The Work of the Critic in the Age of Crisis

Charlie Gere

Abstract

In this essay I look critically at art at a time when it seems beyond criticism, and entirely

bound up with the art market, as the purest manifestation of exchange value. This in turn

renders all attempts at criticality empty and pointless, and closes up any meaningful

critical distance which would enable a genuine engagement with the value of art. This is

exactly the loss of distance in general, and critical distance in particular, that Jameson

suggests has been lost in postmodernism. This is less a question of postmodernism, and

more one of theology and in this paper I suggest that art has become a key component of

what Walter Benjamin describes as ‘capitalism as religion’. This opens art up to an

analysis using the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Marie Jose Mondzain in showing

how art continues to be part of apparatus of glory that originates in conceptions of

Christian oikonomia, and which is now manifested in the spectacle. Following

Agamben’s analyses of messianism and Franciscan arguments for use over property, I

propose an alternative vision of art in terms of use value. This can be found in the project

started by artist Tania Bruguera to develop ‘useful art’, and in the work of Grizedale Arts,

an arts organization in the English Lake District. This is turn offers a different

understanding of the role of the critic, as critical of the role art has come to play in late

capitalism. Like the monastic orders of the middle ages art, and art criticism, need

perhaps to find a space outside the spectacular operations of power, and to practice

critical disengagement and reclusiveness as a means of resistance to that power.

Keywords. Art, exchange value, use value, use, Agamben, Groys, Duchamp, oikonomia,

spectacle, Hirst, profanation, play, criticism

The word ‘critical’ derives from the late Latin criticus, which in turn comes from the

Greek kritikos, from krites, a judge, and thus from krinein, to judge, decide. The last is

also the origin of the English word ‘crisis’, which in late Middle English came to refer to

the turning point in the progress of a disease. That we are in the midst of a number of

crises, political, economic, environmental, cannot be doubted. What therefore might be

the role of criticism in this critical juncture, this time of crisis, in particular criticism of

the arts and humanities?

Certainly the role of the art critic is increasingly meaningless. Despite the extraordinary

degree of inequality and misery in the world, a single art sale at Christies in 2013 made

three quarters of a billion dollars of sales, including nearly 150 million dollars for a

Francis Bacon triptych. Such extraordinary prices has led Philip Kennikott in The

Washington Post to ask ‘As the price of art rises, it its value plummeting?’

Going back as far as the Renaissance, artists have had an uneasy relationship to

patrons and the money they offer. And the fear of mass commercialization has

been a perennial theme of art at least since the days of the pop artists a half

century ago. But something different is in the air today. The level of disgust is

deeper and more visceral. The art world has collapsed into the world of

commerce, and while there may be celebrations at Christie’s, there is an almost

apocalyptic level of gloom everywhere else. (Kennikott, 2014)

Is there is no longer any point in trying to make critical judgments about works of art?

As far as the art market is concerned there is no incentive to ask ‘is this work of art

good?’, but only ‘will this work of art maintain or increase its financial value in the

future?’ In such a situation the traditional understanding of the operations of critical

distance are rendered irrelevant, in that capitalism forecloses such distance under the sign

of pure exchange value as the only meaningful value.

Perhaps the perfect example of this is Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a diamond

encrusted skull, which he first exhibited in 2008 in The White Cube gallery in London.

Presented as a piece of theatre, in which security guards ushered small groups of viewers

up to a small, dark room at the top of the gallery, in which the skull sat in a vitrine, lit

dramatically. For all this theatricality the skull itself was disappointing, with the

diamonds badly set and thus looking more like crystals masquerading as diamonds, such

as those sold by Swarovski in any high street. The real work of art was not the skull itself,

but the price for which it was supposedly being sold. Fifty million pounds was widely

quoted, though it was also suggested that there had been difficulties getting anyone to

buy at it at this price. In the end it was bought by a consortium, one of whose members,

rumour has it, was Hirst himself. Of course this could be construed as a kind of

performative critique of out-of-control capitalism , a move Hirst himself apparently tried

to make. But, as Kennikott remarks:

There lingers in some corners of the art world the conviction — more like a

desperate article of faith — that art can still redeem itself, through mockery, satire

and irony. Thus, artists such as Koons and Hirst are somehow satirizing or

critiquing the market that makes them wealthy. But more and more there is

despair, a sense that they aren’t joking their way out of anything, just sneering all

the way to the bank. There is no “outside” to the market from which artists can

observe and comment independently. (Ibid)

There is also, therefore, no outside, and thus no point of distance away from the market in

which critics can do the same. The Skull was exhibited shortly before the scandal of

subprime mortgages and toxic debt bundles nearly brought the entire world economy

crashing to the ground. Hirst cleverly auctioned off a large amount of his work for a

record £111 million literally days before the actual crash, or, more accurately, before the

markets started to respond in panic-mode to the consequences of their own greed.

