Stupidity: A Big Picture

Art is perhaps the only occupation where behaviour that would otherwise be deemed stupid is embraced. In most other fields and in daily life, we avoid actions and statements that might make us look stupid. In art however, apparent openness to stupidity is not so much testament to the corresponding stupidity of the author (well, not always) but to the questioning of commonly held assumptions of what constitutes aptitude and mastery. Choosing to behave stupidly becomes a potential means of challenging institutions authorising intelligence. Generations of artists have intuited and exploited, often performatively, fissures that link knowledge to idiocy: Buster Keaton is not so much ‘accident prone’ as exceptionally skilful at consistently avoiding his own annihilation. Samuel Beckett’s characters pointlessly waiting for ‘something’ also evince undeniable resolve in the face of the greater existential predicament of a world without assurances. Paul McCarthy’s Painter (1995), riffing on Duchamp’s (in)famous statement about them, parodies the willingness of artists to play dumb to collectors and curators. Adrian Piper, cruising New York with a rag stuffed in her mouth, looks ridiculous while managing to ridicule endemic racist othering. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s hyper-caricatural Undiscovered Amerindians (1992-93) expose audience gullibility and racist proclivities. The list of art that critically engages stupidity is practically endless and well documented. As a result, this essay does not speak to individual art works or the intentions of the artists in the exhibition. Instead, it focuses on the paradoxically serious, but stupid, macro-structures that frame art today. These structures condition the knowing or unknowing stupidity of contemporary artists: the stupidity endemic to the global domination of capital, and the current accelerated stupidity and bankruptcy of Western global geopolitics. These wider interlinked lenses affect us all, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Art and Stupidity

“…whereby it cannot be excluded that the artist idiot, insofar as being an interpreter of social stupidity, is the true organic artist of present society.”

Mario Perniola, 2004

“Under capitalism, the dumbest people have the most power.”

Sam Sacks, Means TV, 2023

Marcel Duchamp famously coined the phrase ‘as stupid as a painter’ to target the ‘retinal’ obsessions of artists fixated primarily on aesthetic outcomes. Numerous commentators have argued that today Duchamp’s example represents the dominant outlook of artists, the conceptual anti-retinal approach triumphing over the ‘stupid’ preoccupations of artist-aesthetes. While the ‘conceptual approach’ has totally reconfigured the practices of contemporary artists and the art world in general, obsessions with aesthetic delectation have not gone away. Indeed, appetites for it have only increased alongside the regressive global control of finance. Aesthetic distinction, even if it is reactionary, ends by reiterating the historically inscribed clichés of the artist’s ‘difference’ and separation from ‘normal life’ that has assumed the quality of coveted commodity.

However, financialisation as the contemporary shift in capitalism from production to dematerialised speculation that swells the profits of a minuscule elite, is also ‘conceptual.’ It is conceptual in so far as abstractions of value riven from real economic ends, end by being valued more. If Duchamp’s insight into the cognitive dimension of art was ultimately of more historical value than the pursuit of the time-tested materialist productivism of painting, so now abstract financial value created ‘out of nothing’, is worth more than practical economic interventions aimed at improving life. Nonetheless, contemporary concepts of value seem to have come full circle statistically favouring the irrefutable ‘timelessness’ of retinal invention over attempts to undermine it. Either that or they are ascribed a predominant aesthetic gloss.  Likewise, institutional valorisation of the universality of aesthetics while emphasising topical differentiation, is underwritten by the theoretical neutrality of the world’s sole universality, money.

The institution of money is far from neutral. When funded by money, no institution – cultural, political, educational, or otherwise – is, or can be, ‘neutral’ just as art is never ‘timeless.’ Indeed, it is odd, not to say stupid, that we would seem to be returning to the naturalistic reductionism of such pseudo debates after decades of structural, post-structural, semiotic, and post-colonial discourse. Claims of institutional neutrality and artistic timelessness are ideological constructs whose purpose is to police positions that risk compromising liberal narratives whose function is to protect existing structures from external contamination. Such contamination contests the professionalised assuredness of rank and hierarchy whose trappings encourage those seeking power to identify literally with its abstractions: ‘manager’, ‘director’, ‘CEO’, ‘executive’, ‘boss’, ‘celebrity.’ The stupidity of such identifications, as though they were real, lies in the underlying denial of their fundamentally contrived nature and the fact that such abstractions often facilitate the silencing and/or domestication of what is truly destabilising. The institution knows its boundaries – their repeated re-inscription ascribes its authority.

