[-empyre-] fwd edward wright - Andrea Fraser quote

["Melinda Rackham" <melt2@pacific.net.au>]

Dear Empyre
Following is a quote from Andrea Fraser.
I wonder if Empyre considers itself to be an answer to her complaint?

Andrea Fraser: ".almost all of the available sites in the field of art, both
physical and discursive, are fundamentally oriented toward the production of
belief in the value of various forms of cultural production - artistic and
critical; that is, toward legitimation. One could say that all exhibitions,
whether in commercial or non-commercial spaces, construct their visitors as
potential collectors. More precisely, they construct their visitors as
people who will or will not invest their economic, cultural or social
capital in particular practices. Similarly, the addressees of art magazines
and symposia tend to be constructed as subscribers or potential subscribers,
not of publications or events, but to the positions taken by writers and
speakers. The point here is not to construct an opposition between promotion
and critique. The point is that there are almost no sites within the
artistic field in which producers address each other as producers according,
not to the intellectual or artistic positions they take on cultural issues,
but to the positions they occupy within a field of cultural production as
determined by the social conditions of that field and the social relations
which structure it. The absence of such sites has the effect, not only of
ensuring the atomization of producers in competitive struggles for
professional legitimacy, but also of limiting the development of a framework
in which the function and effect - not only the symbolic value - of artistic
practices can be evaluated."
>From 'Services: A Working Group Exhibition' published in: Games, Fights,
Collaborations. Das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung. Kunstraum der
Universität Lüneburg (ed.), 1996

SIncerely
Edward Wright
(a new subscriber)