Abstract
Painting in fin-de-siècle Vienna, like public intellectuality in fin-de-siècle America, was an act of portrayal at a time when artists then, like intellectuals today, composed in an environment characterized by rapid technological change, conservatism, and a government bureaucracy that attempted to pre-empt individual decisions about everyday life. In Vienna, this environment was coupled with a public which “was nothing if not conservative. Not only the new, the unfamiliar, but also the great was to be distrusted … Add to which, there was a certain delight in the persecution of the great …”1 Public hostility to counter-portrayals of reality was reinforced by bureaucracies for whom “the unforeseen, the irrational was excluded; not only the administrative, but also the academic and cultural institutions of the capital ossified beyond any possibility of change …”2 Intellectual visions of alternatives are likewise judged to be extraneous in fin-de-siècle America, where a letter to The Economist in December 2008 charged: “Academics of all persuasions are where they are today because they believe they know better than anyone else how things should work. Whether many are capable of actually making the world work is quite another issue. The difficulties we face now are not academic; they are real public-policy problems.”3 It is no surprise, then, that a letter to The New Yorker in 2014 worried: “Administrators are increasingly appointed because of their willingness and ability to bring the values of the market to bear on their day-to-day decision making … What is most distressing is that many administrators appear to accept the self-evidence of market values.”4
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Notes
Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 16.
This framework informs the introduction to my book, Patricia Mooney Nickel, Public Sociology and Civil Society: Governance, Politics, and Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012).
Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
Jacques Rancière, “Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge,” Parrhesia 1 (2006): 1–12.
Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 220.
The English translation of Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht varies slightly as Ministry of Education, Ministry of Culture, and Ministry of Culture and Education. The Ministry was also responsible for religion; See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), p. 227.
Markus Neuwirth, “Texts on Art,” in Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka: Vienna 1900 (Hampshire: Lund Humphries, and Paris: Editions de la Réuinion des musées nationaux, 2005), p. 47.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 133.
Timothy W. Luke, “The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of Research,” New Political Science 21 (1999), p. 350.
Ben Agger, The Decline of Discourse: Reading, Writing and Resistance in Postmodern Capitalism (New York: The Falmer Press, 1990), p. 136.
Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 1–58: pp. 14–15.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, “To Sergei Esenin, 1926,” in The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Catherine Ciepiela and Honor Moore (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), p. 100.
Patricia M. Nickel, “There is an Unknown on Campus: From Normative to Performative Violence in Academia,” in Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech: There Is a Gunman on Campus, ed. Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), pp. 161–86.
Ben Agger, Socio(onto)logy: A Disciplinary Reading (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 146.
Paul Piccone, The Crisis of One-Dimensionality, Telos 35 (1978), p. 48.
S. Grey and Patricia M. Nickel, “Kiwibrand Resistance: Banking on Artificial Negativity.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 9(4) (2009).
Hermann Bahr, 1905, in Markus Neuwirth, ed. “Texts on Art,” in Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka: Vienna 1900 (Hampshire: Lund Humphries, and Paris: Editions de la Réuinion des musées nationaux, 2005), p. 45
Michael Burawoy, “Introduction: A Public Sociology for Human Rights,” in Public Sociologies Reader, ed. Judith Blau and Kerri Iyal Smith (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), p. 17.
Michel Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. xv.
Paul D. Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008). Also see Agger, Socio(onto)logy.
Robert H. Blank, Brain Policy: How the New Neuroscience Will Change Our Lives and Our Politics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999).
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989).
Ben Agger and Tim Luke, “Politics in Postmodernity: The Diaspora of Politics and the Homelessness of Political and Social Theory,” Theoretical Directions in Political Sociology for the 21st Century 11 (2002): 159–95.
Agger, Fast Capitalism; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990);
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern: 1983–1998 (New York and London: Verso, 1998);
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
See Patricia M. Nickel, ed., North American Critical Theory after Postmodernism: Contemporary Dialogues (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), p. 25.
Ben Agger, Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
Ben Agger, Reading Science: A Literary, Political, and Sociological Analysis (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1989).
Ben Agger, A Critical Theory of Public Life: Knowledge, Discourse, and Politics in an Age of Decline (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 1991), p. 136.
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© 2015 Patricia Mooney Nickel
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Nickel, P.M. (2015). Academies of Exhibition and the New Disciplinary Secession. In: Culture, Politics and Governing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401977_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401977_2
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