The skull seems to suggest that contemporary art has its critical distance from the market

and thus has lost any engagement with genuine attempts at social and political

transformation, and has allied itself with capitalism, its use value entirely forgotten,

leaving only its exchange value. As Julian Stallabrass puts it

Art and money represent an almost pure form of exchange: in the opposition

between use value and exchange value… their weight is on the side of exchange.

In the pricing of art, exchange value is tied above all to aesthetic judgement. The

association is so familiar that it has developed the power of truism; if people say

an artist’s work is undervalued, they generally mean that it is a good investment

prospect. People rarely say that some body of work is fine, but the market does

not recognise this and, what is more, never will. (1997, 65 - 66)

This is what the skull seems to indicate, that the whole of capitalism was predicated on

investing now against putative future value, and that such investment was the basis of

almost all financial transactions. Here perhaps is the real reason why mainstream art has

difficulties addressing the current crises. It is absolutely part of the problem, rather than

of any potential thinking through of solutions. The avant-garde notion that the value of a

particular work of art or of a particular artist will only be properly appreciated in the

future, a future that the artist’s work has helped bring about, has been conflated with the

increasing importance of futures or derivatives trading in finance, in which a commodity

is traded in terms of its potential value in the future. Thus finance becomes nothing more

than a form of informed betting, or what is sometimes called ‘casino capitalism’, and art

has become part of this structure, with artworks bought and traded in terms of their

potential future value. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of the art market in its

current highly monetised form happens at the same time as the beginnings of futures

trading as a mainstay of investment with the development of the Black-Scholes equation

in 1973, that enabled people to calculate the price of financial derivatives, financial

instruments that have values based on the expected future price movements of the assets

to which they are linked, which in turn are based on the value of the underlying assets.

Clearly the idea of futures trading in art has a number of implications. One is that there is

considerable impetus to make sure that a work of art’s financial value increases by

various means, whatever intrinsic value as an artwork it might possess. Another is that

there is a strong incentive on the part of artists to obey the logic of the avant garde in

terms of current shock value leading to future appreciation, and to make works that look

like they will be properly understood and valued in the future, either because they are

now too difficult or too transgressive and provocative for our current sensibilities and

understanding. This is not to suggest that artists are insincere or lack good intentions, but

rather that art education and the art market has come to value the sovereignty of the artist

as the source of future value. A Rothko or Pollock labouring heroically in the studio to

produce something new and unprecedented in art becomes the model for the artist as the

source of future value. Decoupled from any notion of skill or craft this is then reduced to

the value of the artist’s choices and decisions.

Art is massively invested in by the wealthy not just because it is a good investment, but

also because it offers an image of freedom, a distance, if you will, from the mercenary

constraints of the market, though this is no longer a critical distance, and as a way of

using up the inevitable excess, the accursed share, that accumulates in capitalism. Thus

the uselessness or purposelessness of art that is the legacy of Kantian aesthetics becomes

a means by which the sovereignty of capitalism is confirmed. In its refusal of use value

Art has become pure exchange value. Thus art’s purposelessness or uselessness becomes

a paradigm for the commodity whose value for capitalism is that of its exchange value,

and not its use value. It is the commodity in its purist form.

It can be argued that this is a theological matter. For Bernard Stiegler modern and

contemporary art offers a ‘displacement of the mystery constituted by the object of desire

that was once God, moving toward a new mystagogical field, a mystagogy of

immanence, and thus a space of belief of a new type’ (2008, p. 35). The immanence to

which such works offer an initiation is perhaps that of capitalism itself, especially in its

current neoliberal, virtual mode, which has apparently entirely subsumed all aspects of

contemporary existence, and for which profit appears to be a good that trumps all other

considerations. In a recent interview Giorgio Agamben makes the following claim:

