emcadwaladr submitted a post the other day that convinced me to finally check out a work my best friend had been harping on me to read for a while. The Politics of Aesthetics- to put it crudely- plays very broadly with the definition of Aesthetics, and attempts to map the current interplay between art, aesthetic sensibilities and politics (the term "politics," it should be noted, also gets a complete overhaul, meaning more or less the natural social/informational order existing within a truly democratic system rather than a man-made system of political order).
Anyhow, I post it for a few reasons.
A) It speaks, however obliquely, to emcadwaladr's blog post, and serves as an interesting opposing viewpoint- especially in terms of the criticism of "art as an emblem of one's personal or cultural identity," and
A1) I like the idea of responding to a post about the weird, elite insularity of the modern art world (if that's a fair synopsis?) with a work that's almost wholly inscrutable. Seems funny.
Also, B) Both the work itself and the translator's introduction hearken back to an, er, discussion I had with humanodon a few months back. These texts might serve as a nice coda- and one that favor's humanodon's viewpoints over my own- to that friendly chat. So yeah, give 'er a looksee.
Also: I'm serious, this text is dense to the point of absurdity. I had to read it with the help of dictionaries, wikipedia, and a host of reviews- some of which convinced me that even the reviewers didn't know what the fuck Rancier was getting at. Here's one that puts it as succinctly as anybody- worth reading alongside the text.
Thanks for the shoutout. Off the top of my head, I don't remember the precise points that each of us made during our exchange, but I do remember that we were both fairly entrenched in our views. That said, my views are not static and I certainly welcome other viewpoints, even if that means I have to revise my thinking on a particular topic. I haven't checked out emcadwaladr's post yet, but I will check it out and this one too. Do you recommend that one be read before the other?
Read emc's post first- it's way more engaging and might incentivize the dive into Rancier. The blog post doesn't speak as much to what we talked about, but it just so happened in reading the essay + introductions that I noticed a lot of ideas pertinent to your and my discussion. Like I said- Rancier and his translators fall on your side of the fence, which was neat to read in another context. Re. strongly-held views: ain't nothin' wrong with a strongly-held view when it generates healthy debate. I think it's a testament to that back-and-forth we had that I've been thinking about the issue a whole lot since then. (Edit) Scrap that, emc's post has a fair amount to do with that discussion too, now that I re-read it.
I had a quick look at Rancier and quickly decided not to exert the effort of deciphering his prose. I have to care about something a great deal to slog through material like that. Nietzsche and Mill are sometimes worth it to me, but I'll leave knowledge of this one to your thoughtful second hand discussion. Glad I could provide you with a useful polemic.