Sometimes antagonism is the best medicine. -Arch-priest Reginald Somnambatista
Sometimes antagonism is your only real option.
We've talked in other places about the idea of yarn, a form of materially focused art production that works to avoid post-modern self-critical distance by refocusing its attentions to desire and its form to that which visually represents itself in all its loose and jangliness. That, however, is a trap.
There is no real escape from concerns over authenticity. All art, all production, all life, all everything can be put under question as to its intentionality. This is a pure and unavoidable state.
The problem, however, is constructed almost entirely on the notion of reception. The problem of authenticity is always about a second party (even, as we'll discuss later, when that other party is yourself).
This is why, fuck the audience. Which is not to say make esoteric art that will leave even the elite in a stupor. It means, quite simply, fuck them. And fuck you.
Your job as an artist is solely to engage in the process of production. This isn't a state of being that requires reflection and repetition (it can, of course, or sometimes should).
Fuck the audience takes seriously the notion of creative impulse, not necessarily creative intentionality. Intentionality is already pitched toward reception. It is always angled toward a form of comprehensiblity that undermines the impulse. Now certainly, there is also no pure impulse. That would be almost essentially inhuman to assume anything pure.
Furthermore, antagonism is not forgetting. It is not ignorance or isolation. It is simply the reminder that they aren't the point. Which, as we pointed toward in aside above, is not to say that you are the point either. You are most certainly fucking not. The you of the future is not you and cannot be trusted anymore than anyone else. You are acting for you essentially only in the action itself, not the minute by minute reflection that coinhabits the artistic space. While it would be senseless to ban reflection from that space, it is crucial to retain antagonism toward that reflective corrective. Fuck it. First and foremost get it down. Spit it out. Fuck it up.
The true reception—the receiver, you or anyone else—is just as artistic a process, is just as open to making as in the first instant. When I arrive at your artwork, I may do whatever I wish to it. Hate it, love it, steal it and incorporate it into my own art world. In essence you can't stop me. And similarly, you can't stop yourself. The future you will fuck up your art. You will steal it and massacre it. And that is precisely your right. Which means fuck the artist as much as fuck the audience. You are a free being and it is your job—if we're talking about being an individual either as an artist or just a person—to do precisely what you will with a piece of art.
None of this should be seen as a rejection of the potential for communal interaction around art or anything else. We are speaking solely about a first instance, a snapshot in time to which one could never truly return or inhabit. Art can not be for anything. That is its essence. Art is not even for Art (capital A), which would be to say that art was responsible to some ideal that could exist outside of itself, which—trailing off now—would imply that it wasn't for itself. Art is strictly undefinable outside of negative definitions. Its requirement is to be permanently mutable such that every single instant of creative production can possibly open up to being art.
Which is almost to say that the word itself disappears, loses all meaning. At what point is the conversation no longer about art, but say life, or energy, or matter? No answer. Stupid question. Pointless. Fucking pointless.
Art is not pornography, you don't know it when you see it. That would be loving the audience well beyond the bounds of any safety.
Art is that which you can't really see at all. Art is only that which you can make. So yes. You might as well just say living or making. But isn't that something amazing as such? Perhaps the suggestion here is that all living is unrecognized art (leaving alone for a second the fact that we just claimed that art was in essence unrecognizable). And well, sure it is. Making is the stuff of gods. It you produce a pure moment that must be art no matter the context. As above, this means we are in the realm of the meaningless.
So the question becomes, what is the "art" that we recognize? The answer, which we deduce from its having been made, is those inspired moments that manage to persist in spite of everything that tends to delude there effects. The artist is person that learns to regard the essence of the making. If something was made poorly at first—making poorly might be impossible under this definition, but please, allow us our loopholes—it's remaking can renew or restore its essence. This takes great acuity.
This does not give you license to hack at something lamely and call it art for want of editing because you feel it is pure. Editing can also be art. Art that can piggyback on the first moment and further push that inspiration.
The audience must be fucked. But only as long as they remain an audience. Audiences produce damaging response precisely in their role as viewer. They are essentially at cross purposes with the core of the piece of art. When the audience interacts with the art so as to remake it, they leave the role of audience and become artist. Artists who allow this swapping of positions—or better put a crossing of lines that puts the audience on the same side as the artist—allows the art to change and grow. There can be no damage to the art. Art is never in danger. (Tho admittedly, collective creation is infinitely more difficult than sole creation and is in fact the heart of the sublime, incomprehensible.)
Only audiences destroy. They destroy by being audiences. They destroy in their passivity.
The only good audience is no longer an audience. But of course they never have to be.
So cease. Cease to exist those who don't make. We must be antagonistic to the audience. We must fuck the audience.
Fuck you.