… that capitalism is really a religion literally, the most fierce, implacable and

irrational religion that has ever existed because it recognizes neither truces nor

redemption. A permanent worship is celebrated in its name, a worship whose

liturgy is labor and its object, money. God did not die; he was transformed into

money. The Bank—with its faceless drones and its experts—has taken the place

of the church with its priests, and by its command over credit (even loans to the

state, which has so blithely abdicated its sovereignty), manipulates and manages

the faith—the scarce and uncertain faith—that still remains to it in our time.(Sava,

2012)

In this he follows Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘capitalism as religion’ (1999). For

Benjamin capitalism is more than merely ‘a formation conditioned by religion’, as Weber

believed, but has a religious structure. ‘[C]apitalism serves to allay the same anxieties,

torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers’ (288).

‘Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]’,

in which everyday is a feast day, and commands the ‘utter fealty of the worshipper’

(Ibid). Above all it creates guilt and not atonement; ‘A vast sense of guilt that is unable to

find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal’ (Ibid).

‘Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the

reform of existence but its complete destruction’ (289). For Benjamin it is this expansion

of despair, that makes despair the religious state of the world in the hope that this will

lead to salvation.

Giorgio Agamben expands on Benjamin’s essay on religion in ‘In Praise of Profanation’

(2007). For Agamben the ‘Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged

to the gods’ (73). This is in keeping with Agamben’s understanding of religion as that

‘which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them

to a separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation

also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core.’ (74) Therefore to

consecrate is to remove things from the sphere of human law, and to profane is to return

them to ‘the free use of men’ (73). This is however a form of distance that precisely

forecloses any criticality, inasmuch as it negates critical distance by separating

everything. As such forms of resistance to capitalism, such as indifference are coopted in

the more general process of separation. Thus, following Benjamin, for Agamben

…capitalism, in pushing to the extreme a tendency already present in Christianity,

generalizes in every domain the structure of separation that defines religion.

Where sacrifice once marked the passage from the profane to the sacred and from

the sacred to the profane, there is now a Single, multiform, ceaseless process of

separation that assails every thing, every place, every human activity in order to

divide it from itself. This process is entirely indifferent to the caesura between

sacred and profane, between divine and human. In its extreme form, the capitalist

religion realizes the pure form of separation, to the point that there is nothing left

to separate. An absolute profanation without remainder now coincides with an

equally vacuous and total consecration. In the commodity, separation inheres in

the very form of the object, which splits into use-value and exchange value and is

transformed into an ungraspable fetish. The same is true for everything that is

done, produced, or experienced even the human body, even sexuality, even

language. They are now divided from themselves and placed in a separate sphere

that no longer defines any substantial division and where all use becomes and

remains impossible. This sphere is consumption. (81)

This is how Agamben understands the Debordian notion of ‘spectacle’, as a sort of

generalized condition of difference, in that the

extreme phase of capitalism in which we are now living, in which everything is

exhibited in its separation from itself, then spectacle and consumption are the two

sides of a single impossibility of using. What cannot be used is, as such, given

over to consumption or to spectacular exhibition. This means that it has become

impossible to profane (or at least that it requires special procedures). If to profane

means to return to common use that which has been removed to the sphere of the

sacred, the capitalist religion in its extreme phase aims at creating something

absolutely unprofanable. (82)

Much of the problem here can be understood in terms of what Agamben calls ‘the

museification of the world’, in which…

…One by one, the spiritual potentialities that defined the people's lives - art,

religion, philosophy, the idea of nature, even politics - have docilely withdrawn

into the Museum. “Museum” here is not a given physical space or place but the

separate dimension to which what was once - but is no longer - felt as true and

decisive has moved. In this sense, the Museum can coincide with an entire city

(such as Evora and Venice, which were declared World Heritage sites), a region

(when it is declared a park or nature preserve), and even a group of individuals

(insofar as they represent a form of life that has disappeared). But more generally,

everything today can become a Museum, because this term simply designates the

exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing. (83 - 4)

In her book Image, Icon, Economy (2005) Marie-Josie Mondzain proposes that our entire

contemporary relation to the image can be traced back to the disputes over the icon in

eighth and ninth century Byzantium. These in turn were responses to the notion of

Christian ‘oikonomia’, the idea that Christ was part of God’s overall plan for the

salvation of humanity. In order to make possible a theory of the icon that would not be

tainted by idolatry, and subject to the mosaic proscription on images, the Byzantine

iconophiles developed the idea of the invisible image and the visible icon (69ff). This in

turn served the strategic needs of the Church in its wielding of temporal power. In The

