Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, Makers: Thoughts on Audience, By Martha Rosler (1979)
[Editor’s note- The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Exposure magazine, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education. Throughout the year, we will be republishing a selection of essays that were first published in the pages of Exposure, to introduce a new generation of photographic educators and students to this rich history. What follows in an Introduction by Ariel Evans and a Prelude by Martha Rosler, both written in 2020, followed by a 1984 version of the original essay.]
Some Audiences of Martha Rosler’s “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, Makers: Thoughts on Audience”
by Ariel Evans
Let us now imagine a relation between viewer and photographic project in which the producer actively shares a community with the audience in a different way from the community she/he shares with other producers.¹
Since its publication in the Spring 1979 issue of Exposure, Martha Rosler’s “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, Makers: Thoughts on Audience” has held considerable influence. Republished in Brian Wallis’ landmark anthology Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984) and Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson’s Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (2009) — as well as hundreds of undergraduate and graduate course readers — the essay is a central text in histories of postmodernism, feminism, photography, and art since the second World War.
Readers will find that “Lookers” maps the contours of the art world’s economies and indicates where and how photography grafted itself on to those systems; at the time, fine-art photography institutions remained distinct from art world ones. Each had their own social network of central artists and critics, professional associations (SPE versus the College Art Association, for example), magazines, museum departments, and so on. “Lookers” is among the first texts² to use sociological analysis to describe the relationship between these two spheres. As importantly, “Lookers” shows how both the art-world and photo-world operate similarly in regard to their audience. Identifying how artists perform for the market as either “visionar[ies], whose sources of creativity are outside [their] conscious control, such as Genius and Inspiration,” or, as “scientist[s] motivated to perform ‘investigations,’ ‘explorations,’ or ‘experiments,’ ”³ Rosler delineates how these versions of modernist authorship obscure artists’ relationships to the world we all share. Told to interpret a work according to “genius” — by definition impossible to understand — these paradigms divide us lookers into those who understand the maker’s rarefied intent (buyers, dealers) from those who do not.⁴ Reading the extensive data in the footnotes of the essay’s Exposure edition, and the data tables in the Art After Modernism reprint, it is hard to avoid the chilling, inexorable conclusion that the art world functions to exclude the working classes.⁵
From this view, photography’s then-new status as a high art form galls especially, considering that it is not difficult to interpret photographs as matter-of-fact records of events regardless of class origin. Yet SPE was started precisely to encourage the acceptance of photography among the rarefied fine arts. Take the organization’s founding by-laws (1963):
ARTICLE 3 Objects and Purposes
The objects and purposes of this Society shall be:
- To promote high standards in photographic education.
- To foster and encourage the practice of the art of photography
- To elevate public taste in photography
- To cooperate with all other organizations having similar aims. [emphasis mine]⁶
Reading the rest of the SPE’s founding documents indicates that “to foster and encourage the practice of the art of photography” meant helping artist-photographers, whereas “to elevate public taste” had to do with teaching the non-artist public to appreciate an art photograph — exactly the division of artist from audience, and the tacit hierarchization of the audience proper, that Rosler critiques in “Lookers.”
Thus, while Rosler’s scope in the essay is the larger art world rather than SPE alone, SPE members found plenty that challenged their organization’s central tenets. “Lookers”’ provocation was to have marked effects in the SPE’s social world, in part because Rosler also identified SPE scions as auteurial performers; for SPE members, Rosler’s theoretical critique took on social dimensions within their lived space. Indeed, “Lookers” (among other projects by Rosler and her colleagues) infuriated several leading SPE members. Letters from A.D. Coleman and Les Krims in Robert Heinecken’s archive accuse Rosler and those who agreed with her of youth, unprofessionalism, naivete, and ignorance; of not understanding photographic education; of being Stalinists (this from Coleman) or fascists; of not respecting SPE bonhomie and violating “the implicit social contract which binds the membership of the SPE together, in however fragile a fashion,” as Coleman put it in a December 12, 1981 letter to the Publications Committee of the SPE.⁷
Yet the notion of SPE bonhomie was a luxury that the SPE’s male members tended to enjoy more than its women, and because “Lookers” also indicates that modernist authorship tends to de facto privilege men, it helped ignite women photographers’ simmering dissatisfaction with the institution. When speaking of the construct of the artist as “a visionary, whose sources of creativity are outside his conscious control, such as Genius and Inspiration … and whose audience is ‘himself,’” Rosler footnotes the comment: “‘Herself’ was very rare.”⁸ Read through these asides, the art and photography worlds appear split into auteurial haves (men) and have-nots (women).
Indeed, SPE’s author-based ethos was a labor issue for women photographers. In an institution that materially rewarded the self-expressing subject — the author — women were frequently represented as sex objects by the male photographers who dominated the professional discourse.⁹ In a telling example, Les Krims presented rankly misogynistic work as the keynote speaker at the 1978 SPE national conference, including a series featuring his mother making chicken soup in her underwear (because Krims believed that trying to change the world with photography was as useless as making chicken soup to cure illness);¹⁰ as well as a series of rape-and-murder scenes, in which Krims used chocolate syrup because it looks like blood in black-and-white photography. Both supposedly challenged audience members’ perceptions of photographic reality. Yet to SPE leaders of the 1970s, the grotesque quality and posed nature of these scenes was their “shaping power,” as SPE founder Nathan Lyons explained in 1976:
If our discussions concerning photography do not afford entry or access to the recesses of a layered collective awareness, because few are willing to be so adventurous, are timid, or restricted by the tribal incantations, secure in the Photography Reality chant — this is reality, this is reality, this is reality! […] In Krims we find that the disturbing quality for many is that the photograph … is too actual. His own position is to term the works “fictions, essentially the objectification of inner realities.” [emphasis mine]¹¹
Here Lyons figures Krims as an art-photographer par excellence¹² because his images concern a psychological reality and do not document events in the external, social world (as many tend to expect of most photographs).¹³ Women, however, could not contest such objectifying imagery without risking their own standing as authors. Were they to do so, they could be accused of being ignorant of the nature of photographic representation: “secure in the Photography Reality chant — this is reality! this is reality! this is reality!”¹⁴ That Krims received significant commercial attention and critical accolades strengthens the point; in February 1978 he had a solo show at Light Gallery in New York — a major space for selling art-photography — and which from 1971–1979, showed work by only eight women, in comparison to 66 men.
Fortunately for those women in the audience disturbed by the profuse sexist imagery in SPE and the interpretive criteria that authorized its production, Rosler started the Women’s Caucus at the 1980 national conference, one year after “Lookers”’ publication.¹⁵ At this conference, Rosler also organized the program track “Photography and Political Action,” which laid out alternative visions of collective authorship through two panels of documentarians who used photography to represent communities in which they maintained strong ties. As Rosler puts it in the panel description: “people, working collectively, within the group that is the subject of the work …”¹⁶ Where “Lookers” critiques SPE’s interpretation of photographic authorship, “Photography and Political Action” showcased photographers who negotiate production, distribution, and reception with their subjects. At least part of the Women’s Caucus’ theoretical foundations, then, lie in this two-parted argument which deconstructs modernist authorship and explores more collective alternatives tied to political action. When we read in “Lookers” —
Let us now imagine a relation between viewer and photographic project in which the producer actively shares a community with the audience in a different way from the community she/he shares with other producers.¹⁷
— we find in the Women’s Caucus an audience of producers, who would go on to challenge SPE to recognize them as such.
Ariel Evans is an art historian and Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working on her first book: Pussy Porn and Other Arguments in American Feminist Photography, 1968–1988.
Notes for the Introductory Essay-
1. Martha Rosler, “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, Makers: Thoughts on Audience” Exposure 17 no. 1 (Spring 1979): 24. This essay was republished in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brain Wallis (Boston: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1984); Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writing, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2004); and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2009).
