Isn't the result of the ethical turn to say that the role of the artist today is to live and embody the role of the human being proper? As everyone else is instrumentalised by work and increasing specialisation, isn't the artists role not so much to produce art anymore but to exist as both:
a) the personification of a united society in general as a grounding for that society - that is, to display the unification of society on the representational level; and
b) the last arena left for any humanist/modernist/unmediated life project - that is, while everyone else is to keep society running, experiences life through mediated sensibility and totalising systems, the artist is the only one that can be said to be living life proper, for-itself. The role of the artist would thereby br to register, embody, live and actualise the avowed goal of societal labour, that being to live a life propoer to life itself, and accordingly one th registers and embodies the advancement of human ethics, self-actualisation, and collective actualisation.
You should become the philosophical theorist of contemporary art. There really isn't one at the moment, it seems all the good theorists are generally conservative when it comes to CA like Agamben, and I remember Zizek saying he is deeply distrustful of it. There's only Ranciere, does Badiou talk about it? Anyway, I think it's a gap in the market. And I agree with everything you said.
ReplyDeletewell help me develop this a bit further then and maybe we can write something and get it published
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