Kingdom and the Glory (2011) Giorgio Agamben has pursued a similar investigation of

the modern idea of the economy as being rooted in early Christian notions of

‘oikonomia’. For both Mondzain and Agamben the Trinity as a structure defined by

relationality is central to this development. At the heart of Agamben’s analysis is the idea

that Western sovereignty, based as it is on this economic trinitarianism, is symbolized by

the ‘empty throne’(245). In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben’s goal is to reveal that

sovereign power is fundamentally empty — and the empty throne is a powerful image for

that reality (or lack of reality) (245 - 6). It is this in turn that makes ‘glory’ in the form of

liturgical ceremony a necessary component of politics.

For Agamben this economic understanding of politics emerging out of Trinitarian

Christian theology remains paradigmatic of our contemporary situation, notwithstanding

its supposed secularization. Following the work of Guy Debord and his analysis of the

society of the spectacle Agamben sees modern democracy as formed on the basis of

spectacular power, and ‘the public sphere, and public opinion are the modern form of

acclamation and glorification of power’ (280).

There is a connection here between the current society of the spectacle and earlier visual

regimes of power. Here one might cite the cooption of painters by the royal courts away

from the guilds, in the early modern era, as part of the glorification of the monarchy. This

is described by Martin Warnke in his groundbreaking book The Court Artist (1995), in

which he showed that this cooption led to the notion of the artist as autonomous and

sovereign. To this one might add the religious use of art in the Catholic counter-

reformation, and the emergence of the spectacular form of art known as the Baroque. For

Debord ‘Baroque was the art of a world that had lost its center with the collapse of the

last mythical order: the Medieval synthesis of a unified Christianity with the ghost of an

Empire, which had harmonized heavenly and earthly government’ (189). He continues

that

What eventually followed Baroque, once it had run its course, was an ever more

individualistic art of negation which, from Romanticism to Cubism, continually

renewed its assaults until it had fragmented and destroyed the entire artistic

sphere. The disappearance of historical art, which was linked to the internal

communication of an elite and which had its semi-independent social basis in the

partially playful conditions still experienced by the last aristocracies, also reflects

the fact that capitalism produced the first form of class power that acknowledges

its own total lack of ontological quality — a power whose basis in the mere

management of the economy reflects the loss of all human mastery (Ibid).

This in part at least offers an explanation for the extreme hostility shown by twentieth

century totalitarian governments towards the art of negation to which Debord alludes,

whether this takes the form of the abandonment of avant garde art in Stalinist Soviet

Russia in favour of socialist realism, or the condemnation of ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazi

regime. In both cases perhaps the role of art in the glory that conceals the ontological

truth of the empty throne is promoted, and modern art’s deconstruction of that role is

condemned. This obviously resonates with Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that Fascism

aestheticises politics and socialism must politicize aesthetics. But it might also be

suggested that contemporary art, or at least that form of contemporary art that constitutes

the art market, is a form of glory for capitalism, especially when considered in

benjaminian terms as religion.

The irony here is that it is art that mimics the art of negation that is most prized by the

oligarchs and other supporters of the hugely inflated art market. Hirst and Koons in

particular can be understood, or perhaps misunderstood, as heirs and faithful followers of

the greatest exponent of negation, Marcel Duchamp, yet it can also be argued that their

practices fatally miss the point of Duchamp’s work, particularly in relation to the ready-

made. The case of Damien Hirst indeed shows how easily Duchamp’s radical move can

be co-opted by the art market and the museum. Agamben makes this point in the

interview quoted earlier. After discussing the radical and critical intentions behind the

urinal he goes on to say that

As you know, what happened instead is that a class, one that is still active, of

clever speculators transformed “ready-made” into a work of art. And so-called

contemporary art does nothing but repeat Duchamp’s gesture by filling the

museums, which are nothing but organs of the market devoted to accelerating the

circulation of merchandise which, like money, have attained a state of liquidity

and which they want to continue to value as if they were works of art, with non-

works and non-performances. This is the contradiction of contemporary art: it

abolishes the work of art and then puts a price tag on the result. (Sava, 2012)

What perhaps needs to be recovered is the radical, eschatological dimensions of

Duchamp’s move with the ready-made, and its implications for art, which is perhaps a

kind of critical distance from art itself, and its underlying theological structure. In his

recent book Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012) Boris Groys suggests that for

