Discovering Mike Kelley yesterday was a real bit of serendipity � he sits neatly at the intersection of two of my main interests. Imagine surprise then when I found some his early work today! Futuristic Ballet from 1973 plus Heidi made about twenty years later. FB was almost certainly filmed in Detroit � there are some musical elements rooted in free jazz

I have been digging deeper into the aesthetics of Arthur C Danto - a mainstream philosopher who has taken an increasing interest in the philosophy of art. He has some grand theory of what has been happening since around 1960, partly provoked by attending exhibitions in NYC in the mid 60s. He thinks that in the 1970s there stopped being any idea amongst artists that there was one particular way of making valid art. Danto is not sure whether artists even cared about this � they simply got on with doing things � all kinds of different things.

"...the master narrative of the history of art--in the West but by the end not in the West alone--is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes.

.In our narrative, at first only mimesis was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story�

Reading Danto gives me a clearer idea of what makes the Mins so absorbing � and why Kelley is so outrageous. The Mins were perhaps the last school who believed that there was one right contemporary way to make art and that they were the only people who had identified it. They were prepared to explain why and what that was � to articulate something like a theory of what they doing. There is a tragic irony in that they seem to have provoked the invalidation of their own position � by young anarchists with a video like MK � who just seem to be in pursuit of �far out�.

Browsing for Danto I came got back to Detroit at http://www.detroitcontemporary.com/intersect/. Maybe thats why I decide today to buy Abstractfunktheory which is Carl Craig�s homage to his (mostly) Detroit influences � George Clinton, Cybotron, Model 500, X-Ray and Rhythim is Rhythim � plus the B52�s Mesopotamia