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The Implications of Fun: Art Student as Repeat Viewer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Troy Wong
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Abstract

This essay argues that the art student who decides not to be an artist exposes the essential lack in many working artists today: this is the lack of fun, which is necessary for successful art and which—ironically—the artist might find once they leave their craft. Responding to Arjun Appadurai’s essay, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,” I use Appadurai’s “repeat viewer” to focalize the art student as a figure who is both the repeat viewer and the artist who creates the work of art that solicits repeat viewing to begin with. The art student embodies in his or her own self the transition from the artist to the viewer, allowing for a productive reciprocity whereby the artist performs the role of the viewer and vice versa. I close my essay by reflecting on the art student as a possibility for rethinking India’s political dilemma that concludes Appadurai’s essay.

Keywords

art studentfundebtPaul ChanIsa Genzken
Type
Responses to Appadurai Paradigm Piece (Issue 6.1)
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 377 - 383
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019 

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References

1 Nabokov, Vladimir, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature, ed. Bowers, Fredson ( New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 3 Google Scholar.

2 Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” 3.

3 Appadurai, Arjun, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6.1 (2019), 140–152 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” 1.

8 Chan, Paul, “Debts Not Paid,” in Selected writings 2000–2014, eds. Baker, George, Banks, Eric, and Friedli, Isabel ( New York: Badlands, 2014), 52–53 Google Scholar.

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11 I’m speaking here of Chan’s second debt and not his first.

12 The Museum of Modern Art, “This Is Isa Genzken,” December 5, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8nLkge34mE.

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