johnnys blog

Like some of the other students, the readings made 

me think of the ATC presentions.

In addition to "metaphor", "aesthetics" was also

brought up during ATC.  Aesthetics is bound up in this

battle as Rancière argues, because the battle takes

place over the image of society and what it is

permissible to say or to show.

Back-to-back with this "aesthetics of politics," in

Rancière’s thinking, is a "politics of aesthetics"

itself. To unlock its nature, much time is spent

picking over the idea of modernism and placing it

within Rancière’s tripartite (3 part) scheme of art

"regimes." This complex intellectual equation can be

simplified substantially if one realizes that what he

is doing is combining, in a clever way, art history

with labor history.

First of all, there’s the "ethical regime of art," in

which artistic images are evaluated in terms of their

utility to society. This is linked by Rancière with

that old fear from the philosophy of art, Plato’s

banishment of painters from his ideal community.

Rancière associates this "regime" with the antique

idea that defines artwork as common craft labor. Under

this regime, he basically says that, artists’ work

cannot be granted too much power or acclaim because

the laborer performing the "artistic" task of

imitating reality operates according to the same

criteria as someone making a bucket, and in this

aristocratic way of thinking, common laborers have no

voice within society.

Succeeding the ethical regime is the "representational

regime of art," a novel way of dealing with the

art-labor alliance. Art "ceases to be a simulacrum,

but at the same time it ceases to be the displaced

visibility of work..."the art of imitations is able to

inscribe its specific hierarchies and exclusions in

the major distribution of the liberal arts and the

mechanical arts." Art is granted its own sphere with

its own rules, and elevated above those of common

craft.