abvg,When you wrote at the end of your last posting (which I thank you for) that you "find it dangerous to derive art theory from the general cultural conditions of society" - I assume you refer to my statement that I'm coming from a cultural-critical perspective - which, by the way, in no way implies that I'm in the business of deriving art theory from the general cultural conditions of society (which would not be a very bright idea). You go on: "There is a relationship but it does not seem to me to be as profound as many commentators would like to believe." And just what "commentators" are you talking about? At this point in history, that there indeed exists a relationship between art and the cultural conditions of western society is pretty much beyond dispute (even for neo-liberal reactionaries such as Karol Berger - see Berger's recent "A Theory of Art"). But in order to wave this relationship so lightly aside as you do, one has, only for starters, to dismiss the entire cultural-critical output of the Frankfurt School for Social Reasearch (where the concepts of "cultural criticism" and "critical theory" properly originated) and whose members made some rather persuasive cases for the "profound relationship" existing between art and society. I mean Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, etc. and last but definitely not least, Walter Benjamin. For good measure, I'll throw in the art philosopher Max Raphael who was not a member of the Frankfurt School, but who should have been. If it had not been for the German student movement of the 1960s, in turn decisively influnced by the Frankfurt School (during WW II, the school operated in American exile), German society as a whole today would be quite different - that is, far less democratic (precisely the situation currently existing in America - or, haven't you heard?). The chapter in the devastating Horkheimer/Adorno study "The Dialectic of Enlightenment" entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" should be required reading for EVERY artist without qualification. (In America, I used to get myself into trouble for quoting from this chapter: "enlightened" Americans don't usually like to hear such things.) An outstanding history of the Frankfurt School is by Martin Jay: "The Dialectical Imagination" (available in paperback).
I'm sorry, but your observation about Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin living and working outside their societies is so generalized and platt as to be virtually meaningless (excuse me please, but I happen to be informed over the lives of these artists). That Gauguin lived in Tahiti provides no support for a thesis over the separation of art and society. And your assertion that Van Gogh tried to live as far outside his own society as possible does not begin to correspond with the basic facts of Van Gogh's biography. Further, in light of Van Gogh's life-history, it is possible to maintain that Van Gogh was finally destroyed by his self-cultivated relationship to his own society - a relationship you strangely refuse to acknowledge. This is not only unhistorical, but disrespectful to the memory of what Van Gogh had to endure exactly because of his social relations - a "suffering" extending well beyond his miserable end into our time by the sale of his pictures for ever-more obscene sums. I won't even approach Cézanne.
I've the impression that what bothers you over Postmodernism is the populistic aura of "anti-intellectual intellectualism" which has come to hang over the subject itself in our culture (an aversion I can understand). But it is equally misguided to oppose this phenomenon with a sort of "intellectual anti-intellectualism". I admit that I'm somewhat disappointed with Jameson's study of Postmodernism, an opinion shared by others (the "perverted" theory of which, however, is not to be glibly laid at Jameson's door). Conversely, the first part of Jameson's book - the discussion/comparison between Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes" and Van Gogh's famous "Farmer's Shoes" - is well worth reading for a basic definition of the modernist/postmodernist opposition (available in the internet). Jameson is someone I began to read in the mid-1970s - I think before the term Postmodernism became fashionable - and I have a certain amount of respect for him as a philosopher (regardless of whether I always agree with him or not). Your accusation of Jameson as a "perverter" (along with the others) of "the course of artistic evolution" (!!!) is also so generalizing and indescriminate as to practically make no sense. Unless you bother to support your position with something more concrete - let's say something a bit more "scientifically informed" - aside from your entertaining and colorful painterly images, the charge of "fraud" (a serious charge even when supported) sounds absurd, to say the least.
As a painter, I also have a high regard for painting and what, in its uniqueness, it is capable of saying. But I recognize, too, that painting isn't the only form of knowledge and experience around. Philosophy can also bear fruit occasionally - philosophy, which Paul Valéry wisely designated as properly belonging to the arts.
In turn, I must warn you of something: I enjoy polemics, but have serious difficulties with near-nonsense masquerading as insight.
Best Wishes, David