2. If not the first.
3. Rosler, “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, Makers: Thoughts on Audience,” 13.
4. Of course, this brief prècis does not do the essay justice. Please read the reprint in this same Exposure issue.
5. According to the data, the vast majority of the art audience holds at least a college degree, and a significant portion of that majority consists of professionals attached to the art world. Many of these tables came from Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s L’Amour de l’art (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969). I believe that Rosler was among the first to apply Bourdieu’s thought to the contemporary art world, inspiring a number of artists including Andrea Fraser.
6. Nathan Lyons, Henry Holmes Smith, Sol Mednick, Clarence H. White, Jr., and Arthur Sinsabaugh “Steering Committee Report and Proposed Constitution and By-Laws,” November 28, 1963. Published in SPE: The Formative Years, ed. Nathan Lyons (Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop and the Society of Photographic Educations, 2012), 107.
7. Robert Heinecken Papers, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. White women mainly. Women of color were often left invisible or presented through racist as well as sexist stereotypes.
10. Terry Barrett, “A Structure for Appreciating Photographs” Exposure 18, nos. 3 and 4 “Special Education Issue,” eds. Tony Frederick and Thomas Neff (1980): 53.
11. Nathan Lyons, “Les Krims,” 1976. Lecture. Published in Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews ed. Jessica S. McDonald (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press), 193.
12. The lecture from which this quote comes was given at the Smithsonian, as part of a series where invited scholars “trace[d] the development of photography as a creative art form by discussing some of the leaders of the field.” Where other scholars presented on Julia Margarent Cameron, William Henry Fox Talbot, Henri Cartier-Bresson and similarly august figures, Lyons chose to present Krims as similarly a significant turning point in photography’s history.
13. It’s worth noting that Lyons is far from isolated and this example reflects broad consensus. Robert Sobieszek, Hollis Frampton, A.D. Coleman, and others all made similar claims.
14. Ibid.
15. The archival evidence suggests that Rosler is responsible for the Caucus’ beginning. She placed an announcement in the 1980 national conference bulletin, published at least several weeks before the national conference took place. [1980 National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education Program Supplement (Society for Photographic Education), 45. Society for Photographic Education Records, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.] Of course, Rosler did quite a bit more for the Caucus as well — these are stories for other articles, however.
16. Rosler, “Photography and Political Action,” description in 1980 National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education Program Supplement (Society for Photographic Education), 41. Society for Photographic Education Records, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.
17. Rosler, “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, Makers: Thoughts on Audience,” 24.
Prelude by Martha Rosler, Feb 2020-
I joined the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) in the mid 1970s, to meet and mix it up with other people working and teaching in the field. I’d just moved north to San Francisco from San Diego when I received an invitation from Charles Desmarais, editor of Exposure, the SPE magazine, to write about the photo audience. It was a period of ferment and change for photography, and happily I had a bit of time and mental space to write about it. I wanted to take a look at the rather insular photo circles of this supposedly “minor art” as it was adapting to the larger, multivalent audiences and greater financial rewards of the artworld proper. Photography was entering that larger world during the tailing off of Modernism, which still dominated photographic discourses and understandings, albeit joined to a dogged but outdated technicism. But the entire art world was already being analyzed as a system to which sociological analysis — and, increasingly, financial scrutiny — might be fruitfully applied. The clubby, male-dominated world of photography could do with that kind of attention, and its perhaps inflated ideological and aesthetic verities might benefit from a somewhat skeptical eye.
The language of my article is of its time — a period of widespread self-reflection, as art was clearly turning into a highly capitalized, finance- and fame -driven arena. As the era advanced, photography gave up many of its former self-understandings, and its new production and circulation as “art photography” (as distinct from semi-reportorial genres, and from vintage photographs) led to a predominance that for a brief moment earned it the label “the new painting.” However, in the vast capital flows driving the international demand for investment-grade art, photography has reverted to a status somewhere in between, but bolstered and renovated by galloping developments in new digital technologies creating new social demands on photographic representation and agency.
This essay was originally published in Exposure (Spring 1979). The version reprinted here is a revised version published in Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York and Boston: New Museum and David R. Godine, 1984). A somewhat different version appeared as “The System of the Postmodern in the Decade of the Seventies,” in Joseph N. Newland, ed., The Idea of the Post-Modern: Who Is Teaching It? (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1981), pp. 25–51.
Photography has made what seems to be its final Sisyphean push up the hill into the high-art world, and therefore the photography audience must be considered in terms of its changing relation to the art world system that has engulfed it. The most important distinctions among members of the art audience are those of social class, the weightiest determinant of one’s relation to culture. In the mediating role played by the market in the relationship between artist and audience, the network of class relations similarly determines the relation between those who merely visit cultural artifacts and those who are in a position to buy them.
Historical determinants of the artist’s present position in the art system include the loss of direct patronage with the decline of the European aristocracy and artists’ resulting entry into free-market status. One ideological consequence of modernity was romanticism and its outgrowths, which are a major source of current attitudes about the artist’s proper response to the public. Unconcern with audience has become a necessary feature of art producers’ professed attitudes and a central element of the ruling ideology of Western art set out by its critical discourse. If producers attempt to change their relationship to people outside the given “art world,” they must become more precise in assessing what art can do and what they want their art to do. This is particularly central to overtly political art.
After wrestling with these questions, artists must still figure out how to reach an audience. Here a discussion of art world institutions is appropriate. As photography enters the high-art world of shows, sales, and criticism, people involved in its production, publication, and distribution must struggle with its changed cultural meaning.
In writing this article I have avoided assuming a close knowledge of the material on the part of readers; I hope impatience won’t turn the more knowledgeable ones away.
Some Features of the Audience
It seems appropriate to begin a discussion of “audience” by taking note of the fact that there is anything to discuss. There are societies, after all, in which the social positioning of (what we call) art is not in question. But segmentation is apparent in the culture of late capitalism, where the myths and realities of social life can be seen to diverge and where there is an unacknowledged struggle between social classes over who determines “truth.” In our society the contradictions between the claims made for art and the actualities of its production and distribution are abundantly clear. While cultural myth actively claims that art is a human universal — transcending its historical moment and the other conditions of its making, and above all the class of its makers and patrons — and that it is the highest expression of spiritual and metaphysical truth, high art is patently exclusionary in its appeal, culturally relative in its concerns, and indissolubly wedded to big money and “upper- class” life in general. (See tables 1, 2, 3)
A mere statistical survey of high-culture consumership will delineate the audience and outline its income level, types of occupation, and attitudes toward the ownership of “culture,” serving quite nicely to show how limited the audience really is to definable segments of the educated bourgeoisie,¹ and a minimally sophisticated opinion poll will suggest how excluded and intimidated lower-class people feel.² There are, however, no explanations in the brute facts of income and class; only a theory of culture can account for the com- position of the audience. Further, there is a subjective, ideologically deter- mined element in the very meaning of the idea of art that is essential to people’s relations to the various forms of art in their culture. The truth is that, like all forms of connoisseurship, the social value of high art depends absolutely on the existence of a distinction between a high culture and a low culture.³ Although it is part of the logic of domination that ideological accounts of the meaning of high culture proclaim it as the self-evident, the natural, the only real culture of civilized persons, its distinctive features are distinguishable only against the backdrop of the rest of culture. What is obscured is the acquired nature of the attitudes necessary for partaking in that culture, the complexity of the conditions under which one may acquire them, and the restrictedness of access to the means for doing so.
It can be meaningfully claimed that virtually the entire society is part of the art audience, but in making that claim we should be aware of what we are saying. The widest audience is made up of onlookers — people outside the group generally meant by the term “audience.” They know of high culture mostly through rumor and report. The vast majority of people in the traditional working class are in this group, as are people in most office, technical, and service jobs; they were probably taught the “value” of high art in school and retain a certain churchly feeling⁴ about art but have little real relation to it. Yet their knowledge of the bare lineaments of high culture plays a part in underlining the seeming naturalness of class distinctions — that is, in maintaining capitalist social order — for the transcendental loftiness that is attributed to art artifacts seems attached as well to those who “understand” and own them, the actual audience. It helps keep people in their place to know that they intrinsically do not qualify to participate in high culture.
