reporting by Gaby Saint Cruz, as told to her by Sean Dorian Knight
ART AND POLITICAL ECONOMY: REVOLUTION
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THE LOOMING CRISIS BETWEEN THE OBJECT AND IDEA
A Manifesto on What Lies Beyond the State of Post Modernism in Art
I. Art, Economics, and the World to be Created………………………p. 3
II. Parallel Concerns of Art and Economics in Western society: A Historical View…..……………………………………………….……..……………………………….p.5
III. What Does All This Religion Have To Do With the Artist and the Critic?………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 10
IV. The Task of the Object of Art: Progress of the Spiritual or the Material Mind?………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 17
V. Art, Private Patronage, and the Rebirth of Human Consciousness in Renaissance Europe……………………………………………………………………….… p. 24
VI. Stolen Fire: Rational Perception and the Crisis of Magical Realism…………………………………………………………………………………………………..p. 33
VII. Moral Freedom and the Cognitive Divide Between Artistic Representation and Meaning………………………………………………………………p. 46
VIII. Out of the Depths: The Philosophical Defense of Art and Religion: Purpose Beyond Time……………………………………………………………..……..…p. 53
IX. Magic in the Marketplace: The Forbidden Realm of Unknown Purpose for Sale……………………………………………………………………………………………………p. 65
X. A Disinterested View From Above the Masses: Climbing the Economic Ladder.…………………………………………………………………………………………..…..p. 76
XI. Art and the Metaphysical Base: The Demographics of Revolution in a Political Economy……………………………………………………………………….…………p.82
XII. Voices from the Past: The Specter in the Capitalist Machine….…p.94
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I. Art, Economics, and the World to be Created.
It is contended here that the appropriate and in depth criticism of art is due for a change. One that, if it is to return to relevance, must become far ranging and organic in nature; a day to day interrogation of the most fundamental assumptions of our beleagured social and economic system whose weakened structural ideas frame the backdrop of art objects on view at every gallery and museum exhibition. Having reached a stage in art’s history where the aesthetic encounter is no longer even a premise, medium, or a message that can stand on its own, the educated viewer of today must examine the entire vessel of historical ideology that shaped the journey of art that is created in a present where past is always prologue to art’s continual transformation. Today, art is long past the era that once preoccupied it with the proper representation of our merely physical or material world. Art has reached beyond the totemic symbols of nature into a secret garden of undefined territory where the invisible once again haunts the mind of anyone who would try to grasp at its meaning.
But if meaning can be encountered in art at all, the art object itself stands as a paradox of that very intention between artist and viewer. Have they not understood what brought about their flawed attempts at a spiritual meeting in the first place? Alas, the strange alchemy of philosophical theory and aesthetic grasping for meaning is the only constant of both object and history whose opaque knowledge has yet to be examined for the answer it conceals. The experience of art today is one that is apprehended through feeling but never far removed from the academic nuisance of an accumulation of overhanging and underlying historical ideas. But these ideas, of which some we will endeavor to hold up to the light of scrutiny in scope of this movement of the American Renaissance, seldom are paid more than scant observation by critics of the present art world.
More to the point, the value of any such ideas are assumed validated simply by their incorporation into art, whether they have any weight in truth or not. Once “coined” into the existence of an object of art, when an art object is sold into the “world of art,” the art is deemed proven, and the counterfeit meaning of any such “idea” that it carries becomes substantiated by the final repository of the medium itself. Finally, after the critical first few years, (sometimes decades since its first acquisition), the inherent value of contemporary art becomes consecrated at last by the dubious criteria of a small coterie of private collectors and museums who – for whatever and all intents and purposes – hold the fate of art history and its mysterious meaning for ransom to the whim of market forces and the next highest bidder. But, if it is not the critic alone who is to stand up to the assessment of the validity of the motives and mysterious meaning of art beyond its commercial exchange – then who?
Yet, apparently for the today’s critics too, the small circle of collectors, dealers, and museum curators who make up the economic forces of the art world – seem to be accepted as the only audience that art was ever made to be judged by or created for. Contemporary criticism rarely looks beyond the consumer facts and intellectual influence of an artist bringing forth the latest art product that is made to captivate the eye of the collecting cognoscenti. After all, for them – just as for those owners of art who have a stake in upholding the illusion and stock value of their art investment – art’s value and meaning has elevated itself past the larger context of public social interest in art. To the inner circle of the art world elite, art stands outside of this, with them, on the inside – like a secret form of knowledge coded in a hazy feeling of the supernatural. As if in a secret garden all to itself, the modern art object is displayed behind velvet ropes – in a reality quite removed from the public interest and the museums where common tourists and aficionados struggle for understanding.
But into this secret world, like a thief in the garden at night, is where the critic on the outside must go if anything at all is to be explained in the interests of the baffled public at large. He must question the very institutions on whose foundation that garden is laid. He must go to the heart of the matter now so deeply obfuscated by the curious semblance of modern art itself. The critic must mine the secret core of knowledge that sustains the modern art world’s ecosystem hidden from view. And, without fear of getting lost, he must be prepared to examine and question the roots of both good and evil from which this ecosystem was built, as opposed to the merely superficial kind of criticism commonly employed by the practitioners today: Those who visit galleries to summarily reduce the importance of art’s subject matter to the bland ethereal statements that are the facile lingo of interior decorators. He must know that the secret world of art is not the world of entertainment, a public distraction for the senses on another plane in a world removed from ordinary life, but the essence of this world yet to be created and revealed.
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II. Parallel Concerns of Art and Economics in Western society: A Historical View
In the long cultural heritage that came to distinguish humankind from other living species, the state of art (if it can be so categorized under today’s use of the term), was not simply some palsied notion of leisurely entertainment or amusement outside the public interest. We may imagine how it may have begun in this way, but perhaps not so easily the seriousness with which its growing presence came to be regarded. For at its beginning art represented, quite ambitiously for humans, the first attempts at symbolic thought; later, the concrete ability to establish the bridge between imagination and reality, and for humans to be able to make reference to something outside themselves.
Art in the form of the visual image predates the evolution of linear writing and conceptual thinking by some twenty thousand years. And, in the long developmental course of almost every major civilization, the image at once came to occupy the most salient representation of the public psyche as well as that of the world without. In essence, art was an epistemology and way of knowing that made no distinctions between its own methods and those of the belief in alchemy or magic, or in the most rudimentary notions of incipient science. The state of art in cultural practice represented and amounted to no less than the state of society’s ultimate awareness; of God, gods, monsters and everything else.
In the last thirty thousand years leading up to the twentieth century – and quite noticeably in the last one hundred – however, art has undergone many changes back and forth in its outward form. Art as a symbol has given itself to many interpretations, but not what art stands for as both object and product of the human mind. As it is now, Western culture’s state of ultimate awareness by the public can still be measured in the literature and objects of our human heritage it ascribes value to for the consciousness they represent. Then, we might ask in a general overview, what is this consciousness that the art of today tells we – the public – about what has become of human knowledge and awareness? Is it not created, more than ever, in direct relationship to the context of the economic system? The economics of the market system, more than ever, has become the mode of organization for all of society’s activities. Economics controls all legitimate activities regulated under the rule of law, but also those (sometimes prohibited and illegal) that purposively manage to circumvent the authority of law. It would be strange to think that only art, from its lofty perch in tradition as a representation of human consciousness, could somehow be allowed to subvert economic law.
Here, before venturing any further, a parallel between the discipline of art (as the product of an epistemology and way of knowing) and with the discipline of economics (as a way of allocating those productive goods needed for survival) will first be drawn. Knowledge, whether of a scientific or artistic kind, shall as a matter of course here be considered as being among these necessary and productive goods. In outlining this comparative relationship, it would be useful for the reader to keep in mind the distinction between what can be construed as the “pure” study of distinct branches of knowledge, as opposed to the applied form of the respective disciplines.
A clarification of this perspective for viewing art within regard to its kinship with economics is also in order. Economics however, being a relatively new “science,” grew out of a branch of the study of political science, most significantly toward the middle of the 18th century. Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, considered the blueprint for Capitalism, and still the reigning economic philosophy of our day, was published in 1776, whether or not by happenstance in the same year of the American Declaration of Independence. The story of art is much longer, of course. Art is as old as religion and human consciousness itself. Art’s correlation with human’s religious and moral development is virtually inseparable – but it is precisely here that for our age an important point of economical contention arises.
Economics, and the notion of economic freedom, are at the core of what affects our daily life as people – whomever we are – wherever we live in the world. Economics, at both the abstract and concrete levels, deals not only with the nature of national power, but individual human freedom and power. Though one broad comparative distinction, with respect to the subject of this writing, would be that religious theology explicitly addresses our questions of God or some all-controlling power, while art addresses the expression and application of human creative skill and imagination. But the controlling agents of each discipline; economics, art, and religion, are thus linked by a common relationship or appeal to human empowerment. Economic study intends to govern our influence over earthly or material wants, we might say, just as the latter two (art and religion) address our concerns for control about things immaterial. But on this subject, then it is perhaps better to ask, in other words; can art (albeit if only a rare conclusion expressed from the depths of human imagination) be considered our human creativity’s answer to the question of whether or not we are in fact free from some all-controlling power?
Religion takes art’s answer, often out of symbolic context, we shall see, as evidence to the contrary. Yet, between the tangle of art and freedom – religion and morality – it seems an uncertain score needs to be settled for the material privileges and goods on this earth. Because, notwithstanding the odd skepticism of the modern reader who might still unknowingly be possessed of a medieval frame of mind, foremost, it is only with regard to the mystery of abundant life – and the scarcity of the temporal means to sustain it on our material planet – that there could still be any stake in the issue of human freedom in the first place. Succinctly put, it is no longer the problems of the afterlife that can concern the branches of human knowledge. But, lest the emphasis on earthly matters is forgotten here, it is useful to keep in mind that today the art market alone is a ten billion dollar industry living through objects and authors in a virtual afterlife of their own – with nine-tenths of it encompassing the trade in works of old masters, long dead and yet still posing keen competition with their struggling though still living contemporaries. And, while one can applaud the paradox of a $135 million dollar painting by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) being sold at auction to the wealthy heir of a cosmetics empire (under the approving gasps of high society) while the great majority of living artists are disenfranchised and have yet to have a single solo show – wherein does this strange state of economic affairs lead? If art indeed is something of concern for the public interest, it is the public that deserves to know.
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To Gustav Klimt – as well as to so many of his departed colleagues whose art has also sold for other exorbitant amounts; Manet, Monet, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso, et al. – accrue lasting historical tribute and eternal public acclaim. They receive not a penny of the monetary proceeds, of course, but little of the rewards or posthumous compensation of such extraordinary art sale sums goes to their heirs either. Instead, most windfall profits end up going to the legacies of those to whomever they sold the title of ownership to. A common transfer of legal property rights seems to be all that is stake here between all parties involved. However, the exchange of art on this level attains a peculiar historic status not unlike the transfer of a great deed of land. In art, Spiritual estate becomes Real estate. Cultural patrimony is amassed in the hands of a few collectors and in the heralded names of a handful of deceased artists. The analogy is that for every sale of art by a dead artist, a precious amount of cultural earth needed to sustain living artists is thrown away – all for the sake of a grand cultural tomb – or is it perhaps that would-be spriritual garden enclosed behind velvet ropes at the center of our local museum?
From the perspective of classical Marxist theory, this odd scenario between haves and have-nots – between a few wealthy bourgeois collectors and millions of unrepresented proletariat artists – has all the escalading drama from which bloody world revolutions are made. “What the bourgeois produces above all else are its own grave diggers,” Marx famously adduced in the Communist Manifesto, and even before, in words perhaps more poetic than prophetic; “History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” (Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) So, museums become the mausoleums of the great names and spirits of art history, but there elite splendor is akin to the great pyramids of 18th dynasty Egypt – built on the backs of so many illiterate slaves uninitiated into the magic of the priestly cult. The illiterate slave in, in Marxian terms, was of course the medieval serf; a propertyless class of lumpen proletariat, inextricably tied to land, without class consciousness and at the mercy of those who owned the means of production. In regard to the already “landed” cultural patrimony of art (i.e. those illustrious artists of the past, long dead an buried) and the recent social phenomena of the bourgeois collector, the proletariat lacking class consciousness is, of course, the contemporary living artist himself. In matters of art history, often no more than an illiterate and powerless slave to the system.
Marxist interpretations of everything from anthropology to literature have had a long academic following during the 20th century, and no doubt have inspired the support and opposition of many scholars in the history of art. In 1936, the late Meyer Schapiro (formerly the graduate Chair at Columbia University) argued in his article Social Basis of Art that “the artist had a place in the revolutionary process thanks to his alliance with the proletariat,” a stance he was later to characterize as without hope.1 At The First American Artists’ Congress in the same year, the artist and sociologist Max Weber sardonically commented on the “tragic situation confronting artists in New York, who had to try to survive without the support of art galleries in the face of art criticism of mediocre quality; ‘In the beginning of his or her career, the artist is advised to make connections. We keep connecting, all our lives, and in the end most of us find ourselves connected with the poor house.”2
The blight of poverty is a cliché that has never been too far-a-field from the pursuits of an artist’s lifestyle. It has been the aim of our subject matter, however, to address the idea of public or the republic’s freedom in art as well as economics. And, in spite of all the interest Marx’s influence has generated in academics and social causes, such incursions into the role of aesthetics in society seem to have touched only tangentially on the subject of art with respect to its direct economic relationship to historical materialism. Artists were equated with the working proletariat, yes, but not actually recognized as a distinct species of proletariat vis a vis the historical mode of cultural production themselves. And it is precisely in this realm – where art and religious ideas merge and become fused to the boon or detriment of our civilization always on the brink of apocalyptic war – that the public interest of our subject matter really lies.
Yet it is not the intent of this writing to side with or against Marx on the ultimate direction of history – any more than it is to uphold the assumption that Adam Smith’s laws of classic market capitalism are best left alone, or not alone, in regard to the paradoxical place art holds in our market system. Nonetheless, in keeping with both of these thinkers on matters of trade and industry, the momentum of culture as well as business is here taken to be dynamic and, at root, quite often in conflict in matters of both class and religion. It is the premise of this thesis therefore that the collusions and collisions of art and religion hide human interests and stakes that are far too great not to grant them their moment of civil judgment – and, short of the purification of some inconclusive truth by the violent clashes of fanatical ideology on this subject, the dispassionate arbitration of freedom for our modern civilization can only fall to the study of economics.
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III. What Does All this Religion Have To Do With the Artist and Art Criticism?
What has all this to do with art criticism? To return to an eminent art historian on this subject, it was Meyer Schapiro who was also “severely critical of the individualistic artist who produced for a market that upheld the values of the dominant class while deluding himself that he was in fact independent.”3 To understate the larger social forces that affect the creation of art object at any given moment is to deny the organic nature of art’s existence. Still, the thorny problem of addressing individual works of art within the larger framework of historical theory is a complicated one.
It is relevant to note that the first serious attention paid toward art criticism itself is traced back to the 18th century French philosopher, Dennis Diderot, at a time when the rational explanation of economics was also just beginning to be underway. Diderot was the first to start taking copious notes and writing about the objects of visual art he saw in the Paris salons. Up until then, all the important writings on the subject of painting or sculpture had been the volumes of treatises that analyzed the great stylists of a particular school or tradition: De Pintura, by Leonardo da Vinci, also the noted works of Alberti, Vassari, going back to ancient times with Polyclytus’s Canon, all examined the tenets of a grand following. But, then why this new importance in the 18th century with regard to individual works? It being the age of the Enlightenment, rationalism and of growing individualism, there was perhaps a need to explain the vagaries of artistic phenomena. The hold of “public” tradition was steadily losing its powerful grasp on Western society.
The distinction between art criticism and art theory is helpfully clarified by the scholar, Moshe Barasch. Whereas art criticism addresses a particular object, Barasche explains, “When traditional art theory speaks of an individual painting or sculpture, the work is treated as an illustration of a general idea rather than a single work of art….Throughout the tradition, it can thus be said, the individual work of art remains an illustration of general principles rather than the unique product of an individual artist’s imagination and skill.”4 Every work of art is a product of its age, and as the 20th century painter Vassily Kandinsky wrote, “Every work of art is the mother of the age to come.” But few individual artworks attain this level of significance in changing history.
The Venus of Manet, Picasso’s Mademoiselles de Avignon, Duchamp’s The Large Glass and Any Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are a few examples of moments of watershed change or a turning point in the direction of the development of art. But the historical influence of such individual works can only be noted in retrospect. And the crux of the matter becomes, rather, whether it is then more important to criticize on the whole the less significant aesthetics of individual production, or instead, the greater components and ideas of society that give rise to the changing nature of the artworks in our midst in the first place.
