Today’s post – “The Industrialization of the Arts: Meaning in a Capitalist Framework” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.
The lack of exploration of style, and the absence of style development strikes me as a trait of the industrialization of the arts. The artist no longer has to make poetry, no longer has to open up worlds to be experienced in all their familiarity or strangeness; now the artist must only provoke intense subjective experiences one after another.
It is an impoverishment of art to the level of killing it and reducing it to the same criteria as plain entertainment. I call it the aestheticization of life. The whole life has been made the object of aesthetics.
