Art in the After-Culture

Ben Davis

• Éditeur: Haymarket Books
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642594836
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Art & Politics

"This kaleidoscopic collection will help you see and comprehend the world anew—which is, in my book, what good art should do."
—Astra Taylor It is a scary and disorienting time for art, as it is a scary and disorienting time in general. Aesthetic experience is both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection with them. The self-image of art as a social good is collapsing under the weight of capitalism's dysfunction.

In these incisive essays, art critic Ben Davis makes sense of our extreme present as an emerging "after-culture"—a culture whose forms and functions are being radically reshaped by cataclysmic events. In the face of catastrophe, he holds out hope that reckoning with the new realities of art, technology, activism, and the media, can help us weather the super-storms of the future.

Chapter 1

Connoisseurship and Critique

What are we actually talking about when we talk about art? What kind of social energies does it encode? What are its capacities and what are its limits? These are basic questions, and yet strangely difficult to answer in a straightforward way. It is almost as if “art,” as a field, is committed to not yielding up simple answers.

At a minimum, a fan of contemporary art will be someone who enjoys spotting the telltale signs and styles of artists and accumulating and exercising knowledge about them. Without knowing anything else, such a disposition suggests a way of looking that is deliberately defined by setting itself off against others as more informed and more invested—a fact that connects it to a whole range of implicit questions about status, education, and class. The investment in educated looking can lead equally to an open-hearted curiosity about the many unexpected ways that creativity manifests or to a close-minded cultivation of arbitrary cultural distinctions.

Trying to navigate this terrain, I’ve gone back to questions of taste and distinction, and how they have been enmeshed with the development of our unequal and rapaciously alienating capitalist society. I realize that writing an essay on Marxism and connoisseurship probably seems something like writing a Marxist theory of dressage. Yet when it comes to the posturing around art, discussions about claiming its apparatus of prestige, on the one hand, or rejecting its culture of entitlement, on the other, still take up a lot of bandwidth. These questions even have a political (or at least proto-political) dimension, in terms of what energies writing about art seeks to connect with—the gestures of rejecting snobbishness and obscurantism versus those of rejecting commercialization and anti-intellectualism speak to different kinds of grievances and connect with different senses of what is wrong with the world.

In art today, “connoisseurship” immediately evokes a kind of old-guard gatekeeping that is unfashionable—deep looking, an eye for subtle markers of historical merit, a commitment to fine-grained distinctions of quality, and an obsession with the signature traces of the unique artist. “No moment of the discipline’s history has been more reviled,” one scholarly article puts it. “Connoisseurship has become a byword for snobbery, greed, and professional mystification.”¹ Speaking at a conference on “The Educated Eye,” one British Museum curator put the matter even more starkly: “[I would] rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty penknife than describe myself as a connoisseur.”²

Yet the interesting thing is that, as art has fled from its historical association with connoisseurship, the very same virtues have experienced a boom in the culture beyond the gallery and the museum. Everywhere people have been encouraged to style themselves as discriminating consumers, possessed of obscure and specific knowledge about the objects they acquire. As if by magic, the recent past has conjured up entire new fields of connoisseurship.

One hundred years ago, when the classic connoisseurs of art like Bernard Berenson and Max Friedländer were at the height of their prestige, Henry Ford’s Model T had just introduced the automobile as the prototypical mass industrial product. In the new millennium, interest in collectible cars among moneyed baby boomers has been as fierce or fiercer than investment in traditional status symbols like art or wines. Symposia with titles like “Connoisseurship and the Collectible Car” promise the knowledge necessary to navigate this new terrain. “The car is always an assemblage,” advised one sage, “not just an object, but a bundle of stories, paperwork, contexts, as well as parts.”³

“I always call my cars ‘moveable’ art,” one collector said in 2019, “and I call sneakers ‘wearable’ or ‘walkable’ art.”⁴