When appraising the works of individual artists in contemporary art though, hardly is any true “criticism” evinced. To the casual social historian intrigued by the anomalies between superficial taste and extravagant prices, for example, it might seem obvious that there must be some hidden or secret explanation for why the vaunted meaningless of so much art on display is simply taken for granted. But, to no avail, an observer may scour in wonder the texts in which artists and their work are descriptively written up, praised and interpreted by the leading art magazines. As it were, name brand periodicals that – at the expense of substantive text – without even so much as pausing to question the prices of wall hangings that command more per square inch than the most coveted floor spaces of Manhattan real estate, consciously gleam with the most fashionable displays of high gloss ads and commercial font for the latest exhibition. But so where is the curious observer to go for answers?
Most contemporary books on art history, criticism, or the state of the actual art market lack the ambition to analyze the historical nuances of what made the art market they way that it is. Moreover, as erstwhile investigative journalists, writers on art do not seem to possess the necessary incentives to even mention these perplexing and even troubling issues about art and economics. This, despite the fact that the average art critic’s salary hardly affords him the means with which to buy a small New York studio apartment, let alone the art he is writing about. It maybe for fear that any negativity against an individual work be taken too harshly by an artist, or because it would adversely affect the economic relationship between the gallery system and the “critical” magazines in which they advertise. Perhaps it would be idealistic to say that art critics should have to answer only to the art they are critiquing, but is it so cynical to realize how obvious it is that – at least by the omission of the greater issues that they are skirting – they are simply answering to “the man?” Whatever the truth, the criticism of contemporary art today, stifled by budgetary word-counts and buried within the back pages of inconspicuous magazines, stands in an abject relationship to the gravity of its subject matter.
Among the important thinkers on art in the 19th century, Pierre Joseph Proudhon was, besides an aesthetician, sincerely engaged in the problems of social reform and justice. “Art is liberty itself,” he proclaimed5. But, more importantly, he highlighted the social character and significance of art. “In fact, the social character of art is so overwhelming that it almost completely overshadows its natural components.” The conclusions are far reaching. “Art, it follows from much of what he says, is too weighty and serious a matter to be left to artists alone. Precisely because the painting or statue has such a great power of incitement, it is society as a whole, and not the individual, even if he is the artist, that must determine the subjects and uses of his art.”6 It is thus that we should aim to rightfully criticize, if need be even negatively, both the artist and the society from which the vision of his work is produced.
As we come to look with greater contemplation on the relationship with art and religion, what’s more, we shall see that it is as well imperative for the artist that he understand his work to be taken with utmost seriousness. “Proudhon stresses that the artist cannot help being ‘committed,’ to use the present-day term. To paint something without caring about what one represents is not only morally detestable; in the final analysis, it is simply impossible. The artist will always take up a position, he cannot simply remain neutral, without color, as it were. It is for this reason that Proudhon believes the artist to be the collaborator of the social reformer… The subject matter and style of painting follow from art’s function in social reform.”7
Hence, a proper criticism of art cannot be limited to those individual objects in display in the gallery system, nor can it be in service to the approval of their economic interest in promoting their product. In this regard, a proper criticism of art must be tantamount to a criticism of the economic and political system in which it is made as well. And where there is politics and economics, as we know, religion is not far behind. Just as art, we might say, is a priori to religion, or simply religion in its raw, un-politicized spiritual form. But without the need to digress into the history of these two sister phenomena of art and religion, it is now almost suffice to name a few of the titles of some of the founding and most influential texts on economic thought to find common cause with the same moral weightiness of their concerns.
Before his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) was to grant the founding father of modern economics Adam Smith immortal fame, in 1759 he had published a small sensation entitled: The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In 1793 (the ominous year of another famous revolution) William Godwin, an ordained Anglican minister and the father of Mary Shelley, published Political Justice. A book in which Godwin, addressing the problem of population for the promotion of national wealth foretold of a future where “there will be no war, no crime, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be no disease anguish, melancholy or resentment.”8 Another man of the church, the Reverend Robert Thomas Malthus, in the year 1798 published anonymously his legendary Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society; a dire warning of famine as the consequence of population overgrowth. Frederich Engel’s prelude the to The Communist Manifesto and the zealous humanism that inspired Karl Marx was his meticulous and sympathetic study of poverty in The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1844). In the Victorian era, the treatise of the University of Manchester professor W. Stanley Jevons on political economy was summed up as “a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain.”9
The French political and economic satirist, Frederic Bastiat meanwhile published a work by the name of Economic Harmonies, “in which he was to show that the apparent disorder of the world was disorder of the surface only; that underneath, the impetus of a thousand different self-seeking agents became transmuted in the marketplace into a higher social good.”10 In the same spirit of observation, the American economic reporter Henry George’s book was called Progress and Poverty. And the list of conspicuously moralistic sounding titles from the development of economics goes on; Thorstein Veblen’s famous, Theory of the Leisure Class and his essay on the WWI Versaille settlement Inquiry into the Nature of the Peace; on the same worldly subject, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and later his The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money.
In sum, the problems dealt with in the very titles of the great works on economics and by the history of economic development within the last three hundred years are, from the very start, notably on the subject of human struggle, strife and the overcoming of the obstacles of earthly hardship. Poverty, injustice, peace and war – the problems of good an evil, we might say – are the same problems that in the ancient past were addressed almost exclusively by religious texts, or parables and sermons regarding the morality of human actions.
Making sense of poverty, injustice and war under the existence of an alleged divinity are the subject matter and at the core of almost all ancient religious teaching, but also no less centrical to the art that becomes the exponent of any religion’s narrative. The common themes in Christian art: The annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Coronation of the Virgin, the Arrest of Jesus, the Crucifix – are, after all, deptictions that are a result of the devotion to the prophecy of one man on such matters good and evil.
“Life is short, art is long,” the Roman senator Seneca is to have said. Art is broad, we can muse; but even when it is about “nothing”, is it not still as if it were also saying something about these things simply by the fact it is classified as art? Even when art is secular or void of any nominal religious content, the subject matter itself grapples with the themes of good and evil or the making sense of the dramatic consequences of poverty, injustice and war on the public itself; the moral afflictions of the human condition, and the ideal of freedom and its limitations under earthly circumstances. We may take as an example the content of but a few of the most famous works in Western culture, and consider the pains they take to figuratively and dramatically render the spiritual state or moral qualities of their protagonists’ actions:
Raft of the Medusa, The (1818) – Gericault, Theodore
Birth of Venus, The (c.1480) – Botticelli, Sandro [Alessandro Filipepi]
Scream, The (1893) [aka The Shout; or The Cry] – Munch, Edvard
Garden of Earthly Delights, The (c.1500) – Bosch, Hieronymus [Jerome van Aeken]
Oath of the Horatii, The (1784) – David, Jacques-Louis
Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586) – Greco, El [Domenico Theotocopoulos]
School of Athens (1509-10) – Raphael [Raffaello Santi, or Sanzio]
The Potato Eaters – Van Gogh, Vincent
Liberty Leading the People (1830) – Delacroix, Eugene
Be it through a subject matter that is mythical, dramatic, or merely descriptive, the moral context to which each of these works draw the attention of the viewer is – not only plainly evident – but also a major emphasis made by each one of these major artists of the Western tradition. That the very nature of art is tied to the moral and religious tendency of humankind could be cited in any infinite number of ways. Show me a work of art, and I will show you a moral – or an amoral – statement. Art cannot exist in a moral vacuum, but inescapably leans one way or another on matters of value. Art, as if having a greater likeness to God than the concept of God itself, it cannot be or even pretend to be morally neutral and at the same time continue to exist as art. Meanwhile, to list here merely a small fraction of the major Western masterpieces in painting that are known by the titles of their religious content would occupy a space at least one hundred times as long.
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IV. The Task of the Object of Art: Progress of the Spiritual or the Material Mind?
In its widest scope then, the presiding theme of this paper is with respect to the contended disputes in art, religion, economics and the organization of human liberty. These conflicts that beleaguer the human condition have been at the root of every civil society’s revolutions and wars, their faith in upholding a democratically elected government or in adopting alternative radical religious beliefs, and they continue to be of worldly and international import. Yet, in the more narrow sense, all these problems have throughout history been consistently addressed by art in its various forms, and fall within the totality of its domain.
Art’s relationship to the grand scale of this subject matter, however, has foremost been a traditional one with its basis in the physical art object. What is meant by this is that, curiously here, we are literally speaking only of objects that have traditionally addressed these issues of the human condition, while the artists or the author’s of these many works themselves have been studied somewhat secondarily (although with increasing fascination since the Renaissance) as biographical subjects in regard to their mysterious talent in producing them.
In this sense, the importance of an art object has always foremost represented a tradition in culture as opposed to the individual vision of its author. In Ancient Greece, where the purpose of the sculptural medium was the expression of divine sanction over national conflict and domestic prosperity; likewise in Medieval Christendom – where icons served as an aid to the indoctrination of Biblical morality so as to curb human avarice and defer gratification to a promised afterlife, for example, the large body of artistic production is of anonymous authorship. The object or icon itself is what is of supreme interest to the public. Even in cases where the remarkable skill of an artist is highlighted by the learned contemporaries of his day (such as Dio’s comment of Phydias’s famed sculpture of Zeus in the 6th century BCE), it was still foremost the art object as an expression of the divine that merited the attention and wonder of the audience.
But thus, although the ultimate consciousness of the Greek and Medieval Christian world’s subjects may have had a markedly different in outlook, the mysterious unity of art with the special power of consciousness in the artist who created it has remained largely neglected. Superseding any fascination with the cult of individual knowledge and insight of the artist, the emphasis, general interest and approach to art by society has been object based, and notably bound to a tradition. If we take for our consideration the production of art under these circumstances during the late medieval period, for example – we see that this meant that market economics, at least at this point in question, did not really enter the equation. Where artworks were produced in keeping with a respective tradition, emphasis was on adherence to the characteristics of a canon rather than on innovation for the sake of economic gain or individual notoriety. Little thought was given to the potential market worth of an art object. And this remained true even when, outside the considerations of artistic matters, other products of human individuals were already forging sound economic relationships and exchanging their goods and services on basic principles of trade.
But the art object was – and to this day remains – a cultural product that occupies a rare position in its insulation from the normal processes of economic exchange. To use a contemporary European term that holds equally true for our modern museum culture as it did for the subjects of the world of Classical Greece or the Middle Ages, art is considered only as the stuff of “human patrimony” or the heritage and endowment of a culture belonging to one and all, or perhaps to the state or church, but to no one else in general. The main difference we might say is only that cultural patrimony in the past was represented by a living canon of tradition – where myth, faith and the object symbol were one within its respective civilization (whether an oracle out in the open air at Delphi or the painting of the Virgin within a Medieval abbey). Art was a public matter, woven into the very fabric of cultural religious belief.
In recognizing this vital relationship that art had to the moral fabric of ancient societies, however, several issues are raised that cannot be addressed off-handedly or all at once. Most salient of these issues is the conceit of the timeliness and universality of art. Something that is easily taken for granted for an observer who is referencing an art object in the context of a living tradition. The art of a society in such case embodies the living ideals of the time. Thus, it can be said to be “timeless and universal.” Yet, this point of view – to be taken up later in the course of this writing – is inevitably brought into question from a more distant historical perspective.
For now, we may simply consider how a historical work of art – of the 14th century, for instance – may still be our rightful cultural inheritance, but the great link between this art and the average citizen of our day is no longer a public spiritual affair approached with fear and trembling. Everywhere we see how the secular museums of today have had to artificially create a hallowed sanctuary for the various dying traditions of art history that have splintered into becoming the anthropological relics of its various wings. Outside the museum cocoon of their artificial preserve, even the most splendid artworks of the recent past run the danger of being objects that no longer possess any compelling social bond.
Somewhere along the path of history, art first became materially divorced from organized religion in our culture. Eventually, the changes that marked the development of artistic expression during the centuries of Western civilization would come to shape and recreate the moral fabric of our culture anew. Both in its methods and intentions, as well as in its ownership, art would come to change hands. In contrast, when subsumed under the hold of an artistic tradition, art was presumed not to be a matter of exclusive possession, or to be capable of being separated by private economic means from the one cohesive public entity that made up the substance of its representation. And yet, however gradually it came to pass, the unity of tradition in art was discarded in favor of ever newer and freer mannerisms, customs, styles, spurred by private, commercial and economic exchange – until its development became diffused into the secular practice of today.
But how – and, is not the art of a society always its very true religion itself? The general observer may still look at the art of our day with a kind of awe, but – outside the privileged knowledge of art world specialists – it is not the same kind of awe. Now, the most obvious form of value connection between the art and the general public is ostensibly aesthetic, but as translated by the paparazzi press of the communications world, equally measured by the astounding economic price tag that a given artwork can represent.
Nevertheless, a crucial similarity between the ancient past and the present is maintained. Following the thread of our argument as pertains to the contemporary mode of art production – still anchored by the pantheon of the museum system that archives our “Western tradition” – and its comparison to the art of ancient societies where art evolved within the conventions of its own pre-Western traditional canon (that is, before now being etically assimilated as part of our own), we see that in economic terms our present culture is largely at the same archaic stage of development. The term archaic is not here used in a pejorative sense, however, but only insofar as the market relationship between art and society is concerned. Because, for all the analysis of the ideas in contemporary art, societal interests still place emphasis and importance on the phenomenological object instead of the human being who created it.
And just so, for most of the long periods of its history, art had remained an object tied to custom and little given to the incentives of change. Up until the times of economic prosperity when there arose a class of merchants or those of wealthy means – and solely then did it become evident that art (like any other product) was also an object that could be possessed.
It must be underscored then, that it is mainly the degree to which art has come to be an object capable of being in private possession (and coveted in that manner), that in any way distinguishes our object-centered relationship to art from that of the pre-Western cultures of the past. To be sure, there were always men of wealth who owned and collected art, and in this regard the main difference between our society and of those past is really a matter of degree. When the art of a society increasingly becomes a matter of individual property, though, it is only of moderate value if in likeness and presence it is akin to the property of everyone else.
In consideration of the main point of differentiation between Western art and those of more ancient traditions – i.e. the quality of possession – it is therefore appropriate at this point of inquiry to further note with emphasis that the central locomotive of the modern art world now resides within the United States of America; also the leading exponent of Capitalist philosophy in the world. The United States of American was founded on the principles of laissez-faire Capitalism and the profound belief in the inherent human right to private property. The giant canvas for the production of contemporary art now thus lies across one of the richest continents on the face of the earth – with New York and the industry of Hollywood, California at either end, and enveloping a whole inner continent of deeply conservative Christian belief in the middle. Some say the grand torch of the Western tradition in art was passed on to us, its natural modern heirs. Others say we stole it.11 Either way, we are a complex country of robust idealism, driven by material wealth, which holds itself out to the world as no less than the guiding light of human prosperity.
Likewise, the development of art runs throughout the course of Western history as both symbol and representation of the flowering of the human spirit, some might say in a Hegelian sense. Where there was poverty, war, revolution or a conservation of civil tradition – art has been. But has humanity truly moved in the direction of progress? And, as the ultimate representation of human consciousness, if art indeed changes as we see on its surface that it does – then what besides commercial economic trade, we must ask, is it that moves the object to change?
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V. Art, Private Patronage, and the Rebirth of Human Consciousness in Renaissance Europe
Putting the constraints of tradition aside, it is at this point – and upon specifying the modern quality of possession and ownership that an artwork can be subject to – that it may be useful to flash forward to the age of the Renaissance. Not in the least because the relatively recent rise of capitalist America as the center of the art world evinces remarkably illustrative parallels to the newly established art market that quattrocento Italy became during this period in European history.
Renaissance Italy was the inheritor of the Medieval mind made aware of itself by the success of its new material wealth from trade and commerce. From the Middle Ages, where art icons were considered to be the spiritual embodiment of the sacred, to renaissance Italy was transferred the idea that art representing people gave these people (wealthy merchants or aristocrats) a greater public as well as spiritual stature. Art was a spiritually embodied object and renaissance Italy represented according to Jakob Burckhardt, “a spontaneous and ultimately inexplicable flowering of the human spirit”.12
Yet, in retrospect this need not be seen as inexplicable at all. The rise of the Italian city states was impelled by the new creation of wealth, and it spawned an unprecedented consumerism in all things – as well as in art. It was the birth of pre-modern Capitalism. Art became the object of consumerism, we might say the object of a consumerism in the human spirit. And it is here, at this unique time in civilization, that art marked the immense shift toward the new mentality of human individualism that contrasts our thinking from the tradition-based mentality of the Middle Ages.
