Art no competition (was: Re: Borges, Woolf)

[alice wellintown]

Art has to compete for the attention of an audience. The audience can
now appreciate and experience the pleasure that art produces in the
viewer by remaining at home with the Tubes. So the significance of a
work of art like Vineland is diminished, the ever widening canyon
between critical appreciation and popular appreciation, a gulf that
critical readers, academics, the P-Industry, seek to close or at least
call attention to, and thus claim some important fucntion in the world
of art, is one that they find themselves at the bottom of, and like
Black Pip in Moby-Dick, the critic, and so the art, can not
communicate with an audience that has not the vision, the language,
the culture, to comprehend the apparent babble of the ivory tower
visionaries; Even the captains of industry, the Ahabs at the helms of
the silicon and derrivitive fortunes, though they may take Pip as
cabin boy, have little chance of seeing what Pip has seen--the foot of
the gods upon the treadle of the loom projecting a world, weaving a
tapestry. And under the tapestry? There where one might see, as with a
magic eye? Well, critics are often artisits who, in their own strong
misreadings, project a world that, a mass audience rejects as soundly
as the art it takes as its canvas.

To act with ignorance or innocense, to blame mass production or
fascist parades of propaganda or to cash it all in to capitalism and
the visible hand that turns the time against the day is dishonest; art
must compete for an audience and the role of the critic has never been
more difficult. That the critic will not or can not come down from the
tower of babble and, as Molly sez to Bloom, tell us in plane words,
may be a defense against the mass reproduction of bits now made, as
time was before it, something we measure and equate with money. Bits
is money. And money, as Henry Adams sez, can not buy an educated man
understadning of mysteries.