Art In Its Time

Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

Paul Mattick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134554157
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Art In Its Time takes a close look at the way in which art has become integral to the everyday 'ordinary' life of modern society. It explores the prevalent notion of art as transcending its historical moment, and argues that art cannot be separated from the everyday as it often provides material to represent social struggles and class, to explore sexuality, and to think about modern industry and our economic relationships.

1: INTRODUCTION

The ten chapters that follow this introduction were first written, over about as many years, as lectures and essays for a variety of audiences and occasions. Assembled to form a book they present at once the problem of disjointedness and a tendency to repetition. I have left the latter alone, for the most part, in the hope of diminishing the effect of the former. Reading them through to revise them for the present publication, I was pleased to discover to what extent they are bound together by the recurrence of a small number of artists and writers on art: Eugène Delacroix, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Joshua Reynolds, and Andy Warhol; along with Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Clement Greenberg, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Friedrich Schiller, among others. The fabric created by the warp and woof of the works of these figures displays, if not an overall design, a coherent set of basic themes: the eighteenth-century origin of the modern practice of art; the nature of modernity as a period of social history and the place of art in it; the salience of gender categories in the theory as well as the practice of art; the conceptual opposition of art and commerce; the dynamic character of the social category of art, changing theoretically and practically along with the society in which it has its life.

By emphasizing the intimate relation between art and other historically specific features of modern society, I am violating a fundamental aspect of the idea of art, the contrast with what art writers generally call “everyday” or “ordinary” life (a common variant is exhibited in the title of Arthur Danto’s first booklength contribution to aesthetics, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace¹). While its underlying conception is seldom made explicit, it is clear that the contrast is meant to signify a radical separation of art from the social (and individual) circumstances in which it is produced and enjoyed, which then can only appear as its historical “context.”²

Art, in the first place, is supposed to transcend its historical moment: the category unites products from all epochs and areas, a unity represented physically by museum collections and intellectually by art history as a study of products from every human society. The museum physically separates art from the hustle and bustle of modern life, creating an apparently independent universe in which—in the words with which Gurnemanz in Parsifal describes the ritual of the Grail that Wagner no doubt identified with the mystic power of art—time has become space. Similarly, art history presents an autonomous narrative structured by such categories as tradition, influence, style, medium, and technique, a domain of relations between artworks.

In the second place, art represents a mode of value—aesthetic value— independent of practical interest. From the eighteenth century, when Kant characterized the aesthetic attitude to an object (in contrast with the moral or instrumental point of view) as marked by disinterest in its existence, to the twentieth, when the US Supreme Court defined “obscenity” in terms of the absence of artistic value, art’s significance has been distinguished from other modes of social importance.

With no apparent use-value, the work of art seems to acquire its exchangevalue simply by the expression in money of the art-lover’s desire. The miracle is that these objects can achieve prices higher than those of any other human products. This well-known paradox suggests a problem with the distinction of the aesthetic realm from that of the everyday. And a moment’s thought suggests that art as actual thing exists nowhere but within the “everyday life” from which its cultural construction separates it. The artist must pay rent on the studio, buy paint, seek dealers and buyers; his or her product, if it succeeds in entering the stream of art, will find a place in a home, a museum, a reproduction in a book or postcard. The work of art, to have a chance of entering that stream, must show its kinship to other things called art and so to the social world in which artists and art have their places.

That moment’s thought, however, has not as a rule disrupted the flow of aesthetics, art theory, and criticism from the eighteenth century until quite recently. This fact itself is evidently a key to the nature of art, and must be central to an engagement with the literature of art that wishes to provide a path to understanding this social reality constituted, like others in most societies, by activities both represented and misrepresented by the concepts and theories evolved to describe them. To put the same point in other words, these essays are meant as elements of a critical analysis of the ideology of art.