It is what in Western sociology today we call our humanist tradition. And, it is not for any specious reasoning the Renaissance is often considered by scholars to inaugurate what we might more appropriately call the “history of the artist” instead of the “history of art”. The history of art is object-based, whereas “a history of artists” – to use this adoptive term – would necessarily place more emphasis on the human being behind the art. We have noted how in the Middle Ages the art object followed a staid tradition outside any concept of earthly progress, but more poignantly, nor was there then even any notion of human importance on earth. Life was little more than an annoying preparation for a world to come in the promised hereafter. In marked contrast, in the Renaissance the chief distinction of the man of culture became individualism and worldliness.
A major historical catalyst to the emergence of the Renaissance spirit of individualism over the authority of tradition was the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, largely occasioned in around 1453 by the influx of classical scholars fleeing the Muslim siege of Constantinople. “The Ancient Greek, as revealed in this literature, was also a strong individualist, for the voice of the literature was, of course, that of democratic and individualistic Athens rather than the regimented ant hill of Sparta.”13 But the new fascination with the ancient world was not limited to the Renaissance vogue for the strong individual voice of lyrical poetry, for which it also came to be known. In keeping with this new voice, “Another important facet of individualism was the insistence on the well rounded man. If a man is only a unit in a social mass, there is a strong obligation to be as much like the other units possible. But if a man is an individual, an end in himself, then there is a value in his differences, in his uniqueness.14
So, we are here analyzing the birth of the humanist tradition; of our fascination with the artist “man” himself. And though the profound consequences of this realization may have not yet reached its full economic development even in our contemporary present, we can hardly deny that the human being is the ultimate origin at the root of any fascination with the phenomenon of art. “To be radical is to go the root of things,” said Kart Marx, “and at the root is man.” Yet a closer look at the man of the Renaissance is still helpful to assess, not only similarities, but the differences that the later “more” economic man would have to undergo as we come to survey the development of art and the artist within the context of our modern market economy. On the ideal nature of the human being of the Renaissance, for example; that he “furthermore, [should] be complete, with all his faculties developed, instead of being a mere specialist who must be completed by other specialists….
“The accomplished courtier of the Renaissance is supposed to be able to fence, to ride, to read Latin and Greek, to organize the siege of a city, or to write a graceful sonnet to a lady. And in actual fact, we find figures like Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, engineer, and inventor; Sir Walter Raleigh, explorer, freebooter, courtier, poet, and historian; like Thomas Campion, physician, poet, and composer.”15 The ideal of the Renaissance man, of course, still holds a certain level of magnetism for both women and men of today. It is perhaps in the completeness of the development of this kind of human being, however, that our modern economic status also notably differentiates us from this Renaissance or worldly outlook. For even though more individuals may have access to the development of these personal qualities today than ever before, still, the history of economic development has also made largely obsolete the aristocratic class structure which enabled this frame of mind.
Certainly, there are profound similarities as well as differences between the art world of modern America and that of 14th and 15th century Italy. In our own “modern” day, the vast majority of society is yet required to specialize themselves in the task which they are alloted. If no longer by birth, in the traditional sense of ritually observant societies (wherein if your father was a mapmaker then to such office was your calling) then, perhaps all the more, simply by the way nature itself determines one’s talents. Indeed, at any point in human history, the matter of how much choice any individual has in the selection of his or her metier is circumstantial and highly questionable. Under modern Capitalism, all that the centuries of enlightened political thinking have bequeathed our government and its subjects is the promise of a fair playing field, and the intrinsic right of every individual to pursue one’s happiness.
But so the crux of the conflict in this economic analysis returns to the question of the art market and the artists who are the subjects of its peculiar mode of distributing wealth and prosperity. And, without getting into the matter of choice for the moment, or the polemical findings of modern genetic science on the melancholic predisposition of the artist (as opposed to his more happy-go-lucky bourgeois counterpart?), it is from here that art’s special relationship to the modern economic conflict within man – between production and consumption, capital and labor – shall further ensue. Both modern and post-Modern art are merely symbol and testament to the ongoing progression of this conflict, yet to no discernable end or decision.
In pointing out, nevertheless, how the worldview of 14th century Italy was a momentous turning point for the inner consciousness of human beings vis a vis the choices offered by their earthly setting, we are staking a claim for the human faculty of choice. Also, that the art and the conscious formal symbolism in its content during this time of historical change is a mindful and volitional expression of this awareness. Because someone, after all (i.e. artists, whether individually or collectively), were conscientiously making the formalist choices in art now representative of this change of awareness. And because, among other things, art is a reflection of the conflict within human liberty, we see in its development at this historical time a mirror of how the inner conflict between mankind’s fated mortal existence and its then widespread belief in a heavenly benediction presupposed a new type of aesthetic representation that held in the balance. A balance that ever more gradually became measured and depicted by the value of things obtained in the here and now (of that newly evolving time) rather than in the timeworn promises of the afterlife.
“One of the principle forms that the Renaissance took was the rejection of authority – the determination to make one’s own decisions, right or wrong…Thus the central position of the Reformation was that a man could deal directly with his God without going through the channels of the Church, and that he should have the Bible in his own tongue, to read and interpret for himself, instead of merely accepting oficial dogma without going to its source. The beginnings of modern science can also be found in this same rejection of authority, for it automatically involves a fresh look at the evidence.”16
The foundational stimulus for this rebirth and reawakening to all things worldly, though, was not any whim of the artistic imagination determined to break free from the constraints of tradition. But rather a complex diffusion of ideas precipitated by the establishment of new navigable trade routes for commerce, over land as well as sea, which resulted in new reserves of surplus wealth. It was the tide of a rising economy that determined a new outlook and vision of mankind’s place on earth. And the horizon of the new earthly domain was only to be further expanded by the discovery of the new frontier of the American continent in the 15th century.
It is perchance only coincidence, but nonetheless fitting that as of yet the simple word “America” evokes a mythical earthly paradise to so many people around the world. And that, indeed, the American ideal or a notion of the American “spirit,” just as the connotation of the phrase “the American dream,” all share almost a kindred connection to the same spirit of individuality, rejection of authority, and penchant for earthly interests that characterized the man of the Renaissance’s emerging world view. In the Florence, Italy of then however – all the same as in the America of today – this large shift in consciousness toward the new contextual setting for human destiny (from the ultimate aspiration for the rewards of an afterlife to those granted by achieving worldly abundance), did not mean the forsaking of all religious ideology.
Rather, it was as if the same dramatic forces of humanity’s inner spiritual conflict – once symbolized by the otherworldly icons of the medieval period – were, now during the Renaissance, only transferred and returned through art to their rightful stage of origin; the human individual himself. Such was the magnitude of this transition from the icon to art; no less than the birth of art – and therefore of consciousness – as we have come to know it. If not the greatest leap, still perhaps the greatest intellectual development in modern society. Whereas before, a religious man or woman may have been a mere outsider – as if an onlooker in the audience overseeing the plight of human existence as narrated by the venerable tales of Biblical script – now suddenly artists and a new class of human beings could, through artistic patronage, become illustrious protagonists in the escalating drama of the human story.
The commissioning and creation of art during the Renaissance, no longer the exclusive product of guilds in service of the Church, gave the new patron of accumulated wealth an image of himself in beauty and immortality. If this was not enough, more than a few noblemen had their own private chapels constructed and adorned in frescoes for their own entombment.17 Renaissance Italy, we recall, was also the birth of modern consumerism. In Florence itself everyone became aware of their relative net worth. There was a showing off, a legitimization of private property, and possessions came to be an objectification of the self. Selfishness. The idea of American captialist consumerism in art seems no more than a page out of this time of artistic flourishing. Today we could even say we are in an American renaissance. In America there is a passion for spending, although our spending – as in Italy – more often commemorates the spender or patron, not the artist, or worker.
The fascination here, however, is more precisely with a sudden transferring of political influence by economic means. Art, with all its attendant power as a force for political propaganda and religious reverence, went from a domain previously reserved for the sacred auspices of the Catholic Church – to the private domain of the owner of market capital. The introduction of an art based on tradition to the demands of an emerging market was in essence the metaphorical, and real, transfer of moral autonomy – from the most powerful religious institution the world had ever known, to the consciousness of an individual group of society with the increasing means to comfortably sustain itself on earth. It was, perhaps, truly the economic as well as the spiritual prototype of modern day America. It was as if in fact the ability to create conscience and consciousness itself had been transferred from God to man.
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VI. Stolen Fire: Rational Perception and the Crisis of Magical Realism
Now, it is the conceit of those acquainted with art, or the vision of an artistic mind, that there is a moral quality behind it. The sacerdotal connection of the artist to the divine has a long historical pedigree as well. At its extreme, the idea of artistic vision implies a quality of genius – even prophecy; that it is the responsibility of the artist to give the human soul proper direction in its path through the bewildering changes in our unknown future. But, if change might be inevitable, there is no precondition to guarantee that our response to it will have any intrinsic moral determinant – perhaps, especially, if the societal perception of art is so habitually skewed toward its existence as a sensual object/commodity, in disregard of its importance as a repository of enigmatic knowledge.
Nonetheless, the aesthetic and formal changes that have marked the development of the history art – we shall see – have been as much the result of cognitive processes in art theory, and have gone hand in hand with the course of material economic developments. It remains to be seen for our contemporary day, however, how a conscientious fusion of economic principles and a return to the cognitive underpinnings of art might augur an entirely new change in the mode of human experience.
“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition,” remarked the German critic Walter Benjamin in his famous essay; The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction.18 Writing amidst the political upheavals of the 1930s, Benjamin’s concern was with the disappearance of a qualitative essence in art he labeled as its “aura,” as works of art became increasingly subject to instant reproducibility with advancing technology. A technology that, by virtue of its capacity for the mechanical replication of the image, signified to him perhaps the nullification of any possibility for artistic development within a tradition. To extend this thought further to its logical conclusion seems to imply that – as the originality or uniqueness of an image therefore loses its singular place in time – all art created since will increasingly lack the necessary foil of a developing tradition that it needs in order to distinguish its meaning.
Now at the cusp of the 21st century, we are therefore verging on a world of only virtual content in art, where the mechanically generated distribution of images can give promise only to a valueless end result; a consistently static redundancy of ever multiplying copies – a strangely fixed tradition existing outside the natural time zone of history. But one that is, if not universal, paradoxically timeless in its imperturbability; a tradition by default. No wonder the most common criticism often heard about contemporary art is that it no longer says or reveals anything new. But, since the time of the Renaissance, something has clearly changed. Yet, what is it – and how has this affected the artist and the market?
Benjamin also noted with due diligence that, “During long periods of human history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. …Tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol.”19
Before proceeding with the subject of our study it may be useful, at this juncture, to recap and pause for a moment of contemplation. It may also be useful to wonder to what extent the attitudes in thinking about art (vis a vis the ancient statue of Venus, for example) are politically determined. But, putting this thought aside for the moment, suffice is to say that the foregoing contrasts in the thinking about art during such distinct times are hereby illustrated to point out that the attitude and relationship of society to art is, by and large, cognitively based.
Not to be misled by Benjamin’s terminology, it is apt to consider that art may be both created and experienced by “sense perception.” But the point, moreover, is that any slant toward meaning is processed by our cognitive function – which criteria, of course, are also ever changing as it keeps pace with “humanity’s entire mode of existence.” The importance of this conclusion must be here noted with emphasis, as it reverts back to the premise of our approach stated in first beginning pages of our study.
Mainly, it is not our purpose here to analyze the individual aesthetic experience, nor of any necessarily subjective encounter with art. Right or wrong, the practiced observer of art will – before any given object – determine the sensual value of their experience for themselves. The perils of the fastidious judgment of our senses notwithstanding, our concern with art’s importance therefore is primarily with respect to how the underlying substance of art equates to a form of collective epistemology – or knowledge itself, be it of the most esoteric kind. We may even go so far as to say that it is an a priori knowledge (in the sense that it pre-existed in the mind of the artist, even if subconsciously), for which the art object is merely the empirical vessel in which it is encrypted. At the most fundamental level, though – whatever the important truth that art may carry – it can only be of consequence to society if it is efficiently processed in the market of ideas where it can take its rightful place as both the object and representation of its message. (In this light, the political aspect of the problem may become slightly clearer as well.)
Nonetheless, our concentration is first on the aspect of art’s meaning, or the way in which it is apprehended and processed within the context of its relationship to society. And where meaning is involved, it is the cognitive faculty that must be taken into account. Simply put, if society’s relationship to art were not a product of the predominant mode of cognizing the matter of its content, an ancient statue of Venus would not have made one iota of a difference to either the citizens of Classical Greece or the clerics of the Middle Ages. It would simply have been a statue like any other.
The philosophical distance that modern art has required, however, and come to in its own inner development – in order to be able to realize this simple point – is still largely disavowed by observers who are reluctant, or incapable of, understanding art other than on sensual grounds. And so, the overwhelming evidence of the cognitive aspirations and political impulses of modern art notwithstanding, the cultural establishment’s general refusal to accept it on its own terms might thus appear as none other than a conspiratorial undermining of ideas that stand in opposition to the inherited knowledge base of Western society. The logical basis for this assertion will be taken up later in concordance with the evidence.
It is now necessary, however, to first discuss the evolution of logical precedents in history before drawing closer to any inescapable conclusions. We should be forewarned nevertheless that the roots of these precedents record little but the splinter and tear of the still unanswered quandaries that separate faith and human knowledge. The history of when and why Western aesthetics forfeited the functional role of the cognitive faculty in art can be traced back to the 18th century, around the time of the consolidation of the Enlightenment. It is, on its own, subject enough for an entirely separate paper on art theory. Here, it shall serve by way of example to only briefly elucidate how mental paradigms can fundamentally affect the direction of artistic consciousness – and for our purposes, to foreground the setting of our final thesis within the context of the historical transitions of the past.
The initial turning point in the 18th century pivots upon a philosophical reaction by certain thinkers on aesthetics against the rise of scientific rationalism, and the attempt by some of its proponents (called dogmatic rationalists) to establish an overarching metaphysics based on its deductions. Two of the main figures in the dogmatic rationalist camp were Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and his disciple, Christian Wolff (1679-1754). In analyzing the mode of human mental thought processes, Leibniz and Wolff maintained that the mind had two different modes of cognizing the world; the higher one being thought, the lower mode being that of sense perception.20 But with respect to our ways of knowing, the difference between thought and sense perception was not a distinct type of knowledge, rather a matter of degree. “Sense perception”, they said, “cannot be made distinct without turning it into thought; lower cognition is only a preliminary stage of the same knowledge.”21
Thus Leibniz and Wolff considered beauty and the pleasure derived from it as thing appreciated and esteemed through the mental understanding of perfection. Prior to this turning point in the intellectual history, art too was construed in cognitive terms. “Art presupposes this cognition and makes it possible through its creations; art ‘imitates nature’ in the sense that it produces the best examples of perfection of which nature (the world as phenomenon, i.e., as perceived by the senses) is, ideally, capable. Art pleases to the extent that it teaches us through examples.”23 (Ibid)
We may note, in particular, of this formulation of art, that here the word “teaches” accentuates the pedagogical quality of art or, in other words, its function as kind of a epistemology in addition to, or coterminous with, its ability to convey pleasure. The cognitive function of art, moreover, is described as necessarily of the first order. “By the same token, sense perfection can have no perfection on its own, and hence no rules of its own to govern such perfection. The rules that apply to it are simply the rules of all thought: the principle of contradiction, and the principle of sufficient reason (which is the principle that God followed in making the best of all possible worlds).”24
In this early 18th century formulation of art that had held sway since the dawn of the Renaissance, in other words, the beauty of the senses was entirely dependent on our cognitive process. But this statement on its own, while superficially correct, is still a simplistic assessment of the powerful impact that images and their sensual component had on the human mind in the early to late Renaissance. For at this point in history – before any reliability in the scientific method had been established by the advances of quantitative mathematics in the fields of astronomy and physics in the two centuries that were to follow – there was an utter lack of distinction between truth that was perceived either sensually or cognitively. Sensation was cognition, and the perceptions of the senses were not subdivided into any separate epistemological category. In the realm of art, this gave images (in keeping with their Medieval legacy) a persuasiveness and authority that was tantamount to magic. That is to say, before the impending moment in Western history during the 18th century, magic (i.e. art) and truth were but one and the same.
According to one Renaissance scholar, the late Ion P. Couliano, indeed magic (manifested in the form of “phantasms”) was the “ruling myth” of the Renaissance mindset, and magic exercised its power, above all, in the form of images to the extent that they were capable of manipulating the senses. Here, the modern conflict in man between body and mind, matter and spirit, may be said to have begun. It was in fact the influence images had for proselytizing variations of the faith, as well as for subversive political propaganda, that directly led to the iconoclastic backlash of the Reformation.