As to who does own high culture: Everyone knows who they are, those men in white ties and tuxes, those women in floor-length furs, the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Kennedys, Russian ballet dancers, the international jet set, the Beautiful People, the men who run the world of high finance, government, and giant corporations, and their wives and daughters. They are very good at sniffing the wind, and every time a cultural practice is developed that tries to outrun them and their ability to turn everything into money, they manage to buy it out sooner or later and turn it into investments. In their own cultural arena they are, by definition, unbeatable.
Between the people who own and define the meaning of art as high culture and those who are intimidated by it are those who actively cultivate an “appreciation” of art as evidence of elevated sensibilities. The new “professional and managerial class,” sometimes called the new petite bourgeoisie, is marked by strong consciousness of its advantages vis-a-vis the wage-enslaved working class and is just as strongly marked by its aspirations toward the cultural privileges of its class superiors, the big bourgeoisie. Although the dimensions of independence that once characterized this class position have been dramatically reduced, the professional and managerial class is still inclined to count its blessings when it compares itself with the working class, and it clings to its cultural pretensions as proof of its unfetteredness in relation to the workaday world.
The Market as Mediator Between the Artist and Audience
It is useful to make a further distinction among members of the actual audience for high culture — that between the audience simple and the market, a smallish subset of that audience. Such a distinction was of little meaning in Western societies when patronage relations existed between the dominant classes and artists, for then buyers closely controlled art production; there was no other audience for secular works until late in the eighteenth century. But artists developed a rhetoric of productive emancipation as patronage declined and they entered into a condition approximating the competitive free market — of which I say more below. Once again, ideological accounts tend to obscure the contours of both audience and market, suggesting that everyone equipped with the right inclinations may choose to belong to either or both. The meaning of art (roughly, its “use value”) is held to transcend or even contradict its material existence, and discussions of the economics of art (its exchange relations) are confined to professional seminars and business journals (and there is a formulaic ending for such discussions that is meant to rescue them from philistinism: Taste is the ultimate judge, buy only what you like). The actual effects of the market have thus been made mysterious. But we can trace some of the parameters.
Certainly the very rich collectors (including corporate ones) are still the constant substructural support of the art world. Big collectors, now including photo collectors, aside from keeping the cash flowing, have a great deal of leverage with museum and gallery directors and curators and often are trustees or board members of museums and granting agencies. They also donate (or sell) contemporary works to museums, securing windfall tax savings and driving up the financial value of their other holdings by the same artists. In photography, what is now cast in relief is the collectors’ ability to engineer the historiography of the medium to suit their financial advantage. These are clear-cut influences of market on audience at large.
There are, however, many people below the high bourgeoisie who buy art for decoration, entertainment, and status — and very much because of art’s investment value. Their influence is not formative, yet they constitute a vital layer of the market. This market segment is far more subject to the fluctuations in capitalist economies than is big money, though both are affected by boom-and-bust cycles.
As capitalist economies experience downward swings, changes occur in buying patterns that bring about specifiable changes in what the audience at large gets to see. For example, dealers have lately supported (by means of shows and even artists’ salaries) certain types of trendy art, including performance, which sell little or not at all but which get reviewed because of their art world currency and which therefore enhance the dealer’s reputation for patronage and knowledgeability. Bread and butter comes from backroom sales of, say, American impressionist paintings. When money is tight, the volume of investment declines and investors fall back further on market-tested items, usually historical material. This, as well as the general fiscal inflation, may cause dealers to decrease support to nonsellers. But when economic conditions are uncertain over a longer term and investors worry about economic and governmental stability — as now — many investors, including institutions with millions of dollars to invest, put their money in art. Small investors avoid the stock market and savings accounts and buy “collectibles” or “tangibles.”⁵ Tangibles encompass gems, gold (notoriously, the South African krugerrand), real estate, old luggage, and objets d’art: vases, antiques, classy craft items such as silver and ceramics, and old art by dead artists — lately including “vintage” photo prints. People unconcerned with art discourse can be comfortable with such work, especially when, thanks to the effects of the big collectors, brand-name paintings and sculpture seem far too pricey. Thus, the level of safe, purely investment, buying may rise dramatically while patronage buying diminishes.⁶ With the falling dollar, investors from other countries find tried-and-true U.S. art and collectibles to be good buys, thus also enlarging the market for those items — and skewing it toward their particular favorites, such as photo-realist painting. (At the same time, countries such as Britain that are in worse financial shape are experiencing an outflow of old master paintings to high bidders from everywhere else.)
As dealers concentrate on work that sells and show less of the less sale-able, museums and noncommercial galleries also show it less. Artists then make less of it, though the newer sorts of institutional funding — teaching jobs and government grants — keep a reduced amount of nonselling work in production and circulation, at least in the short run. The balance begins to tip toward ideologically safe work. At any time, the nonbuying audience (except for other artists) seems to have a negligible effect on what kind of contemporary art gets supported and produced and therefore on what it gets to see. Popular response no doubt has somewhat more effect on the planning for cultural-artifact museum shows, such as the very heavily promoted King Tut exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art,⁷ providing a convenient reference for moves that granting agencies and corporate sponsors make toward these apparently populist and often wildly popular projects and away from exhibits of contemporary work.
Art World Attitudes
So far I’ve talked about the actual audience as relatively homogeneous and as beyond the artist’s power to determine. But artists may want to reach a different audience from the usual high-culture-consuming public or different audiences at different times. The idea of discriminating among publics is rare in art conversation (though hardly so in marketing), with historical underpinnings. A certain lack of concern with audience took hold with the romantic movement in early-nineteenth-century Europe, a disconnection that was linked to the loss of secure patronage from the declining aristocracy and the State. Production clearly predominated, and marketing was treated as a necessary accommodation to vulgar reality.
The new conception of the artist was of someone whose production cannot rationally be directed toward any particular audience. In one version the artist is a visionary whose springs of creativity, such as Genius and Inspiration (or, in mid-twentieth-century America, internal psychic forces), lie beyond his conscious control and whose audience is “himself.”⁸ Alternatively, the artist is a kind of scientist, motivated to perform “investigations,” “explorations,” or “experiments” to discover objective facts or capabilities of, variously, art, taste, perception, the medium itself, and so on, for presentation to similarly invested peers.
A revolt against the canons of high-art production of the earlier, aristocratic order helped clear the way for artists to choose their subjects and styles more freely. But artists, as a class now petit bourgeois, “naturally” tended toward a range of subjects and treatments that was more in tune with the outlook of the new bourgeois audience-market than with that of any other class. Yet artists’ marginality in that class, and their new estrangement from government elites, contributed to a struggle against the wholesale adoption of the bourgeois worldview and against the increasing commodification of culture. Although the new mythology of art denied the centrality of the market, questions of showing and sales remained of great importance, even if successive waves of artists tried to answer them with rejection. The language of liberation began to be heard at just the historical moment in which all social relations were on the verge of domination by market relations. The various bohemian-avant-gardist trends in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art have constituted a series of rejections and repatriations with respect to bourgeois culture, a series united by their initial contempt for the market and the bourgeois audience at large. The art movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often were part of a larger oppositional culture (and sometimes related to more direct political practice). That was true of a number of versions of “modernism,” as most postcubist art came to be called. Yet, for the most restricted versions of formalist modernism, such as that propounded by the American critic Clement Greenberg at midcentury, there can be no recoverable relation between the work of art and its context other than that composed of similar objects within the aesthetic tradition and the answering faculty of taste.
In the United States, the dominant high-art discourse from, say, the 1940s on has distorted the history of all forms of oppositional culture, whether explicitly part of a revolutionary project or not, into one grand form-conscious trend, with a relentless blindness to the formative influences of larger society and, thus, of the audience. Artists with working-class audiences or who otherwise showed solidarity with revolutionary and proletarian struggles (or, indeed, their opposites, those who produced for the flourishing academic or “bourgeois realist” market) are neutralized in this history. At most, it conceded that (passing over the strident thirties in America, against which this history constitutes a reaction) art and politics were fruitfully linked only in revolutionary France and the Soviet Union, and then but briefly, in the transient, euphorically anarchic moment of liberation.
