Reading Capital, continued (thread #4) Fetishism...

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 07:15 PM

Was one of my favorite classes, it was composed of Marxists and radical anti-essentialist feminists, and me, neither at the time (guess which one I'm closer to)...as a recently off the assembly line welder I think I had some folks pretty nonplussed most the time. All about what kid wants you to expand on...I'm pretty much of a modernist myself...neo-modernist perhaps?

[blindpig]

Two Americas
01-24-2010, 07:45 PM

I don't believe in "composers" of music. That is part of the commoditization of music. It is all bourgeoisie pretense, a fraud - this idea of the "great composers." All of the nonsense about "genius" and stuff is a bunch of hooey, in my view.

Yes, musicians have been reduced to being mere "translators."

Nothing wrong with being an aesthetic nerd. It is all craftsmanship, I think.

Your example of dance - yeah, someone is putting it together, directing it, but the idea that they are the "genius" and the performers mere putty in their hands has more to do with who gets paid the most and controlling the workers so they can be exploited than it does any artistic purpose.

[blindpig]

Two Americas
01-24-2010, 08:04 PM

"How we decide which artists to support is another question."

The Soviets did a pretty good job of supporting a wide range of music, and supporting the performers, so much more so than here that it is a joke. They supported all performers. We have an idea here that it is all about "taste" - which is about buying products, not about music - so people here talk about "who's to say what is good?" and see art as somehow dramatically different than other disciplines - vague and personal and subjective. The Soviet musicians I worked with laughed at all of that - "this is good and that isn't. Obviously!" and they were right and they wondered how people could be so dense and ignorant that they couldn't tell the difference between what was good and what wasn't. Then they found out that the people controlling the business can't tell the difference. Weird society we live in.

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BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 08:17 PM
as the education system neglects all the arts its a weird but pretty boring society at times...

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 08:24 PM

I did not mean to demean the performers at all, so sorry if I came across that way! they take what's written and interpret it in a way that is beyond what is written. In the performance realm the gestalt of all people involved is the major thing...forgive me...

that is what I was trying to say here "The translation skills and creative interpretations of the practicing artists is where the talent also comes in," and may I say genius, there are some movies Gary Oldman has been in that weren't very good, but his performances are genius...


These are reasons why I like jazz and interpretive dance...on the spot...

I don't mean to make any kind of hierarchy of the arts here...

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
01-24-2010, 08:27 PM

I just went to a "cirque de la symphonie" show where you have acrobatics performed in front of orchestral music.

Almost all of the performers were Russian.

The show is insane btw, one act has a guy balance on his hand on the other guys head. Even the juggling is incredible.

Seriously, they're the best athletes I've ever seen and they have an incredible aesthetic/artistry to all of their performances. I think they tried to develop a story of sorts, but it may have been too avant garde for me, ha!

[blindpig]

Two Americas
01-24-2010, 08:35 PM

I think Capitalism does.

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Two Americas
01-24-2010, 08:43 PM

Good example.

Funny how without the incentive of being a star and getting rich for the performers and profits for the presenters and sponsors, better art seems to get produced and more people have access to it. Now that they have a "free market" in Russia, the quality of athletes and musicians is going down dramatically. No need to split hairs over "what is good? Who is to say what is good?" The only reason people get into those debates is because they either need to justify the "success" of a lot of crap, or else question everything a little more deeply than they care to.

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BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 08:44 PM

so funny, Picasso became a communist in later life, ironic with how his work became such a commodity...
Kid of the Black Hole
01-24-2010, 08:50 PM
I posted a piece on SI or Pop Indy about it. But I don't know the first thing about his work, except it was popular and he drew a really terrible doodle of Stalin that caused an uproar.

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blindpig
01-25-2010, 07:42 AM

The fetish is our inability to see this and ascribe value to the product of labor.

The hard part is the 'congealed' aspect of all labor. It is something that 'came about' as exchange grew and prompted production of commodities which over time acquired customary values, subject to various local and temporal modifiers.

Thus one might find a chunk of gold in a stream bed, perhaps by accident and with little labor involved but the gold still has a much greater value than your labor because typically much more labor is expended in order to get that gold. Of course congealed labor includes all of the labor involved in production and cannot be isolated in one kind of commodity.

This is a real sticking point with the 'middle class', who claim their pittance of privilege is the result of the superior value of their work, as though their time on earth is more valuable than mine.