Art and “commodification”

Titian. Venus of Urbino. 1538

To “commodify”: to turn into or treat as a mere commodity

Good art?

• Friedrich Schiller. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. 1793

• George Friedrich Hegel. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. 1822

• Grant H Kester. Learning from Aesthetics: Old Masters and New Lessons. Art Journal Vol 56 pp20-25 Spring 97

Good art?

• Grant Kester• ‘it is precisely the role

of the artist to ask difficult questions, to prick the viewers conscience and to call our attention to uncomfortable truths’

• Activist art

Francis Alys When faith moves mountains 11.4.02. Ventanilla Peru.

yBas – Hirst, Whiteread, Hume, Lucas, Emin, Wallinger, Landy, Hume…1990s

• “Good” art or good publicity and business?• Is Hirst’s work valuable as “art” or does it function more

as a well branded commodity?• Who has more control over what is judged as “good art”

in the current commercial climate – an economic and powerful elite or the arbiters of “cultural capital” in the art world?

• If it is the rich and powerful economic elite, is the inevitable result a “dumbing down” of culture such as that feared by Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

• Is art now more “culture industry” and “commodity” than intellectual life?

• Does this threaten the existence of “art”?

yBas

• Blatantly reject ‘academicisation’ and theory• Aim to communicate with a wide audience • Use the visual language of mass culture –

newspapers, film, advertising, pornography• Use the strategies of the ‘culture industries’ –

spectacle, shock, exposure in newspapers, the advent of celebrity

• Are successful, if success means earning a living

• Successful, if the aim is to integrate art into everyday life

anti-theory and anti intellectual“the personal is political?”

I sew simply because I sew and I am actually quite good at it. It’s not like I’m trying to come up with some kind of grand female statement

Everyone I have ever slept with. 1963-95. Tracey Emin

“I think I’m getting basically more yobbish. Yobbish is visceral”

Damien Hirst‘hackneyed expressions of vulgarity’Au naturel. Sarah Lucas. 1994

Jake and Dinos Chapman. 1995Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic,de-subliminated libidinal model (enlarged x1000)

Sarah Lucas. 1991. Seven Up

If you go up to anybody in the street in the North of England and give them Flash Art and you say ‘Go on have a look at that’ they would just say ‘ What a pile of fucking total bollocks, it’s shit, I’ve never seen anything like it…….Art has got to be able to stand up to everything else and if it can’t then it doesn’t work….if you have an idea of an audience then it has to be to communicate with everybody

Damien Hirst, quoted in Stallabrass, High Art Lite

I want the viewer to do a lot of the work and feel uncomfortable. They should be made to feel responsible for their own view of the world rather than look at the artist’s view and be critical of it…

Sarah Lucas, quoted in Stallabrass, High Art Lite

“To refuse to offer neatly packaged solutions, to recognise complexity and ambiguity, does not have to entail refusing to say anything at all”

Meaningful or simply ‘exemplifying’?

Gavin Turk. 1998. Bum

Sarah Lucas

“Why does critical theory bounce off this work? …It fastens on the concerns of theory but gives them no play”

Art IncorporatedStallabrass. 2004

“As the feature articles build up, they take the place of empirical evidence,

the hype becomes the substance”

Simon Ford. The Myth of the Young British Artist. In, Occupational Hazard. Critical Writing on Recent British

Art. 1998

Hirst’s greatest creation of his career so far has been a walking, talking installation

that goes by the name of Damien Hirst

Cosmo Landesman, quoted in Ford, ibid.

‘vicarious enjoyment of prestige’ Adorno

‘artists simply reflect and examine the new scene in which there is no distinction between art and

commodity culture and they do so without critique or desire for change’

Stallabrass on Buchloh

A culture of fear

• Art is more commodity than culture, more exchange value than critique

• Art is merely a ‘sign’, exploited for its cultural capital

• Art is increasingly banal, ambivalent, refuses critique.

• Art is increasingly debased and vulgar• Art is losing its autonomy and position of critique• Collapsed within popular culture it is ‘dumbed

down’, a lesser art• With no higher purpose, it is morally

compromised and mortally threatened

The argument and the players

• Artists

• Patrons – the powerful and the wealthy

• The ‘Academy’ – the ‘intellectual’, the theorists and critic – the cultural elite – a “petite bourgeoisie” – the arbiters of ‘taste’

• The populist “masses” - alienated, ignorant and lacking in “taste”

“Wealth is the result of commerce, luxury the consequence of wealth and the perfection of the

arts that of luxury”

Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat. The Spirit of the Laws. 1748

“In our society workmen and mercenaries decide the fate of music….they set themselves up as

arbiters of taste…music will never rise again after its fall” Jean Jacques Barthelemy. 1788

“(it is luxury) that degrades great talents, by subjecting them to small works….that degrades

great subjects by reducing them to scenes of revelry” Diderot. 1767

“commerce corrupts pure morals”Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat. The Spirit of the

Laws. 1748

Luxury encourages indolence……Brilliant reviews are organised to provide a spectacle for the ladies…… Mercier, 1782

the dissolution of morals, a necessary consequence of luxury, leads in turn to the corruption of taste……Rousseau, 1751

It is clear to Rousseau that under such circumstances such as those that characterise modern commercial society, an artist has no choice but to “lower his genius to the level of his time”……Mattick on Rousseau, 2003

