Robert Archambeau 2: Commodification

About commodification: some people have gone to extremes to keep their work from being chewed up by the culture industry, but in the end real purity (which I’m not so sure is even desirable — words like “purity” make me nervous) doesn’t seem very possible. I mean, think of the people who’ve gone to extremes in trying to avoid being chewed up by the culture industry. There’s a real irony to the fate of the Dada crowd, for example. They started out trying to short-circuit the whole gallery and museum system, doing things like presenting mass-produced objects as art and displaying their work next to axes that could be used by viewers to destroy works they didn’t like. Fast-forward several decades, and the National Gallery of Art is reverently presenting their work. Anyone coming at the exhibit with an axe would be hustled out the door and into a squad car in no time. Or think of Jeremy Prynne, for many years England’s most deliberately obscure poet: for a long time he chose to publish in the most weird little, non-commercial venues, and stayed off the reading and lecture circuits, too. Now you can order up his poems on Amazon.com, he’s being talked about for some of the big prizes, and he’s a star in China, where one of his recent books sold 50,000 copies. In the end, the big cultural institutions devour whatever they want. I suppose we might ask whether the institutions are changed in the process. I think there’s something to this. Certainly the boundaries between “mainstream” and “otherstream” seem more fluid than they used to.