As is so often the case, scattered pieces of information come together to reflect back to us just how closely we are following perilous patterns that we've already seen played out on the pages of history. A few posts back I referred to the rise of a passion for crafts of all kinds and how that industry has exploded over the past few years. Arnold Toynbee outlined how the chasm  between the elites and the rest of the culture grows over time, exponentially near the end. During the Gilded Age we still found wealthy women engaging in the same kinds of handicrafts as women in the lower classes. They were doing this even though for them it wasn't a necessity but offered only intrinsic value. Today, we are very unlikely to see wealthy women (magazines and reality television now provide us with all the glossy details of their lives) engage in such things.


We are putting ourselves in nearly the same situation as the Romans. We've had a vast cultural heritage. But we have done our best to abandon that culture at home and abroad possibly losing knowledge that might make it easier to recover from a worst case scenario future. Gone with that knowledge are the traditions and spirit of community that centered around the skills needed to make things and the handing off of those skills from one generation to the next.

It's been replaced by the bonding of shopping and sports. Skills that will not serve us well in the future. We are seeing, thanks to a variety of factors, a resurgence of interest in doing, making, growing, things ones self. I think people have realized just how dependent they've become and with that comes the nagging fear of helplessness and an uncomfortable level of dependency.

Hedges writes, "Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not." quoting Wolin on p. 149. Not only do they determine whose ideas, thoughts, and opinions get a public voice, but also whose taste and style set the standard of conspicuous consumption which the rest of the culture, even the poor, try to emulate. Constant advertising and celebrity worship keeps many grasping for the elusive brass ring of status, though it's more likely to be in the form of a luxury car or designer bag. We are chained to those flickering images on the cave even when they are enslaving us in debt.


Often times those masters of conspicuous consumption put their lack of respect for history and culture on display as in the recent story from 60 Minutes, Even in Tough Times Contemporary Art Sells, about the 1%  and their love of voguish art. It made an interesting comparison to the critics of Thomas Kinkade whose opinions were often published this week in articles about his death. His work represented a world (however inaccurate in its nostalgia) that people felt they could understand and that they found comforting. In complex and uncertain times it only makes sense that art representing a more understandable world would appeal to the general population. It stands in stark contrast to the contemporary art being hailed as visionary (and I'll agree some of it is) by the elites who seem intent on detaching everything and everyone from the past. What art is, and what makes it good is subjective. Modern art often has something to say, but the pieces represented in Morley Safer's story seem to represent an unmooring from any kind of anchoring traditional standards.

I am honestly not trying to drag you too far off course! But  all things are connected (at least in my feminine brain) and current things must be noted as they occur. ;)