Photography transforms minor art into canonical monumental works

Evidence

Such effects can be proximately approached by way of older anticipations, such as Malraux’s intuition of a fictive work of art: he had in mind the way in which photography creates hitherto unrealized art forms, for example, magnifying the beaten gold of a piece of Scythian jewelry into volumes reminiscent of the friezes on the Parthenon, transforming decorative art into sculpture, and the provisional, mobile, minor products of nomads, into monumental and sedentary canonical “works.” He himself, being canonical and modernist in his views, did not succeed in producing the concept of such transformations but only in adding the anonymous Scythians (along with the grave painters of Fayoum) to the “major” canon. Whether the operation could work in the other direction, and the great canonical forms be turned back into minor art, is another, unanswered, question (Deleuze and Guattari try to do so with that modern classic called Kafka). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 267

Categorization

• QUESTION: Jameson leaves open the reverse operation — canonic forms turned back into minor art — a question with purchase on whether the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is falsifiable, since it asks whether aesthetic hierarchy can be manipulated downward at all.
• XREF: connects to: Photographic reproduction replaces the real building as the consumed object — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 316; SoHo artist proximity—neighbors borrowing cameras—enabled the making of canonical art — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1118; Everyday moments of attention can be framed and shared as art experiences — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 372
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Photographic reproduction replaces the real building as the consumed object — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 316; SoHo artist proximity—neighbors borrowing cameras—enabled the making of canonical art — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1118; Everyday moments of attention can be framed and shared as art experiences — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 372