Reading Diary - Artists Talk 1969-1977

With confirmation of my hiring, I decided to go to the local thrift and find a book to celebrate. I ended up picking up Artists Talk 1969-1977, a transcript of well, artists talks, from NSCAD over those years. 

...Well despite liking art I'm not at all caught up in academic literature on it, so it's hard for me to dissect. But let me drop some nice quotes from the intro:

• In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. ... The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (Page XI)
• ..."art" becomes history ... the moment it has been accepted as art and entered a culture (Page XII)
• the bourgeoisie and the dominant ideology always want to put art as one of the few ways to be free (Page XIV)

• I started thinking about the relation between words and object, and the word stem as an abstraction... But no one would ever think that language was art. It's just, literally, language. (Page 5)
• I think of work as an investigation, and that no particular work should be a masterpiece ... I tried to keep my works from getting iconic and separated into individual objects. They are all connected (Page 5)
• It's important to understand ... that there's a complete separation between art and aesthetics. There was a time where art was aesthetics. But aesthetics has to do with perception about the world, in the sense that a sunset can be a very aesthetic experience, but it's not art. (Page 6)
• I think tradition is aesthetically antithetical to what art's about. (Page 7)
• I really think the future of art has to do with a certain way of filling that gap which philosophy left. Not that it would be artists' philosophy, but that part of our psyche ... that was once filled by philosophy (Page 8)

In generally, the speech is a mix of what makes up "arthood", how art does and doesn't relate to the world, and its connection to objects vs philosophy. Deep!

But I think what particularly interests me is the idea of art vs aesthetics. Especially with the modern social media era, art that fulfills an aesthetic role gets the most attention as its easy to look at quickly, decide whether or not it fits the supposed aesthetics of your profile, and share it or not. With little engagement beyond that. So if art really was disengaging with aesthetics in the 60s, I think it's back to being connected. At least in the mainstream. 

If you take the view of aesthetics being beautiful but shallow views of the world, while art is philosophy, it does say a lot about the aesthetic and core obsession that people have now. Something about how shallow replacements of true art are encouraged by mass media and others. There's a lot that could be said about it (or against it). 

So anyone who's read all this, what's your thoughts on art vs aesthetics, or anything else related?