Of course, art itself is an institution and is known as ‘art’ precisely for this reason. To name art is to separate art from things that it is not in order to assert the legitimacy of its languages against languages that do not belong to it and to which it does not belong. However, as an institution, art is quite unique in its capacity to absorb and transform languages and practices that typically should not belong to it. It is stupid precisely in its refusal to accept the limitations of its annexation as wholly self-contained, different but predictably repeatable. Ideally speaking at least.

Nonetheless, under the regime of financialisation and in a historical trajectory that appears backwards, discomfiting signs of resistance, refusal, and critique have been converted foremost as circulating currency. Criticality – rather than leading to conclusions that bind art to life decisions and positions – becomes safely sectioned-off as representations demanding neither action nor accountability. The path of art to life and back, ends once more with the traditional autonomy of art’s inward repetition. Art’s circumscribed difference defers to its commodity identity, its financial exchangeability, certainly not a new thing, but answering to the excuse, now simultaneously an implicit accusation, ‘but we live in capitalist society!’ This statement, unspoken overall, suggests that because everything is ‘already capitalist’ no alternative is possible particularly when directed at practices founded on the production of ‘things.’ Such ‘capitalist realism’, famously theorised by Mark Fisher, is a self-fulfilling prophecy after years of the neoliberal denigration of every facet of public life, including art, by making everything accountable to profit and its celebration.

The artist idiot as the interpreter of social stupidity is either playing the fool for the benefits of social and professional ascension, or genuinely stupid in believing that prevailing systems really exist for their benefit. To self-consciously side with capital against your own, society’s, and the future’s interests – is to side as well with the discriminatory power of racial, sexual and class divisions while subsuming the possible to the dumb self-sameness of money. Even the fiction of power embodied by capital goes nowhere near guaranteeing the long-term sustainability of an artistic practice, let alone a decent life. Still, deference to the pervasiveness of economic language confers upon the speaker the ‘maturity’ of a professional who’s ‘in the money’. This is particularly true when money is value’s only remaining unambiguity.

The Banality Stupidity of Evil

“There is not just good and evil. There is good, evil and stupidity.”

Margaret Atwood, 2023

In 1963, Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase – ‘the banality of evil’ – to illustrate the essential mundanity of heinous acts, acts institutionally sanctioned that then assume the prosaic status of work. Arendt’s analysis is compelling precisely because it shows that the vilest of deeds are often undertaken under the cover of societal normalisation. But evil, a term I would normally avoid due to its theological overtones – but which on occasions is the only word proper to certain behaviours – can also be stupid. Consider the recent US interventions in Palestine: air-dropping aid while US bombs simultaneously drop on civilian refugees from US-made planes flown by Israeli forces. In this way, the world’s most powerful hegemon displays both its life-affirming and life destroying capabilities – but in symbolic terms only. The stupidity of this act is founded in theatre whose real target is the optics of US domestic politics. Aerial aid drops are impractical, unnecessary and – as has been shown – sporadically deadly. When the US decides it is going to construct a ‘humanitarian pier’ on the Gazan shore built from rubble trucked in from the homes of Palestinian families obliterated by US munitions, it proves at the same time Palestinians could receive their waiting aid trucks. Such politics play down to a populace they take for stupid.

Assumptions of this kind of stupidity depend on the efficacy of state propaganda voiced via mainstream media that is financially and ideologically complicit in the American imperial project. When faced with widespread evidence of the intelligence and awareness of its populations, the empire satisfies itself mouthing untruths it knows to be untrue knowing the majority of those exposed know them to be untrue also: enunciation is everything. The leadership culture of both Democrats and Republicans serves its own interests irrespective of those it is supposed to represent. Much is the same in Australia except on a smaller scale, with both major parties principally concerned with the attainment or maintenance of their own political power. Both furtively vie more for strings-attached corporate donations, rather than genuinely addressing the interests and concerns of their constituents. This is clearly stupid as it banks, literally, on being able to suppress indefinitely the desires and actions of voters who are increasingly indicating they are nowhere near as stupid as their leaders assume.

The international and domestic behaviour of the US, as the world’s most militarised and capitalist nation, clearly indicates its waning grasp as self-appointed ‘world leader.’ Its political stupidity is the stupidity of a nation that believes it can forever hold onto its self-proclaimed position as Master of the Universe through fomenting unending wars while clinging to the myth of infinite profit. America’s most recent actions in Palestine, supported by most Western nations, only confirm the greater decline of the West. As the situation in Palestine attests, as well as the related accelerated rise in militarised policing targeting civilian protestors, it may take many years of dragging the rest of the world into ever more corrupt and violent misadventures before its power fully wanes.

