Alain Badiou on the political import of the cinematic medium - and, on why you ought to donate to the upcoming documentary film Badiou: a Lifes Indiegogo fundraiser ASAP (https://indiegogo/projects/badiou-a-life/x/6785602) Cinema is without a doubt capable of being a mass art on a scale which suffers no comparison with any other art. Certainly in the nineteenth century there were mass writers, mass poets: Victor Hugo in France, for example, or Pushkin in Russia. They had, and still have, millions of readers. However, the scale - at the moment of their creation - is incomparable to that of the great success of cinema. Mass art fixes a paradoxical relation. ...We usually oppose mass democracy to representative and constitutional democracy. Mass is an essential political category. Mao said that the masses, the masses alone, are creators of universal history. However, art, which is the other half of the syntagm mass art, is and can only be an aristocratic category. To say that art is an aristocratic category is not a judgement. We simply note that art comprises the idea of formal creation, of visible novelty in the history of forms, and therefore requires the means of comprehending creation as such, necessitating a differential education, a minimal proximity to the history of the art concerned and to the vicissitudes of its grammar. A long and often unrewarding apprenticeship. Broadening of the mind. Pleasures, certainly, but pleasures which are sophisticated, constructed, acquired. In mass art we have the paradoxical relation between a pure democratic element (on the side of irruption and evental energy) and an aristocratic element (on the side of individual education, of differential locations of taste). All the arts of the twentieth century have been avant-garde. Painting was an avant-garde art and only ceases to be so at that crepuscular moment when it is introduced into museums. Music was an avant-garde art, and, from the days of Schöenberg, has not ceased to be so (unless we also call music the groaning of popular music). Poetry exists today only as an avant-garde art. We can say that the twentieth century is the century of avant-gardes. But we can also say that it is the century of the greatest mass art that has ever existed. The simple form of the paradoxical relation: the first great art which is mass in its essence appears and develops in a time which is the time of the avant-gardes. The derived form: cinema imposes impracticable relations between aristocracy and democracy, between invention and familiarity, between novelty and general taste.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 03:08:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015