Sweeping Art Under the Market
CRITICAL ART WRITING bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new. In fact, since the 1980s such writing has become commonplace. Thus, it was especially interesting to read a recent article extrapolating such a crisis by the highly visible US intellectual and Humanities Professor, Camille Paglia. Paglia’s recent journalistic essay ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’ first appeared fittingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal (1). How exactly capitalism can save art however is by no means convincingly explained here. In this article, Paglia, who also lectures in Media Studies, writes generalisingly about the loss of meaning and innovation in contemporary art while making various hyperbolic laments such as, ‘No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since… the early 1970’s’ (2). Such a claim is then juxtaposed with others proclaiming the ‘superiority’ of today’s commercially viable cultural fields like architecture (‘superstar’ architects Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid are mentioned), industrial design, even woodworking (3) and opera! What the contemporary art world suffers from according to Paglia, is a surfeit of upper middle class students and practitioners who collectively compose a fake Left whose very privileges are accounted for by the capitalist system they habitually attack. Of course, the outcry over the inherent hypocrisy of artists on this point, and one not entirely unjustified (4), has been made time and time again. Artists are attacked for their suspect idealism on the basis that ‘the commercial world - … like it or not, is modern reality’ (5). Curiously, Paglia’s argument upholding the radicalism of 1960s protest art and social movements turns to the ubiquitous scorn and disregard that contemporary artist’s tend to reserve for religions of any kind, specifically in contrast to the way in which 1960s artists (and perhaps more obviously, pop musicians like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) un-cynically embraced ‘alternative’ Eastern religions. In the end, the essay seems to seek a strange union of capital and ‘the spirit’. Or is it really just the ‘spirit of capitalism’ that is being upheld here over the right of contemporary artists to legitimately question the basis of their own privileges? Naturally, Paglia frames such questioning according to the logic that by doing this, such artists have effectively cut themselves off from the ‘people’ as characterised by a ‘general public’. Given the accumulated affect of Paglia’s criticisms, it is worth considering some of their primary underlying assumptions regarding the role and relevance of contemporary art in society.
One of the most ‘radical’ presumptions of Paglia’s text is its assertion that there has been no major figure in the visual arts of 'profound' influence for the last forty years. The necessary response here would not to automatically engage in a counter claim, listing living artists as proof to the contrary, although that would be easy enough. The real response would be to question what the author means by ‘profound’. Actually, is this word itself not overly grandiose, reactionary even, and more befitting of the strains of a Mahler Symphony say, that is, of a major work that intends overtly to force us to ponder the cosmic enormity and complexity of the universe and the creative act in relationship to it? Or is the question of profundity here not actually one of popular appeal, where the artwork is granted major significance on the basis of sheer exposure? If the latter is the case, then it would be easy to mount an argument (fairly ridiculous) for music’s innate priority over the visual arts based on terms of sheer crowd reach (6). Ultimately though, the answer to these questions is hinted at when Paglia emphatically states, again entirely without innovation, that ‘the avant-garde is dead’, and with moderately more originality, that it was killed by her ‘hero’ Andy Warhol. But how did Warhol kill the avant-garde exactly? In Paglia’s view it was precisely because Warhol so plainly embraced the language of commercialism thus finally blurring the lines between high (avant-garde) culture and low (commercial or industrial) culture. What makes Warhol’s by now, and by no means so easily transparent, disavowal of avant-gardism so profound is the way it actually displaces ‘profundity’ for the readily identifiable language of mass-appeal. Therefore, the profound appeal of Warhol was exactly the result of his savvy and apparently entirely a-critical placement of himself within the very heart of (post-) industrial capitalism: Warhol’s ‘genius’ was his strategic identification with the machine of capital that the Western industrialised nations responsible for inventing ‘contemporary art’, had made such an insistent dimension of every urban environment. For Paglia, this wholly unrepentant pursuit of public overexposure by a particular artist, expressly via the language of commercialism, is unproblematically good. ‘Genius’ is equated in this instance with basic public appeal based on instant recognisability.