Kierkegaard Christ is a kind of proto-readymade, in that he is thoroughly ordinary and

entirely contingent (xii). In his online essay ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Absolute Art’, Groys

declares that

Kierkegaard called Christianity the “absolute religion” because it was not based

on any objectively provable difference between Christ and any other human

being. In the same sense, one can see Duchamp as opening a way for the

“absolute art” that valorizes the profane and devalorizes the traditionally valuable

at the same time — without abolishing either of them. (Groys, 2012 )

Elsewhere he writes that ‘… we can say that Duchamp’s Fountain is a kind of Christ

among things, and the art practice of the readymade a kind of Christianity in art.’ (2008,

29 - 30) Nor was Duchamp unaware of this implication of his work, given that he

described, ironically perhaps, as ‘transubstantiation’. According to critic Jerry Saltz in an

article in Village Voice

Duchamp may be the first modern artist to take God's prohibition against “hewn”

objects to heart. Fountain is not hewn or made in any traditional sense. In effect,

it is an unbegotten work, a kind of virgin birth, a cosmic coitus of imagination and

intellect. Like a megalithic stone, Fountain is merely placed on view, pointed at

as the locus of something intrinsic to art and as art itself. Duchamp's work relies

on a leap of faith: that new thought structures can be formed based on things

already in the world. Fountain is the aesthetic equivalent of the Word made Flesh:

It is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art, an object in which the distance

between image and prototype is narrowed to a scintillating sliver. Just as

Christians perceive Christ as the invisible made visible, Jesus said “He that hath

seen me hath seen the Father,” so Fountain essentially says, “He that hath seen

me hath also seen the idea of me.” (Saltz, 2006)

In another recent essay entitled ‘Weak Universalism’ (2010), Groys, following

Agamben’s work, suggests that ‘the avant-garde artist is a secularized apostle, a

messenger of time who brings to the world the message that time is contracting, that there

is a scarcity of time, even a lack of time’. Following Agamben, and also Walter

Benjamin’s notion of ‘weak messianism’ Groys proposes that:

Contracting time impoverishes, empties all our cultural signs and activities—

turning them into zero signs or, rather, as Agamben calls them, weak signs. Such

weak signs are the signs of the coming end of time being weakened by this

coming, already manifesting the lack of time that would be needed to produce and

to contemplate strong, rich signs. However, at the end of time, these messianic

weak signs triumph over the strong signs of our world—strong signs of authority,

tradition, and power, but also strong signs of revolt, desire, heroism, or shock.

(Ibid)

Groys derives his notion of messianic signs from Agamben’s idea of messianic time,

which in turn Agamben takes from St Paul. In a talk given in front of the hierarchy of the

French Roman Catholic church in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2009 he explained his

understanding and how it differs from the normal conception of messianic delay.

The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but,

instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in time is

experienced. For this reason it is inconceivable to speak of a chronological delay

in this context as though one were speaking of a train being delayed. Because

there is no place in messianic time for a fixed and final habitation, there is no time

for delay. It is with this in mind that Paul reminds the Thessalonians, ‘About dates

and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that

the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night' (1 Thess 5.l-2; 262). In this

passage 'comes [erchetai] is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah

is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes'-that is, he who never ceases to come.

Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that,

'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.'

(2009, p. 5)

Thus for Agamben the time of the messiah is not the end of chronological time, but

...is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we

grasp time, grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time.

This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time.

On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have. To

experience this time implies an integral transformation of ourselves and of our

ways of living. (12 - 13)

Agamben quotes Paul from Corinthians to the effect that time has contracted, and that

‘while it lasts, those with wives should be as those who are without, those who weep as if

they wept not, those who rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and those who buy as

though they possessed not, and they that use this world, as not abusing it’. The ‘as not’,

‘hos me’ in Greek, ‘means that the ultimate meaning of the messianic vocation is the

revocation of every vocation’, so as to free them for a new usage. Messianic time is the

penultimate time, before the ultimate time, in which things are ‘rendered inoperative’, the

more accurate translation of the Greek verb katargein, usually rendered as ‘destroy’ (19).