The proscription against a clear-eyed interest in the audience is part of an elaborated discourse on the nature of art that was developed in the period of consolidation of industrial capitalism. Resting on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German idealist philosopher, modernism has built its house on the base of “artistic freedom” from the audience- market and used as its architect the faculty of taste. “Taste” is the construct Kant used (in The Critique of Judgment) regarding human responses, including appetite and sexual desire, morality, and religious sentiments. In the Kantian tradition, the aesthetic has no object or effect other than the satisfaction of taste, and all other concerns are excluded as contaminants. For the present topic, the signal issue is the impossibility of a sense of responsibility to any audience, a ban that was related to the romantic figure of the artist as utterly alone, perhaps a rebel, unassimilable within bourgeois social order, and, finally, uncomfortable in his own existence. In the folklore of advanced capitalism this figure lies behind the unsympathetic mass-culture view of the average artist as a kook and a misfit, or at best a lucky (because financially successful) fraud, reinforcing the confinement of a positive relation to high art to the socially elite, specialized audience.
The protocols of taste involve a curious attitude toward judgment; judgment becomes a kind of noncalculated, innate response to the work, almost a resonance with it. Normal standards of judgment about the meaning of what one sees before one’s eyes are negated, and in particular the referential ties between the work and the world — especially the social world — are broken. The signal system itself becomes the proper subject of conversation. Mass audiences know that there is a restricted body of knowledge that must be used to interpret the codes of art at the same time that they recognize their outsider status. One is left confronting a void of permissible responses out of which the exit line is often an apologetic and self-derogating “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I [don’t] like.” For the art world audience, the knowledge that informs their taste recedes into unimportance compared with the compliment to their inborn “sensibilities” (taste) that an appreciation of high art offers.
Modernist American critics with the power to define a discourse and an art practice, such as Clement Greenberg, posited an opposition between bourgeois high culture and a more widely comprehensible culture as that between avant-garde and kitsch, and imagined avant-gardism to be magically revolutionary through a liberation of imagination without any need to change social structures; others, like Harold Rosenberg, derided the value of art informed by “community criticism,” instead favoring idiosyncrasy and unwilled art; and scores and hundreds of critical hacks have emulated, embellished, and popularized these dogmas.⁹ Informing this critical line was a militant anti-Stalinist reaction against the thirties’ art world progressivism.
The Concerns of Art
How might artists and other cultural workers abrogate the gospel of genius, isolation, and formalist concerns? Once we even think to pose the question of how to construct an audience, we are confronted by questions that intervene.¹⁰ We must, for example, ask ourselves what the point of our art is (despite the injunction against posing this question). For instance: to entertain, amuse, divert, confuse, defuse, inculcate, educate, edify, mystify, beautify, satisfy, tickle the sensibilities, alienate, make strange, terrorize, socialize. Some of these are incidental to other art world purposes, such as turning a profit, getting grants, or making a reputation.
All art, from the crassest mass-media production to the most esoteric art world practice, has a political existence, or, more accurately, an ideological existence. It either challenges or supports (tacitly perhaps) the dominant myths a culture calls Truth. There was a dry period in the United States, from about the Second World War through the McCarthy period to the mid-sixties, during which the art world slammed shut to even mildly socially invested work.¹¹ But after the cultural heresies of the sixties, the neutralist cultural monolith began to crumble, and art with a conscious political orientation could enter the breach. Theories of culture (as opposed to simple ideologies and journalistic promotion) that began to gain currency in that period have proved useful to the development of an informed art practice.
Following a taxonomy of politicized art developed during the brief period of Soviet cultural experimentation, we may categorize art according to its intentions: to agitate about immediate issues, such as particular strikes, health hazards, tenants’ struggles; to propagandize about more general questions, such as personal liberties, institutionalized violence against women, right-wing insurgency; or broad theoretical education, such as the social significance of economic events, the strategies of cultural forms. The words “agitation” and “propaganda” evoke a familiar negative response in us. They call up pictures of clenched-fist posters, yet it should go without saying that only crude works of agitation and propaganda are crude, and only those that offend our ideological precepts are dismissed out of hand. Propagandistic and agitational works from earlier periods are often recuperated; photography provides unending examples in the wholesale legitimation of past photographic practice. State-propagandist enterprises theoretically should strike us as most objectionable but in reality may be the most easily recuperated; it is those propagandizing against the State that are the least acceptable. The gigantic State-propagandist Farm Security Administration corpus, or to choose a less momentous but more recent example, the courthouse survey (in which a coordinated group of documentarians photographed historically significant courthouses), are readily recovered for art — usually in dismembered form, auteur by auteur.
The theoretical, which is most similar to the art-theoretical modernist project, has the greatest snob appeal and is most easily assimilable into high culture. It is notoriously prone to turn back on itself and vanish into form-conscious academicism. Yet there are fundamental theoretical issues that deserve airing before a mass audience; even to demonstrate how ideology is rooted in social relations is to advance a theory of culture.
The audiences for each type of work depend not on the category but on the content, including the form. The “audience,” then, is a shifting entity whose composition depends not only on who is out there but on whom you want to reach with a particular type of work, and why. There is a generalized passivity in artists’ relation to their audiences, however, built into the structure of the art world.
Art World Institutions and Supports
The “art world” (revealing term!) includes the producers of high art, a segment of its regular consumers and supporters, the institutions that bring the consumers and work together, including specialized publications and physical spaces, and the people who run them. Since the art world is fundamentally a set of relations, it also encompasses all the transactions, personal and social, between the sets of participants. The gallery system remains basic to the art world. The conception of the gallery is tailored to the still pervasively modernist view of high art: The gallery is a space apart from any concern other than Art, just as art’s only rightful milieu is Art. The gallery is a secular temple of Art, just as the art within it is the secular replacement for religion. The invisible motto above the gallery door reads, “Abandon worldly concerns (except if you’re buying), ye who enter here.” The paradigm is one in which work is made apart from an audience and in which a space is then secured, at the sufferance of an intermediary, where the audience may “visit” the work (and where the few may appropriate it physically). This sequential network paradigm of artist/artwork/gallery/audience severs any sense of responsibility or commitment to an audience, and political artists must seriously question whether it isn’t against their interest to perpetuate it.
A main arena for art discourse, the art journals — they are actually trade magazines — have played the utterly vital role of unifying information (and therefore have helped nail the coffin lid shut on true “regionalism,” which could not persist in the face of internationalized communication and marketing). Both the front and the back of the book — both feature articles and reviews — are essential. In the early seventies the major attention given to photography by Artforum, the paramount journal, forged a mighty link in the chain tying photography to the art world. The relations between journals and galleries are close and too often covertly financial. I will pass lightly over the fact that the field of art criticism and reviewing is peppered with puff pieces written by people enjoying close relationships with dealers, a fact too well known to be belabored, and a practice that may be more widespread in Europe than in America. But journals patently live on their advertising — gallery advertising. The “new” Artforum of 1975 to 1976, which lionized photography and began a hesitant but injudiciously trumpeted foray into cultural criticism, was slammed by the art world powers-that-be (who literally seemed to fear a Marxian takeover of the editorial policy), and was immediately faced with the danger of destruction by the withdrawal of gallery advertising. Dealers felt that reviews, which are what bring the buyers, were becoming sparse and sloppy and that in any case the journal was jeopardizing its imperiously aesthetic vantage point. Exeunt the editors.
In addition to commercial galleries there are other places where art is exhibited. There are the museums, of course, but such institutions as large corporations, schools, and even some unions run noncommercial galleries as well. These galleries typically play only a small part in those organizations; their reasons for existing are ideological — to satisfy public-relations goals. Large corporations avoid controversial work, wanting to appear as patrons of Art-in-general, not as promoters of this or that trend. They want to brand the work rather than have it brand them. This is not patronage but sales and hype.¹² The audience that corporate galleries attract is much like the general gallery-going public, though it may include the more marginal members. The ticket of entry remains some previous inculcation in the social import of high art.
