I was thinking. Especially after jayryan's contribution to a recent thread.
(for afsc benefit)
steve wrote:
I cannot see how art can serve anything but the artist.
Gio wrote: maybe it depends on the definition of "serve."
Wood Goblin wrote:For the record, I believe that "audience" does not equal "commercial viability."
steve wrote:I contend that almost all great art... is made with little consideration of its eventual audience.
(Linocut by Lenore Bassan for the Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Grove.)
Tipcat wrote:Yes, Pitchfork sucks.
I think there's plenty of consideration of audience in all the above (and, generally, for the best, too). Quite simply, if anything is "socially conscious" or "community-based" it's conscious of reception and context. Plenty of art
strives to be a part of something larger than the artist's individual "expression." And culture is richer and more dynamic for it.
There's a long history of artists seeking, consciously, to "intervene" in a moment in time.
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
(John Milton, 1655)
Personal expression will likely be "inextricable" from this, and the work will demonstrate formal/aesthetic aspects that may or may not make sense when abstracted from their context. But it's very much conscious of a reader/viewer/other. The two things, expression and context, come together, organically (while the romantic vision of the artist as self-fulfilling individual genius disappears).
Take another literary example, this time from the 19th century. You can't properly "get" something like Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" without understanding the way it cunningly intervenes and plays upon the
particular kind of melodramatic, bourgeois short fiction Melville was being published with in
Putnam's and
Harper's. If you read the story "straight," oblivious to this, it's ridiculous by modern sensibilities (hence read as proto-absurd or "existentialist" literature by some). To a degree, Melville was fucking with his audience and publishers. Was he serving them? No, but the story is not some pure, inner expression. He's writing for an audience.
And, like, drama and satire and stuff. That's an art that tends to have some awareness of the audience.