Couliano cleverly outlines the historical clash of the antagonistic forces of textolatry and idolatry (each representative of our two differing modes of thought; cognition and sensation) in his sweeping book, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. “By asserting the idolatrous and impious nature of phantasms, the Reformation abolished at one stroke the culture of the Renaissance. And since all the Renaissance “sciences” were structures built on phantasms, they too had to be overpowered by the weight of the Reformation.”25
In the Renaissance, insofar as knowledge and universal education was concerned, we must recall that images were still largely functioning as devotional aids for Biblical study by the illiterate. And, as the powerful legacy of medieval icons standing as divine surrogates was still in the air; images, as opposed to written concepts, were no doubt the more powerful presence. Furthermore, by the standards of today, all knowledge (or that which was understood as such) in general was derived from sources in some manner directly linked to the sciences of the occult. For logical reasoning had yet to be taught, common sense did not know to question the magical reality of existence itself, and the faith in any one small thing was only further upheld by the greater absurdity of faith in all. In cognitive terms, it is thus not too far fetched to infer that in an age where universal literacy was non-existent except in the circles of the clergy and the aristocratic elite, art even had too much power; so much, that its dominion over society’s perception of truth – in tandem with the great individual outburst of creative expression during the Renaissance – constituted a grave threat to the established religious doctrine and order of the Church. A matter of circumstances that could not go unanswered by the ruling establishment, and hence led to the iconoclastic repercussions against images.
It is Couliano’s educated opinion though, that – in order to understand the sociological implications of any great historical transition – the studious observer must do their best to place himself in the exact historical frame of mind that he is studying. To do so, we must thus imagine our undivided perception as if overwhelmed under the sensual impact of images and the mystical corroboration of phenomena by historical legend. “On the other hand, if we wish to understand anything about that historical enigma the rise of modern science -…. we must first go to the heart of the Renaissance sciences, of which astrology, because of its universality, was the most important (magic, medicine, and even alchemy can be regarded, in a way, as astrological disciplines”).26
The conclusions of his important work thus become an important preface to understanding the existing frames of thought – and hence the mode of human existence itself – that were in flux at this momentous period in history when science, and later rational economic thinking, were about to impose their disciplines on Western society; when knowledge was based on the mysteries of the occult, and truth itself was still considered to exist largely beyond the ordinary range of human experience. To the modern reader of today, it is perhaps even exceedingly difficult to imagine the veritable shock to human consciousness that such a wide sweeping overhaul of accepted common sense mean to the average citizen of that time. A time when man considered himself the pinnacle of God’s creation and at the center of the universe but, over the course of merely a few generations, the modern scientific heliocentric model of the universe – later to be empirically proven by Galileo – would veritably hit the occult sciences of the Renaissance at their core center from which all of its other magical sciences derived; that is, at the heart of its astrological foundation.
In American Renaissance, another exhaustive and more literary work on the period in question, the contemporary “anti-novelist” and artist Sean Dorian Knight writes of the promethean challenge and heroic resignation to uncertain knowledge that the artist of the time was forced to assimilate in the face of troubling scientific reality:
“Sacrifice for knowledge – it happened – as well – long ago. The baroque was a fascinating period. Yes, to the artist – the scientist of the soul – they were fascinating times, indeed. But outside the masterpieces of light and dark, in the physical sciences men from all over were uniting in alliances of information and experiment. The secular world was overcoming the dogma of old religious order. Everywhere explorers were discovering the proper facts and machinery of our universe. The motion of the world and the motion of our species – the destiny of man – was coming into gear. They on the brink of the age of enlightenment were vitally aware a revolution was at hand. Money and national wealth were thrown in to form established scientific societies. Governments appropriated powers from the church to cement the change. The Royal Society in England, chartered 1662. The Academie des Sciences in France followed the establishment of similar societies in Italy. Scientific publications and periodical literature communicated the results of the emerging scientific method….
“….But, we must not forget their sacrifices. It is easy for us to assimilate even more recent discoveries to our body of knowledge. But how easy would it really be if we – like they of the late seventeenth century – were forced not merely to add one fact upon many others – but forced to throw overboard – to destroy – almost every single thing we´ve had to learn since the age of two?……..As they of the seventeenth century – the century of late Renaissance and Baroque – pivoted on the brink of the revolutionary crevace which they had reached, men highly conscious of their place in history clamored for the change. Scientists called for a new form of knowledge, a new method, and a system to be put forth.”27
In American Renaissance, the tragic hero of the book calls for a similarly new system – a new form of knowledge in art capable of rivaling the importance of science – to be put forth by the artists of our day. It is both an epic elegy and simultaneously the battle cry for a return – through reason – to the magical mode of understanding in art that existed in the Renaissance. In Couliano’s book, it becomes apparent that it is modern science, and the modernist notion of progress that scientific advance has connoted, which he holds in contempt for putting a stranglehold on the Renaissance age of magic – perhaps even, for some reason, to a greater extent than the iconoclastic attack led by the Protestant Reformation.
Our focus, though, lies not with Couliano’s lament for the loss of that magical bygone age, but rather with his delineation of the two major historical movements that at cross-purposes, and under entirely different interests, set the stage for the drastic change of perception that was to occur during the 18th century. In a passage where he ably attempts to record the broad historical causes and effects that can produce sweeping changes to human modes of perception, he sums up the factors that precipitated our turn from “magic” in art as well as life. This book attempts, in fact, to record the concepts of a phantasmic era, their rise and fall. The Reformation interests me only to the extent that it produced censorship of the phantasmic, and consequently, a profound change in human imagination.28 And, On the theoretical level, the pervasive censorship of the imaginary results in the advent of modern exact science and technology.29
To the acute reader it becomes apparent that, along side the important cognitive transition to rational thinking that was to occur in the mode of human understanding, there was during the Enlightenment years likewise a transformation in the spiritual state of society that was slowly taking place as new explanations came to displace long standing myths. For every gain or advance in human perception, society seems to have been taxed with a corresponding loss. Purely rational economic thinking, and the principles of the free market, of course, had yet to make their impact. Yet, at this time in question, everywhere the various forms of knowledge that had existed under the long standing myths and pseudo sciences of the occult; astrology metallurgy, medicine, alchemy, “magic” even, were all being overtaken by the new discoveries in astronomy and physics, and increasingly subject to the testing and discipline of scientific method. Reason, and pure rational thought, seemed to have no bounds to limit the extent of their domain. The Renaissance age of “magic,” may certainly have been coming to an end.
But, how then, did art elude the exacting analysis of this new cognitive thinking – and, in doing so, did it in fact preserve a certain amount of magic for itself? In keeping with our first line of inquiry, the question of how the development of art – both then and now – has been determined by its odd relationship to normal economic principles shall come into greater focus from hereon. After once again contrasting the societal changes that have informed our perception of modern art since the Renaissance, it shall then be up to the present reader to question to what extent art, by its cognitive shortcomings, has remained a form of knowledge that for all the advances of our modern age has willingly relegated itself to the occult.
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VII. Moral Freedom and the Cognitive Divide : Between Artistic Representation and Meaning
It is our premise that the principle of human creativity in art exists in close paradoxical relationship to the human faculty of cognitive reasoning. As will be demonstrated during our brief overview of the 18th century, the human imagination is also well aware of its own economic interests, and is likewise affected by the most advanced thinking in philosophy. The ideal of human freedom inherent in our ability to create, however, takes umbrage at any intent to define the limits of art’s bounds – and if there is one fundamental trait of our imagination it is that it is always prepared to radically demonstrate the conscious autonomy of the human soul.
At a time when the Enlightenment’s unchecked vogue for rationalism appeared to be conducting a thorough disenchantment of the world, therefore, it is little surprising that an equally staunch reaction to this mindset would begin. Artists, and those who upheld art as the symbolic expression of the human spirit, would of course not allow themselves to be limited by any cognitive prison. The argument against having the spiritual and religious domain of the senses being subjected to the standards of reason, though, would in itself have to be made rationally.
In principle, it was a fair crusade against the reductive mentality of those denominated as “dogmatic rationalists” and “dogmatic positivists. Two of the key figures in the disarticulation of the rationalist argument were Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762), and his student Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-1777). In a somewhat facile stroke of philosophical revisionism, Baumgarten and Meir took the conclusions of Leibniz and Wolff that “sense perception cannot be made clear without turning it into thought,” and came up with an almost effortless conclusion to a complex problem. While sense perception can still be “confused,” they said, it cannot be perfected “only” by turning it into thought. “Sense perception, they maintained, can have a perfection its own, a perfection whose standard is not that of logic (although it is analogous to that standard)…Hence there are two different kinds, rather than just stages, of cognition (knowledge), and two kinds of theory (or ‘science’) of knowledge: logic and aesthetics. Aesthetics in the broad sense is the science of sense knowledge.”30
The chief philosophical argument made in separating the realm of aesthetics from the cognitive faculty was made by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his Critique of Judgment, which was intended to unite his first two works, The Critique of Pure Reason, and the Critique of Practical Reason into a complete system. If his overall aim was – as he avowed – to save religion from the full frontal assault it was undergoing from pure reason, then his defense (for all its proxy subdivisions of 18th century mind into transcendental and non-transcendental categories) must be still reckoned as a success. Philosophy has been deprived of the coordinated knowledge between both art and science ever since, and the world has been living in the grip of the consequences still to this day.
Kant was to take the theoretical premises of Baumgarten and Meir, and in accordance with Aristotle, explain the human mind as being divided into the separate categories (or processes) of rational, ethical, and aesthetic thinking. For the latter category, Kant would presuppose another indeterminate concept that Kant called the supersensible basis to nature’s “subjective purposiveness.” This concept of the supersensible basis (though it appears to be variously conflated by Kant with the idea of nature’s subjective purposiveness)31 – we can assume to be an idea that is safely beyond our cognition of the phenomenal world.
Nevertheless, the necessity of its existence was argued speculatively in Kant’s first Critique, and as a necessary practical deduction in Kant’s second Critique. In the third and final Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the idea of the supersensible basis as a substrate of nature’s subjective purposiveness, however, becomes the essential premise to reaching his conclusion that judgments of taste regarding beauty do in fact have universal validity.
What Kant had logically articulated into existence was, in essence, a conceptual category over and above reason that could be transcended only by art and religious thought – i.e. feeling – but never cognized. This conceptual category (or the “supersensible basis”), moreover, set up an entirely new standard of judgment for all art – making it immune to rational critique, and nearly exempt from all logical questioning. The contemporary writer, Michael Lewis, describes this approach to art as the “anti-materialist” or “materially disembodied” theory of art criticism. “It was the premise of idealist or post-Hegelian art criticism that art should, and could, be disembodied from its material context…[The] anti-materialist spirit survives in some of today’s art history departments, which stress connoisseurship and attribution over context and a larger historical canvas. The student receives a high grade if he can tell Lorenzetti from a Veneziano; but if he wishes to know anything about why this or that particular picture was created, he must moonlight in economics or literature or history.”32 But, then it is little wonder why today’s university curriculums – where the materially disembodied approach to art history is so prevalent – place so much stress on the superficial plastic attributes of the art object if the ultimate rationale of their theory is that neither the meaning of art, nor the very reality of its existence, can ever be rationally known.
Similarly to religion, in effect, the genesis of all art is deemed to proceed from that otherworldly realm beyond the range of ordinary human experience (the world of phenomena) that Kant labeled the “supersensible basis,” and which was in tune to man’s natural but unknowable purpose on earth. For Kant, though, the problems leading up to the necessary postulation of this concept of the supersensible basis to “nature’s subjective purposiveness,” as well as the idea of nature’s subjective purposiveness itself, were manifold. The problems that gave rise to its existence were those that were addressed in his Critique of Pure Reason, which sought to resolve the inevitable “antinomies” that vexed the theoretical attempts of understanding made by dogmatic reason. These antinomies were contradictory propositions of truth, based on a priori logic, the solutions for which were unaccounted for in the thinking of Kant’s philosophical predecessors; namely Gottfried Leibniz, and his disciple Christian Wolff.
Though Kant was trained in the same rationalistic metaphysical tradition as these thinkers, his critique of their dogmatic reasoning is an attempt to move beyond their inconsistencies. Specifically, that; one can prove that the world is limited in space and time and that it is not; that composites consist of simple (irreducible) parts and they do not; that there are first causes (causes that initiate a causal series) and that there are not; that there is a necessary being and there is not.33 Meaning that all metaphysical knowledge, as evidenced by the confused state of its conclusions, was incapable of giving any ultimate enlightenment whether it be in science, morality, or religion.
In essence, for Kant the act of rational reflection on aesthetic judgment for a civilized human being thereby becomes the great transition point and mediating principle that unifies our rational understanding with nature’s subjective purposiveness when contemplating an object of beauty. In fact, as Kant emphatically states it: Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.34 The “morally good” is to be analogously related to supersensible basis of the moral law as determined practically by the conclusions of his second Critique.
The objectives of the Critique of Judgment, to make aesthetic reflection serve as a special mediating faculty for further apprehending the underlying supersensible basis of nature common to the premise and conclusion of his first two Critiques, thus hinged on Kant’s ability to prove the validity of a universal aesthetic reflection which was common to all.
The first, and most necessary premise, regarding the nature of the beautiful, is that beauty is not a property of an object that we contemplate to be beautiful, but rather a feeling that belongs to the observer. That beauty is not a property means that it is not an attribute or concept we give to an object because, if so, this would be purposive and contingent on our pleasure. Judgments of taste must, therefore, not be connected with our sensation of the good or the agreeable, but be disinterested. Whereas a liking for the agreeable is connected with what the senses like in a pleasurable sensation, and a liking for the good is connected with what we like merely by this a priori concept – in contrast, a liking that determines a judgment of beauty is devoid of all interest. It therefore follows that, between the three forms of liking that are three different kinds of relation between presentations and the feeling of pleasure, only our relation to beauty is disinterested and free. In essence, as encapsulated in Kant’s saying, Thus [Aesthetic] judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom.35
But while there may be such a universally valid experience with regard to the beautiful, and though the pleasure of the beautiful is that feeling of universal communicability, the essence of the experience of beauty resides in the fact that it cannot be communicated (ergo the materially disembodied approach to art history, and the division of the arts and sciences, prevalent in most Western universities). Because, to reiterate, if we were to take the beautiful and make it a conceptual idea, we would be taking it out of the realm of the beautiful and making it cognitive. For Kant, there simply can be no concept of beauty because it would get in the way of judgment. Therefore, as judgments of taste have no prior given concept (such as the concept of a “dog” presupposes the existence of what we know to be a dog), what serves as the basis for the feeling of universal communicability in the observer in making such a reflection must come from within.
Here, in apprehending nature’s subjective purposiveness, imagination and understanding are in “free play”, since regarding this purposiveness, there is no pre-determined concept; only something that is felt, but not cognized. This indeterminate principle or feeling our judgment must use is once again nothing more than a sense of nature’s subjective purposiveness. Meaning that the reflection of aesthetic judgment (on beauty), in effect, therefore determines in what manner nature is subjectively purposive.
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VIII. Out of the Depths: The Philosophical Defense of Art and Religion; Purpose Beyond Time
The preceding synopsis of Kant’s logical argumentation has been made mainly to demonstrate how the quagmire and the crisis in meaning posed by the object in modern art has its roots in this strange intellectual inversion of the 18th century. As the poet John Keats would famously encapsulate it in the summation to his Ode to a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty/ and that is all that ye know on this earth/ and all that ye need to know”; the only thing was that you couldn’t “think” it.
But, at the same time that art theory was renouncing the cognitive dimension in the apprehension of beauty, we can also take note of how Kant preserved that special domain for art’s “subjective purposiveness.” This mysterious and transcendental universal realm of feeling that implied a sense of purpose and meaning to the direction of art’s development. It is from here only a small imaginary leap to interpret the development of art history’s purpose as a series of stages that connote progress: Much like the stages in the advancement of science revealed the physical laws and workings of the universe, the analogous transitions in art history likewise reveal the moral laws and spiritual direction of mankind’s place in the universe.
During the 18th century’s categorical revision of Western civilization’s existing body of knowledge, thus we see the first branching out of the main intellectual paradigms that characterize our modern framework of thought. In the work of Immanuel Kant, the Cartesian division of body and mind (as propounded by Renee Descartes 1596-1650) appears to finally sediment its lasting influence on the division between matter and spirit. Once the rise of science became the bane of the Church, from then on it seems art (now the lesser threat) was fully prepared to be absorbed into the overflow of quasi-religious feeling that – for perhaps the first time since as far back as the Middle Ages – would again unleash itself in the form of the Romantic movement. Yet while art was allowed to submit itself to the passions, and was given “free play” in the manner of its aesthetic development, there existed in all other branches of knowledge the tendency to further corral all findings into rational specialties. To the extent that thinkers in each field built their lasting historical reputations on the discovery and explanation of the innate laws of nature held to rule their respective disciplines.
