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Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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the timeless lumpenness of a radical<br />

cultural life<br />

art & language, UK<br />

. . . The timeless lumpenness of a radical cultural life; the gangrenous excrescence, stylishly<br />

exposed in the quiet salons. The market for the dry delicacies of pretentious gentility, the<br />

overfed opinion, the corpulent choice, the leisured appropriation, “society” and society in harmony<br />

are an objective condition of the class struggle. The privileged low-life of high culture is<br />

the massification of the people, is the enemy of inquiry, is an insult to, and sometimes an<br />

egregious product of, the achievement and goals of working-class movements, a denial of the<br />

real objectives of the working-class movement. It is not, however, the life of the unwitting fool.<br />

It has its own agencies.<br />

The conditions of the production of high culture are not somehow apart from these<br />

machinations in brutality . . . and the artists are not exempt from the charge of connivance at<br />

the proliferation of force, violence: the barbarism of imperialism. Their “status” as an economic<br />

hors concours serves the aim of the ruling classes in their continuing domination. It avails no<br />

one of a glimpse of “freedom.” It is a status which allows a parvenu sincerity, the treachery of<br />

the successful product, to be deified in a fideism of “culture,” a fideism in the interests of the<br />

ruling class.

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