ArtBistro

Artists, Critics and Class

Johanna Drucker: Sweet Dreams Ben Davis: “Art Class”

Not everyone hates success. Take the art market.

The crowds hurrying to Chelsea for that first Thursday evening in September do not hate it. The owners of the bars, restaurants, and real estate in the neighborhood love it even more. Uncounted others have a stake in it, from collectors keeping the machine going to dealers and artists feeding it. Many times that number wish they had a stake in it. I know I do. Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Ophelia) (Luhring Augustine, 1998-2002)

Now even writers are willing to defend it. They may not celebrate it exactly, but they think it is time to accept the market as a brute fact. At the very least, they believe, one must accept that artists are a part of it. It drives the creative act, and works of art reflect mass culture or commerce. And I do not mean reflect on it critically. Could the time have come for a post-critical theory?

Johanna Drucker, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, ends Sweet Dreams between pleasure and uncertainty. Ben Davis, an editor at ArtNet, ended his contribution late last summer by demanding action. Both, though, agree that critics have everything wrong. The myth persists that art is autonomous—that it rises above the “culture industry.” When the myth breaks down, it leaves critics wondering if art has a future.

Davis and Drucker suggest instead casting away the myth. They see artists as middle-class professionals, working away in support of the culture industry and its message. Davis finds this liberating for artists, but stifling for everyone else, and he calls on artists to rebel. Drucker sees it as a wellspring of artistic productivity. I shall argue that they both overlook real anxieties—in struggling artists, intelligent audiences, and ordinary citizens alike. And that very anxiety keeps driving some terrific art, even as the pageantry of galleries and museums begs viewers to forget the whole thing. Critical industry

Davis and Drucker are right in seeing consensus—or at least a shared battleground. Most critics, including Marxists and Poststructuralists, still share such liberal values as irony, detachment, and engagement. They are likely to see art as an alternative to the business of life as usual. They tend to see representation, appropriation, or digital manipulation as strategies for interpreting the world and holding it to account. In the art boom, they see new opportunities, but also a serious threat. Meanwhile, a handful of conservative critics bizarrely imagine markets driven by fancy French theory, which somehow supplies excuses for abandoning aesthetic standards.

Both sides see trouble when anything goes and everything is up for sale. Still, a writer’s stake in the market is not just financial. A critic is someone who likes to look at art, and most critics are still having a good time. Jerry Saltz keeps questioning Chelsea’s “super paradigm,” brilliantly at that, but he has not run out of shows to review. Even conservatives, when they try to erect a wall between contemporary chaos and dear old modern art, are defending a very recent past.

Of course, critics have a stake in the market, too. Magazines describe it all in full color, even before Richard Prince rephotographs the ads. They discover the latest trend and the latest emerging artist, trying desperately to stay one foot ahead of the Chelsea crowds on the first Thursday in September. Universities are adding courses in mass culture and departments like Drucker’s. Does art still have something to do with subjectivity and creative freedom? Well, individual choice, too, is a value associated with consumer society.

In other words, the state of the art is ambivalence. No wonder I keep returning to the same arguments over and over myself. You may think that you have read all this before, and you probably have. Both Davis and Drucker have a similar, telling moment. Davis describes Peter Schjeldahl, who did as much as than anyone to tout art celebrities in the 1990s, at sea at the latest Venice Biennale. Drucker describes the melancholy in T. J. Clarke, the historian who showed early Modernism as an extension of an emerging middle class.

Both Davis and Drucker see all this floundering as blindness. Even the left, they feel, is clinging to the past. Artists, they argue, act petit bourgeois because they are. For Davis, that means contradictions. Like an old-style Marxist, he sees the middle class as torn between ideals and elitism, but also between populism and compromise—like one long epic by Matthew Barney. Drucker writes about art’s “complicity,” its “active flirtation with the culture of mass production.”

Like Marx, too, Davis thinks the point is not to interpret the world but to change it. He demands a “new initiative,” to alter “the vast inequality of in the distribution of material—and thus cultural and intellectual—resources in the world.” Drucker is more at home in art today, which she finds “materially engaging, viscerally seductive, and visually smart.” I think of them as two kinds of dreamers, and they echo my dreams as well. I share their hopes for the future and their giddiness at the mess of the present. But are we all just dreaming?

Artists of the world, unite!

If distrust of the art market represents the first draft of a critique, Ben Davis supplies a bad edit. His article rambles, shifts course, takes quotes for facts, and ends more confused than ever. Above all, however, he turns up the snark—a sure sign that this critic of high-falutin’ theory is still above it all.

Davis gets in his digs at criticism, starting with the Frankfurt school. All he has to do is note that, in their desperation to defend high art, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno rejected (gasp) Orson Welles and Mickey Rooney. Davis contrasts academic blather with real Marxism: “read the Manifesto of the Communist Party.” What has happened to Marx’s lyrical praise for capitalism, in its power to remake the world, right down to “cosmopolitan artistic culture”? What, for that matter, has happened to people like Davis, smart enough to give The Communist Manifesto its original title?

Davis acknowledges that working critics want something more than “just a rehash of Marxist ideology.” And he avoids dealing with actual Postmodern theorists—who really have read Marx, who question fine art apart from mass culture, and who slam Modernism as all too wrapped up in powerful institutions. He also avoids asking how they found inspiration in the Frankfurt school (or in the Trotksy and Breton of my epigraph). Still, he insists, they are wasting time when they ask for a “new theory.” Well, surprise, he promptly offers one. Having established that his opponents are Marxist “only in the most superficial sense,” he bases his theory on class, defined by “relationship to production.”

Since artists and dealers neither own the means of production nor toil like the working class, they belong to the middle class, just like doctors and shopkeepers. In the class wars, they therefore have conflicted loyalties. This sounds reasonable. In fact, it sounds much like the statement of the problem that Davis dismissed. Marx actually had little to say about middle-class society, which is why Postmodernism and the Frankfurt school exist. Besides, reasonable does not mean valid.

Davis cannot explain America, in which wealth means liquidity, including ownership of the means of production through investments. He does not clarify the relationship of art to either the working class, as entertainment, or to the bourgeois, as patrons. He lumps together all artists, who have many day jobs and thus other class roles, and it lumps them together with doctors, who do not. He does not explain what has provoked a sense of crisis in the first place. Artists have not changed classes all of a sudden, but styles, audiences, markets, status, power, and the very idea of an art world have changed—dramatically and perhaps irreversibly. Besides, globalization of the arts gives “workers of the world” a whole new meaning.

Davis’s definition of class struggle could come right out of David Brooks. Artists are the ones who sip latte and avoid action. After the selective quotation of Marx, about the glories of capitalism, has art reached a happy ending, then, in a capitalist utopia after theory? But no, here comes a final swerve after his hymn to middle-class culture, a demand for revolution in the material conditions of society. Davis does not bother to add what this would involve. Would it help to stop reading criticism—or at least ArtNet?

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