State and municipally funded art museums play an intermediate role. Having a democratic mandate, they cater to the broadest audiences they can safely attract but have special slots for each level of culture. In the disquiet of the sixties, many museums opened token “community-oriented” galleries to show melanges of local work, mass culture, ethnic heritage, and folk-art remnants. But the Harlem on My Mind fiasco of Thomas P. F. Hoving’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York demonstrates what trouble high-culture denizens can cause themselves when they attempt largescale interpretations of “minority” culture.¹³
Museums of modern and contemporary art address a more restricted audience than municipal ones. New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a project of the Rockefeller family and the Kremlin of modernism, is the prototype in terms of its architecture, its ideology, and the social group it addresses.¹⁴ Its domination extends to contemporary photography and its putative antecedents as well, thanks to the efforts of John Szarkowski, curator of photography.
Museums and noncommercial galleries are under the Damoclean sword of censorship in the form of dismissal of curators and directors or withheld financial support from powerful donors or board members with conservative tastes.¹⁵ As I suggested earlier, the cultural climate for the showing of “advanced” work (thus, likely to be of low market value) darkens in times of economic constriction. As museums are generally conceded to be in some trouble, many have even opened boutiques selling copies and cultural artifacts within their walls; these thriving businesses create rips in the seamless ideology of museology and have upset many art world observers. The December 6, 1976, issue of Newsweek reported that “New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer has accused them of destroying the ‘sacred hush’ that should pervade museums by distracting patrons with ‘counterfeitmaterials.’”¹⁶ The advancing bureaucratization in its corporate-sponsorship form is ominous, for here audience taste may have its strongest negative influence. Corporate sponsors want their names to reach the widest museum-going audience and, as in their own galleries, wish to support only sure winners, art that poses the least challenge to entrenched points of view. Corporations sponsor exhibitions of securely commodified art and that which is most acceptable to mass culture.¹⁷
Perhaps only the few union-run and community spaces, especially those of and for “minority” communities, regularly draw audiences that are solidly working class. In many cases the art shown is art made within the community (which, of course, is also true of the art world community), and the work has some chance of being topical or even polemical. Of all gallery situations it may be here that radical, oppositional work has the best likelihood of realization. Although junior-college and library galleries may also take chances, most are more likely to show work that reveals a missionary intention to bring a warmed-over high art down to the viewers.
In general the gallery system helps keep art directed toward the making of products, toward individual authorship, toward a consistency of medium and style, and toward a generalized content. In the art world of the mid-sixties, there was a wholesale rejection of the tiny but hegemonic New York gallery system.¹⁸ Some artists attempted to contradict the commodity status of art by making work that seemed unsaleable or that was multiply reproducible; some began doing “performance” art. But in the succeeding years, the scores of new commercial galleries that opened, and the older ones that reoriented themselves (later opening outposts in SoHo, and so on) to cash in on the boom in the art market, provided potent reminders of how closely art has remained tied to commodity production.
Efforts to bypass the gallery system included the formation of militantly insurgent artists’ cooperative galleries, especially by women; the increasing use of electronic and print media, which could be distributed by artists themselves at little cost; and the creation of “alternative spaces” for showing work. The formation of cooperatives was born of feminists’ resolve to reach audiences both outside and within the art world, despite the exclusion of most women from established institutions, as evidenced by the minuscule percentage of women in exhibitions. More fundamentally, they meant to shake the profoundly male-suprematist orthodoxies of the art world. Cooperatives avoid the domination of an intermediary but often require a prohibitive amount of time and money; and some are simply alternate routes to glory — and the same old audience. As for electronic and print media, they can be quite expensive and are also now well along in the process of commodification; of course, their potential for doing something different isn’t exhausted.
So-called alternative spaces embodied a reaction against curatorial hierarchies, often a certain contempt for the glamorous upper reaches of the audience and, outside New York, sometimes a rejection of New York’s domination. Begun as a democratized way of circulating work and ideas among a smaller rather than a larger audience (producers rather than shoppers or browsers — they are sometimes called “artists’ spaces”), they pose no inherent challenge to art world ideologies, and some have already undergone a fair degree of institutionalization, having latterly been adapted to provide a funnel for government grant money. Those run by artists tend to have a more-or- less explicit anarchic philosophy but, contradictorily, often rely on state funding. They often serve as a testing ground for dealers and generate publicity that may lead to sales. They have been manipulated, by clever dealers and others playing on the issue of artistic freedom, into showing work too controversial for a more mainstream gallery. But again, fiscal conservatism is taking its toll on alternative spaces (a few of which are known to have run through astounding sums with small results), and many venues may become less brave as they also become less numerous and hungrier.
The Assimilation of Photography
The late sixties and early seventies were the high period of the insurgency efforts I just described, which were fueled by a largely antiwar, antiracist, and feminist energy. That was also the moment in which photography entered the art world. Conceptual and pop artists who wanted to avoid the deadening preciousness and finish of high art and who were moving toward a narrative literalism brought photography and video into the galleries; for pop artists, photography was a form of quotation from mass culture, no more intrinsically respectable than comic books. Conceptual artists, moving away from “object making,” also were attracted by the anonymity and negative valuation attached to these media. But, never far behind, dealers learned to capitalize on the unsellable, at that moment by adopting and reifying “documentation,” which relies most heavily on photography and written material.
In the early seventies the lack of an established new style, the escalating prices of traditional art objects, the end of the stranglehold of the modernist critics, and the consequent weakening of the commercial galleries in the face of wider economic crisis helped direct attention toward photography as an art form and as a less exalted commodity. On a more basic level of society we can look to the restructuring of culture in this period of advanced capitalism into a more homogeneous version of “the society of the spectacle,”¹⁹ a process accelerated by the increasing importance of electronic media (in which all traditional art is represented rather than seen) and the consequent devaluation of craft skills, along with the collapsing of all forms and understandings of high social status into celebrityhood, or “stardom.” Dominant cultural forms are increasingly able to absorb instances of oppositional culture after a brief moment and convert them into mere stylistic mannerisms, thus recuperating them for the market and the celebration of the what-is. In the enterprise of celebrity promotion — of increasing importance in the art world from the time of the abstract expressionists onward and now central to the social meaning of art — the role of photography is fundamental.
It is possible that the meaning structure of art has been undergoing reorganization while the market merely faltered briefly and then regained its stride. The late seventies may turn out to have been a revanchist period in which the controlling interests within the audience and market elites regrouped to reestablish the stratification of the audience and its objects, thereby reasserting, for example, the preeminence of painting as standard- bearer and tangible investment. In any case, photography’s position is neither threatened nor threatening but rather rationalized within the system.
Whatever its causes, the rapid assimilation of photography into high art has taken place within a continuing series of changes in the place of photography within our broader culture as well as in the meaning assigned to photography as a force within art. The intermingled histories of photography and painting, formerly disavowed, is now paraded by both sides, though more so by photography people. The following chance quotation from a review reveals the occasional absurdity of using these media to validate each other without acknowledging conditioning factors outside the oeuvre of particular producers: “For all his critical sobriety, [Walker Evans] was one of the fathers of pop art. . . . Evans’ famous print of a small-town photographic studio . . . looks forward to Andy Warhol’s hundreds of Campbell soup cans, each painted in its little niche on the canvas.”²⁰ As photography has moved closer in and farther out and then back again to the charmed circle of high art, it has replicated the ideology and many of the gambits of the more established arts. In the current phase of art world acceptance, the “history of photography” (old prints, called “vintage” prints) is doing better than contemporary work, a fact that seems unarguably market-determined. Photography is selling well and getting regular critical attention (and therefore attention from the art audience); art world interest still tends to be confined to dead photographers, to a few unassailably established living ones, and to those closest to conceptual art.²¹ There is little interest, indeed, in the photographic discourse that was craft-oriented or a pale version of abstract expressionism, and a new discourse is being developed that can be better assimilated to art world discourse. Photo critics are retiring in disgust, outclassed by New York art critics working hard to create, borrowing from opposite European schools of literary or cultural criticism, what often amounts to a mystified language of commentary and analysis in which to couch increasingly esoteric accounts of the supposed essential elements of photography.