With this in mind, Paglia’s suggestion, although unsupported, of the sapping of ‘artistic creativity and innovation in the arts’ (7) is stated as partly the result of a related ‘expansion of form’ (8) This claim essentially refers to the waning of painting as the foremost contemporary practice in the arts from the 1960’s on. At this time, contemporary art began to embrace the ‘brash’ (9) and some would say esoteric, dimensions of multi-media practices as well as the deliberately destabilising and comparatively encompassing possibilities offered by installation art. This incurred what the author decries as the fading of permanence as a goal of art making (10). Yet how could this be otherwise specifically in relation to the conditions set in motion by contemporary forms of capitalism? Indeed, the circumstances of Post Fordist capitalism in which we have been living since the 1960s and 1970s, and which have only accelerated their influence since, overwhelmingly favour transience and virtuality as their primary determining features. In this way, workers once used to stable, that is to say more or less permanent working conditions in static environments, found themselves increasingly outsourced to decentralised multinational corporations who expressed no personalised commitment to them at all. At the same time, with the rapid exponential growth of computer industries and technology, capital itself took on a virtualised form that could be traded invisibly across the globe effectively displacing ‘real’ money as the object of its speculations. More interestingly, increased leisure time, of which the arts is frequently argued to be a major beneficiary, began to imperceptibly merge with work time; people had more opportunities to work from home and work when they wanted to, yet it became simultaneously virtually impossible to state when you were or were not at work (11).
Therefore, the lack of permanence in the arts that Paglia laments is in fact a fundamental product of the capitalism she professes to support, the capitalism that ‘ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation women’ (12). All of these claims are debatable in contemporary terms (13) but what is certain is that contemporary artists, many of whom face extremely precarised living and working conditions involving for example, having to work multiple unrelated jobs to merely make art in the first place (14), have indefatigably mirrored the dominant conditions of contemporary Post Fordist capitalism favouring impermanence. And in this sense, they are doing precisely what Paglia’s hero Andy Warhol had done before them. Only, that now, conscious or unconscious of such conditions, such artists are structurally denied the very prospect of exerting a historically ‘profound’ permanence. And more broadly, this is because the very concept of inarguable historical relevance has likewise crucially disappeared.
The solution to the faded permanence of art’s role within society, Paglia proposes, is the concerted embrace by artists of alternative and more influential cultural fields like architecture, engineering, industrial and graphic design. These artistically ‘undervalued’, less ‘pretentious’ practices she maintains, are today ascendant over a predominant variety of contemporary art that functions allegedly as an ‘airless echo chamber’ (15) within which artists aimlessly babble amongst themselves. As an antidote, the wholly commercially dependent aspect of the aforementioned disciplines is hinted as a saving grace for art. It is through such fields Paglia contends, that technically and aesthetically sophisticated artifacts reach a global, potentially universal public. After all, compared to the audience scope of say an ipod or a personal computer, what hope does the relative hermeticism of contemporary art have? However, there is a fundamental ideological fallacy underscoring this logic whereby it is expected, in a post-ideological world, that contemporary art can no longer argue a case for its ‘specialness’ or separation from the largely utilitarian domain of technologicised personal affects. These contemporary fetishes are proposed to outstrip contemporary art in both aesthetic sophistication and sheer communicative impact. Still, is the real problem here not one of intention? Just because hundreds of thousands of contemporary subjects own and interact daily with iphones does not guarantee the iphone, either as an aesthetic object or communicative tool, as a successful substitute for ‘art’! Actually what differs between an iphone and all related technologies of this kind and a work of art is the way in which the former increasingly seeks to dissolve any awareness of the object’s functioning within the reality of the user’s life: like contemporary virtualised capital, such computer technology strives to completely dissociate the (unavoidably exploitative) realities of its existence by making it seem a natural extension of the owner’s subjective psychical and physiological universe. Much contemporary art on the other hand, even if it deploys such technologies, intends to compel a questioning of the assumptions of this basically biologisised view of technology and the world; art and contemporary art never more so, is always art-ifice. Furthermore, in base capitalist terms, how is it possible to realistically compare a mass-produced commercially orientated product that aspires foremost at generating mass profit (or ‘public appeal’) to a discursive discipline, regardless of how overwrought and ‘entrepreneurial’ it might be, whose very discursiveness also endeavours to question the frequently disregarded naturalisation of contemporary capitalism and its most venerated products.
Linked with contemporary art’s assumed destructive expansion of form is what Paglia refers to a ‘contraction of ideology’ (16). This phrase is more difficult to flesh out, but in the context of this article it is used to accuse the ideological dominance within the contemporary art world, of a ‘sanitised’ upper middle class. Such a class it is proposed, balks at getting its hands dirty through engaging in the more ‘honest’ and yet more influential, work of designing and manufacturing industrial culture. Attendant with this supposed ideological contraction is an upper middle class 'blase liberal, secularism' (17) that habitually denounces all ‘spiritual’ tendencies in art. This is in contrast, so the author claims, of art’s once 'respectful exploration of world religions' (18). This last point is exceptionally ironic given that it arises within the context of an article endorsing capitalism’s rightful dominion over art, art being traditionally thought as a realm of spiritual idealism alongside philosophy.
