Against Art and Culture

Liam Dee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9789811070914
• eBook ISBN: 9789811070921
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering a negative definition of art in relation to the concept of culture, this book establishes the concept of 'art/culture' to describe the unity of these two fields around named-labour, idealised creative subjectivity and surplus signification. Contending a conceptual and social reality of a combined 'art/culture', this book demonstrates that the failure to appreciate the dynamic totality of art and culture by its purported negators is due to almost all existing critiques of art and culture being defences of a 'true' art or culture against 'inauthentic' manifestations, and art thus ultimately restricting creativity to the service of the bourgeois commodity regime. While the evidence that art/culture enables commodification has long been available, the deduction that art/culture itself is fundamentally of the world of commodification has failed to gain traction. By applying a nuanced analysis of both commodification and the larger systems of ideological power, the book considers how the 'surplus' of art/culture is used to legitimate the bourgeois status quo rather than unravel it. It also examines possibilities for a post-art/culture world based on both existing practices that challenge art/culture identity as well as speculations on the integration of play and aesthetics into general social life. An out-and-out negation of art and culture, this book offers a unique contribution to the cultural critique landscape.

© The Author(s) 2018

Liam DeeAgainst Art and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7092-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: What Is Art/Culture and Why Should You Be Against It?

Liam Dee¹

(1)

Australian National University , Canberra, Australia

End Abstract

A Portrait of the Artist as a Risible Wanker

From Gilbert and Sullivan’s japes about the pretensions of aesthetes in Patience to contemporary galleries selling Rothko Paint-by-Numbers Mugs (Case 2008),¹ an easy laugh is always to be had at the expense of art. Nor is this satirical mirth restricted to obscurantist ‘high art’ , with the directors, authors and rock stars that make up ‘popular culture ’ equally vulnerable to mockery over the pomposity of their ‘creative vision’. Across the spectrum of art and popular culture there is a constant spray of derision at artistic hubris, privilege and hollow claims of transcendence. Yet no matter how broad or vitriolic the ridicule it is hard to find examples where either art or popular culture is denounced to the point of a full negation.

The aim of this book is to understand and counter this hesitancy and the first part of that is to overcome the separation of the supposedly different worlds of art and popular culture. The main reason why so many ‘anti-art’ positions tend to be riddled with exception clauses and caveats is because they are usually only against one particular form of art. Despite the generally accepted position that the boundaries between high art and popular culture are flimsy and often arbitrary, critiques tend to be either populist attacks on high art or jeremiads against the aesthetic poverty of pop culture. In truth the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘culture’ is the first hurdle one needs to get over before a substantive negation can be undertaken.

What Is Art/Culture?

Art as Substance Versus Pop Culture as Mere Style

In keeping with the general condition of journalistic amnesia one revelation that never fails to re-amaze is that ‘comics are no longer just for kids!’ ‘Once camp, kitsch and cartoonish, comic books have come of age’ (Thompson 2001, title block). This sentiment comes from an article on the ‘coming of age’ of comics, nominally evidenced by the films X-Men and Unbreakable, yet it is really about the ‘adult’ re-invention of superhero comics in the 1980s. The fact that this is news in 2001 tells you how often this non-story of pop culture being as complex as ‘art’ bears repeating.² Particularly noteworthy for David Thompson (2001, para. 10) is that:

Set against the ‘serious’ contemporary art currently in favour – art that is conspicuously devoid of content or achievement in its construction – these comic books are examples of true modern art. Indeed, Watchmen, Arkham Asylum and Marvels are works of artistic devotion, requiring a lucidity of imagination and a meticulous commitment measured in years – qualities that seem beyond the capabilities of the art world’s latest pretenders. Tracey Emin ’s soiled bed and Sarah Lucas’s vaginal kebab jokes are exercises in self-preoccupation, communicating nothing but the nervous vanity of their makers and conforming entirely to an age in which celebrity is all.

In a nutshell we have both the conventional way in which ‘art’ is defined against ‘popular culture ’ and an example of just how porous this definitional contrast is. Of course Thompson still believes in this border of ‘artistic devotion’, it is just that he is prepared to swap Tracey Emin at the checkpoint for Alan Moore, reflecting a general acceptance that any form of popular culture can be just as ‘complex’ as any venerated gallery masterpiece, if not more so. But all this really tells us is that ‘popular culture’ can be just as good as ‘art’ or that some so-called ‘art’ is as bad as ‘popular culture’. All the rhetoric about ‘content’ and ‘substance’ is itself devoid of content and substance, either being little more than vacuous opinion (‘Gee, that Mona Lisa sure is deep’) or else so broad as to basically describe nearly anything (‘Gee, that Game of Thrones is as complex as the predator–prey relationship in a sewer ecosystem’).

Vague and Positive: Defining the Indefinable

Indeed it would seem that ‘art’ and ‘culture’ are supposed to exist in some quantum field where any attempt to locate them definitively is impossible. Raymond Williams ([1976] 1983, 87) notes that culture is one of the ‘most complicated words in the English language’ and, while we laugh at old-fashioned definitions based on moral edification, the concept of ‘art’ is still dominated by mystical bullshit. On the one hand there is an implied notion that both are indefinable and yet also conceptually crammed full of grandiose and amazing defining qualities.

Sure we have some notion that art and culture are inherently good, that they involve working in particular mediums (indeed an ‘artist’ still acts as a default synonym for ‘painter’), that they are vehicles for ‘personal expression’, and that beauty and elegance are constitutive. More importantly there is a widespread belief that what art and culture share is a timeless, natural quality that unifies everything from Werner Herzog, to tribal ceremonies, medieval religious iconography and Palaeolithic cave paintings. Yet these definitions are, at best, overly inclusive and thus not particularly useful. More often they are vapid metaphysical drivel without a shred of decent evidence to back them up. Nonetheless everyone from artists to government departments to philosophers continually perpetuates them.

