Images of Power and the Power of Images

Control, Ownership, and Public Space

Judith Kapferer, Judith Kapferer

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857455154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Real places and events are constructed and used to symbolize abstract formulations of power and authority in politics, corporate practice, the arts, religion, and community. By analyzing the aesthetics of public space in contexts both mundane and remarkable, the contributors examine the social relationship between public and private activities that impart meaning to groups of people beyond their individual or local circumstances. From a range of perspectives—anthropological, sociological, and socio-cultural—the contributors discuss road-making in Peru, mass housing in Britain, an unsettling traveling exhibition, and an art fair in London; we explore the meaning of walls in Jerusalem, a Zen garden in Japan, and religious themes in Europe and India. Literally and figuratively, these situations influence the ways in which ordinary people interpret their everyday worlds. By deconstructing the taken for- granted definitions of social value (democracy, equality, individualism, fortune), the authors reveal the ideological role of imagery and imagination in a globalized political context.

Chapter 1

Twilight of the Enlightenment

The Art Fair, the Culture Industry,
and the ‘Creative Class’

JUDITH KAPFERER

In Western Europe and North America today, the reconfiguring of the ideologies and institutions of state apparatuses has significant consequences for the arts of postmodern society in the dispensing of social, political, and cultural power and influence. Taking the social situation of the art market at the Frieze Art Fair in London from 2006–2009 as the grounds of my analysis, I propose to investigate here some of the ways by which late modernity has reworked the values of national and post-national thinking in the direction of taken-for-granted meanings of class and status. Class, in the traditional sense of relation to the means of production, and status, as social esteem identified by lifestyle, are everywhere in the process of being breached and overcome by the efforts of individuals to secure and maintain positions of prestige and a favorable relation to the socio-economic practices of the post-industrial world.

Privatization and globalization are the twin pillars upon which current evaluations of social power and influence rest. In the arts, as elsewhere, the legitimation of private wealth and corporate profit is essential to the legitimation of state power (Habermas 1980); indeed, the one supports the other. The fiscal policies of the state mirror the financial decisions of the major transnational business institutions, and this is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than by the state of the arts and their relations with commerce and industry.

This chapter essays a critique of the ‘creative industries’ (Caves 2000), ‘creative economy’ (Howkins 2002), and ‘Creative Class’ (Florida 2002) as examples of the shifting assessments of those cultural productions that cater to a culture-consuming society while belittling a culture-debating one (Habermas 1989). My purpose is to tease out some of the strands of contention in relation to the advent of the ‘creative industries’ as a postmodern financial and transnational phenomenon. The analysis I propose turns on an assumption that the core Enlightenment traditions of criticality, rationality, radical doubt, skepticism, and argumentation have been steadily eroded throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries (and indeed earlier), being replaced by an intense concentration on material profit and an easy acceptance of unequal economic power, at least in the Western capitalist nations. These outcomes, supported by state politics and policies, are grounded in beliefs about the naturalness of social inequalities as individual difference, rather than on a structural understanding of social formations. Central to this stance is the separation of the public sphere from the private domain, a separation that finds the former shrinking while the latter expands triumphantly.

That public sphere consists of two modes: the first is composed of the physical and concrete places and spaces of public encounter and interaction, and the second is the non-material world of the dissemination of knowledge and ideas beyond physical boundaries. I contend that the rise of the culture-consuming society of contemporary social formations and the waning of the culture-debating society of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have consequences for the collective culture of those democratic, civil, and civic manifestations of public spirit thought to have been at the core of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century understandings of public rectitude and probity. The spaces of public encounter, I suggest, are iconic with the spaces of discussion and debate that, from time to time, flourish in the interstices of financial and commercial institutions and personal budgetary concerns. Examples include university and college seminars and tutorials; public lectures and talks in art galleries, museums, and civic auditoriums; and popular demonstrations of a political nature in places such as Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park in London (see Kapferer 2008).

