Extracts from "Art as Technique" by Viktor Shklovsky (1917):

• The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of
  new perception - that is, to make a unique semantic modification.

•  the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. As a result of this
  lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its continuity.

• There is "order" in art, yet not a single column of a Greek temple stands exactly in its proper order; poetic rhythm is similarly disordered rhythm. Attempts to systematize the irregularities have been made, and such attempts are part of the current problem
  in the theory of rhythm. 

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Extracts from "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology" Alfred Gell

in summary Gell  proposes that an objective anthropology of art can only be done from a point of view of someone who is neutral to or unsubscribed from society' subscription to aesthetics.  We are all too immersed in our modern version of aesthetic religiosity through artifacts that may seem common day enough as are libraries art galleries theaters and modern day design and entertainment.  And no anthropologist would convincingly take that position of being an atheist to the aesthetics of whatever culture  they have grown up in or currently reside in.  A reason why  anthropological studies of art have not progressed into the modern society context, according to Gell, compared to anthropological studies of religion (to which an anthropologist can easily claim of being independent to or atheist),  is because no anthropologist would claim to not have any aesthetic standing or engagement with. 

Unless  we begin to view art as a technology in the third person.

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• Art, Religion and Technology:

  • "...the neglect of art in modem social anthropology is necessary and intentional, arising from the fact that social anthropology is essentially, constitutionally, anti-art. This must seem a shocking assertion: how can anthropology, by universal consent a Good Thing, be opposed to art, also universally considered an equally Good Thing, even a Better Thing? But I am afraid that this IS really so because these two Good Things are Good according to fundamentally different and conflicting criteria."

  • "In so far as such modem souls possess a religion, that religion is the religion of art, the religion whose shrines consist of theatres, libraries, and art galleries, whose priests and bishops are painters  and poets, whose theologians are critics, and whose dogma is the dogma of universal aestheticism."

  • "I consider the various arts-painting, sculpture, music, poetry, fiction, and so on-as components of a vast and often unrecognized technical system, essential to the reproduction of human societies, which I will be calling the technology of enchantment."

  • Art pretends to be about individualism, but there are good arguments to say it is still encoded and embedded in deep social norms...(that takes us further away from an objective place to study art).

    • "In speaking of 'enchantment' I am making use of a cover-term to express the general premiss that human societies depend on the acquiescence of duly socialized individuals in a network of intentionalities whereby, although each individual pursues (what each individual takes to be) his or her own self interest, they all contrive in the final analysis to serve necessities which cannot be comprehended at the level of the individual human being, but only at the level of collectivities and their dynamics. As a first approximation, we can suppose that the art-system contributes to securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed. This view of art, that it is propaganda on behalf of the statuS quo, is the one taken by Maurice Bloch in his 'Symbols, Song, Dance, and Features of Articulation' (1974). "​

• HOWEVER, Gell proposes that "The power of art objects stems from the technical processes they objectively embody: the technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology. "

  • "The power of art objects stems from the technical processes they objectively embody: the technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology. The enchantment of technology is the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form. Art, as a separate kind of technical activity, only carries further, through a kind of involution, the enchantment which is immanent in all kinds of technical activity.​"

• Artist as Occult Technician:

  • "The moral significance of the work of art arises from the mismatch between the spectator's internal awareness of his own powers as an agent and the conception he forms of the powers possessed by the artist."​

  • But it is not just technical difficulty, objects such as Duchamps urinal (signed R. Mutt) "is an equally apt means of directing our attention to the essential alchemy of art, which is to make what is not out of what is, and to make what is out of what is not."

• The Fundamental Scheme Transfer between Art Production and Social Process:

  • "We can now see that the technical activity which goes into the production of a canoe-board is not only the source of its prestige as an object, but also the source of its efficacy in the domain of social relations; that is to say, there is a fundamental scheme transfer, applicable, I suggest, in all domains of art production, between technical processes involved in the creation of a work of art and the production of social relations via art. In other words, there exists a homology between the technical pro- cesses involved in art, and technical processes generally, each being seen in the light of the other, as, in this instance, the technical process of creating a canoe-board is homologous to the technical processes involved in successful Kula operations. "

  • "Technique is supposed to be dull and mechanical, actually opposed to true creativity and authentic values of the kind art is supposed to represent. But this distorted vision is a by-product of the quasi-religious status of art in our culture, and the fact that the art cult, like all other cults, is under a stringent requirement to conceal its real origins, as far as possible."

• The Enchantment of Technology: Magic and Technical Efficacy:

• Magic as the Ideal Technology:
  • ​​"The artists' remuneration is not remuneration for his sweat, any more than the coins placed in the offertory plate at church are payments to the vicar for his praying on behalf of our souls. If artists are paid at all, which is infrequently, it is as a tribute to their moral ascendancy over the lay public, and such payments mostly come from public bodies or individuals acting out the public role of patrons of the arts, not from selfishly motivated individual consumers. The artist's ambiguous position, half-technician and half-mystagogue, places him at a disadvantage in societies such as ours, which are dominated by impersonal market values. But these disadvantages do not arise in societies such as the Trobriands, where all activities are simultaneously technical procedures and bound up with magic, and there is an insensible transition between the mundane activity which is necessitated by the requirements of subsistence production and the most overtly magico-religious performances."

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Extracts from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin

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