Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre

Three Incidents at the Border of Genre The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016), 20-29. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jmi.v3i2.2492 Stian Grøgaard © Stian Grøgaard 2016. Oslo National Academy of the Arts [email protected]

ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION

From a perspective of conceptual economy, rather perfection may indeed explain the resilience of the Everyone knows what genre is. The familiar con- than the specialized literature on genre, this text genre form. What remains is a vertical structure, cept promises easy access but is actually difficult discusses what genre divisions can do when ap- a model for which even the model example is a fall to handle. Spotting the difficulty will have to begin plied to cultural artifacts compared to other forms from grace. with the constancy of genre and why it is taken for of classification or typology. On which aspect of granted. Constancy provides a measure for new ex- the artifact is it rewarding for a concept of genre Keywords pressions and an order to which they can belong. to operate, and what is achieved when extending Applied aesthetics; Genre; Restrictive economy; Genre sub- Quite independent of genre theories, the concept of its use beyond traditional divisions in fine arts, lation; Art versus genre; Edvard Munch; Clint Eastwood; Bob genre displays a certain structure and extension – Hollywood movies and popular music? Are there Dylan. in short, a grammar. While a general outline of this restrictions inherent to the concept of genre it- grammar may be gained by conceptual analysis, the self, explicable in a grammar of the concept? The specifics must consult experience from, as always, a criteria unfolded by such a grammar seems to be limited number of genres. These are two sources of more technical than properly aesthetic, close to information, one analytical and the other syntheti- the ideal of perfection in traditional normative cal, and they had best not contradict each other. poetics. With one significant addition, the criteria The following general remarks do not comment are always too specific to allow for the perfect ex- upon the research literature on genre, with which I ample of genre. Perfection belongs to the law of shall claim no close acquaintance. Based on a mix the genre, not to the artifact enforcing the law. Im- of ignorance and fastidiousness concerning genre,

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 20 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre the point is to evoke limits to a concept. Less than nologies as well. Media are not considered genre, mulas for proven success at the box office like mu- generalizing from experience, it is about holding a but there are genres that differentiate each medi- sical, thriller, horror, action, film noir or western all concept up to the test of experience. um. What is at issue here is a specificity initiated pass under the umbrella of genre movies. Laying out genre analytically and relying on a at the level of art practice itself that accounts for Earlier, traditional visual subjects were classi- consumer’s and sometimes a practitioner’s experi- genre division, rather than genre presenting itself fied according to a genre hierarchy, where the term ence with genre is an approach with no guarantees to each art form as a given condition. There is an “genre painting” came to occupy the bottom scale. and may be taken as an admonition to the practice end to genre’s suitability in ordering the practice Genre painting shows “daily life in its typical com- of genre theory. Any attempt to answer questions of art and the production of artifacts. Genre divi- monness,” and was a popular visual form from the put to genre in general will have to move forward sions extend beyond the arts, but there are limits to mid-18th century onwards with common people ab- with the help of examples, in this case, early mod- their application. This may be due to some sort of sorbed in modest activities with no asides, that is, ernist painting, a Hollywood movie, and almost grammar inherent to the concept of genre, where showing no awareness of the spectator. According contemporary popular music. These examples the grammar is different than the immanent law to Michael Fried (1998), absorption was challenged include: a well-known motif belonging to genre of each genre. What then is the difference between in early modernist painting – Manet’s Olympia painting in Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child from forms of art and genres of art, and is there some (1863) being a notable example – but was again 1886; a western, the quintessence of genre movies, similarity between genre divisions within each art absorbed by the medium itself in the painterly ab- for instance in an updated version like Unforgiven form? straction of high modernism. Olympia presents a (1992) by Clint Eastwood; and the recycling of tra- Genre is suited to classify music and its appli- nude woman, or rather a woman wearing only her ditional music genres as in the case of ’s cation can be extended to continuously new forms slippers, reclining on a bed. She looks out of the 1982 homage to the songster and virtuoso twelve- of expression. Since genre’s classification is open, it picture in the direction of the spectator, thereby string guitarist Blind Willie McTell. First, a few ten- cannot be applied normatively and in accordance bringing him (because it is preferably a male gaze) tative remarks on genre in general. with a vertical distribution of value. The same goes into the picture and thematizing the situation be- Classifying art forms is different than classify- for art forms where genre markers may be more fore the painting. Still, this threshold experience ing expressions that belong to each art form. Art is complex. In literature and film, according to the in modern art was based on a motif known to be not subdivided into genres of art, or for that matter, Store norske leksikon (1995), genre refers to both popular already in the Renaissance, termed “the genres of anything else. Genre division is internal formal and thematic markers. Epic, drama and lyr- mistress portrait” by art historians – a famous and to each form. This difference holds for media tech- ic are genres with each their own subgenres. For- probably model example for Manet being Titian’s