Such is the Frieze Art Fair, where what Habermas (1989) calls the ‘culture-debating public’ (of students, connoisseurs, artists, and critics) comes face to face with the culture-consuming society of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ([1944] 1972) despised culture industry—the buyers and sellers of cultural products. Frieze, like all other fairs of its type (e.g., Basel, Miami Beach, Berlin, Cologne, Turin, Venice), cuts to the heart of the relations between art, economics, and aesthetics. Here I am using the term ‘culture’ in its restricted usage as an expression of works of the liberal arts—art, music, literature, etc. This distinction is important because of the way in which culture is central to the four fields of cultural consumption explored in this chapter: (1) the culture industry; (2) cultural studies; (3) the creative industries; and (4) the ‘Creative Class’, the producers and consumers of creativity. Clearly, there are labyrinthine connections between and among these fields (only some of which I pursue here), and they all revolve around the central conception of the art market and the art fair as commercial sites.

I explore the idea of an increasingly influential fraction of the ruling class that supports the production and consumption of—and competition for—artwork of all kinds in the pursuit of financial profit and enhanced social status. At the same time, the culture-debating role of art workers has consistently diminished in favor of stock market quotations and journalists’ opinions. In this connection, I investigate the social relations of cultural production and consumption by reference to art fairs and the role of the state in fostering the arts in cooperation with the corporate interests of the art market.

Fascination with the arts, culture, and the creative industries has grown apace since Horkheimer and Adorno first used the term ‘culture industry’ in 1944 to designate the world of the mass media and the burgeoning communications industries of the immediate post–World War II period in North America and northern Europe. From the 1950s onward, the purveyors of persuasion strategies, opinion polling, and market research filled the airwaves and other means of mass communication with new methods of promoting the policies and practices of governments, businesses, and industries. Fueled by the inventors and designers of electronic and technologically advanced devices, especially in television and film, artists of all kinds were quick to exploit opportunities for the expression of new art forms in video, graffiti, ‘happenings’, performances, and installations, whether temporary or permanent. The expansion and popularization of these novel or rejuvenated artistic techniques, along with the rash of mixed-media messages that accompanied them, produced an explosion of fresh approaches to painting, sculpture, craft, architecture, urban planning, music, speech, literature, performance, and kinetic experimentation. Today, the changing topography of the art world can be read in the events taking place at art fairs, biennials, and exhibitions all over the world.

After World War II, the victorious nation-states of ‘the West’—striving to convince people that, despite commodity shortages and a million private griefs, the war had been worth it—were at pains to improve their image as freedom-loving, optimistic, employment-dispensing benefactors in manufacturing and industry. Their largesse was extended to the erstwhile Axis enemy, the Federal Republic of Germany, in the form of the Marshall Plan (sponsored by the United States) as a means of restarting the Western European economy and shoring up the fragile borders between Eastern and Western Europe. The Great Depression was forgotten, and consumerism spread rapidly. Offe’s (1984) work on the contradictions of the welfare state—inherent in the drive to maintain payments to the unemployed, for example—could be seen as a direct result of the need of the state, as expressed by public authorities, to maintain consumption levels.

The period of the Cold War entrenched the manipulation of public opinion in ways both subtle and blatant (Marchand 1989; Mattelart 1979), a practice continuing today in, for example, the policy of ‘embedded journalism’, in which news reporters are attached to front-line combatants in theaters of war. The expansion of the advertising industry and the increasing number of film and, later, television productions (both commercial and state-subsidized) that extolled the ideology of ‘choice’ attested to the power of the mass media and the economic benefit of cultures of control. The censure of the role of propagandists and specialized agents of persuasion was at the heart of the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry, in which its members laid out their fears for the fate of democracy in a world controlled by those same experts, referred to these days as ‘spin doctors’.¹ The use of those techniques was exposed by, among others, Herbert Marcuse ([1964] 2002: xxxix) as “the paralysis of criticism” in a “society without opposition” and also characterized as “repressive tolerance” (Marcuse 1969: 95; see also Herman and Chomsky 1998). Yet this critique is now submerged in a welter of self-congratulatory practices that throw together artists, writers, architects, critics, and commentators—all the stars of the arts firmament—whose purpose is the production and dissemination of innovative or merely fashionable cultural action.

