Through his close reading of both the works themselves and the public response to them, Emmer once more focuses attention on the competing and overlapping attitudes towards kitsch and the way in which it and its semantic cousins remain a viable and valuable resource with which to police the borders that surround the artworld. The buzzing activity of the internet provides much of the raw material for his arguments. Focusing on debates surrounding two visual responses to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Dennis Madalone's 2003 music video for the patriotic anthem 'America We Stand As One' and Jenny Ryan's 'plushie' sculpture, 'Soft 9/11,' Emmer utilizes these debates to reveal the coexisting and competing attitudes towards ostensibly kitschy objects and the contentiousness of deploying kitsch as a term in these debates. Emmer, both revisits and greatly expands upon disputations within the contested territory of kitsch as term and tool in cultural turf-war arsenals. The author would like to express his gratitude to Andrew Boreham for the permission to publish his superb translation. The article was originally written in German to accompany the exhibition, conceived by its author, America! Disney, Rockwell, Pollock, Warhol, to be held at the Bucerius Kunst Forum Hamburg from Octothrough January 12 2020. The aim of this article is to cast some light on the distinction’s historical emergence as a result of cultural interactions between Europe and the US during the 19th and 20th century and to encourage a discussion about its multi-layered meaning. Apparently, then, there is a gap between discursive claims and real-life practices. The more surprising is that the art world’s critical discourse is taking the obsolescence of that distinction for granted. Yet, if fine art had lost its distinctive status entirely, it would become redundant and, indeed, the distinction is still intact within the art world’s common practice: the art market’s business model and the legitimacy of not for profit art institutions depend on it. From the 1960s, the distinction between commercial and fine art, usually expressed as ‘low’ and ‘high’ art, has been regarded as obsolete, and in that same process cultural expertise has lost its authority and was replaced by the cultural power of media corporations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |