@punctum wrote:
I was recently involved in a heated debated with another art critic on the role and purpose of art and theory. The debate was basically on the role, purpose and audience of art / theory: who, by whom, and for whom, it should be made....
She suggested I consult the work of Susan Buck-Morss, an American philosopher and intellectual historian, whose diverse academic output includes texts on cosmology, Walter Benjamin, and Stalinist Art, but who I classified as elitist because it was tailor made for an audience of intellectuals, rather than the street or the working class itself.
To be fair, I read through Buck-Morss' work and enjoyed it thoroughly, and one text seemed to crystallize our debate on who, by whom, and for whom art and theory should be made.
In a keynote lecture delivered to the first Congress of the International Walter Benjamin Association in 1997, Buck-Morss comments on the irony of writing a keynote for an institution that rejected Benjamin during his own lifetime:
Buck-Morss' concludes:
In a sociopolitical context where financial interest, gender, and racial inequality dominate the private and public sphere, how can art / theory intervene or imagine new social horizons? In short, who, by whom and for whom should art and theory view as its audience?
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