Normative aesthetics is palpably an absurd research project. This does not
mean that there is no logic of "good" and "bad", that there are no useful
axiological concepts. What the indexing project implies is that discourses
with artistic memories throw up surprising (artistic) reflexivities, some
descriptions that turn in strangely and unexpectedly. The other thing that
the indexing project sought to counter was the trivial neo-dadaism of
solipsistic institutional power - a seamless hotchpotch of
emotivist-pragmatist shreds that seek consumer authentication in cultural
studies and its cognates. The indexing project was inaugurated on the
conviction that a (necessarily) complex internal discourse was perhaps the
main condition of resistance a) to institutional power, b) to passive
co-option by that institutional power and c) to the masquerade of artistic
authenticity that is an ideological principle of institutional power.
Michael Baldwin/Mel Ramsden (ARTLANGUAGE@aol.com)
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