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Venus of Urbino from 1538. By the time of paint- cal, like burning crops or spending everything in a differences of discipline and the specific medium erly abstraction in the beginning of the 20th cen- vast display of consumption rather than storing for itself met with a similar fate and became vestiges tury, genre divisions had become non-scriptive and future needs, and is thus geared towards extinction of a superficial identification of what art was all a non-starter. rather than accumulation. There are concepts close about. At the same time, some allowance was made to a general economy, a free-for-all, which would for modern media like photography or film: these lose themselves at their fringes and give their se- are media still connected to ordinary communica- CONCEPTUAL ECONOMY crets away. Still, a sense of reserve or forlorn au- tion but disclosing a more complex relationship thority will cling to genre. Other typologies may be to art than traditional media like painting, whose There are functional limits to genre, which no ex- easier to let go to waste. identity is exclusively tied to art. The difference be- tension will undo. Descriptive uses of genre prom- There is little doubt as to what is prior, the tween art film and genre film is not just commer- ise a view from the outside, a pleasure so often in- genre or the artifacts belonging to a genre. It only cial. The identification of a genre film as art signals vited by extended concepts. appears as if genre comes first, and this appear- the wrong social reasons for it being art. The iden- Finding a common denominator for genre may ance is telling. New artifacts, if accepted as belong- tification of an art film as genre would likewise be extend these limits and miss the point of orthodoxy ing to a genre, appear to be possibilities already in deadly to its status as art. and exclusion, the normative view from within. demand by the genre. When not accepted, nothing From a perspective of conceptual economy, for Conversely, the multiplication of genres does not further happens because genre feeds on exclusion. instance, of a restricted versus a general economy change their conceptual economy. There are silent There have been instances where the artifact car- mentioned above, art and its exit from genre is less conditions difficult to express even when compar- ries genre markers but the exclusion ends up being interesting than cases of genre change or sublation ing a host of genre neighbors. To encounter genre mutual – genre excludes art and vice versa. A clean of genre. The question is whether there is a concep- on the level of conceptual economy means observ- exit from genre was effected in modern art. Genre tual economy in common for what is accepted, re- ing how its order comes about, is extended, revised motifs like the nude, landscape or still life lived on jected, or for that which creates a new genre. Hegel or eventually abandoned. Genre frames what Ba- simply as pretexts for painterly practice, the motifs describes this as the “immanent rhythm of concepts taille would call a restricted economy, and any con- themselves being insubstantial. At one point in his- (1976, p. 56). Aufheben, or sublation in English, is ceptual economy would of itself be restricted, that tory, fine art became uneasy with genre and, in fact, the term used by Hegel to describe the dynamism is, properly economical, to avoid the opposite risk with any form of classification. All it needed was to of concepts if they can indeed be said to move at all. of letting the concept go to waste. A general or unre- be art, that is, art in general. Even “fine” before art As with immanent rhythm, the sublation of a con- served economy, on the other hand, is uneconomi- was one qualification too many. In late modernism cept with another must be internal and necessary.