So how then does a renewed interest in world religions connect with capitalism's supposedly unproblematically beneficial relationship to art? A question of this sort is particularly curious considering that religious anti-secularism is based at its purest, on a firmly anti-capitalist stance. It is curious too, that Paglia cites in this context, the ‘spiritual language… of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko… (whose work today) is ignored or suppressed’ (19) for the work of these artists stands at a polar remove from the decidedly anti-spiritual outlook of Warhol, Paglia’s idolised ‘murderer’ of the avant-garde. But then wasn’t it the originary avant-gardes who, somewhat oddly, shared with religion an undeniably anti-capitalist outlook in their opposition to that system's denigrating 'use' of human beings either as cannon fodder or as factory ‘numbers’? Therefore, if we talk about the 'dead-end' occasioned by the middle class institutionalisation of art as a potentially spiritual expression, can't we also say the same of world religions? Haven’t the latter become more and more managerial expressly as a result of contemporary capitalism’s managerial institutionalisation of the ‘spirit’, in art also? So how then exactly can capitalism be good for either art or religion? Indeed, isn’t the greatest ideological contraction today the outcome of placing the dollar sign, that empty signifier (20), before all else? Certainly capitalism is only really good for art in the sense that it equates maximum exposure, linked to strategic, self-interested profit seeking, with success. And as far as religions are concerned, aren’t the most globally ‘successful’ today those like the various branches of evangelicalism, that argue the church’s ‘holy’ right to profiteer on this earth from practices that are only superficially transcendentalist?
Considering Paglia’s article as a whole, the fundamental questions she raises are three-fold; first, why does contemporary art fares so poorly in comparison with parallel developments in other cultural fields, second, and consequently, what can art do, realistically, practically and popularly within contemporary society and third, where has the ‘spirit’ in contemporary art gone. Once again, the society to which the author refers, as evidenced by the title of her article, is one primarily determined by prevailing forms of capitalism. While there is no convincing proof supplied to suggest contemporary art’s comparative irrelevance, the assumption that art should ‘do’ something is oddly aligned with certain varieties of often anti-capitalist, protest art that emerged most forcefully during the 1960s, an era Pagila returns to a number of times and which she obviously views as especially culturally formative. Considering the sheer extent of civil and social unrest visible during that period, it is unsurprising that certain artists and collectives were convinced that art had to serve an identifiable cause in order to excuse itself from charges of pure selfishness and social redundancy. With regards contemporary art, it is interesting how this demand that art do something has reemerged in many so-called ‘relational’ practices that simultaneously look to deny the very existence of art as a historically determined discourse related to philosophy. The watered down re-workings of 1960s conceptual and performance art typical of ‘relational aesthetics’ usually recast intellectual critique as positive feel-good social ‘experiments’ that likewise prefigure art as banally literal in its aims and outcomes (21). Such work, much of it non-object based, also structurally imitates contemporary capitalism’s ideological demand for immaterial products, here in the form of ‘good-natured’, socially conscious actions ultimately hopelessly limited in their suggestive and political import. Tellingly, such art often aspires to reach broader, non-art audiences and would therefore seem sympathetic to Paglia’s vision of a reinvigorated ‘meaningful’ art on two fronts, as capitalist friendly and socially orientated.
Less appealing to Paglia though about such popular contemporary art, would be its superficial focus on transience and apparent uselessness, compared with more user-friendly industrial forms of contemporary culture (22). Yet what does this reiterated misgiving towards uselessness, unpopularity, abstraction and opacity imply if not the kind of vocational slant that even higher education institutions have been forced to increasingly adopt. It is obvious that in the current climate higher education, including art education, is geared more and more towards the demands of the bottom line. Consequently ‘useless’ endeavours, in fact art is auspicious among them, are implicitly cast under suspicion as being a drain on contemporary society, which translates in reality as being bad for the economy. But isn’t the very uselessness of art, insofar as its use-value cannot be made explicit, what defines art in the first place? And this is by no means to support the elevated uselessness accorded art courtesy of standard Greenbergian tenets. Indeed, this variety of uselessness is very useful to the commercial art sector as a supplier of predominantly elite, often corporate, forms of contemporary decoration. Against such use, isn’t it art’s right to question, paradoxically, even neurotically, the double-bind it finds itself in, in relation to an overweening globalised culture that is not simply practically capitalist but unrelentingly commercial? Why should art be expected to break the bind of this paradox by coming up with a positive solution or by redefining art along the lines of the apriori positing of socially and symbolically ‘useful’ objects and images. Moreover, isn’t contemporary art’s ‘spiritual’ dimension not encapsulated by this very refusal to falsely claim the absolutely positive or negative, as if this were possible in anyway?
