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(More customer reviews)"Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism" is not an easy book to read because of the stylized academic language, obscure references, and love of word play - "sight/cite/site". I joke that I plan to do an "English translation" for popular readers. The challenging language is not accidental and, along with the $68 price tag (reduced from $86) for a thin book of some 200 pages (plus notes and references), the work is unapologetically designed for serious academic readers. The affectation of the author's uncapitalized name (jan jagodzinski) reflects the tenor of the book. That being said, the ideas in the book are profound and worth the effort.
Jagodzinski articulates the important understanding that the role of art in society is to promote free experimentation. The role of art is to maintain the spirit and soul of the nation framed outside the use-value of the marketplace economy. To do this it is often necessary to disturb or challenge the capitalist consumption model prevalent in society. Jadodzinski contrasts this role of art with that of what he refers to as "designer capitalism". He provides extensive examples from history, philosophy and psychoanalysis that show the role of art today is resisting the capitalist consumption associated with the enterprise of design. He documents the understanding that art's 'asociality' exposes its fundamental antagonism within the capitalist enterprise.
Free experimentation outside the set criteria of the systematically constructed, established order is extremely important in art as well as in pure science, pure mathematics and every other area of intellectual pursuit. "Creativity" that does not surprise, challenge, and disrupt is pseudo-creativity. The only measure of activist art is whether the policing agency becomes upset or threatened. That's why designers use the term "innovation" to distinguish what they do from what artists do.
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Click Here to see more reviews about: Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye (Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation)
The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the 'I' of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancière, Virilio, Ziarek, and Žižek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual cultural education. jagodzinski develops the concept of an 'avant-garde without authority,' 'self-refleXion' and 'in(design)' to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek's 'force' of art.
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