Between 1600 and 1800, the fields of study that in the latter days of Classical Greece both Plato and Aristotle had weighed in on in a general and, moreover, literary type of exposition, became subject to the most exacting overhaul ever made by Western philosophy. And, at second glance, we still find that – in substance – almost all segments of our accepted base of knowledge in contemporary modern society are a direct consequence of the rationale analysis handed down from that period of intellectual ferment when “our” great philosophers tried to build whole edifices and systems of thought. After the important work of Hobbes and Locke, it was Montesquieu who, in elaborating the laws of political science to each and every discipline, wrote: ‘The law is not considered as heretofore the arbitrary will of one man or any nation.’ “Laws,” he says, “in their broader sense, are necessary relations which derive from the nature of things, and in this sense, all beings have their laws…”36 And so, just as Newton had revolutionized physics, and the political philosophers were to lay the foundations for the American and French revolutions in Democratic government, it was Adam Smith who was to spell out the fundamental laws of Capitalism that still reign as our existing economic model.
Though not all of the sciences were to advance their theories in unison, of course, and the work of other rational thinkers (such as Darwin in biology) would have yet to make their revolutionary impact, the overall legacy that the period of the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us is the ideal of progress through reason. “Surely the preponderant evidence would show the opposite of cultural decline in science and scholarship, healing and engineering, over the last fifty years,” wrote the critic Clement Greenberg in his essay the Plight of Culture in 1953; “Most of the Western world eats better prepared food and lives in pleasanter interiors than it used to; and whatever the rich may have lost in formal graces, those less rich are certainly gentler than they used to be.”37 Before making any valuative judgment on the merits of rational progress and what this has meant for the state of word affairs, however, we must first note with emphasis again how art – by the hand of philosophers, poets and artists – had conspicuously absented itself from being held to the same standard of “science and scholarship.”
In the previous quote, Greenberg, the foremost expositor of the theory of the avant-garde, was reacting to the 20th century poet T.S. Eliot’s assessment of our cultural decline. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot had written on the problems of comparing different civilizations and their respective stages of development: “Nevertheless, we can distinguish between advance and retrogression. We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago;…I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period of some duration, of which it is possible to say that we will have no culture. Then culture will have to grow again from the soil…”38 The necessary quibbling over the definitions of “culture” and “civilization” between these two intellectuals is, in itself, a salient example of how even the terminology of our subject matter has lagged behind any human advances in conceptual thinking.
Any narrative view on the development of the art of Western civilization is, of course, a matter of historical reasoning imposed by writers in retrospect. Even if we were to consider that any changes to our tradition, gradual or sudden, could sometimes represent progress (technological or otherwise), it is often only a subjective valuation that can be assessed. For the purposes of our thesis, however, if we were to take the previous statements at face value – that culture has patently declined (Eliot) but surely the opposite has been the case in science, scholarship, healing and engineering (Greenberg); here the undeniable influence of economic development – as the branch of learning concerned with the production, consumption and transfer of wealth – on all areas of human activity (including aesthetics and all forms of knowledge) comes once again to the fore. Precisely because, out of all the necessary items produced within a society, it is mainly art whose development – after the Renaissance and since the late 18th century – has been virtually exempted from the realm of rational thinking and hence deprived of the benefits of being promoted by the adherence to strict economic principles.
In here citing the notion of progress within the development of art, specifically in the context of is relationship to economics, a necessary qualification must first be made: Foremost, that in terms of “progress,” it is not the focus of this writing to engage with any superficial formalist debates on matters of style. Nor is it to anecdotally belabor over the sayings of impressionable artists who suddenly proclaim with stupendous élan the daringness of their plastic breakthroughs.* To do so would be to concentrate merely on the formal qualities of artistic development (as a medium of representation) – and not, as according to our first premise – that the importance of art to society is in fact much more than an escape through aesthetic ends, but in fact the key source of knowledge that defines the bounds of our conscious reality itself. Whether in fact this ultimate reality exists, like for Kant, at the threshold of some other-worldly transcendental realm – that can be represented but never cognized – or is, no less plausibly, only a further stage of our own reality that the creative mind enables us to inhabit beyond our self-constructed labyrinths of space and time, is still to be determined.
Whatever the case, in keeping with our view that art is an epistemology, any importance art might have would not be a result of its merely formal attributes of representation (aesthetically pleasing though they may be) – if in fact there were not some unanswered human need for knowledge yet to be “represented” in the first place. Albeit, logically, if there is behind the content of art, and within the make-up of its human creator – not just a feeling – but a necessary type of knowledge deserving of economic valuation, also remains in question.
It so follows, here, if we are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s comparison of the different reactions to a statue of Venus in Ancient Greece and during the iconoclasm of the Middle Ages, that the paradox of whether the substance of art is timeless and universal – or simply a product of the historical knowledge or consciousness of its day – becomes a major impasse if (as we first contended) art is precisely in need of being subject to both rational and economic analysis. Nonetheless, that the enigma of art is primarily of cognitive import – and hence, akin to vital information that is subject to economic valuation – can be attested to once again by contrasting our modern detachment (or disinterest, if you prefer) to a statue of Venus. Of those uncertain and iconoclastic believers in the Middle Ages who may have regarded the Venus as an ominous idol, we can adduce that their fierce reaction to such statues arose because these represented a disturbing clash to their system of belief and accepted base of knowledge. In contrast, we can look upon such a statue with pleasure, as it presents no threat to our cognitive understanding of the world. The varieties of change in religious experience within the context of our modern experience, furthermore, allow our relationship to art to be flexible on these matters. Under the empirical guidance of rational science, we are no longer in thrall to art’s magic. But then again, perhaps, neither has art concluded the trajectory of what it has to say.
To further confront the question of whether art represents the “timeless and universal” or in fact what amounts to the historical consciousness of its day, we must be prepared to once again recognize the fundamental difference between art that was created within the context of a living tradition and that of art that was created within the framework of our modern market economy. Mainly, that it is the degree to which art has come to be an object capable of being in private possession that in any way distinguishes our object-centered relationship to art from that of the pre-Western cultures of the past. Moreover, because it is principally this quality that precipitated the development of art’s formal stages as evinced in the history of Western culture.
Along with private possession, art appears to be inspired with the need to reflect our greater sense of individual human empowerment. Against the bonds of tradition, the dynamics of an art market has the ability to symbolically enact our capability of shaping future change. Whereas in societies where a more public art embodied the static ideals of their time, and was created within the canon of a tradition most often by the state or Church, we recall that there was little change in human consciousness that creative beings needed to express and record through art.
And so, just as the story of our culture shows, it was only when the growth of commerce over a long period of time led to private patronage, that artistic innovation would become a quality that was in demand. Even though it was not until the latter days of the ancient Greek world, and later beginning with the surge in private wealth during the European Renaissance, that art objects came to also command a substantial price for their making. Only from this point did it follow that, the more rare and grandiose the spirit of an object’s workmanship, if recognized, the rarer and more priceless the issue of its economic value or worth. Until, by virtue of an object’s origin and authorship both singular and unique, to an artwork’s new economic possessor was also soon transferred the mysterious cult status of an artwork’s spiritual power.
As it is with the development of almost any modern product line – be it new automobiles, appliances or even clothes – the question of monetary value of art therefore seems to go hand in hand with an object’s distinctiveness or uniqueness, and innovation at the expense of tradition appears to be an equal pre-requisite for this quality. The genesis of “progress” or development in art, as such, shares the same beginning as the birth of economics in art – and thus appears to come first from the capability to think of art as a product. An abstract notion perhaps too easily overlooked in some circles of our mechanical-digital age where there is still a lament over the loss of art’s “aura.”
Nevertheless, on the question of material wealth and human empowerment, it is our purpose to see how the market’s role functions here as the great catalyst of change and human liberty. And if it is, ultimately, economics that has determined the value and market allocation of all objects and products that have benefited the advance of living conditions of humanity – not only their price, but the very representation of their substance as well as the meaning of their content – why then in like manner, not art? After all, did not Kant himself say that, “Aesthetic judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom.”
An efficient economy raises standards of living, creates wealth and inspires the forces of competition. Competition leads to experimentation, even diversity in product, as a means to get ahead. Capitalism’s ordained right to private property, we see, presumes to operate on the most visceral territorial instincts in our nature, and perhaps even mimics the laws of natural selection. All in the name of human liberty and humankind’s right to the pursuit of happiness. The obvious Socialist critiques on the flaws and excesses of Capitalism’s business model notwithstanding, the strength of the American economy has still made it the one most emulated by the leading industrial nations around the world. For a moment, there seems to be a teleological direction to human consciousness and intent.
It may be that desire and greed – as much as the prize of the beautiful and true – are, after all, simply the lure of human ingenuity. And yet, something is amiss. Capitalism in itself, as well as the rough and dismal science of economics, is morally blind to the crude market realities and attendant consequences of subsistence level poverty and exploitation that exist at its base. But who is at fault? Or could it even be at all possible that our art and culture – as the most salient products of society excluded from the rational framework of economic exchange – are themselves to blame? In other words, if something like art is not the development of more acute human consciousness of reality (i.e. akin to ultimate knowledge itself) – but instead considered “timeless and universal” – then what need has it to progress or be further updated in the weltanschauung of our contemporary system?
With moral inspiration, the artist creates from and for the freedom of the imagination, and yet – on matters of pressing social concern – he or she is largely ignored, or always relegated to peddling their influence where he or she can be the least disruptive. All the while, in accordance with Capitalism’s cause, the art and cultural establishment pays heed only to the object and product of the artist’s “unconscious” self. But art objects have no rights in themselves, nor do they aspire to any kind of inherent freedom. As we shall further see, they do not obey the same rules of economic exchange. Even as symbols they fail to serve the cause if they go against the market system.
Aesthetic judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom? In the passage above, of course, Kant was reflecting on his own assertion that the nature of aesthetic contemplation should be devoid (free) of any personal interest – but, for the moment, this only addresses (in the manner of art’s reception) the consumption side of the economic equation. Insofar as the artist’s own production is concerned, however, the ultimate desire for communication of the creative act does presume an interested intent, whether or not there is any monetary exchange or the artist was actually successful in realizing what his intent was to convey. In witness to just the past century of development in Western art history, perhaps we may even conclude that there always was (and is) in the artist the will or desire, not only to express, but bestow – a certain radical kind of knowledge.
But, before we are to speculate on the hypothetical market value of this knowledge, over and above the object of art that is its residue – any more than we could speculate on the monetary exchange value of religious beliefs – here, we are again reminded of Benjamin’s statement that, “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.” (Benjamin; Illuminations p. 223). What this meant for him was that the aura of any artwork was exclusively tied to its origin created in a singular place and time. Thus, in experiencing a work of art, a beholder was automatically linked – even if at a meeting point in an entirely different locus of existence – to the work’s originality and authorship. There was, one might say, the possibility of a spiritual union with the preserved moment of a bygone past, in rare instances, to a moment of an act of genius, no less. As it were, something in a work of art that was indeed timeless and universal and transcended the barriers of historical difference: a mysterious aura, not unlike the undying remnants of the immortal human soul.
But, if true, it is a delicate thing to behold; just as it is for any artist to create – a sign of the most fragile and timeless and universal esoteric erudition. And yet the idea persists that, so long as the physical object has withstood the passage of age, the universal qualities of a great work of art may be rekindled in an eternal present. That great art throughout many civilizations, including our own, retains a relationship to the mystery of religious experience merely accentuates the gravitas of Benjamin’s concern with respect to the loss of its aura. Also, it emphasizes the extent to which art is still relegated to Kant’s transcendental domain of nature’s unknown subjective purposiveness.
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IX. Magic in the Marketplace: The Forbidden Realm of Unknown Purpose for Sale
Whatever art may stand for today, it is clear that its impact and importance to the general population of society has changed a great deal since the Renaissance. The once unavoidable political implications of artistic expression have been diffused into various forms of mechanical-digital mass media and entertainment production at the daunting pace of technological developments. Meanwhile, politicians as well as the factual news media have employed the power of images to impose their economic and ideological agendas on our senses. It almost seems that the term “art” no longer has any traditional relationship to a single human source. In spite of the implicit political impulses of the artist’s message, nor does the singular art image provide barely any true reflection of its contemporary social context; all images (even – or one might say, especially – all historical masterpieces) have furthermore been infused with the capability of multiple existences through the act of digital reproduction. Art has become but one more commodity, now fully integrated into the structure of capitalist production. And yet, we seem to think of art, from its vary beginnings, as being completely at variance with the most basic rational principles of Capitalism’s creed. As has been mentioned, it does not even follow the normal rules of economic exchange. It now remains to for us to take a look at the evidence, both past and present.
In a review of three different books published on the topic of the art market, in April of 1994, the writer Michael Lewis reported on his past experience as fledgling stock boy for a prominent New York gallery. Musing on the apparent indifference the gallery had for unburdening itself of the millions of dollars of worth of artwork in the form of old masterpieces, he wrote: “…In 1982, the public almost never turned up. The last of the great nineteenth-century French dealers resembled a moribund business, or front for a thriving drug operation. So scarce were Wildenstein’s customers that the salesmen in their fifth floor offices could fairly assume that whoever wandered in off the street was either lost or looking for a bathroom.”39 The author estimated the book of the gallery that owned 3,000 works of art to be around $3 billion dollars. But an estimated guess of the book value in today’s prices would be almost $ 9 billion dollars given “…the dozens of Courbets, Manets, Monets, Cezannes, Van Goghs, and Gaugins hoarded for a century; more than 100 Picasso’s purchased directly from the artist; major works by Rembrandt, Hals and the Dutch landscape painters; 200 or so Italian Renaissance pictures; several hundred pictures by the better-French knickers-and-garter painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – including sixty-nine Fragonards; and countless assorted goodies from the interstices of art history”40 that were to be found in the gallery’s annex warehouses.
But, the former stock boy goes on to say, “What chiefly distinguished Wildenstein from an ordinary business was not its secrecy, but its reticence. The gallery didn’t especially to want to sell. A lot of drawings and paintings fell within the price range of the average millionaire, but the average millionaire was never informed of their existence. Inspecting the merchandise was the privilege of the few, rather than the right of the market.”41 From here, an analysis of the book From Manet to Manhattan, by Peter Watson, explores several myths that have grown out of the backdrop of the modern art market.
Watson’s book breaks down the history of the art market into three major stages, after the founding of the auction houses Christie’s (1766) and Sotheby’s (1744). The modern period emerges mainly from the years 1882-1929, “the years of Impressionism and of the boom in America’s demand for great European art; 1930-1956, years of draught and the Westward expansion of the British auction houses; and 1957 to the present, years of plenty and the emergence of New York as the center of the art world.”42 But, after pointing out the importance, in 1883, of the American Art Association (the first American auction house with “snob appeal”), which introduced New York to French Impressionism, the reviewer makes an important commentary that illuminates the sociology behind art as much as it informs about the basic history of the market. “The single even that shaped the trade in portable art objects in this
[the 20th]
century was that Americans suddenly became very rich. Once their fortunes began to grow, someone was bound to feed them art. That rich people should collect art was, by the 1880s, a widely held assumption.”43
The widely held assumption that persists even today with regard to the relationship between wealth and art collecting, we find, sprang from the perpetuation of certain art market myths. Among them, the myth of the great art collector, which follows from the notion that there is a kind of “moral authority in being physically associated with Great Art.” Then there is “the myth of the Great Art Dealer. We admire the Great Art Dealer because, unlike, say, a jewelry salesman, he soars beyond commerce.” (Ibid) As Watson, himself writes; “Truly great secondary dealers (Wilenstein, Seligman, Gimpel, Carrit, Thaw, trading in the works of dead artists must be connoisseurs who know what they buy…the dealer is truly as much a scholar as a merchant, and therefore the acquisition of art, on the part of collectors, from such dealers is as much a learning experience as it is a purchase. That is the difference between collecting and shopping.” Or to take Watson’s other statement, “[Andre] Emmerich is truly as much a scholar as a merchant and has written several books on Pre-Columbian Art. He will never push a work, pushing a painting for him means [it’s] not art; it’s merchandise.”44
From this point the reader is led to explore obviously overlooked questions that are in need of being answered, if one is to attempt to fathom the mystery behind the art world’s aloofness to normal commercial practices. As Lewis writes, “How did any market develop anti-market prejudices? Why was it an insult to describe a painter as ‘commercial’ when the world’s most commercial painters were Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rembrandt? Why did people clap as Sotheby’s after a tycoon paid some huge sum for a work of art? Had the tycoon done something admirable? And if it was admirable to pay a great deal for art, then why wasn’t it also admirable to engage in the hard selling practices that would lead others to pay a great deal for art? Why didn’t art dealers show more enthusiasm for a deal?”45 These questions are hardly ever asked in contemporary criticism and reporting about the workings of the art market.
