This is Kenny Millions : his work blew my mind last night. Genre classification is negative insofar as it assumes a single ground by which both artist and audience might began to derive meaning from the work. I was drawn to the performance via word of mouth about “some cool jazz thing”; because arts of improvisation fascinate me, I decided to go out for it.
In this case, genre classification added gravity to an experience that might have been better classified as simply “other”. Classifications and identification of qualities that inhere to any body - person, body of work, body of experience - assume staticity through time.
This problematizes dynamism and fluidity of experience; it concretizes memory, the operations of which are, I believe, not wholly divorced from the work of a memoirist. For greater poetry to exist in memory, genre classifications should be carefully considered before applied to the work of an art maker which holds singular meaning for the art lover.
HIGHART
VERSUS
LOWART
Distinguishing the fine from the applied arts, and identifying the former as les beaux arts, constitutes a form of repression masked as exaltation paralleled only by the perception of women as the Fair Sex. To put works of art or to set women at what came to be known as “aesthetic distance” — as objects whose essence and fulfillment consists in pleasing the senses — was a brilliant political response to what were felt as dark dangers in both … [In the arts] aesthetic distance then does what frames and pedestals do to icons and effigies, isolating them conceptually from the practical world and humiliating them as objects fit only to caress the disinterested and refined eye.
