>>22248>that would have also crushed the classics we now revere, there is so much more of everything now and we certainly don't live in a meritocratic system where the best things automatically rise through the shitThat's just it, though: they're "revered," and rarely experienced. Plenty of people talk about "the classics," but few people actually bother with them. In effect, "fuck the classics" just reinforces this same behavior and lack of engagement with the past.
There is one sense I would agree with "fuck the classics": trying to find one's own way in art. But this requires actual engagement with the classics and the traditions to which they belong and help constitute, not an empty rejection of the abstraction "classics," and not pointless and stupid evaluations of "classics" on the basis of whether they make you feel good, whether you "liked"
Citizen Kane or not. Fundamentally, both you and the other person are evaluating artistic works in terms of "enjoyment," or, in short, like consumers. For an actual philosophically "Marxist view" on this, here is Adorno in his
Aesthetic Theory:
<Pleasure masquerades beyond recognition in the Kantian disinterestedness. What popular consciousness and a complaisant aesthetics regard as the taking pleasure in art, modeled on real enjoyment, probably does not exist. The empirical subject has only a limited and modified part in artistic experience *tel quel*, and this part may well be diminished the higher the work’s rank. Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by expressions like “a feast for the ears.” Yet if the last traces of pleasure were extirpated, the question of what artworks are for would be an embarrassment. Actually, the more they are understood, the less they are enjoyed. Formerly, even the traditional attitude to the artwork, if it was to be absolutely relevant to the work, was that of admiration that the works exist as they do in themselves and not for the sake of the observer. What opened up to, and overpowered, the beholder was their truth, which as in works of Kafka’s type outweighs every other element. They were not a higher order of amusement. The relation to art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared into the material; this is even more soPost too long. Click here to view the full text.