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Bataille’s generation of the concept general econo- No matter the intent, the producer not only serves somehow seems inadequate to a delicate ear for my was in fact aimed at the notion of sublation for a customer but a connoisseur. Any consumer of genre. In fact, invention involves living by the law not being general enough in its undisturbed accu- genre soon learns exactly what fits and what does of genre, presenting practice as technique, and is mulation of knowledge and never-failing memory. not. If this is a form of knowledge, then it will only thus out of tune with the priority of genre. Perhaps subversion of genre would be more ap- accumulate on the opposite side of art. It involves Genre norms seem more technical than aes- propriate and the rhythm more fatal. For subver- a sense of limits as well as a sense of what resides thetical, prolonging the ideal of perfection in tra- sion there can be no second chance for the genre in within them. The development of an ear for differ- ditional poetics. At the same time, these norms will point, while sublation promises a return to a more ences that owe everything to the priority of genre, never allow for the perfect case. Perfection resides elevated form of the same. So, in defense of a re- although resting on all but solid ground, suggests with the genre, while the case remains in Benjamin stricted economy and with the blessing of Bataille, a proximity to taste as a form of sensus communis Paul Blood’s words “ever not quite,” and it is pre- one may opt for sublation to describe the rhythm of that under favourable circumstances becomes rep- cisely this imperfection that explains the genre’s a genre returning to lay claim on new forms. resentative for everyone. The point is that the ear resilience. The perfect western remains to be made. for genre does not expect anyone’s approval, not Its aim for perfection is disclosed by its appetite for even ideally. It remains positive no matter what and dependence on clichés. Genre needs standard THE AUTHORIZED RECEIVER common sense would contend. expressions as a framing device to optimize its per- It is not easy to tell what directs an ear tuned to formance, both in order to function commercially What then about the recipient of genre? Within genre when it judges an artifact a success or a fail- and to meet communicative expectations. unyielding norms, a particular sensitivity is op- ure, when it refuses the artifact for not complying Of course we know this ideal perfection to be timized. This sensitivity is by no means the sole to the norm, or when it even admits that the artifact comparative, unearthed from exemplary cases. property of the producer of artifacts. In consumer is an improvement with the strange effect of his- There can be no genre unless there are cases of culture, genre is handed over to the receiver and toricizing its own standards. The apparent need to genre, no western without westerns, which make the customer. This reflects commercial concerns, invent new genre for new media technology raises genre an accumulation of markers taken from spe- which ensure that the customer is always right. But the question of how a genre originates. The next cific cases over time. The problem is that the law is there is more to this than lip service. The consumer question is whether the need for invention ends up already in place. What remains is a vertical struc- becomes an insider to genre, matching the knowl- being met by simply transferring existing genre to a ture, descriptive or not, a model for which even the edge of the producer as an authorized receiver. new medium. Traditional norms were specific and model example is a fall from grace. This does not There is an asymmetry of investment in the artifact. technical, inviting a transfer between media that rule out a different order, where the example turns

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 23 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre out to be exemplary of something else less restrict- supposed to do. This particular painting failed to ed but also less transparent. This something other document a memory trace and involuntarily suc- than genre may be closer to a definition of fine art ceeded in exposing a basic condition of painterly when art became modern. Inside genre, the receiv- representation. er is the one who is supposed to know, lending his The painting presents a girl with red hair, her or her voice to the exemplary expression. Modern head in profile against a white pillow, sitting up- art changed the relation to the receiver. Here the right in what in fact was a big wicker chair. To one supposed to know could be no other than the her right sits a woman bowing her head, meant to producer. The receiver had to be represented by the represent a mother (in fact it was the child’s aunt) critic, who had to resort to interpretation, that is, mourning a dying child. The painting was over- a careful approximation of the things the producer worked, unable to satisfy the demands of a popular knew. genre, and met with little understanding from the general public. The typical genre clichés were lack- ing or not up to standards, while the required de- THE SICK CHILD tails of this popular genre form were blurred by an impasto paint that threatened to make the medium The first example concerns genre in Edvard itself opaque. In these shortcomings we recognize Munch’s The Sick Child (1886), which has been a typical, and even necessary, condition of modern Figure 1. Munch, Edvard (1886) The Sick Child. Oil on hailed as the first modern painting in Norwegian art. Munch himself considered the result unsatis- canvas. The National Museum of Art, Architecture and art (see figure 1). Iconographically, it was a failed factory and reworked the painting a decade later. Design. Oslo, Norway. Photo: Høstland, B. genre painting, which happened to break the laws The conviction behind these revisions reflected a of genre and thereby an unwritten social contract change from a naturalism that welcomed genre to with the spectator. Retroactively, it became an em- symbolism with its generic and far more preten- blem of its theme – a child dying from tuberculo- tious take on death. The original version of The Sick sis during the pandemic of the late 19th century. Child was in Munch’s own words “heavy as lead,” Underneath the emblem something strange took presumably with the exception of the child’s red place, namely a displacement of what painting was hair, while the revised right half of the painting was

