Anodyne
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
 
The Honorable Member for South Wellington checks in:

CJB: We don't require writing on theoretical physics to be immediately comprehensible to a general audience. If I study a scholarly article on physics, I realize that there is a certain amount of learning I have to do in order to understand the specialized technical language of the discipline. I realize that the article may refer to concepts and processes that I, with my funny art- and pop-culture-oriented brain, may never be able to process.

PC: Maybe the difference is that theoretical physics is a highly technical discourse and has always has been. Whereas Mike Kelley could be explained to a bright 11 year old in an hour. There's a big difference. And lots of really good artists are as dumb as a bag of rocks. Art existed for thousands of years before any such comparably difficult discourses were deemed in any way necessary, and could survive perfectly well without them. Unreadable jargony art writing is a very recent development, and has more to do with the postwar expansion of the academy than the evolution of art. No one could fake it at a physics conference as easily as most people fake it at an art opening. And just because elitism is hard to pin down doesn't mean that the art world isn't ridden with every variety of it. It's what the crowds at Swarm seem to like -- that velvet-rope "insider" feeling, the lure of arcane knowledge rather than knowledge.
- posted by cjb @ 11:01 AM


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