The mystical view of the nexus where the art buyer meets the art seller, “and both are ennobled,” appears to have been long ago taken for granted by the art viewing public. But on closer analysis, major problems arise – though more than shedding light on the contrarian thinking of the art market pretensions, they merely illuminate the absurdities in what seems to be an ongoing illusion by the mutual consent of all parties involved. For all the lofty associations made about art and the scholarly art dealer, the reality of art transactions are often a much more mundane affair. As Lewis recounts the average sort of conversation he was exposed to when lingering outside the gallery sales room while both the dealer and collector met; “Probably these [interactions] were somewhat more elevated than the art world norm; this was Wildenstein, after all. About four-fifths of what was said, however, was on the level of ‘That green will clash with the sofa” and “So who is more famous, Monet or Gaugin?’ When the salesmen pitched Renoir, they said, ‘I like him because he doesn’t require to much concentration’; when they sold Boudin they said, “We say here that Boudin is the Monet of the skies.’…Occasionally they told stories about a picture, of the famous people who had owned it and the famous museums that had displayed it. Their message was rarely; buy this and you will enjoy looking at it. It was: buy this and you will join the class of superior people who buy it.”46
The illogical associations made around any given art object may certainly be strange, but they would be stranger if they actually proceeded from the artwork by itself. Most often, though, the cult status of art and the odd market behavior that accompanies it is a direct result of the sociology of art that has now almost seamlessly integrated itself with the myth of the art market’s system. But though it be illogical, that is not to say that there is no method in it. At the tail end of the 1980s, a boom decade for the New York art world, and economist by the name of William Grampp wrote a book titled Pricing the Priceless, in which he made a compelling argument for the unexposed rationale behind art world economics.
“Grampp proposed that art objects, like other commodities, were subject to diminishing marginal utility: the more you have of one kind of art the less you want to pay for more of it. The production of another dozen Schnabel plate paintings will, holding all else equal, reduce their price. That is why the market demands different kinds of art. Grampp likened artistic innovation – from Proto-Pop to Pop to Op – to product differentiation. It made sense, by this logic, that styles in painting changed more rapidly in twentieth century America than in, say, twelfth-century France. The demand for art increases with income, and the brisker the demand for art, the more rapid the change in styles. What is more, said the economist, in a society such as ours, in which income has dramatically outpaced investment in taste, one would expect art to appeal to minds equipped to appreciate novelty – it’s flat! It’s abstract! It’s new – rather than complexity.”47
What has the contemporary artist to say about all this? The hard truth is that if successful in the art market, buoyed by his or her rising prices and sales, more often than not the artist will look at these indications as sufficient proof of the viability of his work. Critics are looked upon with disdain, and how much the vagaries of collectors’ whims are a result of arbitrary speculation – or simply the savvy marketing of the gallerists – become an irrelevant question so long as the artist’s view point is represented in an important collection or museum. The economist Grampp cites Renoir as a typical example of how monetary success can breed a great deal of faith into an artist’s view of the market. “Thus Renoir once said, “get this into your head, no one really knows anything about it. There’s really one indication for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sale room.”48 Given the demographics of gainfully employed artists at any time in history, however, we must keep in mind that the prosperous artist is, far and away, the exception in the reality of the market. But, what about the unsuccessful artist?
Two scholarly works demonstrate a strong case that it was, in fact, the inability to successfully compete in a crowded market economy that led artists to use the mythological element of art’s aura for their own commercial gain. They are Richard Goldthwaite’s Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600, and Martha Woodmansee’s The Author, Art and the Market. Goldthwaite’s book is of particular interest because it reveals striking parallels between the surge in demand for art in Renaissance Italy and the new passion for spending on art that spread among the newly acquired fortunes of the American upper-class at the end of the 19th century. The new Italian society of city-states was well aware of its cultural indebtedness to the art and sculpture of Ancient Greece and Rome. Just as America itself, as the civilization of the new world just beginning to come of age, had its own motivations for shaking off the burden of its cultural inferiority to Europe.
Devoid of the oppressive canons of any stifling tradition, America was in theory almost akin to a philosopher’s dream state; a tabula rasa on which to erect an ideal utopian society. But, suddenly freed from economic dependence on the powerful Catholic Church, quattrocento Italy was no less ripe for artistic innovation and experimentation. To describe some of the social forces which distinguished Italy from the rest of Europe: “a booming monetized economy based on trade and finance; a permeable social structure based on wealth in which there were always newly rich men anxious to establish their credentials; and a distribution of wealth far more even than that of medieval northern Europe, or modern north America for that matter. In northern Europe, wealth was based on class. In Renaissance Italy, class was based on wealth; and so the display of wealth became tantamount to the display of class.” 49
But as is evident from Goldthwaite’s research, what was most radically different about the new Italy from the medieval one that preceded it, was the change in moral attitude that went along with the desire and consumption of wealth. According to Lewis’s interpretation, “The Florentine moral climate fairly rapidly accommodated the needs of the newly rich. The religious objections to luxury were overcome, in principle by a barrage of intellectual treatises and in practice by the piecemeal sale of churches. Theorists such as Alberti and Pontano legitimized possessiveness in a way that was without precedent in medieval moral thought.”50 Once the mentality of the society could accept material ostentation, then it was only a matter of time for the supply to meet the demand. Times were certainly new, but the great yearn and enthusiasm for cultural innovation did not necessarily advance at the same pace as cultivation in taste.
“The tastes and the habits of the Italian businessmen were, by the standards of the modern art market, relentlessly middlebrow. The finest artworks were made to order. The Duke of Ferrarra paid by the square foot. The legendary merchant of Prado, Giovanni di Bardi, paid for time and materials. Anyone who was anyone bought a chapel and redecorated it in his own honor. By the early fifteenth century there were in Florentine churches six hundred private chapels filled with frescoes, altarpieces and memorial tombs.”51 And yet, that human creativity was here still indirectly in the service of the faith of the Church, hardly begins to give one an accurate idea of the extent of this new obsession with art.
As Lewis claims, like so many art historians before and after him, Florence was the greatest art producing culture ever. “Rapid innovation in painting, sculpture and architecture spawned the invention of whole new art forms: painted and transparent smalto, niello, wood intarsia, maiolica, stained glass. (Consumer markets outside the fine arts, a concept that did not yet exist, kept pace. The list of different styles of chairs in a 1663 inventory of the Strozzi palace reads like the menu of a fine restaurant – segiole alla Genovese, seggiolle con fondo, seggiolo con cuscine…)”52
The outright consumption of art during this time though is, on closer philosophical analysis, indicative of something far more controversial. Here, there were no hidden pretensions or aloofness toward the direct, unabashed commercial engagement with the substance of art. It is this unapologetic materialistic trait during this time in which so much great art was produced that, according to the author, has since made the field of Renaissance studies a pivotal area in the debate against the materially-disembodied theory of art. And, if Renaissance Italy, being far closer and under the shadow of the religious tradition and sacred aura of art inherited from the Middle Ages, was so conspicuously materialistic – then how is it that the idealistic notion of art as the symbol of pure spirituality still pervades the commercial trade of art in our own market at the cusp of the 21st century? When, in fact, it is also this very flamboyance and lack of hidden aesthetic pretenses in art that our culture so esteems upon contemplating the era of the Renaissance in our history.
“The shamelessness of these progenitors of the modern patrons of the arts is somehow refreshing,” writes Lewis of the aristocratic patrons of the Renaissance, “They make no pretense of disinterested contemplation. Their interest in art was keenly interested. They were propelled into their artworks by the same forces that drove the world’s first modern consumer culture.” Goldthwaite’s book has the last word; “…by enshrining these objects in museums we pay homage to the luxury consumption of the past and thereby reverently celebrate the passion for spending for things that keep the capitalist system of the West going.”53
We recall, of course, the great Kantian philosophical inversion of aesthetic contemplation during the 18th century. But would the turgid writings of Kant’s philosophy have managed to carry so much weight up until our own day had his anti-rationalist theories not been supported by the growing economic problems of the working artist?
* * *
X. A Disinterested View From Above the Masses: Climbing the Economic Ladder
Art and the image during the Renaissance, as the scholar Couliano noted, were phenomena of imposing metaphysical import. As barometers of truth in everyday reality, as well as tools for political manipulation, their power was on par with “magic” and any unconfirmed faith in empirical science itself. It was only after the simultaneous rise of rational empiricism, and the crushing backlash of the Reformation, that images lost the overwhelming power they had on the human imagination. Kant’s philosophical defense separated art’s standard of knowledge into a different realm from that of science, but from this point it was up to the artist to redefine art’s relationship to the market. Moving forward from the Renaissance, we therefore go on to question the particular moment when art became in essence more akin to the way art is understood by our society today. We should as well take note, more than in passing, that it is the manner in which art is evaluated economically that largely determines the public’s concept of its essence.
“The Florentine art market-place perceived the value of a painting and its aesthetic worth as closely related; the qualities desirable in a work of art – ‘magnificence’ and ‘splendor’ – connoted also expense,” asserts Goldthwaite, “What happened between then and now to render art something like an antidote to price theory? [But] what led William Blake to insist that ‘where any view of money exists art cannot be carried on.”?54
In answer to these questions, Woodmansee’s book Art, the Author, and the Market focuses on a moment of failing market interest in the work of artists and literary authors. According to Lewis, her research also disputes the “controlling assumption of idealist aesthetics, that art is timeless and universal.”55 While Goldthwaite’s book concludes that the market demand for aesthetic works of art in the Renaissance arose mainly alongside the market for other consumer durables (as a more or less another material product), Woodmansee describes how our modern “romantic” understanding of art came into fruition out of a veritable market crisis. “The idealist ideal achieved its modern form in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century…..in response to a democratic market for works of art. A German poet, named Karl Phillip Moritz sat down, pen in hand, to rationalize his inability to sell, and created a distinction between an object of mechanical art that served a purpose (such as a clock and a knife) and an object of Fine Art that, he explained, ‘does not have its purpose outside of itself, and does not exist for the sake of anything else, but rather for its own internal perfection.”56 “In establishing art as a discrete realm of ultimate purpose, the German poet ‘was simply transferring an essential property of the Deity to the work of art.”57
An explicit disdain for the public’s ability to discern between the quality of good art and bad art was at the core of Moritz’s idea. In Moritz’s own words, “If the thought of approval is your main consideration, and if your work is of value to you only insofar as it brings you fame, then you are working in a self-interested manner…You will be seeking a false glitter, which may dazzle the rabble momentarily, but will vanish like fog before the gaze of the wise.”58 And so, the Romantic inversion was complete.
But this pure aestheticism, which combined a religious reverence for the artist, was not (according to Woodmansee’s point) a purely spiritual matter. “If the new theory of art was one part displaced theology, it was also one part displaced market anxiety. The [modern] idea of art grew directly from the economic self-interest of artists…In addition to rationalizing popular failure, Woodmansee argues, the anti-materialist idea of art led to intellectual property rights. Before there could be copyright laws, there first had to be some notion of the artist as sole creator….Art’s defacto loss of instrumentality could be recuperated as a (supreme) virtue…Moritz makes a triumph out of defeat and ‘rescues’ art from the determination by the market.” (Ibid)
A further example of this newly adopted theory of art in the face of the new democratic market economy is attested to in the letters of the German writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller. The complete reversal of Schiller’s previous point of view evinces how the new theory provided a powerful intellectual concept that artists could use to advance their falling economic position. “After his first popular success, the year before Moritz had published his ideas, Schiller had written to a friend that ‘the public is now everything to me, my school, my sovereign, my trusted friend. I now belong to it alone. I shall place myself before his and no other tribunal. It alone do I fear and respect.’”59 Fame was good.
“Yet a decade later, after a series of market flops, in a letter addressed to his patron Schiller concluded that it was ‘impossible in the German world of letters to satisfy the strict demands of art and simultaneously procure the minimum support for one’s industry,’ Schiller goes on to write, ‘Our world is no longer Homer’s world, where all members of society were at roughly the same stage with respect to sensibility and opinion and therefore could easily recognize themselves in the same descriptions and encounter themselves in the same feelings. There is now a great gulf between the elect of a nation and the masses.’”60 Suddenly, fame and popularity were bad.
As Lewis sums up his interpretation of the consequences for today’s contemporary art market, “The religion of art has [now] been appropriated from artists by collectors and dealers… There was a dizzying moment in the ‘80s when the art market was booming alongside the markets for other luxury goods, and it clearly paid to push new merchandise. This was nicely demonstrated by the crockery smasher Julian Schnabel. Schnabel and his dealers courted publicity: photo spreads in fashion magazines; countless newspaper interviews, a memoir ejaculated at the premature age of 34,…Obscurity was bad, fame was good….And while the initial critical response to his work was mixed (‘Schabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting’, wrote Robert Hughes), his prices rose inexorably from about $3,500 in 1981 to $35,000 in 1982 to $93,500 (at auction) in 1983 to mid six figures in 1987….And the cognoscenti caved! The Times gave Schnabel a good review. The Met bought a painting. The Whitney gave him a show.
“But the really interesting thing was that, even in the commerce-drenched culture of the ‘80s, the market preserved some of the old Romantic conceits. The artist, of course, tried to have it both ways at once. The result was a wonderful balancing act of the most artistically incorrect deeds with the most artistically correct utterances. Above all, the artist and his image-makers grasped that there was something fishy in an artist being too well-liked. In an interview with the Times as his prices climbed into the low six figures, Schnabel said he saw his work ‘driving people crazy; they don’t know what to make of it.’ In 1987, as his prices rose into the mid six figures, he said that ‘I no longer expect people to understand me.’ His dealers understood him completely. ‘I guarantee you that when his show opens here it will be the biggest opening we’ve ever had,’ said his Los Angeles dealer, ‘and people will stand around saying, “I hate his work.”’ They may have hated it, but they bought it. (They may have bought it because they hated it.)
“The downtown art world perfected the new game of pushing the merchandise as hard as merchandise can be pushed, while preserving a rhetorical distance from the mass market. Whatever else you can say about this phenomenon, it reminded the market of what the market was.”61 Yes, the market is what the market is. And while the sophisticated pose of the contemporary art merchants and collectors toward the products they deal in may not completely answer whether the essence of art is simply material – or also by its symbolic representation, possessive of the inherent quality of self contained perfection that theologians ascribe to the essence of the Deity – there is yet a lesson to be learned here. These variables concern only the demand side of the economic equation. The public can be trained and instructed on how to approach a work of art with cultivated disinterest. But, as for the supply-side, the artist is almost the sole determinant of the presentation of his product – and he has absolutely nothing against the positive interest and material valuation of his creative product. Just as any pure-hearted Capitalist would proudly aver of himself, the artist is an economic animal.
* * *
XI. Art and the Metaphysical Base: The Demographics of Revolution in a Political Economy
Given the choice of market success versus unsung obscurity, it is rarely a question what option any living artist would choose. The strange moral apprehension toward commercially motivated profit by members of the contemporary art world, however, requires that artists cultivate a more nuanced approach. Today, as well as in the time of Renoir or Schiller before him, we can see that the less well-to-do artist can still have recourse to fall back on the long mystical tradition in the history of art; wherein the materially disembodied substance of art’s undying aura is presumed to hover like a disdainful ghost over the spoils of earthly success. To no lesser degree it is also evinced in the anti-market pretensions displayed by reticent gallerists dealing in the works of dead masters. There is an illusion of occupying the moral high ground in championing any virtuoso painter who sacrificed all material pursuit of wealth for the sake of his art, just as for the living artist, to think that his work is misunderstood, can be tantamount to saying that it “soars beyond commerce.” But this contrarian, anti-rationalist theory of art can only serve to further obfuscate and confuse a crucial issue in determining the substance of art’s importance to society.
Nonetheless, rather than risking any objective self-criticism, from both artist and dealer there ensues a confidence game with the potential to defraud the essence of art’s message to our conscious reality. It is used when the tacit proclamation that art that is rejected by critics, as well as the public, is said to be on account of it being even closer to that other-worldly realm of ultimate reality that is beyond cognition, and therefore, obviously misunderstood. Most of the time it is never said at all, in fact, but nor is there any need for it to be said. (The public cannot afford to buy it, usually, neither the critics.) All any interested observer has to do to confirm it is have the nerve to ask about the meaning of an object of art on display at any gallery in Chelsea, and measure the clarity of response from one educated individual to another.
