[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Julian Oliver]

..on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 12:04:26AM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote:
> 
> I am hoping it is possible to find another way through this maze. It would
> seem many in this discussion agree that creativity and identity are
> intrinsically linked. Some seem to accept that this is not something that
> happens in isolation but socially, a sharing. Is the most important thing we
> can create "art"?

Part of the attraction of making art is that it is one of the very few things
you can do that is automatically deemed by a society to be somehow 'important'.
The very carrying through of a desire to make a personal and symbollicaly
meaningful expression is protected within society - at least in the West - even
before the work itself is assigned cultural value. Art, in some way, is always
given social 'room'.

However after Duchamp it seems the making and presentation of art is also an
expression of the maker's preparedness and courage to abstract away from one's
culture, a show of independence, to abandon the known in favour of the other, to
step out and above it. That expression /becomes/ the art. If that stepping-out
is widely recognised, culture as a whole is seen to have symptomatically
progressed somehow. It is this cultural incorporation of the 'independent'
expression that leads us to believe a social negotiation has taken place
somewhere, whether it simply did well at Christies or the Venice Biennal, or
neither, we don't care as long as it's in the books. All the while artists are
seen to be social benefactors.

Despite this, it seems to me that most art is made (or 'done') in the interests
of excelling within the group rather than excelling the group as a whole. Rarely
are American artists 'competing' with European or Asian artists, let alone are
whole disciplines of art competing, between themselves. 

The desire to excell within the cultural group has little to do with social
competition directly I think, at least after art-school. Rather, I think it's
very hard to talk about art and the making of it now without considering the
impact of late capitalism on human culture, as a dis-ease that orders the social
through the internalisation of competitive interest. Every non-established
artist I know is looking for ways to gain exposure such that they can attract
interest, get shows, get sales/funding and keep making work.  It's just such a
fundamental reality for artists these days. 

So, the Market-ordered society is the group to which the culturally
transformative artist currently speaks and in which they desire to excell.

Cheers (and good thread),

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany 
currently: Berlin, Germany
about: http://julianoliver.com