For Paul messianic time is not future time but ho nyn kairos, ‘now time’, or what

Benjamin calls ‘jetztzeit’. The parousia or presence of the messiah is a ‘presence that

distends time, an already that is also a not yet, a delay that does not put off until later but,

instead, a disconnection within the present moment that allows us to grasp time.’ (26)

Agamben accuses the Church of losing contact with its eschatological heritage, and

forgetting the economy of salvation described in Paul’s letters. Instead it remains in thrall

to the force of Law or State, which is dedicated to the economy or, in other words, the

indefinite, infinite governance of the world (35). The Church has forgotten what should

oppose this, the Pauline economy of salvation. As a sense for an economy of salvation in

historical time is weakened, or eliminated, the economy extends its blind and derisive

dominion to every aspect of social life (Ibid).

In his book on Paul, The Time that Remains (2005), Agamben suggests that the radical

Franciscans in the late middle ages were exemplary in their attempt to recover the

messianic heritage (27). He explores this further in his book The Highest Poverty (2013)

in which he engages the theological uses and implications of poverty within monastic

orders in the middle ages. The Highest Poverty is, ostensibly, a study of the relation

between the law and monastic rule in the medieval period, though, as Adam Kotsko

(2013) points out, it is also a subtle critique of neo-liberalism. At the heart of the book,

and central to its critique of neo-liberalism, is an analysis of the Franciscan attempt to

refuse any form of property in pursuit of the ‘highest poverty’ (123ff). This brought the

Franciscans in conflict with Pope John XXII, a dispute which involved sophisticated

philosophical arguments on both sides. The Franciscan argument hinged on the

distinction between property and use. Franciscans can use consumable goods, such as

food, without owning them, and thus compromising their absolute poverty. This in turn

involves a turn away from being to becoming, inasmuch as consumable goods are

‘successive’ kinds of things, ‘which one cannot have in a simultaneous and permanent

way’ (132).

If contemporary art in the galleries and auction rooms has become the glory of

capitalism-as-religion, then what is perhaps needed is an equivalent of the Franciscan

critique of the Papacy. Perhaps this can be found in the concept of Arte Util, or ‘useful

art’. This idea was originally developed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, during a series

of residencies. As the website for the Museum of Arte Util puts it

Whether through self-organised groups, individual initiatives or the rise of user

generated content people are developing new methods and social formations to

deal with issues that were once the domain of the state. Arte Útil case studies

show how these initiatives are not isolated incidents, but part of a global

movement shaping our contemporary world (Arte Util)

This is followed by an eight-point programme which proclaims the movement's

intentions to; Propose new uses for art within society; Challenge the field within which it

operates (civic, legislative, pedagogical, scientific, economic, etc); Be ‘timing specific’,

responding to current urgencies; Be implemented and function in real situations; Replace

authors with initiators and spectators with users; Have practical, beneficial outcomes for

its users; Pursue sustainability whilst adapting to changing conditions; Re-establish

aesthetics as a system of transformation (Ibid). As Bruguera puts it

Useful Art is a way of working with aesthetic experiences that focus on the

implementation of art in society where art’s function is no longer to be a space for

“signaling” problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and

implementation of possible solutions. We should go back to the times when art

was not something to look at in awe, but something to generate from. If it is

political art, it deals with the consequences, if it deals with the consequences, I

think it has to be useful art. (Ibid)

Perhaps the most resonant example of Bruguera’s ideas is also arguably the simplest. She

has proclaimed the need to ‘put Duchamp’s Urinal back in the restroom’ (Ibid). In doing

so she out-duchamps Duchamp.

Bruguera’s move removes art from the sphere of the commodity and of spectacle and

glory, in an act of profanation, and returns it to use. The urinal is just a urinal. Contra

Joseph Beuys’ claim that in the future ‘jedermann ist ein kunstler’, in what Agamben

calls the coming community nobody is an artist, not at least in the glorified sense that that

term has assumed in late capitalism. Here I interpret Bruguera use of the term useful not

to be understood in instrumental terms, but rather as a child uses what is available to her

in play. For a child an object has only use value, and not exchange value. In this sense it

is the opposite of art, as defined by Julian Stallabrass, quoted earlier, as representing ‘an

almost pure form of exchange’. As Agamben puts it ‘The toy is what belonged - once, no

longer - to the realm of the sacred or of the practical-economic’ (1993, 71). In ‘Praise of

Profanation’ he claims that

It is well known that the spheres of play and the sacred are closely connected.

