Originally published in Art Monthly 376: May 2014. The last essay I wrote for the art world…
Anyone who has spent time observing the intellectual art world may have had occasion to observe a striking fact: everybody with a platform appears to share the same opinions. Anti-American, despite the predominance of US institutions and foundations in art education and production; post-colonial, despite the crypto-colonialist organization of the global art world; anti-western, despite the centrality to contemporary art of western practices and concepts, and, above-all, anti-neoliberal, even though no sector better embodies the gated utopianism of global neoliberal society than the ultra-mobile and hyper-networked art world.
What explains this strange consensus? In the first half of the twentieth century, the modernist intelligentsia held political positions ranging from ultramontane Catholicism through mystical anarchism, to unclassifiable species of far-right conservatism: In 1941, broadcasting from his base in Rapallo, Ezra Pound wrote to Katue Kitasono that the US should surrender control over the island of Guam to Japan in return for the sound recordings of 300 Noh plays1; in 1915 Wyndham Lewis argued in Blast that Russian sovereignty over Constantinople ‘’should be the prayer of every good artist in Europe’’ on the basis of a promise of a ‘’long white ‘independents’ exhibition on the Shores on the Bosphorus…’’ and ‘’probably the best Shakespeare Theatre in the world at this gate of the East.’’2
These kinds of aberrant positions have today almost vanished — ironically, at the same rate as the increase in the rhetoric of pluralism, and despite the dizzying ascent of contemporary art from the margins to the global mainstream: a transformation which might have been expected, like globalization itself, to have generated greater political and aesthetic diversity.
Why didn’t this occur? One possible factor is that the record of fascism discredited the radical right in a way that the record of communism did not discredit the radical left, leading to an effective monopoly in the radical ideological field. If it is radical rhetoric you want, there is today a single option: the radicalism of the Left. Anyone seeking to set themselves up on the contemporary art world intellectual circuit who proposed to argue for the views of Ezra Pound would be ostracized.
In fact, the existence of this circuit is itself an innovation. Individual intellectuals and artists have always flirted with radical rhetoric as an outlet for frustrated ambitions, and a form of imaginary revenge. What has changed is the creation of a market for it with the embrace of political discourse by traditionally conservative institutions — like museums — in support of the establishment of political art as a collectable genre of artistic activity.
From Chto Delat, to Occupy Museums, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, to Immigrant Movement International, to Tate Liverpool’s tendentious recent survey “Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013” (the latest installment in their highly politicized program following their 2010 exhibition “Picasso: Peace and Freedom”) and the activities of L’International, the imperialistic conglomerate of European contemporary art museums, all across the art world, curators are promoting made-for-display ideological art projects as the most significant form of contemporary artistic expression.
Why has this happened? One side of the story relates to the fact that, in the absence of a positive conception of humanist culture, the historical project of museums has been thrown into doubt. Without clear criteria for judging cultural expression, it is no-longer clear what role a museum is supposed to play, beyond a strictly instrumental function in support of city branding initiatives and urban regeneration projects. Art political activism gives museums something to do, and to claim, in the absence of a higher purpose.
Yet the effect is paradoxical. Because the institution remains powerful — perhaps more so then ever — in establishing the parameters of how contemporary art is consumed and perceived — the message is received like propaganda. The idea seems to be to criticize the system and the state. Yet these are projects which are being funded by the system and the state, and circulated amongst its most powerful elements. What can the public think?
***
A plausible account for when the cultural plates began moving places the crucial shift in the late sixties, with the emergence of two discourses — conceptual art, and post-structural philosophy, whose positions and attitudes would come to define contemporary culture.
Both discourses emerged in a moment in which the social and cultural premises that defined the post-war Western world began dissolving: “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” symposium at John Hopkins in Baltimore in 1966 introduced Lacan and Derrida to US academia; in 1967, Artforum published Sol LeWitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, and in 1968 Seth Siegelaub “published” the “Xerox Book” and Lawrence Weiner’s booklet Statements. That same year, the serene Paris sequences of Kenneth Clarke’s patrician TV series Civilization were shot during the May 1968 riots as across the river “Le futur n’a plus d’avenir” was being sprayed onto the walls of the Sorbonne.
Like the modernist avant-garde, the leading figures of both discourses saw themselves as burying the past (the death of the author substituting for the death of God) and established their authority on the strength of the connection.3
Unlike their predecessors their revolt was materialist and tactical, rather than romantic or escapist: Anti-Oedipus instead of Ulysses; “It is at work everywhere” instead of “silence, exile and cunning.”
