9.5 Theses on Art and Class

Ben Davis

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781608462681
• eBook ISBN: 9781608462865
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art to the troubled status of "outsider" and street art to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself.

Ben Davis currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.

Notes

Introduction

1. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2011), 98.

One: Art and Class

1. Damien Cave, “Tweaking the Big-Money Art World on Its Own Turf,” New York Times, December 6, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/arts/design/07powhida.html.

2. Ibid.

3. Sarah Thornton, “Top 10 Reasons NOT to Write about the Art Market,” TAR Magazine (Fall 2012): 82–83.

4. Quoted in Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher, “Doyen of American Critics Turns His Back on the ‘Nasty, Stupid’ World of Modern Art,” Observer, October 27, 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/oct/28/art-critic-dave-hickey-quits-art-world.

5. Charles Saatchi, “The Hideousness of the Art World,” Guardian, December 2, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/02/saatchi-hideousness-art-world.

6. “The super-rich dominate the mainstream image of the art market, just as they do much to control the political agenda. Yet huge and diverse realms lie beyond the culture and the politics of this tiny elite. The years of the art boom were also those of social media, as millions started to show their photographs, videos, writings and art online. Many of them found that it is not so hard to make things that look like contemporary art. Another reflection—complex, contradictory, vulgar and popular, and in some respects less desolating—lies there.” Julian Stallabrass, “A Sad Reflection on the Art World,” Art Newspaper, December 2012, www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/A+sad+reflection+on+the+art+world/28099.

7. Jerry Saltz, “The 2006 Revue,” Artnet, December 22, 2006, www.artnet.com/magazineus /reviews/robinson/robinson12–22–06.asp.

8. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1972).

9. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Shierry and Samuel Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 32.

10. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 44.

11. Michael Hardt, “Immaterial Labor and Artistic Production,” Rethinking Marxism 17, no. 2 (April 2005): 176.

12. Michael Hardt, “Production and the Distribution of the Common,” in Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, ed. Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009), 52.

13. See John Parker, “Burgeoning Bourgeoisie,” Economist, February 12, 2009, www.economist .com/node/13063298?story_id=13063298&source=hptextfeature.

14. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (Ithaca and London: ILR Press, 2000), 11.

15. Ibid., 4.

16. To my knowledge, however, there has not been much work done systematically using the Marxist theory of class to understand the position of visual artists. John Molyneux mentions the theory briefly in a footnote to his fine pamphlet Rembrandt and Revolution (London: Redwords, 2001), 55: “Impressionistic evidence suggests that in the capitalist epoch most artists came from a middle to lower middle class background (though in the 20th century there has been a significant working class minority coming through the art colleges), but it is important to understand that the objective class position of the large majority of artists, whatever their background, is petty bourgeois in that predominantly they are self-employed or small employers selling, not their labour power, but the products of their labour where possible to the rich.”

17. Zweig, Working Class Majority, 16.

18. “As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.” Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 254.

19. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 257.

20. Erik Hurst and Benjamin Wild Pugsley, What Do Small Businesses Do? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, August 2011), www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Programs/ES/ BPEA/2011_fall_bpea_papers/2011_fall_bpea_conference_hurst.pdf.

21. Zweig, Working Class Majority, 37.

22. “Self-employed artists’ careers display most of the attributes of the entrepreneurial career form: the capacity to create valued output through the production of works for sale; the motivation for deep commitment and high productivity associated with their occupational independence (deriving from the capacity to control their own work, a strong sense of personal achievement through the production of tangible outputs and the ability to set their own pace); and a high degree of risk-taking, as shown by the highly skewed distribution and high variability of earnings.” Pierre-Michel Menger, “Artistic Labor Markets,” in The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Victor A. Ginsburgh and David Throsby (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2006), 774.

23. The exact total of people who make their living as visual artists is unclear, since the “fine artist” category lumps together “art directors” and “animators” with “painters” and “sculptors.” National Endowment for the Arts, “NEA Research Note #105: Artists and Arts Workers in the United States,” October 2011, www.nea.gov/research/Notes/105.pdf.

24. Some 212,236 workers were identified as belonging to the vague category that includes “art directors; craft artists; painters, sculptors, and illustrators; multimedia artists; animators,” ibid., 4–5.

25. Norman Potter, “Is a Designer an Artist?,” in Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2007), 32.

26. John Schmitt and Nath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• ART AND CLASS
• ART AND POLITICS
• ART AND ITS AUDIENCES
• ART AND THEORY
• CONCLUSIONS
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author