For most of the art world the acceptance of photography seems tied to a vision of it as conforming to the modernism now moribund in the other arts. That is not accidental; it was necessary to the process of its legitimation that photography pick up the torch of formalism and distantiation from real- world concerns. Photography had to reconfigure its own high culture/low culture split: a central matter for photography, which has penetrated daily life and informed our sense of culture as no form of visual representation has before. Photographers are very conscious of Szarkowski’s controlling influence, as regnant photo czar, in determining whose career shall be advanced and what gets said about contemporary work. Aside from his responsibility for the course of the careers of Arbus, Winogrand, and Friedlander, Szarkowski has chagrined many interested observers by his recent elevation of William Eggleston from virtually nowhere, successfully cornering color photography before mass-media photographers like Ernst Haas or postcard artists like Eliot Porter might be slipped into the top spot. The specifics of his influence on discourse affect the most fundamental relations between the work, the photographer, and the world. They include an insistence on the private nature of photographic meaning (its ineffable mysteriousness) and on the disjuncture between the photo itself and the occasion for its making — well-worn art world commonplaces. It can be argued that these elements of an older art world discourse still dominate most photographic production and sales promotion while the new art-critical enterprise is restricted to art journals and anti-Szarkowskian production.
Concomitantly with the elaboration of the received doctrines of photography, the picture of the quintessentially modern (art) photographer as a marginally socialized person has firmed its outlines. It stands in contradistinction to the conception of photojournalists and documentarians as hard- bitten, still artisanal and rational, and to that of fashion photographers as sycophantic (except the few with good publicity).
I can recapture my astonishment at Dorothea Lange, in an interview filmed very near her death, describing a forgotten wartime photo she had rediscovered when preparing her retrospective at MoMA (held in 1966). Szarkowski hovers nearby throughout the film. We see the photo, showing many men and women filling the frame, frozen in the artificial ranks provided by a broad but unseen staircase; they are dressed as industrial workers and they seem to be going off shift. Lange interprets the photo for us, not in terms of the unity of those people in a common purpose (war production); rather she says that each was looking off into a private internal world. There was a terrible appropriateness in this: For someone who had just survived the fifties, the period of the deepest artistic passivity and withdrawal into a phantasmic universe, so to rethink the meaning of her project was to stand it on its head, converting a tight, utilitarian identification into a grossly atomized individualism. There was no gun at Lange’s head; the role of cultural commissar has been diffused among the multivoiced propagandizers, Szarkowski among them. In a fundamental way Lange’s account reproduces the changed account of the documentary enterprise itself, from an outward-looking, reportorial, partisan, and collective one to a symbolically expressive, oppositional, and solitary one. We may take Robert Frank’s practice to mark this transition from metonymy to metaphor.
Artistic solipsism has now advanced farther than the Lange narrative suggests, yet the incident represents a turning, within the course of development of a single artist, away from social engagement into the psychological interior. The art photographer has taken on some of the baggage of the familiar romantic artist — in this case one bound to the use of apparatuses to mediate between self and world — whose ultimate reference is simply that self. More and more clearly, the subject of art has become the self, subjectivity; and what this has meant for photography is that photography heading for the galleries must be reseen in terms of its revelatory character not in relation to its iconic subject but in relation to its “real” subject, the producer.
Levels of Audience and Market for Photography
For most of the art audience and especially for buyers who want investment that will appreciate in value, the certainty attaching to elevated sentiments, to the Kantian rhetoric of removal and formal values, to the denial of the relevance of subject and context, offers the reassuring familiarity of a discourse that sounds like art-ten-years-ago, dishing up again the ruling ideas of painting from the late forties through the sixties. Many photographers produce for this market, and young ones are trained to do so, learning as quickly as young professionals in any field what the road is to success.
So photography penetrated the high-art audience in its moment of hesitation and raised its sights above its previous audience of other, often amateur, photographers. The older, hobby-oriented photo magazines may still concentrate on craft: printing papers, films, lenses, exposure times; but elsewhere the new semiological discourse appears. The new photo journals are being constructed on the model of art journals and the newer, cheaper newspaper-format publications. A great urge for respectability emanates from their very typefaces and layouts. Nevertheless, the smallness and newness of the field is betrayed by the existence of an academic journal calling itself simply The History of Photography.
In the realm of production, a theory-inspired approach referred to as structuralism, a latter-day minimalist modernism borrowed from small filmmaking, appears in art-photo galleries, whereas it could never have entered the photo galleries of an earlier epoch; it has not made it into the controlling commercial dealerships such as New York’s Light or Marlborough galleries. It is usually art audiences and hip fringes of the photo audience — mostly interested professionals, including curators and critics — that are the audience and potential market for such work.
While art photography was divorcing its old audience and romancing a classier one, the industry was increasing its pursuit of the amateurs.²² Reports of the new status of photography are disseminated in versions appropriate to ever-widening circles of the audience. The value of the categories of photographic practice, from high art to advertising to family commemorative, is raised, and all the corresponding markets swell in response. Photo exhibitions and art world attention to photography sell camera and darkroom equipment like painting shows never sold brushes and paint. What accident can there be in the fact that the Museum of Modern Art started promoting color photography just when the industry started pushing home color darkroom equipment in a big way? One can imagine the bonanza of one-dimensionality in store for us if photo corporations like Kodak can sponsor prestigious exhibitions of auratic prints from photographic history that will not only serve as terrific public relations but also lead to an immediate leap in corporate profits. Perhaps Eastman House can have itself declared a national shrine as well.
A new intelligentsia of photography is currently developing in university programs. They will be equipped to dispense the correct cultural line on the meaning of the events being used to mark the march of photography and to shape the received utterances about current work. There is a mutual legitimation at work: People are engaged in codifying a body of knowledge, the study of which will lead to the status-conferring professional credentialing of persons who will be empowered to grant, by their public utterances and other forms of publicity, a legitimacy to that reified cultural entity “the history of photography” and to specific works within it. As the enterprise of art history (itself codified precisely to validate works for collectors) has amply proven, the effect of this legitimation on the market is direct and immediate.²³
The pantheon of past greats will surely continue to be enlarged with new “discoveries,” to forestall the exhaustion of the stock of vintage prints. Photographers will attend parties at which they can meet art and occasionally photo critics, may read a few art journals, and will learn to control public statements about their work. One may be sure also that the firmer the hold photography gains in the art world, the more regular will be the attack on photography’s truth-telling ability and on its instrumentality. Already there is little distinction between Winogrand, Arbus, and Avedon in their relation to a truth above the street. Further, a belief in the truth value of photography will be ever more explicitly assigned to the uncultured, the naive, and the philistine and will serve to define them out of the audience of art photography.
I confess to looking at the transformation of photography with a mixture of amusement, frustration, and awe. I have no sentimental longings for the clubby days before the surge of the market swept the photo world away;²⁴ but I am pained to see the mass-hypnotic behavior of those who thought they lived in a comfortable backwater but now find themselves at the portals of discovery with only a halting knowledge of the language of utopia. I won’t forget the theory-terror exhibited at the last meeting of the Society for Photographic Education (my first), or people’s fear of offending anyone at all, on the chance that a job, a show, or a critical notice might walk away from them; I both understand and don’t understand the pull of fame as it roars near. Artists have had a longer time to learn the game.²⁵
There is a sense in which photography, the most reifying of representational forms, verbal or visual, is a sitting duck for the big guns of art. Even in the earlier moments of photography’s gallery life, the craft orientation was pervasive; the tradition of single fine prints in white overmats merely replicated the presentational style of paintings and graphics. In Stieglitz’s universe, art had to be a propter hoc motive, not a belated discovery in work originally meant for use. The conversion of photographs that once did “work” into noninstrumental expression marked the next great leap into art. In the historical moment of its utterance, as I tried to show earlier, this insistence on the uselessness of art was meant as a cry of the producers’ liberation from the object relations of their product. In an ironic reversal, the denial that the meaning of photographs rests on their rootedness in the stream of social life preserves the photograph at the level of object, a mere item of value hanging on a wall.
