PO-PO-mo-JO (was PO's Vision)

[James Kyllo]

Dave Monroe:

>As Brian Eno notes, "we have moved from the notion of artist as creator
>to that of the artist as curator" or somesuch (source?  Can't recall,
>came up in re: My Bloody Valentine's "Soon," and that's all I can
>recall) ...

>From interview with Brian Eno in Wired magazine:

An artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector
of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for
artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention
to this sequence of things. If you read art history up until 25 or 30 years
ago, you'd find there was this supposition of succession: from Verrocchio,
through Giotto, Primaticcio, Titian, and so on, as if a crown passes down
through the generations. But in the 20th century, instead of that straight
kingly line, there's suddenly a broad field of things that get called art,
including vernacular things, things from other cultures, things using new
technologies like photo and film. It's difficult to make any simple linear
connection through them.

Now, the response of early modern art history was to say, Oh, OK. All we do
is broaden the line to include more of the things we now find ourselves
regarding as art. So there's still a line, but it's much broader. But what
postmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn't one line, there's
just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently.
Thus there is no longer such a thing as "art history" but there are multiple
"art stories." Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine
rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made
what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities.
You've drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the
compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all
people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together