There is in the anti-market pretensions with which one is greeted the thinly veiled conceit of the cult-like relationship of art to religious experience, should one have the further education to discern it. A strange feeling if one is unfamiliar with the art world, somehow kept strangely alive by the mysterious aura that is the legacy of the anti-rationalist theories developed in 18th century. To the ambitious fortunes of the few living artists – numbered in the hundreds – lucky enough to have such a gallery representation, of course, there will be less to complain about as they (along with their pictures and assorted objects) await their inclusion among the rank and file of the still more fortunate deceased artists. They, at least, have the illusion of societal recognition and the hope of being heard. The market, too, may smile upon them.
But to the vast hordes of living and unrepresented artists – numbered perhaps in the hundreds of millions all across the world – the picture is less sanguine. But the interesting thing is that by this measure – when art is implicitly accepted to operate within the same spiritual territory as religious truth – the closed and mysterious world of art world sits atop the altar of culture like a pandora’s box. And, logically, a forbidden door lies in wait to be opened; for the millions of financially destitute artists to morally assert their competitive right to challenge religion’s hidden presence in the order of our economic society. A revolutionary proposition, if the compelling case could ever be made. But is not revolution inherent in the very nature of art and the creative act?
At first glance, the scenario of an aggrieved class of proletariat artists, possessed of sufficient class consciousness to join in concerted effort to forcibly overthrow a bourgeois cultural establishment in control of the means of production, i.e. the gallery and museum system living off the works of dead masters; smacks of ludicrousness. (But we must take into consideration that art is not “officially” consecrated as art until it has been hung on a gallery or musem wall where few living artists get their due before they are dead, and that Marx himself had written that history repeats itself; first as tragedy, the second time as farce.) Furthemore, before questioning the absurdity of any such idea, historical evidence demonstrates a long precedent for art’s most radical spiritual argument.
The auratic quality of art, still given credence today and indicative of an eternal reality beyond, was not first invented in the 18th century by Moritz, Schiller, or any of the other previously mentioned German writers and philosophers. Kant’s transcendental aestheticism in his third Critique was in staunch reaction to the tenets of empirical reason, but it was merely the consolidation in Western philosophy of a tradition that spans the millennia of stages belonging to human civilization.
The distinguished critic and scholar of ancient and near-Eastern philosophy, Thomas McEvilley, traces this auratic quality of art beyond Plato to at least the time of the poet Sappho in the 6th-century B.C, “who said her poems would bring her immortality….. This view of artworks goes back to times when they were sanctified objects made for use in rituals. It is primitive magic plain and simple, which ritually abolishes historical time. It typified Egyptian tomb art, which portrayed the places and things of eternity and was itself magically equivalent to them; it goes back probably to those Magdelenian paintings in the distant depths of the caves, beyond the reach of night and day. Yet despite the extreme primitiveness of its beginnings, this theory of art came into Romantic Europe whole, and has survived to the present day.”62
Knowing specifically how this idea of art has become further tangled and embedded in the art historical narrative of the West thus might even require a thorough and systematic dissection of our most basic cultural assumptions. For if there can be any factual conclusions to these theoretical premises of art, whether they are true or not, would logically presuppose resounding consequences both politically and economically. Albeit it is the case (now stated here and to be further demonstrated) that for these very same reasons, any continuity of our cultural civilization as we know it has required that critics and scholars leave this enigmatic quality of art unanswered.
Nevertheless, the essence of every discipline of art being connected at root, the genesis and inspiration of all religious texts, works of poetry, and existential writings can be questioned and examined (if at least on ethical and moral grounds) to illuminate this potential economic crisis. In evidence of this, we can see that, with regard to the literary production of artistic works, a cultural safety zone for the revolutionary essence of art – as an ulterior and higher reality – appears to have already been long ago established, and even required, for the permanence of our social order. Art in literature is thus denominated as “fiction”; and so literary works are further categorized and classified into genres in order to be published according to their corresponding market niche. While whatever shadowy presence of any alternate and higher reality exists behind inspired words on a page, as so called “fiction”, they do little to harm the existing reality of our Western historical imagination as it was handed from Judeo-Christian Biblical text.
Contemporary literary production of art is thus “make-believe,” and yet for the overwhelming majority of the population in the Western world, the most profound knowledge of “ultimate reality” comes through the literal belief in the ancient stories of mythical scripture. In these holy works, edited for centuries by priestly scholars, the faithful read of human immortality and an afterlife. Meanwhile, the costliest political campaigns and bloodiest wars are still fought in our day and age under the avowed moral guidance of the divine faith that these works of art have wrought. Yet, in spite of complex moral problems and crisises unique to modern existence, what the contemporary writer has knowledgably to say can only extend, but not overturn, the millennia of human imagination. Moreover, it is the living artist whose livelihood and spirituality that is at stake, and the destiny of modern culture that lies in the balance. But, again, is this crisis all about our old imagination gone wild? Or, what does the notion of “art as knowledge” have to do with economics?
Only if, as in keeping with our beginning premise, art is recognized as an important epistemology – and thus an ultimate source of our knowledge of ultimate reality deserving and worthy of necessary economic valuation – does the financially burdened relationship of contemporary art to the cult status of art in the Western tradition come into inevitable conflict. With respect to literature, as art in language is necessarily cognitive in nature, it can question knowledge no further beyond the boundaries of what the mind has already processed; such that even poetry is now static, and a prisoner to linguistic thought. And new knowledge and insight into the metaphysical structure of the world is constrained and subsumed under the oppression of the old.
Human creativity and perception, inherently dynamic before the changing material factors of technology and modern experience, is by this manner rendered moot and without the instrument of an expressive voice. And although the value of such knowledge to economic society may be qualitatively unquantifiable, to the living author whose work must be preemptively classified into the category of “fiction,” this categorical understanding of literature stands as both an economic as well as metaphysical oppression. In no other branches of knowledge do the living practitioners of their trade have to compete against the dead. Lawyers, doctors, and scientists do not compete against dead lawyers, doctors, or scientists for their livelihood – even if their ideas, arguments, and hardfought conclusions of truth may still be in contention. On the contrary, every such discipline builds, overturns, and even confirms the findings and discoveries of the past – but societal compensation for the contributions within these fields is never paid to the deceased practitioners in detriment to the economic plight of those now struggling to make a living. As it should be in any logical state of affairs, renumeratrion and economic standing is justly paid to the living practitioners of all other disciplines, while knowledge is passed on for the benefit of society as a whole and the advancement of human understanding.
To take up our previous example, knowledgeable pronouncements of ultimate reality in literary art may change, but it appears that no longer can any pronouncement on the consciousness of immortality (or any other-worldly realm) be spoken for within the confines of text, nor can it be owned. Living authors must compete against the chapbook prices of centuries of traditional literature, and still cannot dare to complain of how the content of their imagination is clearly overshadowed by the age-old monopoly of sacred and religious beliefs based on formulations of “truth” conceived when – by all in question – the world of the earth was still considered to be flat. As such, for all the ignorance and bloody consequences that these metaphysical assumptions give rise to, new literary art can make no breach against the sacred past: The terminology and meaning of sacred – outside of its additional religious context – here to be understood as “sacrosanct,” “inviolable,” “secure,” “defended.”
But, in at least one regard (in the manner of painting and sculpture), the evidence of how “fine art” still preserves the creative freedom to explore the sacred realm – i.e. the ultimate domain of consciousness that has the power to influence the weightiest decisions of our leaders in government and culture – is plain to see manifested in the workings of today’s modern economy. In fact, the very way in which this art has today come to be understood as a real metaphysical product (i.e. non-fictional), in spite of it representing something beyond the material appearance of reality, is what primarily represents its overcoming of the past. And here is where the economic struggle of the contemporary artist might very well come into play – if not through revolution – then perhaps, plausibly, by legal and political action.
For, even if one were to completely negate and disprove the materially disembodied theory of art for lack of sufficient spiritually quantifiable evidence, the substantial economic stakes in art – calculated as over ten billion dollar in fine art sales annually – would only become more concretely reified and subject to material dispute. And herein lies the double-edged sword of the cult status of art. If art were merely another material product, the sheer degree of openly monopolistic practices engaged in by museums against the individual artist would be a prima facia case for an antitrust suit of resounding historical dimensions. At the very least, the incestuous nature of dual exhibitions, curatorial collaboration, and inside dealing that goes on between the New York cultural establishment’s most prominent museums and private galleries (happily trading in dead white men’s merchandise) would leave their principals severely challenged to defend themselves against a formal legal indictment for collusion and restraint of trade. The punitive damages would be treble.
What are the chances? If in substance art represents a form of ultimate knowledge and insight into the nature of reality, and if our experience of reality is manifestly changing – at least in material terms – it is only logical that contemporary artists see fit to proclaim the priority of their creative consciousness over that of the past. And, in fact, we see that nearly the whole of 20th century art history; from Cubism to Futurism to Suprematism, Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism – records the creative movements and artistic revolts of generation after generation of artists both individually and collectively sacrificing their livelihoods to raise artistic consciousness in continuous effort to overthrow the constraints of a declining Western tradition.
In his manifesto on Suprematism, in 1927, the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich wrote: “We have seen how art, at the turn of the century, divested itself of the ballast of religious and political ideas which had been imposed upon it and came into its own – attained, that is, the form suited to its intrinsic nature and became, along with the two already mentioned, a third independent and equally valid ‘point of view.’”63
“Anti-art” inaugurated the first decades of the 20th century with a bang. In Marxian terms, it was as if the newly born creators of the superstructure of the industrial West sought to overturn rather than mirror the material corruption of Capitalism’s economic base. Behind the cataclysmic backdrop of the First World War and the Communist revolution in Russia, artists saw common cause with the working proletariat’s struggle against the reality of the bourgeois status quo. The desire of artists to change the conscious perception of society was political just as much as it was stylistic.
Stylistic representation, moreover, amounted merely to the formal means to point to true knowledge of a higher reality beyond. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky called for a “non-objective” painting free from the tyranny of the object, while Mondrian criticized Cubism for not following its own discoveries, and for retaining a lingering attachment to the natural object that “veiled the pure relationships of nature” [reality] with matter. As the historian Barasche writes; “Belief in this hidden reality was a crucial assumption underlying the reflections that eventually became the theory of abstract painting. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole theory of abstract painting as it emerged in the early twentieth century was based on the thesis that there is such a reality, and that it can serve as subject matter of works of art. The difficulty in experiencing it, we should repeat, did not cast any doubt on its very existence.”64 In what is currently the most litigious society that has ever existed on the face of the earth – is it too far a stretch of the artist’s imagination to consider that this “reality” could constitute the basis for a class action suit against the cultural monopolies of the museum and art gallery cartel?
Or, we might ask even, what course of action would not be appropriate for the innumerable masses of unrepresented artists to take against the ingrained anti-trust interests that mock the very ideals of our fair and just economic system. For all of art’s revolutionary insurgence against the reality of the past during the last hundred years, the mystical essence of this vanguard art as a symbolic portal to a world beyond has – in effect – proved true only insofar as these works too have become enshrined within the context of the very same past aesthetic tradition that their radical politics sought to repudiate. And so, at the turning point of every art’s singular place in time, the aura Benjamin spoke of as being uniquely embedded within the fabric of our tradition has remained in place and refused to die or go away. Just as the mythical narrative of Modernist art history remains today tangled and embedded like beautiful scaffolding over the facade of our most profound yet disintegrating cultural assumptions.
It was perhaps then only an ill-fated experiment when the Conceptual artists of the late 1960s, in similar spirit, sought to sidestep the paradoxical trap of art as an exploited commodity by trying to author ephemeral works. In the end, the Capitalism of the art market would again feed off the residue of even this art’s most elusive aura. As it is, that the art of the past survives to the economic (and perhaps moral) detriment of the artist of the present remains a fact of life of every living artist’s waking moment. The unsung artifacts and props of most leading Conceptual artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Yves Klien, and Joseph Kosuth can likewise be found within the canonical line up of traditional works at auction and for sale in the private collections and major museums of the west. The market, we see, has acquired the almost ritual power of magical transfiguration over any item, no matter what revolutionary presentiments it ostensibly represents. And so the words of Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti, proclaimed in 1909 in the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, echo as true once again: “And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?”65 While, like the encrypted symbol of some forbidden knowledge, or a riddle from so many dead authors’ sealed lips – the aura of art lives on.
In concluding our point, it is once more Thomas McEvilley who succinctly illuminates how this enigmatic quality is metaphysically connected to our obsession with our idea of art as an object. “Works with exaggeratedly durable materials – such as the granite in which Egyptians carved Pharoahs – participate in the Platonic daydream of transcending the web of cause and effect here below. The idea is, of course, integral to the formalist Modern tradition, which is throughout solidly founded on primitive thoughts and intentions. It is why the artwork is held to have no relation to socio-economic affairs: it has transcended conditionality and, by capturing a spark of the divine, has become and ultimate.”66 Vita brevis est, ars (i.e. the object) longa.
Hence, to contemplate a work of art is akin to being able to contemplate eternity. All the better if one can own it, no matter the price.
* * *
XII. Voices from the Past: The Specter in the Capitalist Machine
So far, we have surveyed the theoretical premises behind art; how artists and even art dealers and collectors, the principle market forces of the art world, have treated the object as representative of something that exceeds the materiality of its content. The spiritual association and irrational quality of art, we have seen, goes back to the first beginnings of symbolic thought by the earliest human societies. And that, in addition, the cult-like, primitive religious reverence for what art represents has persisted even to our own day, and still plays a valuative role in its production and at the hour of its monetary exchange.
That being said, our modern system for the equitable exchange of human goods and services is of relatively recent genesis. It was only since the turn of the 18th century, as the rise of rational thought came to occupy all fields of knowledge, that the science of economics also came to be society’s principal method for the organization and dissemination of new products of knowledge. It was also precisely then, after the Renaissance, that the functionality of art within society came to be differentiated from the rational school. From the subsequent cognitive division between the arts and sciences, thus has followed our modern inability to believe or understand any idea of unified moral and technological progress through reason, as art has refused to accept being determined by this categorization. But does it necessarily follow that art cannot progress as the other branches of knowledge?
At the turn of the century, a disaffected artistic class came up with a slogan that sought to preserve art from the imposition of any outside interference with the autonomy of its meaning. Le art pour le art or, “art for art’s sake,” was the rallying cry for many artistic thinkers and intellectuals intent on demonstrating that art’s ultimate value resided in its freedom from any social or moral constraints. Proponents of this philosophy – including leading figures such as Oscar Wilde or Edgar Allan Poe – could trace its precedent back to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The claim of art for art’s sake was predicated on the notion that artistic pursuit need not answer to the influences of history, religion or anything else. It abjured and looked with disdain on the earthly problems of finance and government.
Nonetheless, it has been the speculation of this writing to ascertain whether, in fact, an equally constructive relationship between the study of both economics and art (in their applied forms) might produce the occasion for greater advancement and insight within these traditionally separate fields. While this premise maybe wholly hypothetical as a tool of thought, still, it parts from an ancient nostrum that all things are rooted in a continuous reality. A magical realm, perhaps, that to this day has been veiled and occluded by the object that once sought to give it light.
In “Beyond the Aesthetic,” in 1946, the painter Robert Motherwell commented the following on the social reaction against the artist’s role in our culture; “The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more human. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore treats him as an anarchist. Society’s logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist’s path.” 67
It has been argued in the preceding sections how, at root, the relationship of consciousness to art is foremost of a cognitive basis. Yet, as such, when the cognitive elements in art are a priori, and hence, at odds with the general mode of relating to the pre-established art of a culture, it seems there is a natural dissonance that occurs at the moment when art must be incorporated into the empirical body of its tradition. This can be attested to by the long history of scandalous receptions that have always accompanied the presentation of new artistic works to the audiences and societal patrons of their time. The debut of Impressionist works at the Paris Salon des Refuses in 1872 is only one of the more famous instances.
Cognitive understanding regularly takes time to bridge the dissonance of perception that occurs at such points of aesthetic progress. Feelings of unease must be chastened and subdued to illuminate the rugged tastes of people toward the useful and the good, so that in the end, freedom may be celebrated. However, this often happens at the expense of the artist’s orginal intentions, resulting in patently erroneous and willful misinterpretation for the sake of personal and societal comfort – in many cases posthumously, as the complete disparagement of the author’s voice is secured without any legitimate way of being contested. But so it is; the hard truths of art can be difficult to palate, and by the officious meddling of career oriented academics in artistic affairs, book after book of theories are published in apology of the cultural establishment’s status quo so that dissonant voices may be incorporated into the cannon of tradition.