The first Nike “Moon Shoe” was made in 1971, when Bill Bowerman had the inspiration to use a waffle iron to mold the sole. Turbocharging the market for sport shoes in the 1980s on the back of the jogging and aerobics craze and the nascent cool of hip-hop streetwear, Nike was the vanguard of outsourcing production to low-cost labor markets. The flip side of this was investing in branding and celebrity, starting with the success of Air Jordans and ultimately flowering into what has now become an intricate ecosystem of limited-edition shoe drops, along with a secondary market for shoes and streetwear that was worth more than $2 billion in 2020.⁵

Sneakerheads sustain an entire apparatus of occult knowledge, with its own hierarchies of discernment. As one sneaker expert explained (in an article actually arguing that the sneaker world had become too snobbish):

It’s not just enough to go out and buy the latest and coolest Nikes, Adidas, or Jordans, you have to know every single historical nugget about them, too. Who designed the shoe? When was it first released? How many pairs were made? Which celebrity wore them in an advertisement that was printed before you were born? All of that is viewed as requisite knowledge for anyone who wants to consider themselves a sneaker connoisseur or, better yet, label themselves with the dubious title of being a “sneakerhead.”⁶

As one “Sneaker Authenticator,” versed in the subtle signs of authenticity—from shoe smell to minute variations in stitching, labels, and dyes—told GQ: “Am I surprised [this is a job]? No. Maybe because I’m just into shoes, I’ve always known how deep the culture was.”⁷

Meanwhile, confusingly, as fine art labored mightily to distance itself from the elitist, gatekeeping connotations of connoisseurship, popular critics of art and academic theorists alike were united in disdain for what the post-connoisseur museum became in the 2010s. The New York Times critic Holland Cotter lamented that the crowds attracted to spectacular contemporary art exhibitions masked the withering audience for anything that is not of the now.⁸ Critic and theorist Hal Foster attacked contemporary museums for becoming little more than props for callow “cultural tourism” and caving to “a mega-programme so obvious that it goes unstated: entertainment.”⁹ The rejection of “connoisseurship” in recent art discourse may be seen simply as the pragmatic outcome of a much-changed contemporary art system. Eclecticism and pluralism are the chief features of the post-1960s art scene; the notion, associated with connoisseurship, of establishing a single firm set of rules for evaluation seems dated at best in a context when almost anything presented within the walls of an art gallery might be considered art. Yet the airy avowal that “anything can be art” masks the deeper, unexamined ways that, in diffused, disguised form, the ideology of “fine art” still structures how art is viewed and valued, even within the polyglot international art world.

The Invention of “Art”

If this question forces us to start from a consideration of traditional European history, this is partly because European industrialization helped forge the contemporary world and European colonialism spread its cultural dilemmas far and wide. We still live in the cage of assumptions formed by this process, so the subject is still worth unpacking.

Among art historians, it is a commonplace that the idea of “fine art” is a relatively recent construction. Its roots lie in the humanism of the Italian Renaissance, the high status accorded to court painters in absolutist societies, and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It was given further impetus by the formalization of Galilean science, which shook up old tables of knowledge. As Larry Shiner writes in The Invention of Art:

By joining the experimental and mathematical methods, seventeenth-century scientists not only laid the basis for the sciences to achieve an autonomous identity but also drove a wedge into the liberal arts, pushing geometry and astronomy towards disciplines like mechanics and physiology that seemed more appropriate company than music, which was itself moving towards rhetoric and poetry.¹⁰

As for painting and sculpture, they could not have existed as art objects in the modern sense before the birth of the museum, which gave the necessary institutional context to view them outside of decoration and patronage. The founding of the Musée du Louvre in 1792 was one of the more unexpected by-products of the French Revolution. It was specifically meant to extract treasures associated with the royal family from their context—and to prevent them from being destroyed by angry sans-culottes. It then became the repository for imperial booty, extracted from conquered cultures and appreciated as trophies.

Yet the truly modern form of capital-A Art is a creation of the Romantic period in Europe (roughly the first half of the nineteenth century), which birthed the ideal of the artist as an independent, “autonomous” visionary. This cult of art emerged opposite the intensifying upheaval of the Industrial Revolution: small workshop production and small farms were being replaced by increasingly industrialized, urban forms of production and consumption. Laborers became anonymous and no longer had creative input into their work; consumers knew less and less about where or by whom goods had been produced.