It requires quite a lot of audience training to transform the relation between a viewer and a photograph to one primarily of mysteriousness, though the gallery dislocation helps. The dual questions of art’s instrumentality and of its truth are particularly naked in relation to photography, which can be seen every day outside the gallery in the act of answering to a utilitarian purpose, in assertions of truth from legal cases to advertising to news reports to home album. This cultural disjunction, made possible by commodity fetishism, accounts for the desperation with which young photographers snatch at the vulgarism that only lies are art and that the truth of photography must therefore be that it is all artful lies, constructions outside the understanding of the common mind. There is an exquisiteness to this hermeneutic, a quiet ecstasy that accompanies the purported lift in understanding that sees beyond the world of appearances through the agency of mere light, magical light, in a leaden culture gone unidimensionally object-bound. But the art world’s sleight of hand consists in substituting another mystificatory veil of “meaninglessness” for the naive one of transparency.
Let us now imagine a relation between viewer and photographic project in which the producer actively shares a community with the audience in a different way from the community she or he shares with other producers. I will not make an argument here for a practice that comes far closer to this understanding of art and its place in the world.²⁶ As a polar situation, we can imagine the disappearance of the idea of audience, along with, perhaps, the ubiquitous standard of the single producer. In the real world we can maintain the movement toward this pole as a tendency. Imagine the implication of the audience in the formation of work: It is just this implication of community that is profoundly embedded in the meaning of art. Its present lack of disconnectedness is more polemical than real, and it has left producers at the mercy of everyone but their wider — nonpurchasing — audience. It was art historian Arnold Hauser’s observation that the doctrine of art’s uselessness was the result of the fear of the upper classes after the French Revolution that they would lose control of art.
The lie of official culture is that socially invested art is sullied, deficient in its conception, deformed in its gestation, brutalized by the conditions of its birth, and abused in its lifetime. To rescue ourselves from this damaging fiction surely requires a new emancipation from market relations, and it demands a rethinking of all the facets of the production of art within culture. The leveling effect of money, of commodity relations, so that all photographs are equal regardless of what they depict and in which standards of quality are external to iconographic statement and intent, cannot go unchallenged:
To supply a productive apparatus without trying . . . to change it is a highly disputable activity even when the material supplied appears to be of a revolutionary nature. For we are confronted with the fact . . . that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication is capable of assimilating, indeed, of propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary themes without ever seriously putting into question its own continued existence or that of the class which owns it.²⁷
To make this argument is not to call for artists to change masters but to effect a break with preceding practice in a strong and meaningful way. We are in a period in which oppositional practice is regaining strength and taking on international aspects. We must inventively expand our control over production and showing, and we must simultaneously widen our opportunities to work with and for people outside the audiences for high art, not as annunciatory angels bearing the way of thought of the haute monde, but to rupture the false boundaries between ways of thinking about art and ways of actively changing the world.
Notes
1. Hans Haacke’s surveys at various locations indicate that the audience for contemporary work seems to be made up of a very high percentage of people who are occupationally involved in art — museum and gallery professionals, artists, art teachers, art students, critics, and art historians. See Haacke, Framing and Being Framed (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975).
2. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: Les musées d’art européens et leur public (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969).
3. There is a dynamic between high and low culture, as well, in which elements within each represent either incorporations or rejections of corresponding elements within the other, though that does not affect the argument here.
4. Bourdieu and Darbel, L’Amour de l’art, p. 18.
5. For this army of small collectors, the project of the late Nelson Rockefeller to produce up-market imitations held out the promise of limited-edition, classy-looking art objects with the tantalizing combination of imaginary and real ownership: imaginary company with the very rich, the hint of solid investment bound to rise in value. See note 16.
6. To underline this point: Investment in art has been discussed increasingly often in business magazines and other periodicals addressing people with money, especially in light of the stock market’s “October massacre” devaluation of 1978. In “The Art Market: Investors Beware,” in the Atlantic Monthly for January 1979, Deborah Trustman addresses the market’s incredible boom: “Art is big business. Sotheby Parke Bernet, the international auction house… announced sales [in America] of $112 million for… 1977–78, an in- crease of $32 million over the previous year… More Americans have become wary of inflation and have begun putting more capital into works of art.” She quotes a vice-president of Sotheby’s in New York who cited a market survey showing that “the young professionals, the high-salaried lawyers and business executives” make up a large segment of the newer buyers.
7. The Treasures of King Tutankhamun, the gold-heavy mid-1970s traveling exhibition of loot from the tomb of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh (the tomb famously opened by English archaeologist Howard Carter and others in 1922), was the original blockbuster exhibition, the art show to which the term was first applied. Drawing crowds of unprecedented size and composition to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and to its numerous subsequent venues, it set the standard for museum attendance, and perhaps for populist hype, to the dismay of many.
8. “Herself ” was very rare.
9. From a randomly selected book and page: “…critics and historians are tempted to blame the [unsatisfactory] situation on the dominance of collectors’ or tastemakers’ whims. Yet while these factors can have considerable effect on momentary prices and popularity, they have never had much effect on the real artist. Rembrandt and Cezanne are famous for their disdain of social pressures … sculptor David Hare has remarked, ‘It is a classical complaint that the artist is forced into certain actions by society. The artist need not be so forced, unless it is his desire to be so for motives outside art.” In John P. Sedgwick Jr., Discovering Modern Art: The Intelligent Layman’s Guide to Painting, from Impressionism to Pop (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 199.
10. There are always plenty of people who have their markets well staked out. It remains to be seen who the pompier photographers will be, beyond the predictable sexual panderers like David Hamilton and Helmut Newton.
11. The simplest expedient was the forgoing of representation in favor of abstraction. “The art of Ben Shahn or Leonard Baskin may have a quicker and easier appeal, but in time it seems to have less ‘content’ — that is, less meaningful experience — than the paintings of Mark Rothko or Clyfford Still, which at first glance might look almost empty.” (Sedgwick, Discovering Modern Art, p. 196.)
12. The invention of minimal art in the sixties proved fortunate; having no generally intelligible meaning and looking remarkably like nothing other than stray bits of modular architecture, it has sold very well to big companies as appropriate decoration for corporate offices and lobbies, which reflect the same Bauhaus-derived sensibilities. It seems there must be appropriately lofty photographs to serve where smaller work is desired — weak-kneed surrealism, say, might be the right choice.
13. In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum opened what was likely the first major exhibition in the United States to chronicle the cultural richness of Harlem in the twentieth century up until that point. With its huge photo blowups and projections but no original works of art on the order of paintings or sculpture, it managed to evoke storms of rage from several powerful constituencies. African American artists picketed to protest their exclusion and the fact that the show was organized without significant assistance from the black community. In fact, at this time of rising tensions between New York’s African American and Jewish communities, the main organizer was a Jewish man, Allon Schoener — but that did not save the institution from the rage of the Jewish community (whose militant right wing also picketed), incensed over what it perceived to be anti- Jewish slights in the preface to the catalogue. That the remarks, according to Schoener, were unattributed quotations from Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous study of immigration, Beyond the Melting Pot, mollified no one; the New York Times and Mayor John Lindsay denounced the catalogue, which was belatedly withdrawn (but re-issued almost thirty years later). Paintings elsewhere in the museum were vandalized, and the show — which featured photography in an early instance of visual culture — became the signal instance of incautiously speaking for others.
14. On the ideological role of the modern-day museum, see Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “Ritual and Ideology at the Museum,” in Proceedings of the Caucus for Marxism and Art (Los Angeles, January 1978). For a more extensive treatment by the same authors, see Duncan and Wallach’s “Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 28–51 [and Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals (London: Routledge, 1995)].
