The Artist at His Rightful Place At Last

 

                                    The Artist at His Rightful Place At Last

How do we evaluate a culture? By its fruits you shall know them? Are the economic buds really the reflection of its roots? Is simple survival the criterion, as claimed by some?

A culture's art might be promising; we feel we have an idea of the ancient Greeks and their world through their art. We can imagine the average fieldhand standing in Athens with wide eyes before the Parthanon or The Artemision Bronze. What, for example, does modern art have to say to the average guy? Is Pollock or John Cage our culture's ambassador to the future?

“...a performative model of subject formation cannot be thought apart from its implication in regulatory practices operating within discursive regimes that circumscribe the ‘materiality’ of the subject through the citationality of norms.”

“The foreclosure of the performative in the Victorian novel is thus the condition of possibility of its disciplined re-emergence as the illocutionary hallucination of the performative as a material event of subjectivity that emerges in a discursive nexus that can be generally named ‘impersonation.’ ”

These quotes are from a book published by the University of Michigan Press about “the novel.” They read like a physics paper. From the Greeks through Shakespeare through the transcendentalists to Hemmingway, the hallmark of literature has been its approachability, the accessibility of the word to people it was felt to benefit. Clearly, those days are gone. Literature is now obscure. Inbred. Unapproachable. And most important, elite. The only thing absent is acronyms.

What, if anything, does that mean about us?