Response: Some thoughts about discussion.

Of course an intellectual enrichment through experience, dialogue and exchange is another seductive narrative, and a romantic one at that. But the potential benefits from dialogue by far outway any worries about the nature of that exchange. Experience is meant to be transformed into palatable narratives, sometimes heavily simplified and often embellished, in order to continue and maintain an intellectual and lucid lineage.

But there is a danger to assume that because a dialogue exists and is lucid it automatically means something: is real. Academics and artists often attempt to escape from certain entanglements of life so that they may better engage with their real and in doing so present themselves with the illusion of choice and freedom, but it is a choice and freedom set out by their own terms and engaged with by like minded colleagues and individuals. I do not mean to say that what results from that engagement does not produce interesting outcomes, merely that the clarity produced through their working process may present a quasi-aesthetic sense of having achieved something meaningful, something authentic.

So, the artist is in some sort of exile and is free from certain sections of her/his existence but by engaging in a dialogue supported by the perceived common ground of his/her peers, is she/he really free at all?