Page 38 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 38
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
artists were neglected or condemned until they were dead and their
works could be separated from their creators’ intentions and treat-
ed as impersonal commodities (Berger, 1965: pp. 203/204).
The cultural ideology that probably serves well to what is increasing-
ly labelled as the “tourism industry” – and one cannot really blame it too
much for this – can be comprehended as a sanctuary for everything from
artists’ narcissism to what is considered the “taste”. This supposedly distin-
guishes class from masses, high from lowbrow, the West from the rest, and
“us” from “them”. This ideology is quite transparently based on a projec-
tion into the past, in which a construction of a world, in which “true values”
were respected, is the central invented idea. As we know this imaginary
world of “true art” is attached to the time of romanticism, which is also the
time of the peak of aesthetics as a philosophic discipline. As Berger persua-
sively argued, such a “world” actually never existed.
Let us then return to the problem of the so-called “falling barriers”.
The meaning of this term in the text, that we are trying to decipher more
closely, consists of two (possible) aspects: the first meaning refers to break-
ing through barriers by artists and/or their works. We may connect this
meaning to Immanuel Kant‘s rule of genius, which operates outside of spe-
cific rules (Kant, 1997, §46). In a different language and a different context
of modernity, we are talking here about inventions, about new ideas and
things, exhibitions and performances.1 The other aspect concerns barriers
between fine and commercial art. The difficulty, which we found in distin-
guishing between them, can be taken as an indication that the phrase about
the “barriers that have fallen” refers to something like this. No matter what
the writers “really meant”, we may ask here whether there is an overlapping
between both meanings. The answer most definitely is that there is such
overlapping, before, within, and after the period, which is the object of the
book Art Without Boundaries, but in the period between 1950 – 1970 such
an intersecting is especially obvious. As much as one could agree or disa-
gree with the authors’ selection of over the apparently most representative
1 “Essentialists” would claim that these inventions and the genius behind it are
somehow “god given” and, therefore, they cannot pass un-recognized. However, in
the period of modernity inventions in different arts that often break a wide range of
rules and defy social and moral conventions, become, in such a view, questionable
as products of a “genius”. The essentialist approach, therefore, must succumb to
the very traditional idea of art and in its normally (but not as a rule) conservative
discourse tries to set the cannon as determining the limits of the artistic expression,
which qualifies to be recognized as such.
36
artists were neglected or condemned until they were dead and their
works could be separated from their creators’ intentions and treat-
ed as impersonal commodities (Berger, 1965: pp. 203/204).
The cultural ideology that probably serves well to what is increasing-
ly labelled as the “tourism industry” – and one cannot really blame it too
much for this – can be comprehended as a sanctuary for everything from
artists’ narcissism to what is considered the “taste”. This supposedly distin-
guishes class from masses, high from lowbrow, the West from the rest, and
“us” from “them”. This ideology is quite transparently based on a projec-
tion into the past, in which a construction of a world, in which “true values”
were respected, is the central invented idea. As we know this imaginary
world of “true art” is attached to the time of romanticism, which is also the
time of the peak of aesthetics as a philosophic discipline. As Berger persua-
sively argued, such a “world” actually never existed.
Let us then return to the problem of the so-called “falling barriers”.
The meaning of this term in the text, that we are trying to decipher more
closely, consists of two (possible) aspects: the first meaning refers to break-
ing through barriers by artists and/or their works. We may connect this
meaning to Immanuel Kant‘s rule of genius, which operates outside of spe-
cific rules (Kant, 1997, §46). In a different language and a different context
of modernity, we are talking here about inventions, about new ideas and
things, exhibitions and performances.1 The other aspect concerns barriers
between fine and commercial art. The difficulty, which we found in distin-
guishing between them, can be taken as an indication that the phrase about
the “barriers that have fallen” refers to something like this. No matter what
the writers “really meant”, we may ask here whether there is an overlapping
between both meanings. The answer most definitely is that there is such
overlapping, before, within, and after the period, which is the object of the
book Art Without Boundaries, but in the period between 1950 – 1970 such
an intersecting is especially obvious. As much as one could agree or disa-
gree with the authors’ selection of over the apparently most representative
1 “Essentialists” would claim that these inventions and the genius behind it are
somehow “god given” and, therefore, they cannot pass un-recognized. However, in
the period of modernity inventions in different arts that often break a wide range of
rules and defy social and moral conventions, become, in such a view, questionable
as products of a “genius”. The essentialist approach, therefore, must succumb to
the very traditional idea of art and in its normally (but not as a rule) conservative
discourse tries to set the cannon as determining the limits of the artistic expression,
which qualifies to be recognized as such.
36
