First published as

‘Normativity, not Cultural Theory; Aesthetics in the Age of Global Consumerism’,

International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol.8, 2004, pp.29-42

Problems of High

Culture and Visual Art

Paul Crowther

Introduction

In an era of accelerating global consumerism,

techniques for the mass reproduction of imagery have tended

to erase subjective awareness of the distinction between

reality and representation. One expression of this is a

skepticism towards the notion of high culture, and art as a

culturally privileged activity.

1

Part One of this paper addresses relevant key

features of global consumerism in relation to its degradation

of all aspects of high culture. In Part Two, it is argued

that nominally ‘oppositional’ modes of contemporary cultural

theory based on poststructuralism do nothing to resist this

degradation, and are, in fact, deeply implicated in it. Part

Three will argue that key aspects of contemporary art and its

modes of ratification are also fully complicit with global

consumerism, even whilst protesting their opposition.

Finally, I shall briefly consider and reject,

Adorno’s critical theory as a basis for an alternative

approach to resisting the neo-consumerist attack on high

culture and art. I will then sketch the trajectory of a more

viable phenomenological approach geared towards an

understanding of what freedom means in concrete terms, and

towards art construed as a formative power of artifactual

imaging.

Part One

2

Western civilization has been dominated

traditionally by market systems of production and exchange.

Since the second world war (and the 1960’s in particular) new

market structures have created – through the most aggressive

forms of advertising – a consumerist sensibility which now

spans the globe. This sensibility is in a constant process of

adaptation to changing media–driven fashions for buying, a

process which is itself driven by the in-built obsolence of

most products, and the psychological need to replace them.

This even extends to building, insofar as they are created

cheaply with a view to easy demolition when the market

demands for what is housed in them, falls away.

One of the reasons for the success of this

process is the development of technology enabling rapid

capital transfer and the effective implementation of large-

scale marketing strategies. Even more important has been the

development of mass-media such as television, video and the

internet. These technologies not only facilitate the

effective implementation of consumerism on a global scale,

they also provide a significant level of its broader cultural

content. The consumer choices which the market subject makes

3

are usually driven by conformity to patterns of success,

desirable living, and comfortable stereotype roles projected

by the media.

This conformity, however, drives culture in a

specific and hugely problematic direction. In this general

context, Baudrillard observes that

‘all hold-ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were

simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed

in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the

media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible

consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs

dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs and no

longer to their “real” goal at all.’1

Characteristically, Baudrillard overdramatizes the point.

This being said, his remarks point towards the right avenue

for understanding a key feature of global consumerism; namely

a willingness to take the acquisition and exchange of signs

as the basic condition of personal and social existence.

4

One widespread expression of this is the extraordinary

collapse of distinction between the contemporary manias for

‘soap operas’ and for ‘reality’ television. The former are

meant to be representations rather than realities, but their

broader cultural function defies this status. The characters

represented and storylines become matters of profound public

concern in the mass-media. The bad characters receive real

hate-mail; the misfortunes suffered by the more sympathetic

characters arouse national indignation and campaigns for the

relevant wrongs to be righted. (Even the British Prime

Minister at that time - Tony Blair - lent his jocular support

to a ‘campaign’ for one popular victim of injustice in the

soap opera East Enders to be freed from jail.)

On the other hand, ‘reality’ programmes often

involve the viewers’ voyeuristic and direct involvement in

actual existential scenarios experienced by people who are

not actors. These scenarios, however, are staged and edited

so as to to shift the programmes’ viewer-appeal from the

level of ‘reality’ to that of the soap opera.

Worse still, they are a kind of symbolic

regression to the Roman circus – with gladiatorial violence

5

shifted to the level of psychological interchange, and death

replaced by formalized social humiliation. The viewers – in

voting to eject or reject characters - are invested with the

powers that repeat (in a trivialized form) the Emperor’s

power to grant life or death to the vanquished. Even

apparently innocent programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing

involve this in a more focused form, through intentional

humiliation of the loosers by (quite deliberately)

opinionated judges, as well as by the viewer’s telephone

‘voting’. Indeed, the superficially democratic mass ‘voter-

participation’ in this last mentioned phenomenon, is no more

than a symbolic reinvention of the eighteenth and nineteenth-

century urban ‘Mob’.

Of course, any decision-procedure involves some

hurt and disappointment to those who are the loosers, but the

culturally regressive feature of the aforementioned

programmes is the overt and direct humiliation of the loosers

as a source of entertainment for the Mob. Psychological harm

to the individual is the raison d’etre of such programmes.

