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Elie Charest <turgon@mlink.net> wrote: : But if you hold something to be high art you should be able to express why - even in : simple terms. How would you argue that Baywatch is art? I can't...I've never seen it...but I understand it to be the most popular program on the planet and there must be someone who thinks it to be art. Gosh, twenty years ago I thought ABBA was the greatest, most artistic singing group around. : > But the free market is exactly what produced the beautiful art : > of the Avant-Garde of the 20's and 30's...so what's the problem? : Er... not really. The Free Market didn't have much to do with it. In fact the Free : Market has little to do with art: great art comes from great artists. Case in point the Why do you differentiate the creation of art with the exchange of products or services for money? To me there isn't any difference. My father was a professional musician his whole life and he earned a very good living at it. His job I would describe as 100% artistic but he still used it to bring home the bacon. He was part of the free market...why weren't the Avant-Garde's also part of the free market? : theories of montage elaborated by Eisenstein - which greatly influenced Cinema as a : whole - and which were based on Marxist theory. Following your logic, one could say they : were "produced" by a Planned Economy. Actually, many artists in the former Soviet Union, such as Eisenstein, were rewarded with incredible privileges that the ordinary Soviet citizen were not afforded. And this was true for others in other areas of Soviet society that excelled in their fields. So, in a sense, Eisenstein's rewards were a very real function of the principles of a free market: produce good product and you will be rewarded for it. Of course, the Soviets didn't employ this same principle for the rest of society and that's why the system didn't work! The fruits of Eisenstein's genius were a result of his own self-generated efforts, not a planned economy (seems to me I had to sit through Battleship Potemkin and something to do with the Steps of Odessa when I had a film class in college...lots and lots of montage, like you say). : Yes, but how do you choose your watchdog, and how can you be sure that it even itself : biaised? I though the idea was that the consumer had the power to choose? Isn't it : better to hone your critical sense so that you don't need someone to tell you what to : trust or not? Yes, I believe that the critical sense that you describe IS the best way to filter in ANY input from ANY media...nothing should be taken at face value...not even a 30 second video clip of a Rodney King being beaten, which very well could have been taken out of context thus making the apparent agressors, the policemen, look like the perpetrators when they very well could have been 100% innocent. Now, I'm not saying that IS the case, but you would have to concede that selective editing, if it can be done by "big brother", it can also be done by other parties. So, yes, the critical sense that you describe should be active when watching something like a Rodney King beating and one should say to oneself: There may be more here than meets the eye and I will reserve judgement until all the facts are in. : In any case, those media watchdogs you refer to can usually only reach an infinitesimal : fraction of Big Media's audience. Our clueless elites can not tolerate anything that : questions their authority, and the control they exert on Big Media forbids any serious : critic of editorial policies and the system in general. Note that this can be quite : different on the net, where you don't need huge amounts of cash to print a newspaper, : and are therefore less subject to pressure from advertisers and capitalist owners. This : is where the internet might change the News equation. And don't you think that any news media source that discovers a good story or scoop on the net will take advantage of that and reproduce it through their media outlet? If you answer "yes" to that question, you must realize that what fuels the motor of the media is the good story, the scoop -- no matter whom or which sacred cow it blasts -- and THIS is