[rangerone314]

I was reading up on various performance art, and it occured to me that a lot of avant-garde art is about shock value, to get an emotional reaction or doing some thing that hasn't been done before for the sake of doing something new.

Then I thought of popular culture, something some artists disdain.

Then I thought of how in popular culture, TV and movies are constantly trying to push the limits, in terms of sex, violence, believability.

And it occured to me that avant garde art is not much different than mainstream culture.

Thoughts?

[rangerone314]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'I')t's all about getting attention and feeling human. I believe most people, down deep, understand they are just cogs in a wheel. Industrial machine parts. It makes you feel good for a while to be part of something real, a rebellion against conformity.

[pablonite]

You might like this article...
http://www.xurban.net/notion/art_politics.htm
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')rt is politics. It is political as opposed to politics as management (ie. of state), a profession, a power play, manipulation or propaganda. As a matter of existence, art aims at the political as the ultimate means of emancipation, absolute freedom from commodification, if such is still possible. Art is a critical necessity as long as it fights being a part of the spectacle, as it aims to turn the spectacle upside down, as it exposes the 'culture industry.'

The crisis of art and with it the artist in the 'center' (West) stems from the impossibility of politics as such, within the captured psyche of the consumer culture...

...Once the dust is settled and the hype is over, and the commercialization of the cyberspace is complete, the second wave of the telematic revolution should aim at the politicizing of the web via truly artistic means. Referring back to Adorno, if the technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers; and to abolish the difference to an absolute in the sense that nothing different survives, then the resistence is to find its path through the counter-flow of the information technologies, crisscrossing the popular media on the way in order to gather the momentum to overturn the tide. The inverse flow is where the collectivity finds its expression of being simply political, different.

[Ludi]

As a professional and amateur artist, I don't spend much time worrying about "What is ART."

[efarmer]

Masturbating hidden under a slanted platform and announcing fantasies on a loudspeaker
is politics and not art, and is so common, why would you buy a ticket to attend?