Rejecting the metaphysics of painting, which for four hundred years had functioned as the supreme Western artistic medium, conceptual artists turned to the anti-humanist coolness of Duchamp, and the commercial alchemy of Warhol’s factory, to legitimate an art of fetishism, reference and exchange.
Post-structural philosophy, disavowing the universalism of the Western tradition (reinterpreted by Derrida as “White Mythology”) turned away from the dialogue with classical philosophy in favor of contemporary engagement with non-philosophical discourses — sexuality, pop culture, and politics.
By endorsing immaterialism (LeWitt: “The idea is the machine that makes the work.” Weiner: “The piece need not be built”) conceptual arts established the principles of a new global art system, liberated from the creative restrictions — what Marx might have termed the “rural idiocy” of medium-specific approaches — in favor of free-floating interventions into an expanded aesthetic field.
Art shifted emphasis from the production of objects to the exposition of connections, the performance of gestures, and the production of statements. The problem of staging and marketing the gesture, through the generation and dissemination of curatorial discourse, merged with, and then came to take precedence over the work itself.4
Urgency and ubiquity replaced integrity and universality as the key critical categories. The image of antiquity — the ballast of modernity — was replaced by the rhetoric of the contemporary as the ultimate standard and reference point for artistic endeavor.
Displaced at the same time was the idea of an evolutionary art history, as incarnated in Alfred H. Barr’s infamous speeding torpedo: the sigil of the original MoMA (see Fig. 1).
fig. 1.
If “(art) history advances at the speed of its weapon systems”5 the contemporary metaphor would be a Predator drone — ubiquitous, tactical, remote controlled — the weapon for a dislocated culture in which history has ceased to represent a disciplinary mode of understanding and become a kind of waking dream, which penetrates reality as echoes and associations.
Disconnected from the supposition of a universal meaning, and no longer able to legitimate avant-garde art, either by providing support, or by provoking a challenge, history acquired the status of a material resource, leading to an explosion of micro-histories of uncertain significance, as the “grand narrative” splintered into fragments — like an empire splitting into autonomous provinces.
The “historical” role of the artist as a Faustian visionary — simultaneously perceiving and enacting the future — transformed into the “contemporary” reality of the artist as a lap-top strategist, writing e-mails to their art world contacts from a departure lounge between connecting flights.
“Historical” artists spoke in manifestos and polemics; contemporary artists speak in conversations and interviews. The change in tactics reflects a change in philosophy. Contemporary art works no-longer act aggressively towards once another; they are well-behaved — as well-behaved as their creators.
The “historical” artist was threatening, since their authority was located at some untimely point outside of the prevailing order; but because the value of a contemporary artist is anchored in the depth of their connection to the present moment, and the systems which compose it — they’re on notice.
Tied by rumors to the determination of the zeitgeist (as discerned by a decentralized network of professional curators) artists have been politicized by market forces, but in an unexpected way — as political marketeers.6
Lacking a higher purpose, politics, which was formerly, in a way, a matter of personal conviction for an artist who, after all, was also a citizen became integral as a sector of the culture market — became professionalized.
On the same basis, the identity of the artist — their sexual, cultural, political and ethnic background — became professionalized. It means something specific to exhibit a Palestinian or an Iraqi7 artist against the background of the news; a selective socio-political biography will be provided on the press release and reiterated everywhere as a lens through which to view their works — whose geopolitical significance will thus be magnified.
The artist becomes a cipher for a territorial reality, through the prism of a cartographic gaze which is interested in politicization as such — in images of politics — rather than political objectives.
Pressed to legitimate this interests, the art world will insist that presenting political images is already political, since they incite forms of critical thinking by “provoking debate” or “imagining another world”. As such — the story goes — they serve as figures of resistance to the “regressive” status-quo conjured by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous axiom “There is no alternative” — a line cited incessantly by the political art world as if it represented an injunction (“It is forbidden to imagine”) instead of the bombastic defense of a specific political policy, and as if Thatcher — for better or worse, one of the most revolutionary politicians of the twentieth century — was a demiurgic figure, opposed in principle to change. But this is the rationalization of a limit as opposed to an elective choice.
***
Political content can only appear in the art world as an exhibition or a program — authenticated by an artist as a work of art, and framed by a curatorial structure composed of concepts, networks, interests, and a certain ways of doing business.
