For the most part, Tagg repeats and develops these issues for the rest of the book. He is astute and a 'great read'. Tagg's historicizes Rosler's antipathy to mass culture by proposing a genealogy that runs from Clement Greenberg and the arguments of the Partisan Review in the 1940s back to nineteenth century conservative cultural theory and exclusivist aesthetics. Tagg spells out this conception of the artist as someone 'socially or spiritually empowered to adjudicate on abiding human values', a notion attached to the romantic idea of the 'artist as outsider, heroine on the margins'. Tagg argues that the belief that the future of significant culture lies in the hands of an embattled few is an 'elitist or utopian fantasy.
Marginality guarantees nothing'.
Tagg articulates the historical conditions in which avant-gardes have emerged. Cultural institutions require a whole range of functionaries and technicians who contribute their skills or service cultural production in a whole range of ways. A painting is as much a collective work as a film and only takes on the currency of social meaning through the application of multiple levels of expertise. It follows then that any adequate cultural intervention must be collective. Tagg seems to have inherited the cultural studies assumption that government, and, ipso facto , governmentality, is by definition a bad thing.