Talking Out Both Sides of Our Mouths
The freedom of Art is an illusion of contemporary capital culture that thrives on the exhibitionist nature of artists at large. As individuals, we continue to exert our unsubstantiated claim that the freedom to create exists in a vacuum devoid of any social trappings/workings. Julian Stallabrass summed it up well by stating, “Art appears to stand outside the realm of rigid instrumentality, bureaucratized life, and its complementary mass culture” (2). The operative word is “appears.” No matter where we stand within the contrived society that we’ve built up, there is some form of interaction between the extremities that destroys the innocence of the parts of the whole. Innocence is a perpetual illusion of the capitalistic machine that allows us to sleep soundly at night, blissfully ignorant of our implicit roles as the cogs of global turmoil. Art has become a means for a fraction of the populace to either maintain the fabrication of innocence or to challenge what it means to be a globally conscious citizen. (I would like to briefly put forward a personal point of view: that it is impossible to affect change on a grand scale without first enacting those changes on a personal level. This impossibility of change without sacrifice renders null any grandiose ideas of reform).
“We are dealing with a culture without memory and without any rules whatever” (Virilio 72). The vast digitization that consumes us, (we are lying to ourselves we we say that we consume the digital), has created a culture that has no boundaries or taboos. While there will always be activist and political groups that protest content and circumstances that offend their beliefs, that protest does not automatically validate or vilify the protested as taboo; it only solidifies the taboo as something to be obtained or strived for by the subversive side of the system (most often, artists) to cause commotion, change perceptions, and cause the eventual callousness towards the taboo. (I am thinking of the cases that Carole S. Vance discussed in “The War on Culture.”)
Are we just whores that peddle smut, then? Is that all that Art and artists have become since our commodification, whenever one would like to peg that? “The obscenity of visibility” that Baudrillard discusses now exists in a fully digital world where everything has become transparent to the point of being ignorable (“The Conspiracy of Art”). It seems too obvious to say that Art has made the deified dollar its sustenance, but this observation has not instilled a new sense of honesty. “Much cultural production is systematically excluded from the contemporary art world,” yet we appropriate “cultural productions” in our making of products that are supposed to exist above the mass market (Stallabrass 151). We’re just blowing smoke up everyone’s asses when we maintain Art’s immunity to common culture. Worse, we’re lying to ourselves by not acknowledging that the pedestal we’ve occupied as a creative force has only existed because of the smoke of our predecessors. “Contemporary art must continually display the signs of its freedom and distinction from the mass, by marking off its productions from those vulgarized by mass production and mass appeal” (Stallabrass 5-6). There is a need to believe our own bullshit, certainly, but there also needs to be a recognition that our products are not necessarily culturally better than what is available in the mass market. Exclusivity and limited production do not automatically endow quality and our “continual insistence on the unknowability of art is strange, particularly since it has been accompanied recently by some transparently instrumental art practices” (Stallabrass 9).
It would seem that we are enjoying a golden age of Art since we are not for want of new works to see and there are infinite ways for us to create innumerable products in just as many mediums. However, this “golden age” may generate a broader realization that high culture is nothing more than a commodity that is bought and sold by the elite few with deep pockets who create the exclusive playground on which various schoolyard transactions take place. The illusion of Art as the noble philosopher, the poet of love, the wise teacher of what is culturally valuable, shambles along like a flaming zombie in search of the brains of the asinine foolish enough to willingly feed it. Digital consumption reigns, with many of the works that we view, at worst, existing solely in the realm of the screen and, at best, never being seen in a physical space; this is similar to the mass market commodities that we cannibalize. The over-saturation and the over-commodification of what constitutes our livelihood can no longer be ignored, and if not changed for the better, at least acknowledged in a sinister embrace.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Conspiracy of Art.” The Conspiracy of Art. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Trans. Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotext (E), 2005. Print, 25-29.
Stallabrass, Julian. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.
Vance, Carol S. “The War on Culture.” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print, 123-131.
Virilio, Paul. “Night of the Museums.” Art as Far as the Eye Can See. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Berg Publishers, 2007. Print, 69-114.
