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So, my remixing class is starting off with a bunch of modern/post-modern art theory essays, and it's...well. See for yourself:
"What I have been calling the fiction of the originary status of the picture surface is what art criticism proudly names the opacity of the modernist picture plane, only in so terming it, the critiic does not think of this opacity as fictitious. Within the discursive space of modernist art, the putative opacity of the pictorial field must be maintained as a fundamental concept. For it is the bedrock on whic a whole structure of related terms can be built. All those terms - singularity, authenticity, uniqueness, originality, original - depend on the originary moment of which this surface is both the empirical and the semiological instance. If modernism's domain of pleasure is the space of auto-referentiality, this pleasure dome is erected on the semiological possibility of the pictorial sign as nonrepresentational and nontransparent, so that the signified becomes the redundant condition of a reified signifier. But from our perspective, the one from which we see that the signifier cannot be reified; that its objecthood, its quiddity, is only a fiction; that every signifier is itself the transparent signified of an already-given decision to carve it out as the vehicle of a sign - from this perspective there is no opacity, but only a transparency that opens onto a dizzying fall into a bottomless system of reduplication." [Rosalind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant Garde"]
I've read this paragraph four times, and I still can't parse what the hell she is on about, except that it has something to do with Duchamp and photographic reproduction. You win, art theory. I thought literary criticism was bad (Sturgeon's Corollary of Academic Discourse - 10% of it is engaging/interesting/relevant, the other 90% is nonsense and intellectual masturbation), but we've got nothing on this. This is critical technobabble raised to its highest art form. Somewhere, George Orwell's ghost is crying.
On the other hand, this essay by Jonathan Latham on intellectual property presents an interesting ethical model for artists in the internet era. Nothing fandom hasn't argued vociferously before, but well-stated, and something I'd like to see more professionals advocating.
"What I have been calling the fiction of the originary status of the picture surface is what art criticism proudly names the opacity of the modernist picture plane, only in so terming it, the critiic does not think of this opacity as fictitious. Within the discursive space of modernist art, the putative opacity of the pictorial field must be maintained as a fundamental concept. For it is the bedrock on whic a whole structure of related terms can be built. All those terms - singularity, authenticity, uniqueness, originality, original - depend on the originary moment of which this surface is both the empirical and the semiological instance. If modernism's domain of pleasure is the space of auto-referentiality, this pleasure dome is erected on the semiological possibility of the pictorial sign as nonrepresentational and nontransparent, so that the signified becomes the redundant condition of a reified signifier. But from our perspective, the one from which we see that the signifier cannot be reified; that its objecthood, its quiddity, is only a fiction; that every signifier is itself the transparent signified of an already-given decision to carve it out as the vehicle of a sign - from this perspective there is no opacity, but only a transparency that opens onto a dizzying fall into a bottomless system of reduplication." [Rosalind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant Garde"]
I've read this paragraph four times, and I still can't parse what the hell she is on about, except that it has something to do with Duchamp and photographic reproduction. You win, art theory. I thought literary criticism was bad (Sturgeon's Corollary of Academic Discourse - 10% of it is engaging/interesting/relevant, the other 90% is nonsense and intellectual masturbation), but we've got nothing on this. This is critical technobabble raised to its highest art form. Somewhere, George Orwell's ghost is crying.
On the other hand, this essay by Jonathan Latham on intellectual property presents an interesting ethical model for artists in the internet era. Nothing fandom hasn't argued vociferously before, but well-stated, and something I'd like to see more professionals advocating.