Ultimately, anything that the art world does depends upon this structure; and everything it does works to expand it — into new territories and markets, new modes and forms of life, and new dimensions of experience.
Political art, which amounts to an aesthetic digestion of ideological politics — rather than their celebration — is a paradigmatic example; a form of “curatorial” aggression, analogous to the secular reframing of religious icons as, precisely, art works beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.8
In the earlier period, the main “characters” involved in aesthetic reception shifted from being the religious figures (Jesus, Mary…) depicted in art works to the artists (Titian, Raphael…) who made them, as “historical” modes of thought involving doctrine of uniqueness, and the simultaneous perception of identity and difference superseded theology9; today, the protagonists are shifting again, from individual artists — who have become more-or-less replaceable programmers, salesman, technicians and illustrators — to systems of curators, brands and institutions.
***
Anyone in the art world who has gained the privilege of speech is someone for whom the system is working, and who is working for this system. In formal terms, the discourse which they generate reflects their status and their aims. The “content” is inconsequential. What is required is a form of speech which can supply opinions on a range of subjects (valuable for arts professionals, competing in an industry in which meaning constitutes a form of value) which is theoretically directed against massive global forces (glamorous, since it aligns the spokesman with the rebels, as well as flexible, since it can be applied with minimum variation in almost any country) but doesn’t implicate anyone personally (it is acceptable to run an anti-neoliberal program, which is sponsored by a bank, or arrange a biennial about freedom in a country employing slaves). This is a discourse which fulfills the need to speak, but has no fundamental connection to a concrete object.
On the back of the contemporary tendency of art institutions to directly sponsor, and therefore control “criticality” (a development licensed by the conceptual rhetoric of dematerializing the art object as commodity form) this language is now proliferating through the art world at an accelerating rate, through conferences, symposia, educational programming, and other discursively-driven events and arrangements — with the result that the art world is now effectively suppressing discussion.
By flooding all communications channels with syncretic speech, and co-opting critics through the promise of paid invitations (in a situation in which writers have already been proletarianized by the internet) negative criticism of powerful institutions and tendencies has effectively vanished, in favor of advertising, masquerading as phenomenological description.
***
If the outside world is beginning to notice this unhappy arrangement (“Art is a left-wing hobby,” claimed the Dutch populist leader Geert Wilders in 2011, in a quote that was later used as the tagline — ironically? — for the 2012 edition of the arts festival Steirischer Herbst) and beginning to question the basis of continuing public art funding, there has been no corresponding self-reflection;10 instead, the system is defended uncompromisingly, on the basis of an anti-neoliberal argument about the public good.
Yet there are few clearer examples of the central contemporary “neoliberal” economic policy11 of socializing risks and privatizing profits then the present funding arrangements of contemporary art.
Representing a net transfer of wealth from the public to a small, elite group of self-selecting professionals — well-connected individuals and institutions capable of generating plausible, bureaucracy-ready applications — the system is a case study in how a vested technocracy is capable of compelling the public to support the business activities of private individuals and companies with no democratic accountability or control.
Projects selected for funding are characterized by conflicts of interest; from Bob and Roberta Smith’s “Art Party” project — a political platform which calls for an end to cuts in Arts Council England funding which is itself supported by the Arts Council England, to the fact that between 2012 and 2015, the Turner Prize-nominated Otolith Group — two people — one of them the brother of the former chairman of the ICA — have received more than £150,000 from the Arts Council to make films after registering themselves as an organization.
After the commission, artists take the art work that the public has paid to produce, and sell it to private collectors: editions of Jeremy Deller’s work in the British Pavillion this year in Venice turned-up in Art Basel, editions of the public project commissioned by Transport for London from Mark Wallinger went on sale at this year’s Frieze.
The arrangement also has other costs on the level of content, encouraging work underpinned by a calculated conformism, in which desire to appease masquerades as a desire to provoke. Recent pan-European support accorded to Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International is a classic example — a superficially challenging romanticization of the figure of the migrant that on a closer examination simply recapitulates the middle-class liberal politics already maintained by the people who visit contemporary art museums.
Meanwhile political art projects which do not fit easily into ‘’radical’’ orthodoxy, or which disturb it, are marginalized or met with incomprehension: perhaps the best example is the tangled reception and production of Artur Żmijewsky’s insane, but daring Berlin Biennale 7 — a disastrous and almost self-parodying exercise in over-identification devoted to collapsing the distinction between art and politics, which was sabotaged internally by the eternal conformists of the Kunstwerke and then savaged unreflectively by a baffled art press in a kind of double whammy.12
***
The final element — and perhaps the most decisive — is the education system. At the same time that the author’s death certificate was being issued, art — no-longer identifiable on the level of the object — was turning into something — no more and no less — that an artist made — and school became the machine that made the artist.
