Re: Saving the advertising industry in a fractured media-verse? Biz 2.0

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tom Walker wrote:
>
> Science World here in Vancouver runs a continuous loop of the 1987 Fischli
> For another take on "The
> Way Things Go," here's an excerpt from Arthur Danto:
>
> http://www.postmedia.net/999/fischweiss1.htm
>

>From Danto:

the individual episodes seem to happen one after another smoothly and
without interruption - the danger being that something will go wrong and
break the chain. It is, for all the triviality of its individual
episodes, an epic of some kind, vastly transcending the connotations of
play while retaining the spirit of innocent mischief in which boys at
play egg one another on to high and higher efforts which, taken
collectively, seem to imply the pointless horror of unending war.
Beginning with a Katzenjammer Kids mentality, Fischli and Weiss take
their mischief to a distance so great that the resulting work becomes a
postmodern classic, with a rich art-historical pedigree ranging from
Jean Tinguely, the fabricator of self-destroying machines, to Joseph
Beuys, who made art of soap, old newspapers, and whatever was, to echo
Heidegger once again, "at hand."

This "high and higher efforts" that Danto speaks of, leading to chaos,
must owe something to Laurel and Hardy as well. And of course Chaplin's
Modern Times. In fact to much of the great slapstick, 1915-1940.

Carrol