Now the traditional function of fiction (in the

broadest sense) is to offer a temporary pleasurable and

6

acknowledged escape from the pressures of the real, or (in

the case of fiction as high art) a critical distance which

illuminates aspects of the real. The mass-media programmes

just discussed , however, serve to collapse the distinction

11) Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P.Patton,

and P. Beitchmann, Semiotext, New York, 1983, p.41

2) See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the

Age of Showbusiness, Methuen, London, 1987

3) I explore this concept throughout my book Philosophy After

Postmodernism; Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge, Routledge,

London, 2003

4) For more on this issue see Chapter 12 of my Philosophy After

Postmodernism…Ibid.

5) I have in mind the general work of Fredric Jameson and

Christopher Norris. Both, however, have been compromised by

poststructuralism to some degree.

7

between reality and representation. And this collapse is a

distinctive feature of consumerist culture per se.

The terrible dangers in this for contemporary

life have been well documented by Neil Postman2. He argues

that modes of media presentation and ‘image’ have made

6) This sense of ‘dialectical image’ should not be confused

with Benjamin’s sense of the term – which addresses the

capacity of small scale formations or practices to exemplify

the contradictions inherent in larger ones.

7) See Chapter 3 of my Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism,

Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993 ; and also Chapter 9 of

Philosophy After Postmodernism…op.cit..

8) Included in his Illuminations, trans. H.Zohn, Fontana,

London, 1970.

19) George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Cornell University Press,

Ithaca, 1974, p.32.

10) The best general statement of Danto’s position remains

his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace;A Philosophy of Art, Harvard

8

political exchange and information inseparable from mere

entertainment – to the detriment of the former. This – and

the mass-media idioms discussed earlier – should be taken as

indicative of a global process which I have elsewhere called

symbolic arrest 3. This involves self-consciousness becoming

University Press, Harvard, 1981.

11) These are central themes in my book The Transhistorical Image;

Philosophizing Art and its History, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 2002. See especially Chapter 4.

12) For a recent discussion of this see Chapter 1 of my book

Defining Art: Creating the Canon, Oxford University Press, Oxford,

2007.

13) See Chapter 1 of my book The Language of Twentieth- Century Art; A

Conceptual History, Yale University Press, New Haven and London,

1997.

14) For more on this issue see Chapters 8 and 9 of The

Language of Twentieth-Century Art…op.cit, and the discussion of

Conceptual Art in the Conclusion to The Transhistorical Image…

9

locked into the fantasy that signs and symbolic display are sufficient

characterizations of reality itself. The production, consumption, and

exchange of signs becomes a substitute for more vital life-

processes, or else serves to distort or conceal such

processes. Entertainment becomes a dominant criterion of the

real.

There is, of course, some analogy between this and

the notion of ‘reification’ – whence commodities and

op.cit.

15) Bruce Gopnik, ‘At Venice Biennale; Fred Wilson colors in

the city’s history’, Washington Post, June 18th , 2003.

16) Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. W. Pluhar,

Hackett and Co.,1987, p.175.

17) The concepts discussed in this paragraph are major themes

in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, The

Athlone Press, London, 1997

10

processes are fetishized and become thing-like. However,

whereas reification issues in a possessiveness for things,

symbolic arrest is much more fluid. It does not converge on a

fixation with settled ownership, but rather a sense of

ownership which is constantly shifting, and where such

shifting desire itself becomes the thing, rather than the

specific objects desired. We have a reification of the flow of

signs qua flow. In such a context, signature does not become a

sign of ownership, rather what is owned is the capacity to

assign one’s signature again and again to ever new and

changing fads and gadgets.

Given, then, that the subjective expression of

global consumerism is the mediocrity of symbolic arrest, what

are the means of resisting or transforming it ? Before the

present era, the answer to this has always been

straightforward and of a normative kind. Market and

commercial values are fine in creating the means to satisfy

some basic desires, but the satisfaction of desire is not, in

itself, a means of significantly improving the quality of an

individual’s life.

11

Such improvement requires processes of education

and enculturation which allow individuality to be developed

and advanced, rather than locked into a repetitative loop of

unreflected-upon-desires and realizations which is dictated by

the status-quo. A person cannot fully become a person without

initiation into the range and depth of different possibilities

of becoming. These possibilities are opened up through coming

to experience various forms of knowledge and aesthetic

activities – each of which offers its own logically distinct

perspective upon the world. The recipient of such education

and culture has the capacity to become a genuinely critical

agent in his or her dealings with life.

