ix-09/12

“Artistic and writers need to be assigned the task of healing the community”—Lyotard

I really liked a lot of what Lyotard was saying, but I most definitely disagree with this totalitarian apocalypticist comment. His first assumption is that the world/community is in dire need of repair and healing (granted, he was writing during the Reagan/neoconservationist years—in the Al Franken sense of the ‘neo-con’).

Lyotard’s second implicit assumption is that somehow, artists and writers will be able to create a shamanistic healing potion that will ease the fragmentation of postmodern society and, I get the slight sense, he believes we can achieve all this through his “miraculously” inspired ideology.

The second problem with the aforementioned quote/comment, one that was pointed and dissected in class, is the word “assigned.” This begs the question: Who does the assigning? And depending on the answer, whether it’s a peer community of artists and authors, (which Lyotard would probably opt for), or government sponsorship—local and/or federal—there would be a slew of new questions to work out. i.e. In this exclusive elitist community panel of authors and artists who is “IN” and who is “OUT” (to quote Project Runway)? Just because these people are “experts,” do they necessarily have the right to determine what gets into a museum? Or better yet, the authority of what/whom ultimately gets funding? This ideology is not unlike the same authoritarian principles that were popular in the academicism of the 17th century. Granted, beautiful art and literature was constructed in this manner, but through the impositions of formulas and rules that I doubt many would want to revisit or be subjected to.