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 24 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre executed in fresh alla prima brushstrokes, mostly continual presence in people’s lives. Both the visual UNFORGIVEN in red and dark green to rebuild the color contrast language itself and what it referred to were dis- in the picture. placed, whether it be tuberculosis or, a few years “No white hats” was the terse comment passed by Well before today’s postdisciplinary and post- later in Munch’s life, the more elevated cases of an old father to his far more enthusiastic son af- medium situation in art, painting had to dissolve neurasthenia or anxiety. Both were worthy modern ter watching Clint Eastwood’s western masterpiece genre divisions if it was to count as being modern. ailments and almost already art. Make no mistake, Unforgiven in a local cinema somewhere in Colo- By the turn of the last century, genre painting was modern art is as content-driven as traditional art rado in 1992. (Unforgiven is almost on par with an- becoming obsolete. The Sick Child was to be the was, once guided by genre demands on presen- other great Eastwood western, The Outlaw Josey painting that managed almost by itself to subvert tation and presentability, such as melodramatic Wales from 1976). The father’s comment expresses the genre called genre painting when it was shown identification, empathy and idyllic bliss. The pre- the conviction that there is a price to pay for updat- in 1886. Still, there was a twist in the effect it had occupation with formal issues in modern art rests ing the western genre, and the price is not simply on national art history. Something peculiar hap- on an expanding and therefore unclear content, al- one of a better morale indicated by the cliché of the pened in the reception of this particular painting. most too shy to be identified. After The Sick Child hero’s white hat. His comment reveals outmoded It came to carry the truth of genre painting, as if no motifs would be interpreted with sole reference preferences and a forlorn idealism. By insisting on all the pictures of children dying from tuberculosis to genre topics. Twenty years later, Munch’s young- the fiction, that is, the difference between the west- at the time were given their reference to real life er colleague Ludvig Karsten painted a coloristically ern genre and updated demands for cinematic real- through Munch’s break with genre painting. In ret- studied painting entitled Tuberculosis (1907) al- ism, the father was defending the functionality and rospect, The Sick Child became the icon of the tu- most in bad faith. It shows a singular figure, an el- therefore the truth of genre. I would like to pay the berculosis pandemic, historicizing genre painting derly woman, standing against a wall, pressed from old man his due. What impresses is his self-confi- by being the picture of the picture of tuberculosis, both sides by two fields of color. The coloration is dence and assurance, not to mention his ability to both a meta-picture and the referent, the effet du interesting but not too harmonious, suggesting a express this confidence in one striking expression. reel of all obsolete genre painting, “tæringsgenren” figure fighting over the conditions of how she is to Evidently, Eastwood did not want to give his (the consumption genre). be presented in paint. hero away by the color of his hat. But the father, After this single incident no painted picture of familiar with the traditional western, may have tuberculosis was to be about such an easily recog- had something else in mind. He thought that Un- nizable loss, notwithstanding that the illness was a forgiven was a movie with no clean-cut characters,

