I'm so glad I did! I've only listened to half but it's been really interesting so far. I've particularly enjoyed Alistair Hudson's comments. I've attempted to use Otter.ai to transcribe them (it seems to have a 30 min limit on the free version so I might need to try something else!).
Hudson was the director of the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery, which has the strap-line "Making art useful since 1889". I was amused but cynical... Can art really be useful? Is 'useful art' even fine art? But then Hudson went on, at time mark 14.57, emphasis mine:
...the short version is, of course, is that our last 200 years of history is one that's defined by this idea of autonomous art. We could touch here, perhaps upon sculpture and how that, you know, how we how we conceive of and think about sculpture, but it's really one that's defined in Western Europe, or centered around Western European thinking, the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, for example, about sort of isolating art out of the system and thinking about it on its own terms. This is really it kind of created the conditions that were very supportive of an art market. It was very support, supportive of the conditions that created kind of hierarchy, hierarchies within society, but it's one model of art. And what that model of art did, basically was push out the idea of use value within art itself, which for a long 40,000 years of human history, people have been using art in their daily lives in all kinds of ways for a very long time. So it was really about not necessarily doing away with art in its current form, but reintroducing this idea of use as a way to actually understand what's going on when we do art, or we look at art, or we employ art that process, and think about art as a process which is then employed in life practices. So that's sort of the underlying philosophy of it. But what it means, in practical terms is that I've become particularly interested in forms of art in which they are their very definition is defined about their use. So rather than prescribing meaning from the outset, which is dictated primarily by you know, an author or so on, the meaning itself is derived over time, through through processes.
Mind. Blown. WTF! I had no idea about any of this. I had no idea that what I think of as 'art' is 'autonomous art', let alone that it's only one form of art. Of course, now I see how that could be so but... Wow. Reading more about autonomous art.
I really like the idea of making art that is defined by it's use... It feels adjacent to some of my earlier musing on art as the 'fire' (event/process/experience) not the ashes (object/record). I am a bit of a meaning freak, and the idea of meaning being created through processes - not 'process', but processes, I think meaning the processes of use - the use develops the meaning, especially (in the context of the podcast) meaning to the community of people who use the art. You could argue that something like The Angel of the North has developed meaning not through existing as an object, or even though its form, but through the meaning it has come to have in the hearts of the people who have interacted with it.
What does this mean for my own art? Dunno, certainly it has renewed my interest in participatory art, but also perhaps given me a new way of thinking about meaning and how it comes to reside in a work... I need to get a good walk in, and ponder this further.
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