"Lester Bangs again: I long ago gave up on giving the other fellow’s taste the benefit of the doubt. It led me to too many shitty, phony albums rhapsodized over by the influential sycophants serving as rock journalists… The pure aesthetic has created a monoculture called the American theater—two act dramatic realism by white playwrights with white actors watched by white audiences with a talkback after the show thrown in for anybody still awake. The pure aesthetic is death to diversity of thought, image, performance, practice. Believing in the pure aesthetic is like believing that a market economy is the one and only economy. And we are marketing in an economy of the pure aesthetic and the result: theater isn’t for everyone; it’s for those with a solid standing in that market economy. Economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book The Price of Inequality makes an important point about who is at the top of the economic food chain…it’s not inventors and scientists and academics but rather the bulk of those at the top are geniuses in business, and that genius is focused on a singular individual getting ahead of everyone else financially: More than a small part of their genius resides in devising better ways of exploiting market power… and in many ways ensuring that politics works for them rather than for society."
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:23:43 +0000
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