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 25 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre much less clean motives, though the movie made should be moderately realistic, while the reference ary presumptions way beyond the musical genres use of a whole range of other recognizable genre to the hat is an idealism for grown-ups and for an he chose? He may have fallen between stools when clichés.It might be that Unforgiven is a better film older cinematic language. The old man does not entertaining educated young adults with music that than more typical examples of the genre, and there- want to swap day dreams for real nightmares, not- was text-based rather than merely complying with fore a successful case of genre innovation, or what withstanding that you learn more from the latter if the social demands on a song and dance man. The might be called a sublated western. In any case, it is only because you deserve them. He prefers an obvi- happy outcome nobody expected was the inven- still undeniably a western. The point is rather that ous fiction because the western will forever be such tion of clichés for a “genre” known as Americana, of the father knew what he wanted, and the expecta- stuff as dreams are made on. which Blind Willie McTell is a revealing example. tions he had for a full night’s entertainment were Every line of this song’s lyrics, every historical pic- correct beyond those of a customer. Moreover, ture of America it presents, is a cliché. The musical he may have known something the producer had BLIND WILLIE MCTELL structure is minor key , much like the klezmer forgotten. Since the mythical time of the western introduction to W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues, or is fixed, he was perceptive to problems the genre The third example concerns Bob Dylan’s ambitions the anonymous St. James Infirmary Blues, which will meet when improved by updated mores.The as a “song and dance man,” as he once modestly Dylan cites obliquely in the last verse (“St. James father obviously found the genre type more enter- called himself at a press conference early in his Hotel”). Either way, it was to his advantage since taining than even the slightest revisionist take on it. career in response to whether he considered him- the impact of any form of popular music speaks in This makes him a pessimist or rather a classicist of self to be a poet – as a lot of his fans did – or a favor of clichés. Nothing but clichés would do. genre. Westerns with white hats expose the myth, singer. Modesty and mystification aside, he was For years, a couple of days prior to the announce- while every western with “no white hats” still feed an entertainer who wrote songs clearly asking to ment of the Nobel laureate in literature, voices on the myth. The former has the vitality of a myth, be read as well, and thus promoted an uncommon were raised declaring that Dylan should finally be while in Unforgiven the hero becomes a hero by his type of artist, a performing author. Albeit that the awarded the prize – voices that finally found satis- deeds and regrets, not by his looks – the traditional musical structure of his songs was based on rather faction in 2016. Yet this recognition of Dylan by the one-to-one relation between what you see and what anonymous genre music, which he electrified and Swedish Academy presupposes the tacit inclusion you get. The complication of this simple one-to-one gave a lasting personal imprint. Did Dylan manage of those who write for the ear and perform in song relation indicates problems concerning a surplus of to lend well-worn musical forms the dignity of po- – that is, it takes for granted that the standard for fiction in the genre. Eastwood updates the western etry, or was he just another inauthentic entertainer written and sung poems are one and the same. Up to meet new demands on realism, and westerns simulating bygone folklore while displaying liter- until 2016, the Nobel Prize was awarded to writ-