15. On a panel about funding at the 1979 meeting of the College Art Association held in Washington, D.C., some of the human meaning of art emerged. On the panel were a representative of Exxon, Robert Kingsley (now dead), needled by Hans Haacke in his work On Social Grease for calling art a “social lubricant” necessary for the maintenance of business executives in big cities; someone from the Rockefeller Foundation; someone from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); someone from a state granting agency; and a gallery director at a huge California state university. The Exxon and Rockefeller men suavely offered facts, figures, and descriptions of their expanding underwriting of art. The woman from NEA was positive but cautious; the federal art budget wasn’t running much ahead of inflation. The audience shared her pleasure over the fact that President Carter’s budgetary stringency hadn’t affected the arts, and everyone refrained from mentioning what did feel that ax: social services and aid to cities. But the gallery director acidly sketched a picture of slashes in state and local art budgets, of canceled shows, of museum and gallery closings, of abrupt firings. The session encapsulated the working of the fiscal crisis, in which federal control may be consolidated at the expense of state and local control and in which the public sector — with municipalities like New York and Cleveland experiencing the crisis most acutely — must cede a wide range of funding, services, and jobs to the private sector. For a powerful analysis of the more general relationship between the state and the private sector in advanced capitalist society, see James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).
16. Think of the uproar over the “traitorous” project of simulacrum production that Newsweek headlined as “Rocky’s Art Clones” (October 16, 1978). Fortune had it as their cover story, captioning the cover photo “Nelson Rockefeller, Salesman” (October 23, 1978).
17. The largest corporate sponsors include giant conglomerates and multinationals, among them Xerox, Mobil, Exxon, Rothmans, and Philip Morris, for whom patronage is part of a campaign to counter negative publicity (over the social cost of their products or industrial practices) by constructing a corporate “personality,” replacing a threatening facelessness with a human image. Philip Morris has also used art to create a culturally valorized workplace to “motivate” and pacify workers. I will dwell on this awhile, because it represents in concrete form the instrumental relation that corporations have to art, here not merely for “image building” but also in attempting to manage productivity and workers’ satisfaction.
In 1974, when massive corporate financial incursions into art had become a subject of talk, a pair of articles by Marylin Bender appeared side by side in the Sunday New York Times (October 20, 1974): “Business Aids the Arts . . . and Itself ” and “Blending Automation and Aesthetics.” The first ties the rise of corporates pending to the severe effects of the bearish market on the portfolios of arts foundations and museums during a period of rapidly rising profits in certain industries. The second describes Philip Morris’s new plant in Richmond, Virginia, designed around pop art. It provides, among other lessons, a textbook example of how a shift in audiences immediately destroys irony. The loss of the art world frame (which had occurred long before 1974, with the reincorporation of post-modern, pop imagery in its new, validated form back into mass culture) meant an airlessness between the visual artifact and its representation, a collapse that destroyed the whispered critique of mass culture apprehended by high-art audiences and replaced it with adulatory monumentalization. Oversize graphics as art were, at the Philip Morris plant — “the world’s biggest and most highly automated cigarette factory” — strategically placed to contradict the utilitarian character of the jobs done within; to drown out symbolically workers’ alienation and its psychological manifestations; to argue the existence of a shared cultural unity between owners, managers, and workers; and to slap a veneer of civilized decor over material issues of health and safety, wage demands, and the desire for self-determination. Bender writes, “The plant represents a striving for maximum aesthetic return to help attain such mundane business objectives as increasing productivity and edging out competitors in a tight labor market.”
To quote Robert W. Sarnoff, collector of contemporary art, vice chairman of the Business Committee for the Arts, council member of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, formerly a trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art and currently of the John F. Kennedy Library Corporation, as well as former chairman of the board and past chief executive officer of both NBC and RCA, who has numbered among his positions directorships of the New York Stock Exchange, the American Home Products Corporation, the Planning Research Foundation, the American Arbitration Association, and the Roper Public Service Opinion Research Center, and executive positions at Cowles Publications, and directorships of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Random House, Banquet Foods, and Hertz; who is a board member of the Institute of Judicial Administration and of several colleges and universities, including Harvard and UCLA; and who has many other business and cultural affiliations, speaking in Toronto in an interview broadcast in March 1979: “The history of Western civilization is that business has been patron and sponsor of the arts. What’s happening in our country is that it’s a new phenomenon. Business is beginning to be a major support of the arts, particularly over the past decade, and it’s taking the place of the individual patron, because, frankly, of size and cost.” The force of pop-as-art-form is summarized in the fifteen-story “pop obelisk” (designed by Ivan Chermayeff of Chermayeff & Geismar Associates) converting the plant’s merely artily designed sign covered with corporate trademarks into a cultural monument. Art’s role here is to add its implacable authority to that of the corporation.
18. The rejection was of art’s commodity status and its consequent vulnerability to market domination far more than of the ideology of art as a specialized entity within culture. Formalism moved away from the stress on composition and transcendence symbolized by Bauhaus aesthetics in favor of the formalism of the Duchampian art-as-idea. There was little overt politicization of the idea of art, nor was much attention paid to the role of art within class society. And except for a sector of the organized feminists, few artists really went after audiences with less art education. Finally, the fact that the formation of true work collectives or collaborations was hardly ever seriously considered reveals much about the retention of auteurship. It can be argued that the turn away from commodity production was an inevitable further move into the “twentieth century,” since handicrafts had long been superseded in the culture at large by industrial objects and images whose existence and power were unrelated to their saleability as artifacts and depended, rather, on their existence as texts, bodies of signifiers. Thus pop appears as a continuation of artists’ preoccupation with the processes of signification.
19. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, rev. English trans. (Detroit: Black & Red, 1977) [reprinted, ed. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994)]; and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
20. Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle Sunday World magazine, January 21, 1979, p. 56.
21. There are a few celebrity fashion photographers recognized for their aspirations to an art practice.
22. “For a wild week in December photokina packed a dozen halls in Cologne… While commerce reigned supreme in the football-field-sized halls, the aesthetic side of the medium was revealed across the Rhine with photography exhibitions at the city’s art museum and at other galleries. The growth of photokina, from sleepy trade show to big-time world’s fair, reflects the surge in popularity of photography itself. Today photography is a boundless industry with millions of dollars in annual sales… Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more insatiable buying public than that existing in today’s photographic marketplace.” In John von Hartz, “Photokina: World’s Fair of Photography,” “Marketplace” section of Pan Am/Intercontinental Hotel’s Clipper Magazine, January 1979. Art and commerce are here seen to march in step.
23. Dealers and buyers look up artists and works, past and present, to see what if anything has been said about them, for example. A tiny further example of the day-to-day relations within a system: At the recent College Art Association meeting (see note 15), there was a scholarly session called “Atget and Today,” two of whose participants were Szarkowski and Alan Trachtenberg, a respected social historian with an interest in turn-of-the-century photography. At the back of the hall a young woman handed out discreetly printed cards announcing “EUGENE ATGET, An exhibition of vintage prints, Reception in honor of the delegates [sic] to the College Art Association…, Lunn Gallery/ Graphics International Ltd.,” with address.
24. For precisely this lament, see Shelley Rice, “New York: What Price Glory” (Afterimage, January 1978), from which this excerpt is drawn: “It’s intimidating to walk into an opening where everyone is over 60 and wearing mink and photographers are justified in feeling co-opted. From this point on, the creative individuals are only the grist for the economic mills. Collectors and potential collectors are now the star of the show.”
25. This would be the place to point to the outrageous sexism and white-skin privilege of the photo establishment, despite the large number of women involved in photography and the far greater number of nonwhites than we ever get to know about professionally. There is also the further problem that the tokenistic partial incorporation of some of women’s photography into art world photography is used to obscure both the question of oppositional practice and the dismal inattention to minority-culture photography. That is, a superficial acceptance of some basic feminist demands is used to divert attention from the retrograde practices that prevail. But in these matters photography seems about equal to art; again, the art world has had the time to construct a better defended façade.
26. Instead, I refer you to Allan Sekula’s “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 859–83 [reprinted in Photography Against the Grain (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984)], which defines an oppositional practice emerging from a conscious break with the late-modernist paradigm.
27. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 93–94.