Under the conditions of contemporary global capitalism that seek evermore a ‘use’, actual and symbolic, for everything at the expense of distracted or otherwise abstract thinking, isn’t art one of the few remaining areas in which such thinking might thrive and reverberate? The kind of linear can-do thinking that distinguishes Paglia’s essay, denies the subtle, indeterminate paths of influence that contemporary art initiates in contemporary culture generally. That a global art world, increasingly represented as a secondary aspect of the global tourist industry (in which architecture like Gehry’s plays an undeniable part), frequently translates as ‘successful’, art works that display overly descriptive or entertainment-leaning proclivities, does not do any justice to the contemporary practice of art. Indeed, contra to Paglia’s thesis that capitalism can ‘save’ art, the frequently strained and unpredictable relationship between art and its markets, actually testifies to contemporary art’s continuing capacity for at least partial, resistance to its wholehearted integration into capitalist machinery. That this machinery is excessively fickle, thereby denying again Paglia’s nostalgic yearning for artistic permanence, only means that art must function in the face of and despite, market demands. In fact, it is this stubborn ‘despite of’ that speaks most loudly of art’s continued critical relevance, a relevance that has little to do with avant-garde mythology, but which has much to do with valuing art as one of the few prevailing avenues of abstract, ‘distracted’, ‘useless’ thinking.
Alex Gawronski
First published in Broadsheet vol 42 no. 1, Mar, Apr, May 2013. CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.
1. Paglia, Camille, ‘How Capitalism can Save Art’, the Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2011
2. Ibid
3. Paglia writes effusively about the particular creativity of one of her students a ‘virtuoso’ woodworker, who earned a living as a furniture-maker proving that ‘Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs’. Ibid
4. On this note, consider just how expensive it is to study art in the US. Given this, Paglia’s jab at hypocritical art school leftists seems at least partly, warranted.
5. Ibid (italics my emphasis)
6. But then again, even as far as music is concerned, one would always have to ask ‘which’ music for within contemporary ‘popular’ music there is a vast array of genres and sub-genres each with its own considerable audiences.
7. Paglia
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Ibid
11. ‘Working time and free time have no clearly defined borders. Work and leisure can no longer be separated. In the non-paid time, they (cultural producers) accumulate a great deal of knowledge, which is not paid for extra, but is naturally called for and used in the context of paid work, etc.’ Lorey, Isabell, Governmentality and Self Precarisation, in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds) ‘Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique’, MayFlyBooks, London, 2009, p 197
12. Paglia
13. For example, doesn’t contemporary neo-liberal capitalism support and encourage new corporate aristocracies while the majority of the world’s population still lives in abject poverty and while women workers globally are routinely paid less than their male colleagues.
14. ‘ ‘Voluntary’, - i.e., unpaid or low paying jobs in the culture or academic industries, for example – are all too often accepted as an unchangeable fact, and nothing else is eve demanded.’ Lorey, Isabell, Governmentality and Self Precarisation, in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds) ‘Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique’, MayFlyBooks, London, 2009, p 197
15. Paglia
16. Ibid
17. Ibid
18. Ibid
19. Ibid
20. In Lacan, $ stands the barred Subject, the symbol of a lack, that (emptily) propels desire.
21. There are many examples this, most of which are well intentioned and which tend to collapse contemporary art into peripherally related fields like social work and straightforward pedagogy. The majority of these examples, in doing so, ask that art achieve something immediate and ‘concrete’ in a social context even if what results is difficult to distinguish from a ‘slew of community-based practices that revolve around the predictable formula of children’s workshops, discussions, meals, film screenings and walks’. See Claire Bishop, ‘Artificial Hells, Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship’,Verso, London, New York, 2012, p 21
22. On this note it is interesting to consider the example of Russian Constructivism, a key avant-garde movement that sought to institute its revolutionary political program, partly via the mass manufacture of common, industrially produced items. While the Constructivist’s envisaged a utopian social outcome in which people’s everyday lives were affected by revolution, can the same thing be said of a contemporary capitalist ‘revolution’ that prioritises particular, isolated technological fetishes?