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 26 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre ten images, not live performances. Dylan writes the mid-1930s. Dylan’s later recordings of McTell’s Dylan was credited early on for being able to songs that are literary without being mistaken for songs include the murder ballad Delia and the present complex issues in a simple and striking literature, music driven less by the songs’ poetic twelve bar blues Broke Down Engine, both on the manner. He would adapt what was on his mind content than by their literary form, which he nails 1993 album on which he per- to slightly revised expressions from well-known down in unfailing rhymes and snappy expressions, forms old songs he probably appreciated in his folk genres like the ballad or the blues, and this sufficed conveyed with a timing and articulation no one is revivalist youth. Dylan has always recycled songs to renew popular music in the 1960s. My question able to match, and adjusted to the genres he em- by others by equipping them with new or slight- to a favorite entertainer, who just like McTell does ploys, which is to say almost every American genre ly improved lyrics and signing them anew, but so much more than simply entertain, concerns of popular music including, in the last twenty years McTell’s was a signature too strong to erase. This Dylan’s ambitions as “a poet, and I know it/ Hope I of his career, early swing jazz. poetic technique, with its partly denied form of imi- don’t blow it,” as he says in one of his self-ironical Blind Willie McTell was recorded in May 1983 tation, was given a name with the title of Dylan’s rhymes. That is, does the homage to McTell risk be- with Dylan on piano and Mark Knopfler of Dire 2001 album Love and Theft. The title was stolen as coming some kind of tourism in American history Straits on guitar, but the recording was first re- well, this time from the music historian Eric Lott, and a renewed, invisible form of the old blackface leased when The Bootleg Series appeared almost who brought the case to court. As a thief in love performance – a white performing as a black man a decade later. The famous single line refrain is with his contraband, Dylan is never boring or ped- to a white audience. As such, it would betray an in- strangely unrelated to the lyric’s series of tableaux agogical. He is always an impersonator, taking the authenticity Dylan fans are unwilling to accuse him and never quite catches up with the rest of the song first singular person perspective on whatever song of for the simple reason that the sources of his tour- or wraps it up like a refrain should do: “No one can he performs, in contrast to folksinger Pete Seeger, ism, like McTell, would be inaccessible without a sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” McTell who performs even his own songs in the position of go-between and mediator like Dylan. The distance was a songster who performed ballads, gospel, and an inclusive, big “we,” as if the songs were written to the original recordings of local black performers blues, and was as a remarkable twelve-string gui- by others. Whatever Dylan loves strongly enough in the 1920s, revealed in the very category “race tarist in his use of bottleneck and open tunings. to steal, he performs as if he is speaking personally, records,” will never be bridged, so we indulge in Besides covering contemporary Tin Pan Alley hits intent on appearing as the originator of the song. the illusion Dylan presents and pardon him for his for his local audience around , Georgia, bal- When the song is old or worn, it takes a trick or two lack of genuine aesthetic judgment and disrespect lads, gospel, and blues were the three main genre and a strong signature to appear in the position of for the distance to his sources. No doubt, Dylan options for a solo black entertainer during the early the one who once wrote it. writes better lyrics than McTell, “better” meaning recordings of “race records” from the late 1920s to not more effective but just more modern and more

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 27 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre written. Dylan has no other choice than to make the as an exception in Munch’s oeuvre. Despite break- conformity to a standard. This power is challenged leap, in Schiller’s words, from naïve to sentimental, ing with genre expectations and recognizable nar- only when genre is brought too close to other typol- that is, to a more reflective poetry with its strong rative details, the painting’s content still matters. ogies, like art, or to purely technological definitions sense of loss and disturbing sense of cliché. Dylan By taking the figure of a sick child from memory, of a particular medium. Secondly, there is some- goes on to gather dead voices from the musical ar- Munch lost his firm grip on naturalist observation, thing ungrammatical, maybe even an instrumental chive, but in his subject position as an imperson- but it is first in retrospect that this painterly loss fallacy, in the ambition to create a genre. You make ator he still remains an archivist. became the actual loss of his sister. Dylan’s Blind an artifact belonging to a genre, not a set of rules Following Dylan from his early retake on his- Willie McTell has the air of access to memory and for a genre that subsumes a practice that doesn’t torical (local) pop music to contemporary rock mu- the ground on which folk music moved, and this is yet exist. The strange characteristic of genre, where sic and then Americana – a genre Dylan is said to inauthentic to say the least. Eastwood extends and every revision when accepted shows the norms to have invented and a recognizable as well as prof- accentuates the part of naturalism and the everyday be elastic and substantiated by the revision, points itable industry – it still feels overstretched to call in his last take on the western – a process that con- to differences of media technology. Successful revi- Americana a genre and the span of his musical tinues to this day to the detriment of the western sions always turn out to be more inherent to the career an “immanent” rhythmic development be- genre. Still, an exit is kept open through the misery genre than the elements they replace. Maybe it is tween genres.From a position opposite art, Dylan of the settler life, and the reason is that both the imitation more than anything else which, by invit- achieves something similar to what Munch man- landscape and the historical period are stable and ing social complacency, comes closest to producing aged to do to genre painting. Both remain some- mythic. No hat is white anyway, when seen against a new genre, though it runs the risk of being sub- what too vernacular, too communicative, to count the setting sun. sumed by a genre already in place. Thirdly, revi- as a typical modern poet/painter. Their goal may sions never improve the patterns of the genre but have been a little short on sublimation, lacking a change it involuntarily. It turns out that the pattern purified art in the end. Blind Willie McTell became CONCLUSION becomes definitive by what it excludes. Genre is not generic Americana, just like The Sick Child became a scheme for improvement but rather the sum of the generic genre painting (“tæringsgenren”), that To conclude, genre weakens when it opens up and total improvements. Fourth, and finally, the genre is, a concept of a specific genre rather than an ex- turns descriptive, and its form of sensitivity has concept is reminiscent of classicist poetics with its ample of it. This was achieved precisely by an exit to catch up. No extension of it, however, will take shift of emphasis from producer to receiver: the from genre and with a painting that was to stand out away its power to authorize a judgment or measure consensus about norms for what is to be expected,