Julian Stallabrass. 1999

‘An essential question – and it is an old one,………..that should be asked of an art that deals with mass and popular culture, that hails the non-elite audience, is whether it takes as its task to stir “hearts and to prevent them falling asleep in that false and wholly material happiness which is given by monarchies”

The majority of artists purveying high art lite have been content to play the well-remunerated role of court dwarf ’

Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite, 1999

Quotation from Stendhal, 1839

Pierre BourdieuA Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

1979

“nothing more rigorously distinguishes the different classes (than) ..the aptitude for taking a specifically

aesthetic point of view on objects”

“art and cultural consumption are predisposed…..to fulfil a social function of legitimating social

differences”

Mike FeatherstoneLifestyle and Consumer Culture. 1991

“Intellectuals have been able to establish a monopoly in defining legitimate taste within the cultural realm, to

distinguish…what is tasteful and tasteless, between pure gaze and vulgar, between aesthetic distancing and direct

sensory enjoyment….

They share an interest in maintaining the existing state of material class relations in which economic capital

enjoys….. a high exchange rate when converted into cultural capital

They will therefore always seek to increase the autonomy of the cultural field and enhance the scarcity of cultural

capital by resisting moves towards the democratisation of culture”

“a single and unified national intellectual life which could be drawn upon and appealed. At least since the 18th century

that realm has been in crisis and conflict, divided by material interests and the demands of commerce”

“The shift from seeing art as an integral part of an intellectual culture which also involved politics, philosophy, music,

literature and the sciences, to one that sees it as a lifestyle issue, a complement to an interest in furnishings”

Julian Stallabrass is a writer and critic. He teaches history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Univ of London

‘The truth is, playing dumb and shouting “ARSE” and taking your knickers down has become an attractive

move in the face of the professional institutionalisation of critical theory in art in the 1980s’

…….a position from which the new generation were seen to have ‘fought to renew the conditions of art’s

passage into the everyday and away from ‘art’s academicisation’

Observations on John Robert’s defence of the yBaS in Neil Mulholland, The Cultural Devolution (Art after

Britain?), p141

A paradox:Modern art and money

“The majority of artists purveying high art lite have been content to play the well-remunerated role of court dwarf “

Julian Stallabrass. High Art Lite.

“Master Pietro is to paint a history similar to that in the

design which is on this sheet. This drawing is taken from a design which now belongs to Master Francesco Squarcione and was done by the hand of

Niccolo Pizzolo. He is to make it similar to this but to make more

things than are in the said design”

1466 Contract for the Lazzara Alterpiece in Padua

Art, money and the “everyday”

‘linked to the ruling classes by an umbilical cord of gold’ Greenberg

The ‘delightful illusion’ of art’s separateness from commercial culture – Mattick

Art is likewise to be distinguished from craft. The first is also called free art, the second could be called mercenary art. We regard free art (as an art) that could only turn out purposive i.e. succeed, if it is play, in other words, an occupation that is agreeable on its own account; mercenary art we regard as labour

Kant. The Critique of Judgement. 1790

(It is the task of art) to reconstitute the fragmented human person, “to restore by means of a higher art the totality of our nature..

Let him (the artist) direct his gaze upwards to the dignity of his calling and the Universal Law, not downwards towards Fortune and the needs of daily life

Schiller. On the aesthetic education of man. 1794

“a conflict at the heart of the modern practice of art…..the idea that art’s production differs from all other production in its freedom from the market”

this conceals “the umbilical cord of gold”

“art’s separateness from commercial culture…in its modern form… has proved impossible to sustain

Paul Mattick. Art in its Time. 2003

‘ “Thatcher’s children” ’ – though like all children they had no choice in the matter of their parents. They have had to make their way in a world which believes it owes them nothing”

McCorquodale, Siderfin and Stallabrass

There has to be some way of being an artist and making a living

Angela McRobbie

Ensconced inside consumer culture, less lonely and cut off, the new art simply becomes less important…..The Sensation exhibition did not require the usual quantities of cultural capital to enjoy it……In this respect art has come down from it’s pedestal

Angela McRobbie

A “re-branding of art” in consumer culture:

…….Art has got to be able to stand up to everything else and if it can’t then it doesn’t work….

if you have an idea of an audience then it has to be to communicate with everybody

if I was painting something, I’d always do the blood first, the best bit, then leave the boring bits until later

I decided that the layer of paint on the surface is just the same as an object in the room. You know – the deliciousness of it, the thing that makes you love the painting, it is a physical thing……..You want to eat it as if it were ice cream or something

Damien Hirst

Art and commodification

• Is art more commodity than culture, more exchange value than critique?

• Is it merely a ‘sign’, exploited for its cultural capital?

• Increasingly banal and incapable of critique?• Increasingly debased and vulgar?• Losing its autonomy to capitalist masters?• Collapsed within popular culture and ‘dumbed

down’, as a lesser art?• Morally and mortally threatened?

Or is there negotiation of a new position?

• Which resolves the paradox of modern art and money

• Acknowledges the need to earn a living• Democratises art and restores it to the everyday• Negotiates recognition for art in an image

saturated and aestheticised society• Restores the intuitive and rejects the dominance

of the Academy

The pale of historyArtists, patrons, intellectuals