Advait:
I like this idea of art and life commingling, eliding, etcetera, but I wonder if this is truly the case. As much as contemporary art practices seek to blur the distinctions between art and life, there is simultaneously a kind of distancing taking place, something that still implies a hierarchy of art > life. Even taking for instance Alfredo Jaar’s work (the grafting together of Rwandan statistics and Newsweek covers); the work reframes these two elements, and asks that we look! Look at these two things! Something is not being said, or something is being said instead of what ought to be said (perhaps). But it is the artist who is asking us to look; Jaar’s eye is still privileged (at the very least, above the editors of Newsweek magazine).
“Thus, by being ubiquitous and universal, the ‘consumer’ no longer regards it as aesthetics, and accepts it uncritically.” I thought this was fascinating. But what is the alternative? Aesthetics and design that would seek to draw attention to how “designed” they are? This kind of thing really only makes me think of Tim & Eric, and how tropes/conventions/etc. are used to subvert expectations. It is a kind of truth-telling, a kind of sublime ridiculousness. We are able to distance ourselves from how “ubiquitous” the aesthetic is? I say this as someone who didn’t grow up watching daytime/local-access television. Perhaps another example might be something like The Colbert Report? Taking a familiar form? Cramerotti notes quite succintly that the “appearance of both [new and traditional aesthetic regimes] brings focus to the aesthetics itself”. But I suppose what interests me about something likeThe Colbert Report is how irony/sarcasm/humour is used to differentiate, rather than something more clearly aesthetic.
Tate:
What is being asked of individuals is that we develop a personal ethic that either makes us empowered producers and consumers. Art is permission and an assertion of narrational permission. This is not just about news obviously. It’s how do we go about living in a massive, all encompassing system that is not working. A sinking ship that is blaring classical music.
The news is an endless feed of the multitude of examples for how things are not working. There are those who try to sugar-coat it or place the events in a blank positivity relating right back to the powers that be who, of course, want us to believe the solutions lie within the system. Then there is this impossibly long litany of critiques from those who challenge that, journalists and artists alike. We are dealing with huge centers that have incredible organization and resources for creating and disseminating media. Towers that emanate single story-ness. As a result we have cascading orbits of debate, chaos and squabble reacting to these centers and often times combating single-storyness with another reactionary single-story mentality. I think this book is a manifestation of this exhaustion of going in circles relating to mass media logic and control that from the beginning has no real importance or value. It does not help us relate to problems and solutions or change our lives. It just keeps us spinning our wheels as we busy ourselves processing and relating to relation.
What’s at stake is what’s being lost as we are distracted. Something is lost while we are everywhere and nowhere at once. What I see on a daily basis is a culture that has mimicked the logic of mass media. We have taken its power for exponential abstraction and into our lives, which makes mass media not neutral by any means. We live according to it. These are not just screens. The hours passing by us are real because the ache in our backs is real and so are the problems and solutions right outside out doors. It’s more than coincidence that the results of urgent new stories is widespread inaction. I know I sound all conspiracy theory, but unfortunately this is not the stuff of science fiction. This is real. Werner Herzog’s film proved this more convincingly than I have seen so far. My sense is that our challenge will be how we react to this beyond this class. It’s a quick reaction that says create more media to challenge and tit for tat the mainstream. I don’t think it’s that easy. I really think it has every thing to do with how we talk about me and how we live our lives in response to a world laden and sopping with information. It’s not our job or responsibility to make sense of it all. Picking our battles is.
Hyo Jin:
After reading this chapter I thought I would have clear mind of what it Aesthetic Journalism but I got more confused. For me "Aesthetic" part was hard to understand. Before writing about it I have to say first of all, I am a bad reader and not fond of reading. So I don't really read news paper or news from internet that much. I was forced to read them until high school but the language itself was very hard for me to understand. Obviously it was written in Korean which I've spoken that whole my life but the way the articles are written are so mysterious and coded with terms that I couldn't fully tell what they are trying to say. Even though it's the reason why I don't like reading and writing I love words and languages because it can be used in many different ways. Can hide multiple meanings and questions. So how I understood how Art and Journalism can match is in that way, rising questions. And other thing I thought it is interesting is does people want to know the truth? But before that what is truth? Especially on events or happenings there is so many different views and sides involved. Everybody has different truth. I guess fact can be told but I think there is no one truth and that is the beauty of Aesthetic Journalism.