To call a discourse ideological is to read it differently than did its originators: in particular, to identify at its basis a set of assumptions not explicitly recognized by them. While the inhabitants of a mode of social life typically experience their cultural conventions as not only normal but natural, an outsider may seek to understand those conventions as the product of particular historical circumstances. This might be described as the anthropological point of view; to understand one’s own culture with some independence from its ideology, as I am attempting to do in this book, one must view it from something like an outsider’s perspective. Comparing it to other cultures is helpful; a variant required in any case is to view it historically, in the double sense of having not only an origin but also an imaginable endpoint in a future fundamental social transformation.³

Characteristic of modern ideology is the idea that culture has a history of its own, with a logic of thoughts operating independently of the other factors acting on the thinkers of those thoughts. It may even seem—as it did to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, to Hegel, and still to many contemporary thinkers—that social history as a whole is regulated by the progress of thought. This appearance acquires strength, as Marx and Engels pointed out in their influential treatment of ideology, from the existence of professional thinkers within the social division of labor.⁴ As the activity in which a particular group of people specialize, consciousness ceases to look like the necessary aspect of all social activity it is and appears as an autonomous domain, with its own history.

Only in relatively modern times has the set of practices grouped since the eighteenth century as the fine arts become an important element of ideology in this sense, demanding to be considered historically autonomous, part of the domain of “mind” alongside law, morality, religion, and philosophy, as opposed to that of productive labor or quotidian life generally. This peculiarity of the modern idea of art cannot be explained within the terms set by that idea. Art developed along with the commercialized mode of production that became capitalism, and it is only by understanding art as an aspect of this mode of production that the supposed antagonism between them (central to aesthetics)— and so the idea of art’s autonomy—can be understood.

How difficult it can be to attain the outsider’s anthropological perspective can be gauged by considering Terry Eagleton’s popular (at least among academics) effort to confront aesthetic theory as ideology, a book that itself employs the vocabulary of that ideology in speaking, for example, of the “debasement” of art as a branch of commodity production.⁵ Eagleton’s argument is that aesthetics, the intellectual product of a social system that both places its highest value on human subjectivity and requires the subject’s submission to class oppression, at once expresses basic ideological themes of modern society and provides a powerful challenge to those themes. In its freedom from social and economic utility—threatened by commodification—art provides “a utopian glimpse of an alternative to this sorry condition,”⁶ in principle shareable by everyone. Such an argument, despite its author’s wishes, restates fundamental elements of the aesthetic ideology against which it is directed; in particular, the idea of a polarity between creative freedom and the compulsions of the market.

Renaissance artists laid the groundwork for the modern ideology of art when they struggled for social status by insisting that they practiced not a craft but a liberal art, the object-making hand merely fulfilling the dictates of the imaginative mind. The nineteenth-century modernization of art that replaced working to the order of religious, state, and private patrons with producing on speculation for the market redefined it as the expression of individual genius. In fact, artworks are produced by independent entrepreneurs (or, latterly, professionals, employed by nonprofit cultural or educational institutions) rather than by wageworkers. Art can therefore incarnate free individuality, validating the social dominance of those who collect and enjoy it, and signifying a cultural end to which the making of money becomes only a means. The freedom of the artist, including his or her freedom to starve, provides a model for that of the ruling elite (who have the education and leisure necessary for the appreciation of art) purchased by the unfreedom of the many. It is precisely its distance from market considerations, its “non-economic” character, that gives art its social meaning— and its market value.

Aesthetics, along with the artistic ideologies at work in critical and pedagogical theory and in the history and psychology of art, consists of theoretical constructions open like other discursive products to critical analysis. But if, in accordance with such analysis, art is seen to derive its meaning not from some autonomous realm of spiritual significance but from the social world in which it exists, art objects themselves must be able to embody ideology. It is not in principle difficult, though it may take ingenious and scholarly work, to identify ideological elements in the aspects of artworks that have or can be given linguistic representation, such as Zola’s biologism or the vision of a fruitful natural order crowned by aristocratic ownership presented by some English landscape painting around 1800. But since the nineteenth century the question of artistic meaning has increasingly been addressed in terms of a contrast between the “content”—stateable in words—of artworks and their nondiscursive “form.” Especially after the development of abstract art, the purely aesthetic element in art has been identified with those attributes—color, line, and handling, in the case of painting, for instance—peculiar to particular artistic media. Can ideology be interpretively identified in artistic form?

