Quiggin Posted December 15, 2021 Share Posted December 15, 2021 (edited) Sylvère Lotringer's obituary was recently published in the Times. Quote Sylvère Lotringer, who popularized French critical theory in the United States, helped inspire the “Matrix” movie series, hosted conferences for counterculture celebrities, lent his name to a character in an acclaimed novel and a television series based on it, provoked rants on Fox News and founded an influential publishing house — all while trying to outrun memories of a childhood spent on the precipice of disaster — died on Nov. 8 at his home outside Ensenada, Mexico, in Baja California. He was 83. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/books/sylvere-lotringer-dead.html In a 2006 interview in the Brooklyn Rail he talks about how middling works of art and general cultural infill increasingly obscure our view of the genuine. Quote Among all the works that are produced everyday and simultaneously exhibited in all the art venues available worldwide, it could even be that there is better art than ever existed before. But this is not the point. It is impossible any more to evaluate art independently of the new environment that has been created. And this environment makes it impossible to consider anything as a privileged object. Of course, you can always stop dead and focus on a particular work for a while, and I do it occasionally, as one suddenly focuses on a piece of information on the evening news, but it is immediately replaced by some other news, other works already claiming attention, or the same space in the gallery. From the point of view of the gallery wall, there isn’t much of a difference between one kind of art and another. The same goes for the art system as a whole, which doesn’t allow for anything to stand out for too long. Art is not in the era of mechanical reproduction any more, but in the era of mass consumption. In a consumer society art is being consumed like any other product, and the mass circulation and consumption of art changes entirely its status and reception. Art isn’t exactly a commodity, but it assumes all its characteristics, and it is more and more difficult for anything to retain any kind of singularity for too long. https://brooklynrail.org/2006/09/art/a-life-in-theory Edited December 15, 2021 by Quiggin Link to comment
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