Oh, Paul Greenhalgh. Why do you do it? Don’t you have any friends? Or pets? I will buy you a kitten to occupy your time so you can stop writing these crazy articles.
ANYWAY.
I guess, if I had to get right down to it, these articles are informative, thought-provoking, and interesting, but OH MY GOD they are a death-sentence to read. I just… don’t want to read it. Because it is not fun or engaging in ANYWAY. It is engaging if you are a stuffy art-snob type and want to think about how awesome you are while you read this and want to understand it real bad. I mean. Not to push anyone’s buttons or anything, but if I heard someone raving about Paul Greenhalgh’s writing style I would not want to talk to them or be their friend. I would assume they were too pretentious and stuffy and un-fun for ME.
Regardless. I read the article. I understood it. I learned things. I was stimulated intellectually. But reading it was painful.
“The way we make things is fantastically revealing of the human condition.”
I believe I said this in so many words in my last article response post.
“It would be a mistake, however, to see the genre simply as a set of techniques and materials for the production of artefacts; it has roles that have little to do with the workbench. It functions in the marketplace, mediating and stabilizing commodity values; it is the main vehicle for the creating of hierarchies between types of produce; it gives identity to ethnic and class-based groups. In this way it straddles the economic, political and social worlds.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the hell he was indicating as far as what a “genre” was, so this paragraph really helped clear that up.
“Throughout history, guilds, unions and societies have protected the interests of the genre, academies have consolidated its methods, the marketplace has monitored its distribution, the stock exchange has fixed its price, scholars have maintained its status and museums have preserved its heritage.”
Like, whoooaaahhh!! A similar reaction that I had to the last paragraph quoted. “Genre” isn’t something I’ve really thought of defining. This helps.
“But a genre can also lose its position within the cultural hierarchy. Many of them were originated to produce objects that were vehicles of communication or prosaically utilitarian. When technology or economy renders these roles redundant, such objects survive for other, usually symbolic or cultural reasons, and these might simply not be good enough.”
Lost arts! That’s cool, huh! It’s a lost art, but I still do it ’cause I like to and it’s cool. And so on. Ergh. Forgive my informality. Paul’s stuffiness is making me gag.
And… Anway… forget all of the other paragraphs I highlighted. I don’t think it will help anyone if I transcribed them again. Let me just buzz through…
Genres change and get all mixed up, culturally and through time. By definition, they kind of have to, because genres are living, growing things that never really go away, but just adapt because of changes in exposure, technology and general interest. I liked the statement, too, about how craftspeople engage in one genre while designers must address many. This helps me to understand “craft” a little better.
Then he gets into this “positivist” versus “ironic” bibble babble. This whole section is rather like the Art and Fear article we read last time, where everyone is aware of this sort of thing, but it’s so ingrained it is totally looked over and taken for granted and no one writes five full-page articles on it. SO HA. Okay, so Paul says positivists are concerned with aesthetic expression and ironic artists “question the role and purpose of things.” Okay. Define those terms you want to use and forget about it. We really don’t need 25 more paragraphs of explanation and examples, really. I know, I know. It did not hurt me to read any of them and I did nothing but learn and grow out my little brain cells, but sometimes learning infuriates me, especially when I’m just relearning something I already knew in a few different words.
One last quote, though. One I really liked:
“This fusion of the universal and the personal is the central function of the genre in late Modern culture and a key to the persistence of craft.”
THERE.
-Sara
