Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture

How to Tell the Difference between Life and Art: A Grant Proposal (Take 1)

How to Tell the Difference between Life and Art A Grant Proposal (Take 1) .0 This is a request for funding in order to develop a new interface for poetry and culture, tentatively entitled Industrial Poetics. This interface will require a no-holds-barred engagement. .1 There are times when one must permit certain words or concepts to operate in the absence of hard-and-fast definition. This is one of those times. .2 Art is not the guy or gal next door. The guy or gal next door may very well lead a happy and carefree life in the short term in the absence of artistic provocation. The guy or gal next door may very well lead a lonely and impoverished life in the long term in the absence of artistic provocation. (1) Will they know it? (2) And who’s to say? .3 Art is a judgment call. Today we can rely neither on connoisseurs of taste nor eternal verities to make that judgment call for us. But if you have do-it-yourself art, you must have do-it-yourself criticism. The function of do-it-yourself criticism at the present time is to foster the production of better art at the present time. By “better art” is meant art whose purpose ultimately is to transform the social domain for the better. Art may serve this purpose in perverse or contingent ways— one can never be certain. Such is the nature of social circuits. .4 Careful readers will be sure to note that I hedge for the moment on the word better. .5 Taste? OK, so here’s what I have to say about taste: Winston tastes good, like a [two beats] cigarette should. .6 At any given instant, life demonstrates art’s convictions. At any given instant, art exceeds life’s demonstrations. .7 Answers: (1) Believe it or not, people are often aware that their lives are lonely and impoverished. They just don’t know what to do about it. (2) Passing judgment is something most of us do most of the time, and we’d do it better if we gave some thought as to how we ourselves are implicated in our judgments and assumptions, why we think the way we do. Trying to avoid the difficult work of judgment—aesthetic, aesthetic-ideological, what have you—has become a means of avoiding responsibility for thoughtful making. .8 We ought not in any case to place ultimate emphasis on end product or process. .9 Neither life nor art is like a box of chocolates—but chocolate may be essential to the life of the artist. .10 Art is at work in all human activities, and thus cannot be construed a luxury. Yet art is rarely an initial response to security or survival needs, and to admit as much is hardly to the detriment of art. .11 Preheat oven to 400 degrees. .12 It very likely requires a supportive and ambitious public, a public willing to risk emotional and cognitive complacencies and certitudes, for ambitious art—art that frowns upon training wheels—to make a real and lasting difference in the lives of nonartists. Let us not be overprotective of our arts, but let us do everything we can to create an environment congenial to the demands of ambitious art. .13 Let the bird stand for ten minutes or so before slicing. .14 Insert thermometer into thickest part of polemic. .15 Ambitious art—ambitious making of any kind—is a prime reason why we have the expression weep for joy. You cannot be an artist if you are never humbled by art. .16 Art changes the world not because of some intrinsic form presumed to attend to a specific transformational politics, and not because of preset social configurations, which amount in themselves only to the conditions of and for change (and which must of course be given their due). Art changes the world because people change the world, people who find themselves in countless situations, interacting with other people in countless ways, and transforming themselves in the process. Sometimes this can amount to a desperate or quixotic activity, sometimes a hopeful one. It is always, at some level, a pedagogical activity when understood not as a function of the artwork, but in terms of the person or people involved. .17 But art has changed the world, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Ante up. .18 Collaboration = a clash of convictions tempered by the prospect of...