Radicant Chapter 2

1. I'm curious what people will think about a paradox described on page 81 - that though the world is becoming increasingly mutable, we're operating under the sense that the systems in place (like captialism and democracy) that created the mutable world are somehow insurmountable - there's no alternative to them. I'm inclined to agree - there seems no way of escaping capitalism. Maybe when we're able to go to Mars and establish colonies we'll do better. In the meantime, the artist reacts by making the mutable waste into something substantial, but making it Art.

2. So many artists were brought up like Jason Rhoades who use a lot of found objects and create a chaotic installation that defies order and structure and pretty much any conventional ways of decoding the work into meaning for the viewer. Before my formal artistic eduaction, I was inclinded to view work like this as massive piles of junk that were not expressing anything of value to me. Even B. admitted that he struggled at first to understand the point of Rhoades's work, but then he formed this theory of creating meaning through defining negative space. I suppose I was one of those with a more "stationary gaze," seeing only chaos. I would say that I see so much chaos every day that I've been conditioned to ignore that I don't want to pay any special attention to this pile of junk and bombardment of neon lights, no offense Mr. Rhoades.

3. It was an important point brought up around page 110, that amidst all the art being created by journeys, there needs to be some sort of starting point or something towards which to journey, like pickles, apparently. Though the journeys wander through boundaries, there is still a system in place for them to be conducted. This is an act of the artwork creating its own context.

4. Topology = geometry that measures nothing and no quantities are compared. Instead one examines the figure's qualitative invariants by deforming it to see what happens, like folding a piece of paper. Art topology = perhaps the meaning derived from a Koons work is found in the invariants left behind when he blows up a toy to the size of a building.

5. Revocable aesthetics - an interesting phrase. It implies that the authority a work of Art has can be yanked at any time. I'm trying to imagine this situation happening with a classic, like a Picasso... It's hard to imagine that all of a sudden people will reject the merit of Starry Night, probably because this is a contemporary problem. Okay, how about a Damien Hirst... Well that's easier, many people wouldn't consider a shark in a glass case very aesthetic in the first place. The job of an artwork now is to create its own authority, its own context, that can stand up when the rest of the world has become entirely skeptical. That's a huge job to do - no wonder grad school is so stressful!