Most of the games with which we are familiar derive from ancient sacred

ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that once belonged, broadly

speaking, to the religious sphere… In analyzing the relationship between games

and rites, Emile Benveniste shows that play not only derives from the sphere of

the sacred but also in some ways represents its overturning. (2007, 75)

For Agamben ‘play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without

simply abolishing it’ (76). It ‘deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to

common use the spaces that power had seized’ (77).

Perhaps the finest expression of the coming together of use and play is a work of art by

artist Jeremy Deller, working in collaboration with the arts organization Grizedale Arts in

the English Lake District. (Grizedale Arts are also part of the useful art network initiated

by Tania Bruguera). In 2004, as part of an initiative entitled ‘Romantic Detachment’,

critiquing the romantic ideas we entertain about other cultures. Deller commissioned a

painter of customized motorbikes to decorate a pair of tea urns and teapots, one of which

was given to Water Yeat, a small village in the Lake District, for use in their village hall,

and the other was sold to Tate at the Frieze Art Fair. The Tate version is accompanied by

a strict instruction that it is ‘not meant to be used’. Thus, in one neat move, Deller

profaned the sacred art object, and returned it to use. This is one of a large number of

playful projects that Grizedale Arts has been involved with since the end of the last

century.

Here then might be a new understanding of the role of critic; not to engage in judgments

on aesthetics or the effectiveness of a work of art, but to be critical of the whole apparatus

of the art market and indeed the art world, much as the great Franciscan thinkers of the

late middle ages were critical of the wealth of the papacy, and its failure to pursue the

Church’s eschatological mission. Thus, like the monastic orders of the middle ages art,

and art criticism, need perhaps to find a space outside the spectacular operations of

power, and to practice critical disengagement and reclusiveness as a means of resistance

to that power. Like those orders the basis of this withdrawal might be found in a refusal

of possession and an embrace of use.

References

Agamben, G. (1993). Infancy and History. Cambridge: Verso

Agamben, G. (2005). The Time that Remains. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press

Agamben, G. (2007). Profanations. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books

Agamben, G. (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press

Agamben, G. (2012). The Church and the Kingdom. London: Seagull Books

Agamben, G. (2013). The Highest Poverty. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press

Arte Util. http://arteutil.net/main/. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Benjamin, W. (1999). Selected writings. Vol. 1, 1913 – 1926, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press

Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Presses du réel

Bourriaud, N. (2009). ‘Altermodern Explained: Manifesto’. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/altermodern/explain-altermodern/altermodern-explainedmanifesto. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Debord, G. (1995). Society of the Spectacle. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books

Stallabrass, J. (1997). ‘Money, Disembodied Art, and the Turing Test for Aesthetics’. In Buck-Morss, S, Stallabrass, J., and Donskis, L. Ground Control: Technology and Utopia. London: Black Dog

Groys, B. (2008). Art Power. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Groys, B. (2010). ‘Weak Universalism’. E-flux Journal. No. 15. 04/2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-weak-universalism/. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Groys, B. (2012). Introduction to Antiphilosophy. Cambridge: Verso Books

Groys, B. (2012) ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Absolute Art’. Mousse Magazine. NO 36. Dec 2012. http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=914. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Harrison, E. (2009) ‘Altermodernism: The Age of the Stupid’. http://www.furtherfield.org/articles/altermodernism-age-stupid. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Philip Kennicot (2014), ‘As the price of art rises, it its value plummeting?’, The Washington Post. 7th Feb, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/as-the-price-of-art-rises-is-its-value-plummeting/2014/02/06/54b585e8-7190-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Mondzain, M. J. (2005). Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press

Richter, G. (1995). The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962 – 1993. London, New York. Thames and Hudson.

Salz, J. (2006). ‘Idol Thoughts. The Village Voice. 21st Feb, 2006. http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-02-21/art/idol-thoughts/full/. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Savà, P. (2012). ‘”God didn't die, he was transformed into money” - An interview with Giorgio Agamben’. http://libcom.org/library/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-sav%C3%A0. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

Stiegler, B. (2009) ‘Mystagogy: On Contemporary Art’. In Backstein, J, Birnbaum, D, and Wallenstein, S-O. Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art. Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press.

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Bio

Charlie Gere is Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for

Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, and author of Digital Culture (2002/2008),

Art, Time and Technology (2006), Community without Community in Digital Culture

(2010), co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art, 1960 – 1980 (2009)

and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2010), as well as many papers on art, philosophy

and technology.