Sentiments such as these are often dismissed as

‘elitist’ or, at best, a backwards looking cultural

conservatism. However, it is important to be clear about what

these terms actually mean. If by elitism is meant a doctrine

which ties access to the achievement of excellence to those

who have the right social background or adequate financial

means, then elitism is indeed, a reactionary and morally

indefensible position. But if we use elitism in the sense of

12

encouraging cultural self-improvement in the sense noted

above, then entirely different considerations apply.

For to improve the self in this sense is to open

up possibilities of understanding and experience whereby one

does not have to be tied to the status-quo and to ‘know one’s

place’ in life . It is to admit that one’s personal and

social being is not exclusively given by nature, and,

thereby, to take responsibility for one’s existence. There is a

conceptual connection between the development of freedom and

the potential critical autonomy which is opened up through

the pursuit of cultural excellence (a point that I shall

return to, at length, in a subsequent chapter). Of course,

some people may not want this, but the vital thing is to

ensure that for those who do, the opportunity to achieve

critical autonomy through cultural knowledge and activity is

made readily available.

These points show why the notion of cultural

conservatism should also be recontextualized. There can be no

simple return to some Golden Age of culture based on

fantasies of a more authentic past and/or a fear of the

‘masses’. However, the alternative to this amounts to much

13

more than the mindless ‘lowest common denominator’ instincts

of consumer society’s so-called ‘modernization’. In fact,

modernization in the context of the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush-

Blair economic neo-liberal era amounts to little more than a

return to the socially iniquitous free trade mania of the

second half of the nineteenth-century. It is actually a

systematic de-modernization.

What is really called for are political and

cultural practices which preserve tradition through

simultaneously contesting and learning from it - rather than

dismissing it outright as obsolescent, or as no more than the

province of the white male middle-classes, or whatever. This

means, in effect, criticizing and going beyond consumerism.

Cultural conservatism is now a left-wing project.

Unfortunately, (in the United Kingdom, at least) the

complex educational processes which would facilitate cultural

improvement have been displaced in favour of a managerial

pseudo-culture of testing, and overemphasis on basic reading,

writing, and numeracy skills. The goal is no longer education

for the creation of individuals, but rather the training of

functionaries adequate to work practices in the global

14

consumerist market. Indeed, (as I have argued in detail

elsewhere4) , this tendency has infected higher education –

the very area of culture, which should have been most

critically resistant to it.

In this context, recent talk has been of changing

admissions procedures in favour of a broad range of subjects

or even basing them on ‘intelligence’ tests. There is a

pervasive fear of specialization (i.e. the depth factor in

knowledge). The ideal of learning becomes ‘general knowledge’

with, in effect, the culture of the t.v. quiz show as its

tacit paradigm. More generally, the universities are under

constant pressure to ‘dumb down’ their basic modes of

intellectual operation by basing them on crude cybernetic

models of communication.

Ironically enough, this ‘dumbing down’ centres on

the notion of ‘quality’, which is equated with such things as

the production of ‘factsheets’ for students and the reduction

of course content to step by step ‘aims’ ,‘objectives’ and

‘learning outcomes’. Individual teaching approaches are

suppressed in favour of institutional standardization

15

measured by facile and reductive ‘Teaching Quality Assessment

’ regimes.

‘Quality’ in this context amounts to little more

than the effective transmission of factual information, on a

standardized basis. It is a euphemism for standardization,

and, more insidiously, compliance with regimes of

standardization which are alleged to ensure more efficient

‘delivery’.

The real aim of this is a general dumbing down of

standards so that as many students as possible get ‘high’

marks – a strategy determined by a business model of

education. The underlying dynamic of this process is a reduction of the student

to a mere consumer of ‘useful’ information. Knowledge is a product

which the ‘student-customer’ buys. Education is training.

Part Two

The infection extends unfortunately, not only to the

organization of university teaching and research (and its

symbolically arrested bureaucracies of implementation), but

16

also, indirectly, to some dominant modes of conceptual

production within the university and broader fields of

knowledge. The problem here is that of cultural theory and,

in particular, the rise of poststructuralism.

These latter intellectual tendencies (be their

orientation linguistic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, or

feminist) tend to constellate around two basic dogmas, namely

cognitive perspectivalism, and the ‘ex-centricity’ of the

self. The former position holds that the categories in terms

of which we classify the world are labile and overlapping,

and are constantly transformed by changing historical

circumstances, driven by interests of class, race, gender,

and other power relations.

Likewise, the self is taken as little more than a

constantly changing network of signifiers driven by shifting

patterns of desire and identity – patterns which are mediated

or repressed by different socio-historical circumstances and

power relations. On these terms, neither conceptual grids nor

the self can be theorized in foundational terms. They are

cultural constructs whose specific historical configurations

17

must be analyzed as a play of the various factors and power

interests noted above.