Here’s Shiner again:

Whereas the eighteenth century split the older idea of art into fine art versus craft, the nineteenth century transformed fine art itself into a reified “Art,” an independent and privileged realm of spirit, truth, and creativity. Similarly, the concept of the artist, which had been definitively separated from that of the artisan in the eighteenth century, was now sanctified as one of humanity’s highest spiritual callings. The status and image of the artisan, by contrast, continued to decline, as many small workshops were forced out of business by industrialization and many skilled craftspeople entered the factories as operatives performing prescribed routines.¹¹

In Europe, the most influential writers to give voice to the age’s intensified artistic sensibility were Charles Baudelaire in France and John Ruskin in England. These writers would have been in the same high school class with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the theorists of socialism, which is no coincidence. The same factors that led to increasing awareness of the degrading contradictions of European society also led to an increasing hunger for alternative paths of aesthetic salvation. “There is no understanding the arts in the later nineteenth century,” writes the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, “without a sense of this social demand that they should act as all-purpose suppliers of spiritual contents to the most materialist of civilizations.”¹²

This position, in turn, gives art a troubling double status. Dave Beech sees art’s “exceptional status” as an alternative to alienated labor within capitalist society as containing the germs of meaningful rebellion: “Art’s historical hostility to handicraft specifically and work generally has operated according to a utopian logic of securing an island of worklessness within seven seas of drudgery.”¹³ Simon Gikandi, in contrast, emphasizes that, at the same time European cultures were building up a “culture of taste” that redeemed the grubby business of commerce and politics, they were submitting other peoples around the world to enslavement and colonization, in the name of Europe’s civilizing mission. “There has been an intimate connection between a sense of cultural achievement and superiority and the practice of domination.”¹⁴

The process by which cultural objects from non-European cultures were, as art historian Elaine O’Brien put it, “reimagined as ‘art’ in the modern sense of a product of individual expression meant for individual secular contemplation,” has been extensively critiqued and studied.¹⁵ Such values of art have sometimes been imposed on non-European cultures by the most sordid of imperialisms, displacing indigenous art forms. Yet the status invested in the “autonomous” artwork as a kind of alternative to modern pressures can’t be seen purely as one-sided imposition either, at least not without overlooking the ways this status has been appropriated critically.

For example, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a formerly cloistered Japan decided to industrialize on its own terms in reaction to the expansion of the empires of Europe and the United States. Art historian Dōshin Satō shows in his important book Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State that the Japanese equivalent term for “fine art,” bijutsu, was consciously constructed by the modernizing Japanese government in this period of social transformation.¹⁶ The field of bijutsu, Satō argues, elevated genres including painting and sculpture, which became associated with individual vision and the modification of tradition for the present, attracting members of the former samurai gentry who were looking to hold on to prestige as new economic relations eroded their old privileges. Meanwhile, another term, kōgei, approximating the idea of “craft,” absorbed the remaining artisanal handicrafts and became associated with the new export economy servicing the West’s hunger for Japonisme—and therefore with alienated labor and a lower status.¹⁷ A self-conscious ideology of “art” is, it seems, as characteristic a symptom of the implantation of capitalism as wage labor or the commodity form itself.

If European colonial plunder offers the gravest examples of cultural forms being stripped of links to traditional community by domination and commodification, anticolonial thought offers some of the strongest counterexamples of how the figure of the independent artist could be claimed critically. In Postcolonial Modernism, art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu firmly rebukes the convention of seeing Nigerian artists who adopted easel painting and European-derived styles of art as victims of cultural imperialism.

Indeed, he argues, it was British colonial administrators like the educator and archeologist Kenneth Murray who advocated that Nigerians should focus on learning traditional handicrafts. In contrast, figures such as the painter Aina Onabolu, one of the progenitors of Nigerian modernism, self-consciously claimed the status of artist as a way to assert “an African modern subjectivity defined primarily by their own need for self-assertion and their visions of political and cultural autonomy.”¹⁸ The independent artist was seen as a modern figure. Seizing its status was felt to be part of Nigerian intellectuals’ claiming modernization and independence against an empire that wanted...