This question provides a meeting point for two important problems: the relation between experience and what is said about it in words; and the means and nature of the production of meaning in non-discursive modes of signification, such as gesture, sound, and imagery. The first of these arises as soon as ideology is understood as a systematic rendering of social practices—such as behavior at home, school, and work, voting or not voting, reading newspapers, watching television—that people ordinarily engage in without thinking too much about what they are doing. What is decisive in social life, as Raymond Williams says, “is not only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings and values.”⁷ Williams wrote of “structures of feeling,” meaning “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind.”⁸ This may be compared to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” dispositional schemata of action and perception, learned in the family and reshaped as individuals move through social institutions like school and workplace. Habitus includes, for instance, the unconscious details of carriage, tone of voice, vocabulary, and differentiated response—reactions of enjoyment, displeasure, or indifference—to objects and activities, that allow people to sort each other out by social class. It involves for some a sense of being at home with works of art, and a felt assumption of a high place for art in the scale of social values. We can think of ideology as a systematizing (and simplifying, since abstracting) presentation of such structures of feeling and action as natural forms of experience. Thus the doctrine of “aesthetic experience” defines art, a cultural practice, as the natural producer of a particular psychological response (if only on the part of certain, properly sensitive individuals).

But why should language be seen as the only medium for such systematization? Even within the linguistic domain, the plot summary of a novel leaves out much that readers might look for in the work, and that a writer might have labored to put into it; no description of a painting is a substitute for the visual experience of the picture itself; and the question of the “meaning” of music antedated the development of abstract composition, in eighteenth-century debates about the relation between music and text in opera. Yet it is hard to see how a piano sonata or an abstract painting can be understood as exhibiting features of an ideology. Can the meanings inherent in such works, or identifiable in the formal aspects of narrative or descriptive art, be capable of ideology, presenting people’s experience of their social existence in ways that occlude the historical specificity of that experience?

Theodor Adorno argued that it was the very irreducibility of an artwork to its description—a version of Kant’s idea of the autonomy of art, its independence as a mode of meaning and value from other modes of experience—that constituted its social significance. Music, the most abstract art, provided the clearest case. Adorno saw the music of Viennese classicism as ideological by virtue of its submission to formal laws of composition, by which “it closes itself off against the manifest portrayal of society in which it has its enclaves,” hiding class conflict with harmonically structured wholeness.⁹ He believed that the new music of the second Viennese school, in contrast, was “no longer an ideology,” because in its hermeticism and refusal to please an audience it “surrendered the deception of harmony” and made the alienation of the oppressive class system in which music has its being audible in the rigors of serial technique.¹⁰

Despite the brilliance of Adorno’s writing the relation he discovers between Arnold Schoenberg’s liberation of dissonance and the avowal of social disharmony is only a suggestive analogy. Elsewhere he compares serial composition to bureaucratic rationalization and the relation between theme and variation in sonata form to the dialectic of individual and society. Such analogies or allegorical readings can be stimulating and even revealing, but they can also be arbitrary or mechanical. At best they point to further, deeper questions about the origin of the seeming similarity between such disparate orders of social reality as economic organization and compositional technique.

The relation between the two tends to be mediated in cultural theory by some conception of “world view” or “class outlook.”¹¹ Such conceptions demand further exploration of the relation between artistic activity and the social groups to whose outlook it supposedly gives formal definition. One path art historians have taken into this territory is the study of patronage, ranging from examination of the constraints set on earlier artistic activity by the religious or courtly commissioners of work to more recent examples such as the effect on Abstract Expressionist painting of its utilization by the American ruling class as a propaganda weapon in the Cold War. Serge Guilbaut, for instance, concluded with regard to the latter case that American “[a]vant-garde art succeeded because the work and the ideology that supported it, articulated in the painters’ writings as well as conveyed in images, coincided fairly closely with the ideology that came to dominate American political life after the 1948 presidential elections.”¹² (I consider a related argument of T. J. Clark’s, formulated partly in re...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM
• 3: ART AND MONEY
• 4: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
• 5: THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
• 6: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF ART
• 7: PORK AND PORCELAIN
• 8: THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
• 9: THE ANDY WARHOL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
• 10: THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
• 11: CLASSLESS TASTE