Contemporary cultural theory (with a few striking

exceptions5) has made these poststructuralist themes the

basis of a relativist orthodoxy. The fact that the orthodoxy

has established itself so very pervasively is not surprising,

although it is again grimly ironic. The irony consist in the

fact that it imagines itself to have some kind of vague

‘oppositional’ significance in terms of ‘contesting’ ‘spaces

and territories’ and the like.

Interestingly, however, the jargon of

poststructuralist cultural theory uses the same kind of

facile neologisms (‘en-gendering’, ‘re-membering’, ‘gyn-

ecology’ ‘etc.) and pseudo-managerial concepts, which the

discourses of marketing, advertising, and ‘quality-assurance’

documents use.

This should hardly surprise us, for in both form and

tacit content, poststructuralism is in complete harmony with global consumerism.

The former developed as the latter began its most rapid

period of expansion in the late 1960’s. The perspectivalist,

‘ex-centric’ agent of post structuralism is, in substantial

18

terms, identical with the consumer subject of the global

market place. Both are premised on shifting cognitive

frameworks with in-built obsolescence. In the

poststructuralist case conceptual schemes are made redundant

by transformations of power relations, whilst in the

consumerist case, the animating force is the constant search

for new commodities and styles thrown up by market forces.

The phrase ‘thrown up by market forces’ is

also extremely apt in relation to both consumer agency and

the ex-centric poststructuralist self. Both reduce the human

subject to an effect of the play of different kinds of

signifiers within an unstable, constantly transforming field.

This isomorphism between putatively opposed tendencies is in

fact, rather familiar. It constitutes a dialectical image6

i.e. one wherein some force or social formation interiorizes

- without being fully aware of the fact - key structural

elements of the forces which it is opposed to.

In the twentieth-century for example, Soviet

communism on the one hand, and fascism and Nazism on the

other, mirror and thence indirectly consolidate one another

through their general shared purist ideologies of culture,

19

and glorification of the individual’s submissiveness to the

state.

In the present case, the ramifications of

poststructuralism’s dialectical image of global consumerism

are quite obvious. Cultural critique and opposition from a

poststructuralist point of view has no genuine potency in

relation to global consumerism because it has no way of

thinking out a systematic alternative program. It is

structurally akin to its opponent, and thence its projected

resistance will operate within parameters already shared with

that opponent.

In-built obsolescence and epistemological

nihilism vis-à-vis conceptual frameworks and the self means that

poststructuralisms amount to no more than rhetorics of

difference – rhetorics which take their place very easily in

the context of fashionable global consumerism of the

intellectual kind. Both poststructuralism and global

consumerism embody a tacit and strictly instrumental concept

of reason which focuses on power, transience, and

instability.

20

Hence, political positions based on

poststructuralism do not offer fundamental radical

alternatives but point, at best, towards new patterns of

personal and group style choice. In such a context, politics

functions as little more than fashion, and hence consolidates

the global consumerist sensibility. This represents a most

insidious form of cultural regression. For both the attackers

of culture and the ’opposition’ now share the same basic

mind-set.

It must be admitted, however, that even though

poststructuralism is a dialectical image of global

consumerism, this does not, of itself have a bearing on the

question of its truth. However, (again as I have shown at

great length elsewhere7, and as we shall see in a subsequent

chapter), the central poststructuralist themes are

conceptually flawed and often self-contradictory.

This means that, in fundamental terms, they

are little more than interesting configurations of signifiers

– great to play with, but, in effect, mere fantasies about

how the world might look to a disembodied subject existing

21

only on a diet of signs. They are, as it were, symbolic

arrest in its self-congratulatory baroque mode…

I shall now consider the role of art and its various

justifications in the age of global consumerism.

Part

Three

One of the most decisive twentieth-century

recontextualizations of art consists in its changed relation

to mass-culture. In his grossly over-influential essay ‘The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’8 Walter

Benjamin suggests that the reproducibility of images makes

them ubiquitous, and hence diminishes all aspects of their

‘aura’ or originality.

This position links up well with a tendency

within modern and postmodern art practice itself, namely a

willingness to offer as art, artifacts or installations

comprised of material which was not physically made by the

artist. In the age of Duchamp’s unassisted ‘ready-mades’ and

their huge influence on the post-war art scene, the idea of

22

‘masterpieces’ and of a ‘canon of fine art’ seem to be

notions whose time has gone.

