By the 1880s...the resulting consciousness of individual freedom involved more and more an estrangement ...and those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the norms of freedom, but lacked the economic means to attain them, where torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous and indifferent mass. By 1880 the enjoying individual becomes rare, only the private spectacle of nature is left ... the social group breaks into isolated spectators who do not communicate with each other or consist of mechanically repeated dances submitted to preordained movement with little spontaneity. Meyer Schapiro, Abstract Art, 1937 (i editorialize only to note that this, from which those famous passages on impressionism were drawn, was written two years before Avant-garde and Kitsch and takes to task in advance the latter texts naive idea that the a-g has or had anything to do with freedom. It historicizes this notion of freedom as a fictitious side-effect of the commodity, of capitalist propaganda that posits consumption as a space of choice, and acknowledges that even this myth was disarticulated by the a-g itself by 80 already)
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 01:21:50 +0000
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