By submitting students to a system of certification indexed strategically and tactically to market forces, teaching artists how to position their work, and embedding them in the interpersonal networks surrounding the schools — while at the same time teaching them the politically correct perspective through a curricula drawn overwhelmingly from the same small number of critical left-wing theorists, contemporary art schools have become case studies of what Louis Althusser termed ideological state apparatus — case studies secure enough to themselves teach Althusser. Today, it is possible to take a course on Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts for 40,000 USD a year, where you attend Marxist lectures, by the usual suspects, and learn about the link between neoliberalism and educational debt.
The systematic result of the expansion of art schools has been the practical reinforcement of a predetermined division, in which the art world has confirmed itself in specialized zones of activity — sites of production, and sites of consumption — that cannot be confused, and outside of which art can’t exist. These days, nobody will consider you an artist, no matter how well you know your subject, if you have not been to the right school — not because of any positive belief in the value of art schools (there is almost no positive belief in the art world to speak of) but because the systematic organization of the art world has arranged attention in a way that independent curiosity outside of designated structures has been nullified.
The result is a new academicism in contemporary art, which, in the decades and the centuries to follow, will come to be seen in the same light as the academic painting of the nineteenth century. The same biennials repeat the same lists of artists from Sharjah to Shanghai, each one defined through their exoticism, yet all of them strangely the same, in a self-confirming spiral in which global ubiquity reaffirms contemporary significance in the circular discourse of contemporary globalization. Who, who visited both Frieze contemporary art fair, and Frieze Masters next door, could have failed to notice the shallowness of the contemporary work?
Organized through clique-like power structures making unaccountable decisions, based on strategic business interests, the art world now hosts, and in some ways has significantly refined, the same game which also operates in other sectors. Like in other creative industries, personnel costs are kept low and wages at the top kept high by an inflow of young art school graduates and other would-be interns and associates; practices of offshoring production to the developing world have normalized: videos by left-wing collective Superflex are made by the Propeller Group in Vietnam. More financially-savvy artists now seek to generate value like social media companies: by crowd-sourcing “content” from “participatory” audiences through the creation of platforms for the expropriation of value — the work is then signed by the artist like a celebrity autograph. The highest level witnesses the accumulation of positions, like non-executive directorships on FTSE boards;
power is monopolized, and spent on the accumulation of more power; for everyone else, there is debt, and the delusions of a discourse of resistance that has become a systematic lie.
1 See Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.210
2See Wyndham Lewis, ‘Constantinople Our Star’, Blast №2, July 1915, p.11
3The fascinating question of whether intellectual movements are determinative and causal, or merely symptomatic and reflective is beyond the scope of this essay; suffice it to say that the same period saw the development of a mode of communications technology which practically instituted both discourses theoretical and aesthetic positions.
4 Ironically, the same result was lamented by Deleuze when drawn to comment on the ‘’mediocracy’’ of post-68 philosophy. See Dominique Lecourt, Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s, Verso, 2002.
5See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, Semiotext(e), 2007
6There is a relationship here to the transformation of politics itself into a vocation. See Max Weber’s famous essay at http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Politics-as-a-Vocation.pdf
7Even if this artist is not “really” Palestinian or Iraqi (most likely they were educated in the USA or Europe, and often by the person who is curating the show).
8For a broader perspective on long march of history see: J. G. A. Pocock’s essay “Western historiography and the problem of Western history” available at: http://www.unaoc.org/repository/9334Western%20Historiography%20and%20Problem%20of%20Western%20History%20-%20JGA%20Pocock.doc.pdf
9For more on this, see Daniel Miller “Interview with Walter Benjamin”, A Prior 23, November 2012
10This is contrast, surprisingly, with socialist France, where independent film producer Victor Maraval last year initiated a debate about the role of public funding in supporting middle-brow movie projects. See Richard Brody’s recap in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/01/france-and-politics-of-movies.html
11A doctrine which would have appalled the architect of “neoliberalism” Milton Friedman, whose position was directed against exactly this kind of practice.
12Probably the best write-up came from Julian Stallabrass in the New Left Review. But the behind-the-scenes story is
