planned obsolescence in all its forms

 

Art can be defined as whatever an artist says it is - and anybody can declare themselves to be an artist. This... people find disconcerting, and annoying. 

Meantime, certain individuals, anxious to have their unusual artistic practice recognized as falling under the definition of their art form, often announce exaggerated claims for what they produce. Such claims frequently include an insistence that their artistic productions are the newest development in the art, and should receive attention precisely for that reason. Our society at the moment is under the sway of values that glorify planned obsolescence in all its forms: fashions, fads, tends, and disposable products that even twenty years ago were considered repairable. Thus, making a fetish of the new is central to commerce as well as being the rationale for some artistic approaches. A barrage of advertising and other propaganda is directed at consumers by enterprises desiring to encourage the purchase of the latest products, In order for this inducement to buy to be successful, people must believe that we have entered an entirely different era in which previously held attitudes and values do not apply. Hence the urgency and frequency with which the corporate cheerleaders - and some of their artistic followers - declare out times to be postindustrial, postfeminist, postmodern. 

...

The term "experimental" for certain kinds of poetry doesn't seem to work either, although that term, too, is in use. "Experimental" is language borrowed from science... In truth nothing is "experimental" about experimental poetry - that is, nothing is definitively proposed, then proved or disproved via reproducible results, as in a scientific experiment. Art, thank God, is neither military nor scientific. It draws from other sources of the human experience. Every sort of writer, in fact, in the act of compositions considers alternative formulations of all the facts of writing - experiments, if you will - and then adopts those nouns, verbs, modifiers, grammatical and formal structures that the author finds will best convey the effects he or she wants to achieve. 

- Tom Wayman, from his Ralph Gustafson Lecture Songs Without Price, as published in a book of the same name (Institute for Coastal Research, 2007).