Re: <documenta X><blast> home
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Fri, 15 Aug 1997 20:01:01 -0400
>
>Hmmm... Then _everything_ is mapping, which I doubt. I also wonder how
>quality becomes allied with, in allegiance with, "good" and "bad" which
>otherwise have ethical connotations.
>
>Alan
one CAN speak of an ethical dimension of goodness vs. badness, but that is
only one dimension of analysis. A rifle may be a very fine and accurate
sniper rifle, we may say that it is a top quality piece, it does what a
rifle should do better than most others, but it can be put to very bad
uses. Or more extremely, a hydrogen bomb that is capable of detonating is a
good bomb, from a nuclear engineering standpoint. It yields 50 megatons, it
is good, and there is somebody out there who may pay you 500 million
dollars for this high quality thing, because they know what it can do. In
this case, its physical perfection exists in exact inverse to its social
menace.
Conceptual art is no hydrogen bomb, but there can be better or worse
conceptual pieces. If it were not possible to make a better idea-work, then
there would be absolutely no logic in even starting to make the piece at
all, because one thought would be no differnt than any other thought.
Practical experience tells us this is not the case. Eating doorknobs is not
as good of a thought as eating asparagus, especially when you set out to do
it.
Actually the so called anti-elitism of "quality denial" is an extremely
intense form of elitism of its own kind, it pretends to demote ideas in the
name of progress when it actually seeks to promote its own power seeking in
the desguise of power denial; slave morality a la Neitzche.
It is now time for everybody to own LeRoy Neiman prints.
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