intermedia response

Dick Higgins' essay on intermedia starts comes across as very abrasive and elitist. though he later states that he doesn't want for avant-garde to mean "avant-garde: for specialists only", he doesn't do a good job of making traditional art seem very worthwhile.
I disagree with what Higgins says about paintings being static. he says that there is no dialogue in a painting, and that they exist as decorated ornaments to imply grandeur. I think that the quality and value of a painting has to do with the though process of the painter and the interperatation and subsequent thought processes of the spectator rather than it's cost-value or whose wall it decorates.

Higgins excludes a very important and very alive form of art in this essay - folk art. Though he mentions pop art as being dead, i think that folk art is part of a dialogue with modern life (i probably don't know what the difference is between pop and folk art). Who can argue that graffiti is static? Higgins himself commends a contemporary for his political art, though in that case the art was not composed of a single type of media.
I think that it was Goethe who said something along the lines of there being three different types of art: 1) art that entertains 2) art that educates and 3) art that exalts. Higgins does not take the first type of art very seriously, in fact he suggests that it may even be an insult to our intelligence. Though it is important for art to break down boundaries, it is probably not essential to be as reactionary as Higgins is.

thank you for reading my essay about the water cycle in central europe