Central to the development of the modern culture industry has been the rise of an academic territory known as cultural studies, a perversion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s original definition of the culture industry, although now thought to be cognate with it. The vicissitudes of university politics and economics in the post-Thatcher era in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth were grounded in a belief in economic rationalism and a celebration of superficiality and immediate gratification. Cultural studies allowed for a rationalization of those intellectual pursuits considered to be impractical and/or merely recreational (e.g., faculties of arts and departments of literature, languages, history, philosophy, and social science). These departments were often cheap to run (only books and teachers were required) and popular with students, but the interests of what was called ‘the real world’ were bent on the erasure of all studies not believed to have a straightforward application to economic, commercial, and industrial fields—that did not attend to the training, as opposed to the education, of the rising generation. The solution was to constitute cultural studies as a refuge for some few scholars of the old disciplines and to undertake a massive revamping of former academic divisions to encompass studies of, for example, communications, media, journalism, advertising, and so forth, thereby ushering in practical training regimens by the back door.

The pursuit of cultural ignorance has been an offshoot of the free trade in university studies and other areas of ‘higher’ education and has been much lauded by the cultural and creative industries, which have indeed, along with government policies and directives, been instrumental in their creation. An expanded field of activity, of practical training and studies relevant to employment opportunities in a post-industrial world, means that a range of new qualifications and regulations has been established in educational institutions at all levels. These moves have the effect of controlling and managing the aspirations of young people in matters of career choice and suitable routes to specific career goals. The direction and disciplinarity of the world of workers is further constrained by means of quality controls and performance reviews on the job, smacking of school tests, report cards, and the instigation of standardized ratings of success.

The post-industrial field of the jobs market and its relevant qualifications produce an enormous selection of burgeoning occupational opportunities in the newly designated creative industries. These include not only creative workers in what might reasonably have been thought of as creative activities, such as the arts, technics, and design, as well as isolated inventors and scientists. One economist, Richard Florida (2002: ix) also includes, for example, members of business corporations who could be thought of as inventing new methods of production and distribution of valued goods. “[I]f you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law or some other profession, you are a member” of what Florida calls the ‘Creative Class’—which in the United States alone totals 38 million, more than 30 percent of the workforce (ibid.). The creative industries, according to another economist, Richard E. Caves (2000: 1), include “goods and services that we broadly associate with cultural, artistic, or simply entertainment value. They include book and magazine publishing, the visual arts (painting, sculpture), the performing arts (theatre, opera, concerts, dance), sound recordings, cinema and TV films.” Howkins (2002: 123) lists advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software, television and radio, toys and games, and video games. Florida (2002: 46) cites Business Week as introducing the “concept of a ‘Creative Economy’ ”—a notion to which he and others make constant reference.

An enormous number of enterprises have sprung up, climbing on the creativity bandwagon since the late 1990s. They include, for example, businesses such as Creative and Cultural Skills, whose mission is “to turn creative and cultural talents into productive skills and jobs” under the aegis of Britain’s National Skills Academy’s Creative and Cultural sector. The company offers a Cultural Leadership Programme and Creative Apprenticeships.² A favorite term in relation to management is ‘passion’—a passion for ‘enterprise’ or, in the case of Deutsche Bank’s advertising, for ‘performance’. Business schools highlight their courses on corporate entrepreneurship, creativity, and motivation, while many have an underpinning of psychology. The emphasis placed on leadership, team and individual entrepreneurship, employment opportunities, and so forth points to the purpose of these initiatives as sectors of a business-dominated focus on production and profit. On 18 November 2008, Global Entrepreneurship Week was opened with fanfare, lauding the ways in which “young entrepreneurs will be the key to kickstarting the economy.”³ The nexus between creativity and economics is indeed a tightly knit one.

A Culture-Debating Society

Like Adorno (1991), Jürgen Habermas (1989) laments the rise of a culture industry that operates...