Athletic Aesthetics
Herein, are my impressions throughout, and directly following, my reading of Troemel’s essay “Athletic Aesthetics.”
I wrote this for class a few months ago as a homework response, and didn’t want to see it get lost entirely - so i’m reposting it here for safe keeping.
“This has reversed the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have an audience. Today’s artist on the Internet needs an audience to create art. An aesthlete’s audience, once assembled, becomes part of their medium.”
Is this “flip” of the traditional recipe slightly exaggerated? I agree that the audience-as-medium, as well as artist-as-art/commodity is a very valid point, and is definitely a very real aspect of art in the internet age; however, the statement that the artist needs_ _an audience to create art (as well as the “tree falls in the forest” analogy that Troemel uses) is just as true in any given epoch as it is now. Is a painting that sits in an artist’s studio, unseen by all, until its destruction in a studio fire, any different from a work of art that receives zero views online and is eventually taken down?
“What separates the aesthlete from the overworked intern or sweatshop worker is that the aesthletes’ labor serves themselves; it’s self-exploitation rather than exploitation at the hands of other capitalists…Most aesthletes secure artistic freedom only by working in the precarious space outside the governing institutions of their field.”
Self-exploitation, yes… but also, is that any different from exploitation in the general sense? No actual exploitation can ever take place_ _without the (even begrudging) consent of the exploited. The “self-exploiting” aesthlete is really a self whom accepts exploitation at the hands of the audience, and the constructs of the (social) medium through which the artist purveys his/her work.
If aesthletic artistic production is able to be mediated only through social media, isn’t the artist’s social media platform(s) of choice the “governing institution of their field?” If raw production is valued while “truth” in aesthetic/craft superiority is meaningless, the governing institutions that would normally control the artist are essentially inconsequential, especially considering that Troemel seems to make a hard distinction between athletic artists, and artist’s working traditionally.
“Release schedules for work were once fully orchestrated by culture-industry institutions, tailored to the market-researched demands of a buying audience.”
The above quote describes, to a “t”, the current experience of the aesthlete working via social media. The social medium is the “culture-industry institution” (literally: culture being mediated through a framework or interface that is industrial in nature, eg. Facebook), and the “market-researched demands of a buying audience” have not gone anywhere. They may not be “buying,” and the market-research may be carried out in a less explicit manner on the part of the artist, but the audience is consuming, and the artist (even subconsciously) is almost certainly hyper-aware of the “market’s” dynamics. For example, only the most deft of athletic artists has done the necessary research to know the prime times to post their stream of work, the best places to disseminate it from, etc.
It seems that Troemel, in some cases, is slightly too quick to sever the up-until-now workings of the art industry, from the working style of the contemporary aesthlete. To me, it seems that differences such as these, while still very good points in general, should be seem more as re-contextualizations of existing modes of art making than completely new modes of working as an artist.
