[tar-ancalime]

Following Louis Althusser strictly -- we are junk since in a consumerist culture you are, well, what you eat. . .or what is fed to you.

We are all of us the "them" that imprison each of us individually. As such we cannot produce any kind of art that is not an expression of what we have made ourselves to be in order to find existence within the ISAs that we've built to order our existence. Freedom from these is a dream.

But I think we've got a skewed perspective on the "junk" that sometimes passes for art. There is this idea that our current society, our market, or some other modern institution targeted for finger-wagging is somehow responsible for what seems like a glut of appalling art. But while self-flagellation and finger-pointing can be fun, when we go in for this sort of thing we're forgetting something important: there has always been bad art. Picasso wasn't the only painter in Paris; but today we value his art over many of those who were around him because time has shown it to be superior (note that I'm postulating its superiority and neatly evading the question of what makes it so). The art that has come down to us from past eras (not that Picasso's era was all that long ago) has been distilled through time, with only that art judged valuable being preserved. Thus, almost all of the works of art (whether paintings, novels, symphonies, etc.) we know from past eras are, if not great, at least well-made in one or more aspects. The bad art simply hasn't survived--we don't know the works of the worst Renaissance writers because no one bothered to copy their manuscripts. The parchment they were written on was reused or destroyed. Simply put, no one cared enough to preserve them.

So in our present era, we're still surrounded by all of the bad art of our own time. The good art has not yet risen above it. The difference, of course, is the variety of media and the vast dissemination in comparison with earlier eras. A bad book, in times past, would have reached a relatively small audience compared with a bad blockbuster movie today. However, in the long view, I'm sure that the good art of our own era will be remembered and treasured by past generations in much the same way that we remember and treasure the very best art of the eras that preceded us.