When working with literary theory it can sometimes seem, as if one is moving further and further away from the actual work of art. "Work of art" itself, to give an example, being a contentious term in theory.
It is thus even more satisfying, when I find that my theoretical concerns always take me back to my work as an artist. I have had many a discussion with some of my colleagues in academia about the question: What is art? What makes good art? etc. Yes, these conversations were as pretentious as I am making them sound -- and my artist friends usually stayed out of it -- but my point is, that these ivory tower contact highs matter more than they may initially seem.
For one, I have always maintained the position that there is no such thing as good or bad art. There is only stuff one likes or that one does not like. This does not mean that art is a free for all. Or rather, it is a free for all, but one should feel compelled to only make art that one likes and not art that one feels one is supposed to make. In a sense, taste, quality, craft are all self selecting processes as I can only judge how "well" something was done, if I have an interest in the category by which I choose to judge it. Had I understood this from the beginning I might just become the artist I always wanted to be. I might have, for example, saved myself the waste of time that was hating heavy metal, since I was constantly judging it by the genre codes of jazz. I am convinced that "learning to like" something really just means learning to assess something in a way that will produce a positive judgement. Affect, emotional responses, exist and they are important, but they are ultimately mere effects of learning the laws of genre. (Think about how much you hated Shakespeare as a kid and how now you call him "the Bard", how boring you thought Mozart was until you saw "Amadeus")
Secondly, art is always a negotiation. Meaning: the ivory tower is not outside of the "real world" but part of the artwork itself. It is one of the places in which the artwork (stuff) is socially performed as artwork. None of the things I am saying here are original, but it took me the perspective of the ivory tower, the learning of the codes, to become aware of them.
I have left out the political dimension of the artwork and art production for a reason. The analysis of the politics of art is not a quality judgement. It is not a taste judgement either. The politics of art is an analysis of the discursive qualities of the text under consideration (text in the farthest sense). Or to put it differently, and to get back to the beginning of this etude, what one likes and why one likes is a political question and its interrogation is an interrogation of ideology. It is, as all philosophy, a chicken/egg question: do I like this piece because it fits my politics or are my politics the way they are because of this piece (think "Guernica").
The art that I like deals with this question --these questions-- self-consciously. And that may be, because I am currently reading a lot of literary theory. And literary theory, to refer to a discussion I have had with a good friend of mine, gives me the smuttiest thoughts.
