| | | | | | trast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes. . . ." 59 By escaping to a new world of forms, artists abandoned their ability to speak directly about issues that were the concern of the masses. They now exclusively addressed specialized audiences, a situation which pushed them further and further afield. Eventually this led to the adoption of an "international" style that retained few connections with the different national cultures within which artists in fact worked. For all of that, it remained that modern art, by its very nature, posited a field of activity, a world whose values were very much at odds with those pushed by the mass media. The mere presence of that art offered a possible refuge from the crass commodities of the consumer industry everywhere on display. This is why Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory, insisted that modern art, for all its shortcomings, nevertheless produced the only works which countered the presence of commercial interests. "Works of art," he wrote, "are plenipotentiaries of things beyond the mutilating sway of exchange, profit and false human needs."60 High art, by its very presence, implied that not everything in life was for sale. It even had the potential to reveal their alienated existence to those caught up in the ideological spin of the times. Modernism, at least in Adorno's eyes, had thus an utopian social effect: "Art respects the masses by presenting itself to them as that which they might become, instead of adapting itself to them in their degraded state." ''Culture," he concluded, momentarily "keeps barbarism in check."61 | | | | | | | | | What was possibly an admirable solution at the beginning of the century was less clearly so at its close. Artists became disillusioned with museum culture as well as with self-imposed exile from daily life. Beyond that, some unexpected applications of semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc., in the sixties and after, suddenly exploded the conventional ways through which art and artists were viewed. Semiotics, to take a single example, was revisited long after Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure proposed their seminal insights about the working of language. First, Peirce made us realize the distance between a referent (what is out there) and a sign (a word, for instance). For Peirce, although we have direct contact with the world, our signs are merely the interpretants of that world. They cannot by definition bring across the fullness of material objects. Because of this, our | | | | |
