Abstract
The Introduction begins by examining the definitional ambiguity surrounding ‘art’ and its cognate ‘culture’; how all manner of exercises in purported clarification fail to clarify what ‘art’ is and often even reinforce the ambiguity. In contrast I coin the concept ‘art/culture’ to describe the overlapping territory of creative excess and idolised subjectivity. Having established ‘art/culture’ the issue then becomes why it is so hard to find a definitive critique of it and why such a critique is necessary. A brief survey of hesitant criticisms, which always explicitly avoid a total condemnation of art/culture, is undertaken along with the outline of my own criticism: that art/culture generates an ideological fantasy of perpetual revolution and self-realisation while reproducing exploitative relations and impoverishing the resources of imagination and creative subjectivity.
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Notes
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And so six years later we have Lisa Cornwell’s ‘Whammo! Comics get respectable’, which is about comics art classes being taught in US colleges, a newfound legitimacy that is once again located in 1980s comics re-invention (Cornwell 2007).
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James McNeill Whistler’s 1878 libel suit against the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin , for the scathing review the latter gave to Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, came down to Ruskin’s claim that Nocturne was not art. Though this definitional issue was not necessary to resolve a case of libel the case quickly became based around the question of whether Whistler was an artist or not. No clear answer was forthcoming on this issue, as the compromise verdict of guilty but with only nominal damages of a farthing made clear (Fennell 1971). Similarly, in the 1929 case Hahn v. Duveen, the art dealer Joseph Duveen was sued by Andrée Hahn for claiming that a painting Hahn was trying to sell as a Da Vinci was a fake. The case took nine years to come to trial, the papers being served in 1921, and it came down to competing aesthetic claims for what constituted a ‘real da Vinci’ that led to the jury being deadlocked and an out-of-court settlement that once again did not please either party (Secrest 2004, 224–43). In between the papers being served to Duveen and his trial taking place there was the 1927 case Brancusi v. United States to decide whether a minimalist sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, was indeed a work of art. If so it was exempt customs duty after being shipped to the USA from France. Alternatively if it was, as the Customs Office had originally declared it, a ‘manufactured object of metal’ it would be subject to tariff. The judge ruled in Brancusi’s favour, overturning a 1916 US Customs Court decision that defined sculpture in terms of mimetic qualities that would make medical anatomical models works of art. However ‘the decision’s focus on the decorative qualities of the Bird made the ruling just as perishable as the standard in the 12-year-old one it replaced. And its reliance on the judges’ personal taste made its application perhaps more arbitrary and restrictive’ (Giry 2002, para. 31). The 1990 acquittal in Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center, over whether the works of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were obscene, demonstrated that nothing much had changed in the intervening 60-odd years, as a work could not be obscene if it displayed ‘serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value’, a status that could not be defined beyond the subjective opinions of art experts (Wilkerson 1990, para. 24).
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The only place where ‘liberal arts’ still retains any meaning is in the world of academe, where a ‘Bachelor of Arts’ degree or a north American ‘liberal arts’ college speak to the desire to hang on to classical legitimacy in the face of an ambivalent relationship to modern rationality.
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The reader may note a preponderance of the term bourgeois as opposed to the more generally accepted term middle class throughout this book. I try to avoid the latter as it is an obfuscating anachronism that refers to the feudal social order when merchants were in-between serfs and the nobility. In modernity the aristocracy is no longer the ‘upper class’ as they are either mere symbolic figureheads and/or ‘merchants’ themselves (like the British Royals with their private capital portfolio). Middle class was a term coined in Anglophone countries to avoid the negative connotations of wealth and elitism that beset the term bourgeois (Moretti 2013, 1–10). Middle class now operates as a means to confuse ‘class’ with ‘income’ or ‘occupation’ (white collar vs. blue collar) and thus make the economic order seem less stratified than it really is. I tend to favour the Marxist understanding of class in terms of relations of production where fundamentally you are either bourgeois and own capital or a worker and have to sell your labour-power to survive. You can own shares and see yourself as ‘upwardly mobile’, but unless your money earns all your income as ‘investment’ you have to work like every other schmuck.
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Lee Smolin (2013, 35–6) provides another interesting angle to the disconnect between our representations and the world they represent:
There’s a simple reason that no mathematical object will ever provide a complete representation of the history of the universe, which is that the universe has one property no mathematical representation of it can have. Here in the real world, it is always some time, some present moment. No mathematical object can have this particularity, because, once constructed, mathematical objects are timeless.
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Interestingly Karen Lang (1997, 426) notes that the modern concepts of the ‘fetish’ and the ‘aesthetic’ arose at the same time in the late eighteenth century to categorise different relationships to ‘sensuous materiality’: ‘In the experience of fetishism, it is the object that has power over the mind of the subject. In the Kantian sublime, it is the mind of the subject that is superior to itself and to the world of objects.’
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To be fair the political has a long history as the defining principle separating humans from animals, going all the way back to Aristotle (Danta and Vardoulakis 2008, 3). However the modern conception of the cultural has largely taken over this role.
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This is not something that has always been the case, but it is interesting how, rather than becoming more anonymised as industrial development increased, many forms of popular culture gave more attention to the creative talent rather than less. The comics industry is a good example where a slump in the mid-twentieth century led to a more streamlined distribution process focusing on specialist retail outlets frequented by a more discriminating readership that were attracted to particular creative talent, pressuring publishers to make writing credits more common (Thompson 2001, para. 2; Metcalf 1995, 151). It should also be noted that there are many things that fall under the rubric of ‘popular culture’ that are in somewhat of a border zone when it comes to creative subjectivity and excessive signification. Pornography , design, craft, graffiti and sports all flirt with a ‘star system’ and loudly proclaim any example of unpredictable nuance or ‘aesthetic excellence’, though rational ends usually trump ‘expression’. This is not to say the borders are static: ‘The simultaneity and contradiction of the two statuses is particularly striking in the case of … the “sprayer of Zurich”, Harald Nägeli, who could at the same time be pursued, arrested, convicted and jailed [for graffiti vandalism ], and be sponsored, collected and defended by artists’ (Gamboni 1997, 328).
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Derogatory art/culture critiques often make mention of the political-economic circumstances of the work under attack (how large the price was, the artist’s mercenary interests, the venal studios or agents behind the art etc.), while a laudatory review will only talk about ‘the art itself’. Gene Ray (2004) even notes this rhetorical device before himself falling victim to it, discussing Damien Hirst’s business dealings when trying to pop his bubble and the works themselves when trying to be positive.
- 13.
This is in reference to the pop star Prince famously appearing with the world ‘slave’ drawn on his cheek to protest his record contract with Warner Records (Mirror.co.uk 2010). Prince was not being forced to create records to specification, he was simply trying to get out of a contract faster than his label wanted him to.
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Dee, L. (2018). Introduction: What Is Art/Culture and Why Should You Be Against It?. In: Against Art and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7092-1_1
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