Artists, like true connoisseurs, though, know that in the beginning all great works of art arise from a vision of exactness and perfection – in the will to transfer the spiritual into the material world – that is, before communication inevitably breaks down at the rough threshold of the material object, and whatever moral message may become lost at the source. Yet, the tragedy for artists of our time – perhaps the most changeful epoch ever in Western art history – is that this rift between object and idea has also resulted in the summary dismissal of the great energy and critical social engagement that went into the most important artistic movements of our past century.
Specifically, in the controversy always inherent at such moments when artists exercise their moral right to engage with the public sphere, and their conflicting message is most unwelcome. As was the case in movements like Surprematism, Futurism, and Dada that included, along with their artistic message, manifestos and ideas that were as outright political as they were aesthetic – but, at the hour of their greatest relevance, of course, were largely ignored. And, still, the confusion and harmful effects of this recalcitrant and myopic attitude toward art persists. The historical consequences are doubly relevant to us, though, because – above all – the injury toward the original cognitive intentions and ideals behind the founding moments of modern art continues to be perpetrated at the highest echelons of the art establishment itself; by those whose responsibility is to illuminate rather than occlude the sociological roots of art – and yet with effete and sanctimonious casuistry, willfully substitute their own interpretations of the residual object of art for the intended meaning behind its content. But, why always this obsession with the material object, over the import of its idea? One has to wonder how exactly, in politics as well as art, the invisible hand of the market is always at work.
“Feelings must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses to the objects of the external world. Apart from the struggle to endure – …the changes that we desire in the world are in the interest of feeling….But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means.”68
This statement by Robert Motherwell, in particular, addresses the subtle distinction between the artists’ objectives – to bring new structures of feeling into the world – and the confusion that arises when art (or the medium inherent in the artwork that communicates these feelings) is mistaken for the desired end, instead of the receptacle and symbolic representation of the desired end. The resulting paradox would seem to amount to a viscous circle where object and idea are mutually identified, and incapable of separation without mutual annihilation. But this rather archaic mode of thought – though completely valid when art exists within a unity of tradition (as in ancient statue of Venus or when in the Middle Ages icons acted as a surrogate for the presence of Christ’s divinity) is wholly inappropriate to the interpretation of an art that is conceptually based on the premise of establishing new changes and feelings that go beyond the medium of traditional art. It must be said, furthermore, that the artist’s averred intent to introduce new feelings, structures, and changes into contemporary reality – whether he is successful at it, or not – still connotes a peculiarly political slant in its motivation.
The energy of the void that exists in the unfulfilled gap between object and idea is testified to in the words of the American sculptor, David Smith. Writing in the late 1940s, at the same time as Motherwell, he said; “Art is a paradox that has no laws to bind it. Laws set can always be violated. That confuses the pragmatic mind….[Art] is created by man’s imagination in relationship to his time. When art exists, it becomes tradition. When it is created, it represents a unity that did not exist before.”69
All art exists, therefore, in an effort to bridge the gap between time and antecedent tradition. But the disjuncture in unity is not always so easily overcome. The artist, we recall, “stands for the human against society” – and it is often the case, even (or especially), when in the context of a society that alienates the human. Again, Motherwell’s interpretation of the artist’s stance in society strikes out for its use of clearly political terms. This having been phrased so explicitly by him, it is only relevant to wonder why the problem of market economics in art has avoided any mention – is there not any connection here? – from so many artists who, just like him, have shared the same moral attitudes toward art. But, at this stage, the problem of what ideological or political truth could actually replace the art object as it attempts to fill the metaphysical void is perhaps too great a question to answer.
Nevertheless, we may somehow suspect that a connection is there. When, as of yet, it is precisely because of the conundrum in art that “feelings must have a medium to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols,” that any and all cognitive intentions within modern art have continually been the easy target of co-optation by a Capitalistic art market system that is only too eager to incorporate artworks into the medium of “tradition” as objects of fetish rather than as the symbolic cries for human change. After all, we are speaking of ideas (whether political or not) within art – even knowledge – that is potentially injurious to the system, and whose existence almost certainly does not yet have the maturity or high enough relationship within the means of production to sell as well as objects.
Thus the paradox of modern art is marked, above all, by a giant disconnect between audience and creator. One that further echoes the political alienation of the artist’s human voice within society. Tradition (even one as expansive and flexible as our late Western tradition has become) always invokes the pre-established modes of understanding in the mind of the viewer whenever they encounter an object – even if that object stands in direct opposition to all that our tradition has ever stood for, in spite of its objectness.
“I feel no tradition. I feel great spaces.
I feel my own time. I am disconnected.
I belong to no mores – no party – no religion – no school of thought – no institution. I feel raw freedom and my own identity. I feel a belligerence to museums, critics, art historians, aesthetes and the so called cultural forces in a commercial order…”70 writes, David Smith.
The trajectory of David Smith’s art is noted for its innovation in avoiding the concept of central mass that was the common organizing theme in the history of sculpture. In hollowing out the central mass of his first pieces in the late 1930s -40s (often by creating them within the open space of a welded metal boundary, an artificial representation analogous to the picture frame), his beginnings suggest how his entire oeuvre may likewise be understood as the pioneering of the sculptural form into the conceptual void of present moment. By the same token, the dictum that “art is created by man’s imagination in relationship to his time” is also evinced by David Smith’s choice of modern materials. By the 1950s, the maturation of Smith’s work was a unique fusion of the main current of the aesthetic influences of Cubism and Surrealism; a virtual translation of “drawing in space” that Smith paralleled in his marked use of industrial materials, found objects, and welded metals – the new three-dimensional idioms – he pursued in sculpture.
“I believe that my time is the most important in the world. That the art of my time is the most important art. That the art before my time has no immediate contribution to my aesthetics since that art is history explaining past behavior, but not necessarily offering solutions to my problems.”71
Smith’s statements highlight the necessary approach of a thought-based understanding to modern art; one that is not hog-tied to the pre-established relations of culture to past tradition, albeit that his sculptures remain objects all the same. Nevertheless, the increasingly cognitive progression that art has taken (along with artists’ increasing ambition toward creativity that is not dependent on the sensual object), is evinced by several other factors that have become rooted in Western aesthetics since the beginning of the 19th century. Among them; the complete turning away from figurative representation, marked by Cubism as well as Suprematism in the period of World War I, Duchamp’s experimental Readymades in the post war period, and the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s after World War II. Later, the trading of the pictorial plane of the canvas by the “Combines” of Pop Art and Minimalism in the 1960s, and the preponderance of Conceptual Art in the 1970s – each mark a cumulative assimilation and expansion of the cognitive dimension in art. To the point where the contemporary critic and scholar, Arthur Danto remarked on many different occasions that, “Art has become philosophy.”
“Much of what contemporary art is about is the concept itself, so its meaning must be understood with reference to art-world discourses which are still ongoing when the work is shown. Artists always have an ideal audience in mind – an art world for which they work….. The great works of art are those which express the deepest thoughts, and treating them as mere aesthetic objects cuts one off entirely from what makes art so central to the needs of the human spirit.”72
But, though Danto’s writing on this subject (in 1999) is the closest we have examined in proximity to our own time, any careful reading of his texts nonetheless reveals how futile, or impossible it has been for contemporary thinkers and artists to escape from the tyranny of the object. “…the being of a work of art is its meaning….” Danto comments earlier in critique of the poet Archibald McLiesh’s famous epigram “A poem should not mean, but be.” “…Art is a mode of thought, and experiencing art consists of thought engaging with thought.”73 And so still we remain, it seems, caught up in the same old perpetual art-world discourses, referencing the same old conundrums presented by the object. And, when not even the philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, is prepared to radically question whether the object’s role in the discourse is merely of nominal value in the first place – or a superfluous extension of the mind of the artist – all the more simple it is then for the many scholars, museum curators, and gallery critics whose job it is to illuminate the historical motivations of art, to instead occlude them (and the artists unpalatable views) according to their own vested interests in commercial objects.
There is, of course, no conspiracy or oppression where there is no voice that is being oppressed. But, when transferred into the context of the gallery or museum, and pronounced as “art” – it is notably apparent how the voice of the artist is ceremoniously traded for the mute object, safely voiding any of the cognitive antagonism of his speech. And, while it is only in the most successful instances of the unbridled expression of feeling through art that the artist’s voice may be redeemed through his created object – how few in number of those living among us are heard at all. More often than not, they are long dead by the time their audience is ready to understand the urgency of what they had been saying all along.
“Art is not divorced from life. It is a dialectic. It is ever changing and in revolt of the past. It has existed in the minds of free men for less than a century. Prior to this the direction of art was dictated by minds other than the artist for exploitation and commercial use…The freedom of man’s mind to celebrate his own feeling by a work of art parallels his social revolt from bondage. I believe that art is yet to be born and that freedom and equality are yet to be born.”74
The preceding issue between the art object and the unrevealed thoughts behind its creative intent has been delineated in order to highlight the modern crisis in art’s meaning. A parallel outcome to our final inquiry has been to raise the question of the paradox of the (perhaps illogical) necessity of the object as the representation of a mode of thought. Illogical, if only in the sense that – not only does the artwork’s cognitive background gain relevancy mainly within the context of an object’s existence as a commodity; but, if art is to be engaged with as a mode of thought (as the critic, Danto proposed), it is worth reiterating that the object itself would almost seem a superfluous extension of the mind of the artist himself.
The issue is, of course, unnecessarily confused in the modern mentality still accustomed to assess meaning in art primarily through the filtering lens of aesthetic contemplation. But as pointed out, unfortunate though it may be, this attitude amounts to no less than a controlled ignorance of the deepest cognitive intentions at the origins of modern art. And, while clinging to the past, we may understandably say; “I do not care what the artist intends, all I care is that his art be beautiful,” this attitude in no way changes the reality of the message of those artists who were emphatically at war with the legacy of Western tradition. A message whose accompanying significance for the meaning of art as well as the world would of course be moot, if that’s all it were – simply a message – unless art were indeed more than an aesthetic diversion; unless art is in fact a fundamental way of knowing, a strange and sacred epistemology not to be disregarded.
In final summary, we may debate whether or not these changes in artistic tradition represent spiritual progress or – perhaps – the reverse. But more importantly we are again reminded of Benjamin’s conclusion first stated regarding what happens when a civilization undergoes a change in their standard of perception: “During long periods of human history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.”
In considering the historical precedents of art’s power for political influence, propaganda and religious reverence, furthermore, it would neither be a fallacy to assume the inverse – that the entire mode of human existence can change for a long period of human history simply with a change in the mode of human sense perception. It is where the object of art and the objective of the artist finally meet, as if absurdly at last, like in some unforeseen antinomie in the suprasensible world that Immanuel Kant never considered inhabitable by the human mind.
For this change in perception after all is what art’s cognitive intention has always been about. And, yet, we see that the ideological mind of the artist intent on progress at any cost is blocked from the realm by the art object itself. It is the looming crisis between object and idea; but, just as we salute the greatness of the art object in our contemporary lives, so we await unawares the historical depths of the abiding revolution between art and political economy. And, so for all those artists beholden to the idea of perceptual change – we conclude whatever illuminations we have had, for now, cast back into the shadow of unsuspecting danger that is born from the title of this work.
* * *
REFERENCES
Barasche, Mosche: Theories of Art, Vols. 1,2,3; London: Routledge 2000.
Baudrillard: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
Beaud, Michael: A History of Capitalism
Benjamin, Walter: Illuminations, Essays and Reflections ; Schoken Books,
English Translation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1968.
Bonafoux, Pascal: Van Gogh, The Passionate Eye;
Caws, Mary Ann: Manifesto, A Century of Isms; University of Nebraska Press 2001
Couliano, Ioan P.: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance; The University
of Chicago Press 1987.
Danto, Arthur: The Madonna of the Future; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2000.
Greenberg, Clement: Art and Culture; Beacon Press 1965.
Guilbaut, Serge: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; The Universtiy of
Chicago Press 1983.
Heilbroner: The Making of Economic Society; Simon & Schuster, New York
Helibroner: The Worldly Philosphers; Simon & Schuster, New York 1986.
Hornstein, Percy, Brown: World Literature; Mentor, New York 1973
Hughes, Robert: Nothing if Not Critical;
Hume: Writings on Economics
Kandisnky, Vassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;
Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.
Knight, Sean Dorian: American Renaissance, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice in
the Arts and its Influence on Morals and Happiness; Greenlee Publishing, New York
2003.
Kristin Stiles and Peter Selz: Theories and Documents in Contemporary Art;
University of California Press 1996.
Krauss, Rosalind: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths;
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massechussetts 1986.
Levi-Strauss, Claude: Myth and Meaning; Schocken Books New York, Universtity
Of Toronto Press 1978.
Lewis, Michael: “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,
Vol. 210 Issue 17 p. 27-34
Marx, Karl: Das Capital, Volume I
McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Discontent; Theory at the Millenium; Documentext,
McPhereson & Company 1991.
Plato:
The Republic, Phaedrus ;
1 Guilbaut, Serge: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; (The Universtiy of
Chicago Press 1983.) p.24
2 Guilbaut, p.20
3 Guilbaut, p.21
4 Barasche, Mosche: Theories of Art, Vol.2; (London: Routledge 2000.) p. 123
5 Barasche:Volume II, p. 331
6 Barasche: Volum II p. 332
7 Ibid
8 Helibroner: The Worldly Philosphers; (Simon & Schuster, New York 1986.) p.77
9 Heilbroner: p. 177
10 Heilbroner: p. 183
11 Guilbaut, Serge: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; (The Universtiy of
Chicago Press 1983.)
12 Lewis, Michael: “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,
Vol. 210 Issue 17 p. 27-34
13 Hornstein, Percy, Brown: World Literature; Mentor, (New York 1973) p. 445-446
14 Ibid
15 Ibid
16 Hornstein, Percy, Brown: World Literature; (Mentor, New York 1973), p.445-446
17 Lewis, Michael: “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,
Vol. 210 Issue 17 p. 27-34
18 Benjamin, Walter: Illuminations, Essays and Reflections ; (Schoken Books,
English Translation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1968.) p.223
19 Ibid
20 Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;
(Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.) p. xlviii
21 Ibid
23 Ibid
24 Ibid
25 Couliano, Ioan P.: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance; (The University
of Chicago Press 1987.) p. 194
26 Couliano, p.182
27 Knight, Sean Dorian: American Renaissance, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice in
the Arts and its Influence on Morals and Happiness; (Greenlee Publishing, New York
2003.) p. 596
28 Couliano, p. 195
29 Couliano, p. 182
30 Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;
(Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.) p.xlix
31 Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;
(Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.) see p. xxiv and pp.1xii, 1xiii
32 Lewis, Michael: “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,
Vol. 210 Issue 17 p. 27-34
33 Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;
(Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.) p. xxxi
34 Kant; 353, p. 228
35 Kant; 196, p. 37
36 Hornstein, Percy, Brown: World Literature; (Mentor, New York 1973.) p. 356
37 Greenberg, Clement: Art and Culture; (Beacon Press 1965.) p.24-25
38 Ibid
* In a documentary film on art, the late Barnett Newman is recorded commenting on the moment when he had the audacity to paint a solid orange line down the middle of a sublime deep blue background, “Well, I took one look at it on the canvas, and then hid it for six months in my closet, afraid to go near it. I thought to myself, ‘what have I done’?”
39 Lewis, Michael: “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,
Vol. 210 Issue 17 p. 27
40 Ibid
41 Ibid
42 Ibid
43 Lewis; p.30
44 Ibid
45 Ibid
46 Lewis; p.31
47 Ibid
48 Ibid
49 Ibid
50 Ibid
51 Ibid
52 Ibid
53 Lewis; p.31
54 Ibid
55 Ibid
56 Ibid
57 Ibid
58 Ibid
59 Ibid
60 Ibid
61 Lewis; p.34
62 McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Discontent; Theory at the Millenium; (Documentext,
McPhereson & Company 1991.) p. 75-77
63 Caws, Mary Ann: Manifesto, A Century of Isms;
(University of Nebraska Press 2001) p. 411
64 Barasche, Mosche: Theories of Art, Vol. 3; London: Routledge 2000.) p.313
65 Caws, Mary Ann: Manifesto, A Century of Isms;
(University of Nebraska Press 2001) p. 188
66 McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Discontent; Theory at the Millenium; (Documentext,
McPhereson & Company 1991.) p.177
67 Kristin Stiles and Peter Selz: Theories and Documents in Contemporary Art;
(University of California Press 1996.) p.27
68 Ibid
69 Stiles and Selz; p. 37
70 Ibid
71 Stiles and Selz; p.38
72 Danto, Arthur: The Madonna of the Future; (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York
2000.) p. ix-x
73 Ibid
74 Stiles and Selz; p.38