Thus when you ask artists for definitions you’ll still get stuff like this: ‘What is art for? To make meaning happen!’ (Antin 2007, 204). Even if we assume multi-media artist Eleanor Antin is not talking about your common-or-garden ‘meaning’ but a grandiose ‘Meaning-of-Life’, there is no indication as to how art does this, just the usual assumption that art is deep without having to be proven so. Perhaps the problem is that practitioners are too close and are liable to the poetic excess they work in. To get a better grasp on the subject we need a bit of distance provided by art critics:

‘Art may be hard to define, but whatever it is, it’s a step removed from reality.’ In one breath, [music critic, Anthony] Tommasini, a modest man, says that he can’t define it; doesn’t know what it is; nevertheless will define it; will tell us, in effect, that he knows exactly what it is, when he writes the words ‘a step removed from reality.’ (Lentricchia and McAuliffe 2002, 351)

Soon the dreams of anti-matter engines will be realised simply by placing Rodin sculptures and Picasso’s blue-period paintings into a rocket; releasing energy as they obliterate the matter of reality. Seriously though, while the ‘virtual’ nature of art could be a useful distinction, the way it is conceived makes all forms of play and entertainment art, as well as ignoring all the ways art is immersed in grubby day-to-day business and politics. Perhaps more important is the stress on art being hard to define, something that seems to persist even in the realms of state officialdom.

Thus, though the distinction between art and ‘non-art’ is one the law has put its considerable wisdom to revealing, numerous cases, such as Whistler v. Ruskin , Hahn v. Duveen, Brancusi v. United States and the Mapplethorpe trial (Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center), have created impermanent and contradictory rulings, with judges usually resolving cases without having to define art and indeed going out of their way to avoid doing so³ (Mansfield 2005, 30n27; Giry 2002, para. 33). This same uncertainty exists in the government bureaucracies whose purview covers art and culture:

The [UK] Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS’s) website admits ‘There is no official government definition of “culture”.’ Efforts have begun at various levels – from UNESCO, to the European Union, to DCMS itself – to tackle this issue of language and definition, and progress is being made, but as the DCMS’s Evidence Toolkit insists, when it comes to culture, ‘There are no shared definitions, systems and methodologies.’ (Holden 2006, 11)

Clearly we need to go to the rarefied height of philosophy, where meaning is paramount, to nail a definition. For Jean Baudrillard (2005, 63) ‘Art is a form. A form is something that does not exactly have a history, but a destiny.’ ‘For me, form has nothing to do with focusing positively on something, nothing to do with the presence of an object. Form rather has to do with challenge, seduction, reversibility’ (ibid., 84). So we can test for art-ness by seeing how challenging, seductive and reversible some ‘form’ is? Is art the only thing that can be a ‘form’? Well I guess we should expect such enigmas from a postmodernist , a philosophical tendency itself inspired by the hothouse hyperbole of modern art. But even a more sober French philosopher, like Alain Badiou , obsessed with the rigours of mathematics, has a definition that reads like a teenager’s poem:

I propose to say that a world is an artistic one, a situation of art, a world of art when it proposes to us a relation between chaotic disposition of sensibility and what is acceptable as a form. So an artistic situation, in general, is always something like [a] relation between a chaotic disposition of sensibility in general (what is in the physical, what is in the audible, and in general) and what is a form. So it’s a relation (an artistic world) between sensibility and form. (Badiou [1997] 2005, para. 20)

Of course one might ask what is not a relation between ‘sensibility’ and ‘form’? Nose-picking? Accountancy? What in human culture is not a massaging of the ‘chaos’ of the corporeal into ‘form’? The separation of ideas from visceral affect where, art notwithstanding, we are either brains-in-jars or pure sensual Id, is inconsistent with lived experience as, to quote Sebastiaan Faber (2004, 141 emphases in original), we don’t ‘just have ideas but always actively live them’. Even if you could defend a notion of the purely conceptual (a text that is absorbed straight into the brain without the sense of sight or touch or any emotions interceding) and perceptual (an orgasm that escapes any linguistic categorisation, including the word orgasm) these would be such extreme situations that they would hardly help define art separated from the rest of normal human social life. Even Badiou ([1997] 2005, para. 20) himself admits how poor his definition is, though not for the reasons that I point out:

It’s a completely abstract definition, but you can see the nature of the definition. So, if you want, the state of affairs in the artistic world is always a relation between something like our experimentation of chaotic sensibility in general, and the distinction, which is a moving distinction, between form and inform, or something like that.

Yeah, something like that.

So what about analytical philosophy , which is all about rigorous definitions rather than the stoner hermeneutics and poetic inexactitude of the ‘Continental’ intelligentsia? We are not off to a good start when one of the most respected and venerable figures of ‘analytical aesthetics’, Arthur C. Danto (2013, 38 emphasis added), admits that his ‘intuition was this: The artwork is a material object, some of whose properties belong to the meaning, and some of which do not.’ So we are still in the realm of gut feelings and insights that are both banal and silly (an artwork is a ‘material object’ but only part of it has ‘meaning’ and the rest is as meaningless as a non-art object like a stop-sign or swastika).

From another analytical aesthete we find that going with your intuition, rather than being all, like, uptight about facts ’n’ stuff, is also the way to go:

So long...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: What Is Art/Culture and Why Should You Be Against It?
• 2. Artistic Differences: In Search of a Negation
• 3. Artistic License: The Catechisms of Art/Culture
• 4. Artistic Freedom: Privilege and New Products
• 5. That’s Showbiz! Artistic Form and Control
• 6. Conclusion: O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie
• Backmatter