That's quite a gap in the blog from November till now, so I'll start it off again. Someone just introduced me to a book that I like: "On the Margins of Art Worlds", by Larry Gross. I haven't read it all, but what I have read articulates some of the things I've been thinking about recently. If we wnat to broaden how the arts are thought of and valued, then first we have to consider how they are currenly defined. This is how Gross sees the marginalization of the arts:
"The majority of the population in modern industrial societies does not view the arts as central, essential institutions in any personal, individual fashion. That is, for most of us the activities and products associated with the arts are generally outside the mainstream of our daily lives and important concerns.
As I have noted, the term art, or the fine arts, in the modern sense, came into currency in Europe only in the 18th century. Arguable, the term became conceivable as the common rubric for a diverse class of activities and products partially in response to their increasing irrelevance to the lives of most people. As these various objects and events moved to the periphery of Western culture, their common characteristics became more visible, their differences less noteworthy – hence their ability to shelter comfortably under a common umbrella. To use a metaphor, this process of cultural realignment resulted in the banishment of the arts to a reservation on the psychological periphery of Western culture.
By using the image of a reservation I do not mean to imply a dry wasteland at the geographic boundary of our world. I am speaking of a reservation in the sense that we tend to view the arts as institutions that exist at the fringe of society. These are cultural “spaces” that real people visit in their spare, fringe time but that only fringe, spare people inhabit in their real time. The arts can be said to exist on a reservation, therefore, because their “territory” is foreign to the majority of the population, is visited briefly by a minority as a leisure-time tourist attraction, and is lived in by a tiny minority of special people. Only those with special qualification (genetic or temperamental) are considered eligible for (or condemned to) full-time residency on this reservation.”
What do you think? Is he overstating the marginalization of arts in contemporary society?