This essay is © Ian J.F. Wagner.
The freedom of Art is an illusion of contemporary capital culture that thrives on the exhibitionist nature of artists at large. As individuals, we continue to exert our unsubstantiated claim that the freedom to create exists in a vacuum devoid of any social trappings/workings. Julian Stallabrass summed it up well by stating, “Art appears to stand outside the realm of rigid instrumentality, bureaucratized life, and its complementary mass culture” (2). The operative word is “appears.” No matter where we stand within the contrived society that we’ve built up, there is some form of interaction between the extremities that destroys the innocence of the parts of the whole. Innocence is a perpetual illusion of the capitalistic machine that allows us to sleep soundly at night, blissfully ignorant of our implicit roles as the cogs of global turmoil. Art has become a means for a fraction of the populace to either maintain the fabrication of innocence or to challenge what it means to be a globally conscious citizen. (I would like to briefly put forward a personal point of view: that it is impossible to affect change on a grand scale without first enacting those changes on a personal level. This impossibility of change without sacrifice renders null any grandiose ideas of reform).
“We are dealing with a culture without memory and without any rules whatever” (Virilio 72). The vast digitization that consumes us, (we are lying to ourselves we we say that we consume the digital), has created a culture that has no boundaries or taboos. While there will always be activist and political groups that protest content and circumstances that offend their beliefs, that protest does not automatically validate or vilify the protested as taboo; it only solidifies the taboo as something to be obtained or strived for by the subversive side of the system (most often, artists) to cause commotion, change perceptions, and cause the eventual callousness towards the taboo. (I am thinking of the cases that Carole S. Vance discussed in “The War on Culture.”)
Are we just whores that peddle smut, then? Is that all that Art and artists have become since our commodification, whenever one would like to peg that? “The obscenity of visibility” that Baudrillard discusses now exists in a fully digital world where everything has become transparent to the point of being ignorable (“The Conspiracy of Art”). It seems too obvious to say that Art has made the deified dollar its sustenance, but this observation has not instilled a new sense of honesty. “Much cultural production is systematically excluded from the contemporary art world,” yet we appropriate “cultural productions” in our making of products that are supposed to exist above the mass market (Stallabrass 151). We’re just blowing smoke up everyone’s asses when we maintain Art’s immunity to common culture. Worse, we’re lying to ourselves by not acknowledging that the pedestal we’ve occupied as a creative force has only existed because of the smoke of our predecessors. “Contemporary art must continually display the signs of its freedom and distinction from the mass, by marking off its productions from those vulgarized by mass production and mass appeal” (Stallabrass 5-6). There is a need to believe our own bullshit, certainly, but there also needs to be a recognition that our products are not necessarily culturally better than what is available in the mass market. Exclusivity and limited production do not automatically endow quality and our “continual insistence on the unknowability of art is strange, particularly since it has been accompanied recently by some transparently instrumental art practices” (Stallabrass 9).
It would seem that we are enjoying a golden age of Art since we are not for want of new works to see and there are infinite ways for us to create innumerable products in just as many mediums. However, this “golden age” may generate a broader realization that high culture is nothing more than a commodity that is bought and sold by the elite few with deep pockets who create the exclusive playground on which various schoolyard transactions take place. The illusion of Art as the noble philosopher, the poet of love, the wise teacher of what is culturally valuable, shambles along like a flaming zombie in search of the brains of the asinine foolish enough to willingly feed it. Digital consumption reigns, with many of the works that we view, at worst, existing solely in the realm of the screen and, at best, never being seen in a physical space; this is similar to the mass market commodities that we cannibalize. The over-saturation and the over-commodification of what constitutes our livelihood can no longer be ignored, and if not changed for the better, at least acknowledged in a sinister embrace.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Conspiracy of Art.” The Conspiracy of Art. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Trans. Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotext (E), 2005. Print, 25-29.
Stallabrass, Julian. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.
Vance, Carol S. “The War on Culture.” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print, 123-131.
Virilio, Paul. “Night of the Museums.” Art as Far as the Eye Can See. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Berg Publishers, 2007. Print, 69-114.
This essay is © Ian J.F. Wagner.