The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 28 Grøgaard, Three Incidents at the Border of Genre where the anticipation of possibilities based on the gaze of the dead on his contemporaries. This Derrida, Jacques. (1992). The law of genre. In Jacques convention replace the test of experience. In genre has contributed to his ability to renew himself and Derrida, Acts of Literature (pp. 221-252). London: resides the wit of orthodoxy. This is the opposite of has given him a much-needed distance to the music Routledge. the logic of Hegelian sublation, since sublation is industry of his own times. In this song a certain so- Dylan, Bob. (1991/1983). Blind Willie McTell, The Boot- what is commonly understood by criticism: to lift lemnity overtakes him, where he drops the theft for leg Series, vol. 3, Columbia 02-488100-10. the artifact up to the concept, leaving it behind as the love of his sources. For obvious reasons there Dylan, Bob. (1993). World Gone Wrong, Sony BMG, an aesthetic fact. will never be another McTell, though we may live ASIN: B0015RCUSW. Modern painting abandoned genre for art pure to see a more perfect western that reinvents the Eastwood, Clint (2002/1992). Unforgiven, 10th An- and simple, leaving genre to be a mere pretext for settler ethos in the margins of Hollywood produc- niversary, Two-Disc Special Edition, Warner Bros., still recognizable forms in a period of transition tions. The difference is not merely one of generic Z12 23457. (expressionism), a period whose return, it would genre versus historical record. In the former art was Fried, Michael. (1998). Manet’s modernism: Or, the seem, has no end. The exit was not final, opening an exit from genre, while the latter is undisturbed face of painting in the 1860s. Chicago: University of up a life beyond genre in order to rescue painting documentation. All genre extension turns to either Chicago Press,. from becoming obsolete when its communicative of these – art or record, monument or document Hegel, Georg. (1976/1807). Phänomenologie des Geistes function was handed over to emerging repro-tech- – when fiction becomes opaque and too intrusive. (Phenomenology of the spirit). Frankfurt am Main: nical media like photography and film. With the Suhrkamp Verlag,. western, living inside a new medium, genre sur- Munch, Edvard. (1885-86). Det syke barn (The Sick vives any improvement. While fighting idealized REFERENCES Child), The National Museum Oslo, Collection num- irrelevance (white hats) or a surplus of fiction from ber 839. within, no improvement can possibly change the Derrida, Jacques. (1978). From restricted to general Karsten, Ludvig. (1907). Tæring (Tuberculosis), The mythic backdrop of the genre. Dylan’s finally re- economy: a Hegelianism without reserve. In Jacques National Museum Oslo, Collection number 963. leased Blind Willie McTell comments on genre mu- Derrida, Writing and Difference (pp. 251-277). Chi- Store norske leksikon (1995). 2nd edit. “genremaleri”, sic by affixing Dixie clichés to a blues ballad, which cago: The University of Chicago Press. vol. 6, p. 76, “sjanger”. vol. 13 p. 253, Kunnskapsfor- in itself is a transitional genre or genre mix. He not laget, Aschehoug & Gyldendal, Oslo. only recirculates a musical form but also insists on taking the position of the old songster by borrowing and representing his convictions, thereby casting

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