Talk:The Practice of Everyday Life
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[edit] Perceived implications for some areas of contemporary art practice:
[edit] The Artist as “Strategical”
de Certeau’s model has the effect of undermining the artist’s perceived role as voice of freedom / bringer of change. The producer-product dichotomy on its own had the artist on a pedestal as creator, but the contrast produced by adding the consumer to the mix relegates him to the category of strategy, his image as underdog less telling now than the structure of his behaviour.
This is especially uncomfortable to some artists because of the strong bias running through the book – a rather simplistic: strategy, bad; tactic, nice. The artist is probably somewhere in between, but as someone who has studied fine art, I found the new contrast more liberating than offensive. de Certeau’s strategy-tactic model has widened the field and made it possible to apply more systematic reasoning to trends like vigorous branding and PR as an artistic device. Some regard branding as a deliberate inversion of artistic values, others see it as part of a natural progression – and the latter de Certeau’s model reaffirms. However, de Certeau tries to show that at user level the strategy is not that difficult to render powerless.
[edit] Saturation point
On the other hand, whenever I see gently spiked tiles in the street in areas where pedestrians and cyclists are unwanted, I see that the strategy has cottoned on to the tactic and is responding with products designed to be impervious to re-appropriation.
Selina Apostol 19:42, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