Meanwhile, Israel continually presumes the dumb receptivity of audiences, the vast majority of whom have shown themselves to be appalled and outraged by its genocidal atrocities, ongoing occupation, and apartheid system. Israeli institutions have vested a great deal of faith in media spin that aims to conceal the historical reality of their colonial-settler orientation and behaviour. However, for a global majority, with access to independent international news sources, this PR would be laughable if its motivations weren’t so base. The act of an IOF commander speaking to camera and pointing to a calendar on which months and days are written in Arabic while explaining it as forensic evidence of some kind of terrorist roster, is beyond stupid. And evil. Delivered from within the decimated husk of Al-Shifa hospital, the commander self-consciously speaks English to a foreign audience he presumes represent the unknowing and endlessly gullible Western World pre-sold the idea of the innateness of Arab ‘terrorism.’ This performance backfired and was debunked almost immediately, as have practically every accusation the Israeli regime has made against Palestinians since October 7 – ‘beheaded babies’, ‘systematic rapes’, ‘human shields’ and yet they are still used by supporters for racist colonial means.

More generally, the stupidity of the racist can also be the instinctual refusal of otherness. Racism’s violence arises then from the need to assert, by force, denial of the knowledge that liberty naturally belongs to all. Colonial exceptionalism represents a particular dimension of stupidity. It is based on denying knowledge of the rights and reality of others, choosing instead to violently assert what it knows to be inherently false. The racism of the Imperium is the racism of a mythological supremacy that can easily be refuted. Such stupidity is evil because, knowing better, it prefers to do ‘what it likes’ purely for its own interests while continuing to elaborate the lies of its myth.

The imperial dimension of this same denial is often expressed in the so-called reasonableness of liberal language. The knee-jerk, ‘there’s always two sides to every story’ reaction, similarly abets albeit ‘non-confrontationally’, the most brutal and transgressive expressions of colonial domination. It does this even against international law. This is a new low for stupidity that exposes the institution of international law to be entirely dependent on the whims and strategic interests of the global North. Those excluded and politically marginalised have been brutally aware of this institutional ‘failing’ for decades. However, the current outing of this skewed reality vis-à-vis the West’s active participation in genocide, has only opened the eyes of progressives worldwide who are concurring in ever greater numbers with the revolt against so-called geopolitical normalcy. No amount of military aggression will stop this changing tide. Expected attempts to militarily quell the emergence of this new world portend serious domestic truncations of liberal and democratic rights now and into the near future. This is true even for market affirming liberals (who arguably constitute most of the so-called art world) whether it ‘concerns them’ or not.

Stupid Times

“Some scientists claim hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the building block of the universe.”

Frank Zappa, 1990

As the world’s most powerful empire grinds to its end, Western institutions have two choices: to furtively cling to the wreckage of neoliberalism profit seeking and interminable dog-eat-dog competition, or, embrace alternatives. Choosing the former will mean complying with increasing authoritarianism and legislated suspensions of liberal freedoms as the power of a beleaguered capitalism, that serves a meagre few, is globally enforced everywhere. Expanded policing, surveillance, imposed debt (another kind of violence), indentured labour, and ever new governmental policies like anti-protest laws and the draconian criminalisation of whistle blowers, represent a combined bulwark against changing the current system. Alternatively, for a younger generation that has experienced and is experiencing the brunt of this shift first-hand, this situation is intolerably stupid. The collective power of this demographic hinges on their divestment – in terms of both attention and money – from existing institutional structures to focus on what they can create beyond their purview, a phenomenon already underway. Naturally, many coveted institutions into which scores have focused their ambitions, time, money, and dreams of cultural influence, will begin to look even more like generic cultural centres with little distinguishing their activities from other entertainments. They will be an investment for those who believe they either know, or can be told, what a ‘winner’ looks like and what they’re worth. Equally, against a climate of horrific brutality and the rise of new fascisms with complete disregard for the most basic principles of humanitarian law, current institutional representations of difference look evermore like so many updated colonial trophies. On the other hand, joining these to the political project of the ascendancy of others will grant them an agency that is not simply aesthetically consumable or merely ‘cultural’ (like a souvenir). If stupidity really is the basic building block of a divided universe, then exposing the specifics of its influence and deleterious effects becomes the imperative of another kind of ambition. Likewise, feigning stupidity holds strategic possibilities allowing entry into domains we might instinctively shun, to positively contaminate them from within in an effort to break them open.

Catalogue text for the exhibition Stupid As, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne/Naarm, Australia.

https://gertrude.org.au/exhibition/stupid-as-curated-by-alex-gawronski

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