Reviews for Artificial mythologies

The average rating for Artificial mythologies based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-26 00:00:00 daniel nelson Can art be radical? Not very likely. This book is more important now than when it was published in 1978 (before the radicals were old enough to score jobs at marketing firms). Back then, artists pretended to be radical cause it was hip, and, you know, sold more shit. Now they know better, don't give a shit, and head straight from art school to marketing firms. The result is advertising using imagery of revolution. You want a good advertisement? Well, fucking recruit a former Marxist or Anarchist to design a nice little campaign for you. After all, they know the game of propaganda, right? And what role did punk rock play in all of this? Well, it was loud enough (and powerful enough) to finally make the capitalists see that hiring these assholes with tattoos and torn up clothing was in their best interests. Punk rock was a bunch of assholes banging their heads against the walls of corporate America begging to be let in, or else! Or else, what? Or else they'd burn the fucking place down like a bunch of spoiled little children. And so they let them in. And boy was that a good idea! Now no one can tell the difference between an Exxon Advertisement and a call for revolution. But who the fuck cares what the difference is, anyway? People like things that stir them up. It's a drug. They get high. Doesn't matter if it is an advertisement for a certain micro-brew (fuck you Magic Hat) or a call for bombarding the headquarters. People like that fuzzy feeling. None of what I wrote above is in this book, but it sure did help me think about these things. I highly recommend it.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-19 00:00:00 Norman Cohan I noticed, but didn't read, this book years ago when I was an undergraduate. Taylor isn't opposed to people painting, writing poetry, making music .... but he does think that "art" is a socially and historically bounded ideological concept that exerts a malign influence on our class-divided societies and on creative performance itself. Shades of Foucault, Bourdieu and Nietzsche here, but written in deliberately accessible language and without apparent direct influence from any of them (though Sartre is plainly in evidence). The first chapter debunks the notion of "art" as an eternal and universal category in favour of a view of it as a kind of tyranny of taste exercised by elites as a social marker and leaving the bewildered masses excluded and feeling inadequate. The second attacks Marxist writing on art as being effectively an uncritical attempt to save the values of the haute bourgeoisie from the corrosive philistinism of the market (hence the appeal of Marxism to the "sensitive" intellectual. "Not radical enough!" is Taylor's verdict: "art" itself is tainted and oppressive! The final chapter explores the assimilation of jazz into art, the shifting historical meanings of the desire for jazz to become "art" and the differing psychological and social needs served by this at different times. Taylor's view is that the aspiration to be "art" ended up killing jazz as a musical and social form. The book appeared in the Harvester "Philosophy Now" series in 1978, a series somewhat associated with Radical Philosophy. It was oppositional then and anything like it would be now. You can't see a book like this getting a good score in the UK's Research Excellence Framework or, indeed, getting taken seriously as philosophy. Which is a shame.