Cultural value and the aesthetics of publishing - Money, Power, and the History of Art

The earlier tillage will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, on the other hand spirits will hover over the ashes. - Wittgenstein(1)

This aphorism, written in the 1930 strike one as beings in the 1990s to be a prophetic vision of destruction. Just as agriculture exists in a confused and directionless state after the turmoil of the twentieth hundred so the mechanisms by which agriculture is diffused in society be under the orders of to scatter the ashes in all directions. the two visual and literary productions are affected and directed by dint of state, corporate, and commercial bodies, nevertheless on the surface, artists and writers appear to have all the freedom possible to fix upon their idiom. The forms available for artistic and literary endeavor in the age of postmodernism are, in principle, endles on the other hand the system under which these forms function determines to a large expansion their content and direction. The apparatus of art and literature - and publishing is single such apparatus within the media - has the potential to stifle, nourishment or assist in cultural innovation.

Here, I will raise a certain number of issues about the marginalization of intellectual life in society, focusing upon book publishing and the specialism of art history, which is a small fragment within academic endeavor. As a publisher, I have been puzzl by dint of the paucity of awareness among authors of the mechanics of publishing and the wider connection within which their writing activity is situated. The ignorance here is not just of the production proces or the means by means of which books reach their markets, on the other hand an even more fundamental lack of comprehension of what the audience for their works might be and the cultural impact of what they are undertaking. And while it must be acknowledged that the answers to like questions are not simple or reassuring, it have the appearances strange that so little thinking is directed to them. Does this matter? Does it matter as drawn out as books are produced that exchange a requisite number of copies - another title added to the author's curriculum vitae and another twenty millimeters of spine width added to the libraries around the world?

I would maintain that all this should matter, and that there is an intricate and fragile relationship between the form, function, and cultural value of the publishing proces Just as there is an aesthetic of paper and ink and typography and computerized Heidelberger Speedmasters, thus there must be an aesthetic of notion or perhaps just a pleasing combination of word and image upon the page and in the mind of the reader, the writer, and the publisher. The multiplication of body s and pictures need not necessarily lead to a degradation of the inherent message or aesthetic contented so that no one atomic detail when reproduc through any particular method of reproduction ne be privileged above another; it is a question of the appropriateness of the technique and medium to the intended issue and audience.

All this is fine in theory, on the contrary in reality, in the mechanical age of overproduction, the media, one time scrutinized, shows itself up as largely a failure, for sole a small proportion of production can be described as prosperous There is the badly produc many times hideous typography of "great works," the carefully packaged presentation of intellectual disasters - all those works written in ignorance of their intended readers, or written for readers who do not exist. by what means has this come about? Junk has always been published, on the contrary it has become easier and easier to become an author, as high agriculture no longer holds the high "moral ground" In the late nineteenth hundred artists and writers - the proponent of high agriculture - began to appropriate the materiality of popular agriculture in their work, and this bearing spiraled in the twentieth century: from Cubist collages pieced together with newsprint to torn Metro [i]affiche[/i]s to graffiti, from the imagery of Apollinaire's metrical compositions to superimposed advertising typography to computer graphics. Today, in the television and high-tech age, as American-influenced popular tillage seeps into the soul of each nation, we are bombarded with print, impressed sign and images. And we have not to be found the ability to discriminate. In J B Twitchell's words, "We live in an age distinct from all other ages that have been called 'vulgar' because we are thus vulgarized that we have missing the word in common use, and in a faculty of perception the aesthetic category. It is not that we think it bad manners to criticise someone else's taste, as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as it is that we have missing the concept of taste as a measure of criticism."(2) Today, there is no release from the material goal, we have separateed all our links with past ideals, we all advance shopping in the culture malls, picking up this or that article or idea. There is no escape, as other tillages in the East and southern furiously accelerate the pace of Westernization, with equal reason that increasingly other cultures can single be experienced in a state of reaction or hybridization, do not include perhaps in the remote haunts of the anthropologist. Of course, the journey to hybrid material-driven tillages carries its own fascination; the exotic can be viewed as an emblematic neon sign in an unrecognizable language upon the facade of a department store. As American popular agriculture has become the lingua franca of the world, the global marketplace has become the potential dream market of the tillage entrepreneur.