Walter Benn Michaels
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226210261
- eISBN:
- 9780226210438
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226210438.003.0003
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
The attraction of materiality--an intensified and literalized commitment to the idea that the work of art must not mean but be--has been a powerful one to both recent theorists and artists. This ...
More
The attraction of materiality--an intensified and literalized commitment to the idea that the work of art must not mean but be--has been a powerful one to both recent theorists and artists. This chapter focuses on Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder and on photographs by Phil Chang and Arthur Ou as works that powerfully register that attraction, but that, more powerfully, seek to dramatize the conditions under which a work counts not only as being something but also as being about something. And it concludes by identifying this thematization of meaning as an effort to distinguish the work of art from the commodity it also is.Less
The attraction of materiality--an intensified and literalized commitment to the idea that the work of art must not mean but be--has been a powerful one to both recent theorists and artists. This chapter focuses on Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder and on photographs by Phil Chang and Arthur Ou as works that powerfully register that attraction, but that, more powerfully, seek to dramatize the conditions under which a work counts not only as being something but also as being about something. And it concludes by identifying this thematization of meaning as an effort to distinguish the work of art from the commodity it also is.