Alex:
The idea of media stemming from a mediated relationship seems obvious in hindsight, but somehow it’s a connection I never made prior to Alfredo Cramerotti’s text. Mediators play a key role in communication and reconciliation, in some fashion, between parties, but can fade into the background. Though some prominent individuals may be featured as mediators in international affairs or so, many end up blending into the background through their supposed objective sagacity, and the resulting trust assumed in them. In my parents divorce, the mediators undoubtedly influenced many things but they’re far from the first people I think of when I contemplate that time.
What exactly is mediated, in journalism and art, and how? The censorial potential exists as one extreme, yet in a way it can never not be censorial to some degree, as something is filtered through a channel for consumption for some other. The act of lying by omission, of some part, seems inevitable. Cramerotti’s mention of fiction, and of how neither fiction nor journalism are “mirror[s] of reality” (p. 30), reminded me of the case of Janet Cooke, who I learned about my freshman year of high school. Janet wrote for the Washington Post, and published a profile of a boy named Jimmy, an alleged 8-year-old heroin addict. Ultimately, after she won the Pulitzer Prize, her piece was revealed to be false, “Jimmy” existing as a compelling composite figure stemming from Cooke’s investigation into heroin addiction. Perhaps this veers too far off course, but could we interpret Cooke’s piece as, perhaps, a piece of aesthetic journalism? Though it wasn’t something deliberately intended as such, Cooke took a broader base and condensed it into a detailed, mentally tangible tale that stirred questions from its moment of publication. I don’t necessarily think so, but the potential is interesting. If it had been intended as an artistic piece or statement could we then analyze elements differently, such as Cooke’s choice of using a child as the protagonist and how that could pertain to the niche in which drug users can be cached? Can we, even if it wasn’t intended that way?
Caroline:
The new field of aesthetic journalism Alfredo Camerotti proposes is the amalgamation of the artistic practice with the pure, fundamental mission of journalism to "serve the interest of the highest number of people". In his view, the artistic component in journalism does not exist to merely enrich the journalistic output or turn it into a more sensorially rich experience for the reader. Its role instead is to inform the journalistic practice in itself: "If journalism can be considered a view of the world (of what happened and its representation), then aesthetics would be the view of the view.”
Aesthetics versus reality
In our culture, knowledge and aesthetics have been traditionally held as incompatible: the idea is that one cannot transmit clear, factual knowledge by aesthetic means, which appeals to the senses and to "feeling" rather than to rationality. In Camerotti’s text, such dichotomy is easily resolved by his early invalidation of the very concept of reality: "The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is false... there is only narrative." (Suchan, 2004). One will soon find out that attempting to define the “journalism" after having eradicated the idea that there is a difference between reality and fiction becomes a hard task, for journalism has traditionally been defined as the act of reporting objective and real happenings.
Journalism as an Institution
In face of this contradiction Camerotti decides to talk about journalism less in opposition to other literary and mediatic genres— which seems to be everyone's first impulse when prompted to define the term (For instance: "Journalism is unlike fiction and film because it deals about real people rather than inventing characters.” “Journalism is unlike film because you cannot pay who is on screen"), and rather approaches journalism as an institution. When we think about journalism as an institution, we distance ourselves from the sterile dichotomy between reality and fiction and can thus define journalism by its own terms and in a more complete manner rather than by opposition with other genres: journalism as an institute is a bundle of formal codes and professional practices and conventions (in writing style, depiction style, chosen themes, appropriate materials, etc.). Through this point of view, journalism is not really a depiction of reality, but rather a medium that servers to create, through its codes and stylistic standards, the language of what is conventionally accepted in society as “reality.” As Camerotti puts it: “The journalistic method is the principal instrument to read the world"
Aesthetic Journalism — an impression
In face of these ideas raised by Camerotti, his proposition of aesthetic journalism as the melding of art with journalism is still unclear to me. Journalism, he proves, is in fact an institution with a defining and particular aesthetic. Wouldn’t all journalism, then, be aesthetic? In these first two chapters it seems to me that the major point the author is driving is the invalidation of the archaic canon of objectivity and the revealing of the formal structures of journalism practice. This way, he isn’t really getting into his aesthetic thesis. In a sense, the beginning of the book makes me feel as if he is not talking about any new kind of journalism, but rather about a more honest and careful journalistic practice that stands true to the impossibility of objectivity and to the awareness of the fiction of reality. Rather than “Aesthetic Journalism” it seems that he could (should?!) call these chapters Radical Journalism or Post-Modern Journalism (since post-modernity is characterized by self reflexivity). After reading these first two chapters of the book, the question “what is aesthetic journalism” is still very much raised and remains but partially approached .
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