Well, I finally got to finish the second part of this thread...
Many good points have been made here (and, milum let me just say that only
you could've come across that Japanese-animation site...your background of Atlantean/Mu-ian powers is definitely showing!
...and, no, I am
not ogling the women..well, okay, mebbe just a peek now and then
).
This thread would definitely seem, to me, incomplete without a mention of Robert Mapplethorpes'* (see edit)
Piss Christ, the piece which consisted of an upside-down Crucifix in a jar of his own urine, and which ignited the whole furor over the National Endowment of the Arts in the US. IMHO, there really must have been
some better way, even at a soley intellectual level, to convey what he had in mind. All this did was give ammunition to the fundamentalist zealots to campaign for the removal of all public funding for art. As a consequence, and due to drastic compromising over the years since this Mapplethorpe* piece and exhibit gave rise to the controversy, funding for the arts has drastically, and continually shrunken...theatre companies and literary magazines are folding in droves, deprived of the meager, but crucial, grant monies that once kept them afloat. Then, of course, the same mindset was taken a step further, and seized on "art" as a dirty word for their own agenda's propagandizing, and music and art programs started disappearing from our schools, etc. Boy, funding
Piss Christ was worth triggering all this, wasn't it?
*[
EDIT: >Once it was abstract art that outraged the public and press, but almost all the recent controversies surrounding art in the popular media have involved images. Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987)are memorable recent examples.<
So, evidently,
Piss Christ was
Andres Serrano's work, not Mapplethorpe's, but their work toured with the same exhibit that ignited the controversy.]
And, yes, mg, these huge grants are monopolized by certain cliques in power, for instance the academic poets/professors who regularly award each other the huge grants (ie. Guggenheim, NEA, Bollingen, etc.) to reinforce their one-way post-modernist view of writng (or strangulation, thereof) as per their MFA Programs and "show don't tell" mantra that prohibits any real f****ing soul, spontaneity, spirit, or life from creeping into their cookie-cutter cardboard box "creations". The focus on the imposition of pure intellect is
not art, IMO, and supports only their own agenda to be able to
teach, and keeps their lucrative MFA Programs alive, and provides them with their
reason to teach...because you can only teach what you can control, and you can't teach anything other than pure intellect...that's why the surreal, the abstract, the spontaneous, etc. scares them so. It renders their tenured teaching positions meaningless. The onslaught of MFA Programs have choked the life out of American writing, on the most part, and everyone knows it. I can site many "insider" essays and literary movements and circles afoot that speak to this...but, still, the 'establishment' is very difficult to derail. So, if you learn how to play the game, and kiss-up to the proper poet/professor[s] (if you wanna play that game), and start using their name and a hint of their style in submissions to university journals (most editors want to see cover letters, now, rather than to let the work speak for itself, this just being a cynical method of screening out their academic peers for publication
), you can start getting published and awarded almost immediately, and acquire publication credits so you can
teach and launch your own workshops and, then, hopefully procure a nice fat MFA position at some college. In short, folks are flooding the market with shit work after whiling away a short time in MFA workshops so they can use their publication credits to
teach. Writing to
teach, not
writing to write...so that's that. Some folks who go through this process do seem to somehow rise above it and hold onto the life in their work...our current US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, for instance (who many in the academic establishemnt deride as 'too accessible', even though Collins is a professor himself, because they are highly suspect of his more spontaneous approach to writing), and Tony Hoagland, for instance. In short, you can't teach the subconscious and any element of that is a threat to the stodgy academic elitists now in literary power. But that will change, it always does. Bottom line is, we'll see what survives...what folks will be still be reading a few hundred years from now.
Grants and fellowships were first established as awards to free up the time of new and emerging artists of promise so they could focus more on their work. But they've been turned into pretentious trophies that are continually awarded to established academics, by each other, who have cozy tenured professorships and every summer off to focus on their creative pursuits....
bourgeois art,
bourgeois poetry (now
there's an oxymoron for you).
Whoever dies with the most prizes wins, or sumthin' like that.