There is a further factor, which might also seem to

militate against the canon and fine art, etc. It consists of

the fact that the massive availability of visual information,

now makes it appear that western art is just one amongst many

idioms and has no privileged position. The fact that it has

been assigned such a position in historical terms is a

function of conceptual and social exclusions based on race,

class, and gender interests. However, in the age of

postcolonial and multiculturalist theory the opportunity now

exists to unmask these exclusions through appropriate forms

of cultural critique.

Now before deliberating on these three very general

theoretical standpoints it is worth considering some of the

recent art practices with which they are associated, and of

the response which they have elicited from philosophical

aesthetics in the analytic tradition.

First the practice. It is clear that Duchamp’s legacy

began to bear full fruit with those varieties of pop art such

as Raushenberg’s, John’s, and Warhol’s ironic appropriations

23

or facsimiles of mundane everyday artifacts. In the case of

minimal art there is an equally significant diminution or

elimination of the role of expression, and the artist’s

physical working of the object. Both these tendencies meet

and are significantly extended by the rise of Conceptual Art

as an orthodoxy in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Traditional

idioms such as painting and sculpture are still practiced,

but the the postmodern era seems to favour Conceptualisms.

Given these developments, the basic impetus of analytic

aesthetics has been to accommodate them by redefining art on

the basis of them. The means to this have been

‘Institutional’ definitions of art associated most closely

with George Dickie and Arthur Danto. These philosophers, of

course, are not poststructuralists by any means, but their

analyses share the same global consumerist ideology. Dickie,

for example, observes that

‘when we reflect upon the deeds of Duchamp and his friends we

can take note of a kind of action that has until now gone

unnoticed and unappreciated – the action of conferring the

status of art.’ 9

24

It is this ‘conferring of status’ rather than any process of

making which is the essence of art. Danto makes this more

specific. His key idea is that through such designation the

work is elevated above the status of a mere thing by virtue

of now being situated in a theoretical context of ideas

concerning the scope of art10. The work takes on, thereby,

emergent properties of theoretical meaning, over and above

its physical characteristics.

I shall now review the three general theoretical

standpoints noted above, and also their relation to the

patterns of art practice and Institutional definitions just

outlined.

First, Benjamin’s point concerning the mechanical

reproduction of images and the attack upon ‘aura’ and

originality. Not only is the substance of this claim false,

the exact opposite of it is in fact true. Far from diminishing

the aura and originality of works, the mechanical

reproduction of them has enhanced the power of the original

to an inordinate degree. Characteristic signs of this are the

explosion of interest in gallery visits and exhibitions, not

25

to mention the astonishing increases in the price of original

works.

Of course, it might be argued that all this is due

to the effects of the market – in setting up artworks as safe

investments. However, we must then ask why artworks should be

regarded as the kinds of thing worth buying in the first

place. And if the answer is to provide kudos and cultural

capital, what is it about art works, which allow this to be

done so systematically ? (The answer to this involves

profound questions concerning the ontology of art and its

diachronic history11.)

We are thence led to the second point, namely the

elimination of the need for the artist to have physically

made his or her work of art. To understand this one must

refer directly to the third point, namely the equal viability

of non-western artistic idioms. Far from this disqualifying

the canon and notions of fine art, it is in reality an

indictment of the Duchampian tradition, and the Institutional

definitions’ attempts to ratify it.

As we have seen, the central strategy of this

ratification is to suggest that what really makes art art, is

26

not any process of making, but the relation between a

designated ‘art’ item and a relevant context of theory

concerning the scope of art. This is a tacitly racist notion,

which, in effect, makes a mockery of artistic practices in

non-western cultures. For whilst ‘art’ is a western concept,

what it conceptualizes is a formative power of artifactual imaging

which is profoundly and mainly non-western in both its

origins and distribution12.

The Institutional definitions take their cue from

a de facto move made by one limited aspect of western art,

namely the Duchampian tradition. They then make this the

basis of an imperial gesture of re-definition. However, what

happens de facto does not entail de juris entitlement; and

overlooking the dire racism of the move for a moment, some

significant epistemological problems also arise.

We will recall that, in terms of the Institutional

definitions, the reason why artworks are more than mere

mundane artifacts is because of their link to an atmosphere

of theory concerning the scope of art. If this were true, we

could be forgiven for asking for further criteria, which

would allow such works to be distinguished from items

27

existing merely to illustrate art theory. Such criteria have

not been forthcoming.

Matters get even worse when we address the level of

theory itself, specifically, we must ask, what theory? Since

the beginnings of conceptual art in the 1960’s it has been

unusual to find the kind of theoretically rich manifestoes

which marked the emergence of abstract and abstracting

tendencies in the first half of the twentieth-century.

What has taken its place, is an egotistic anti-

convention of ad hoc denotation, whereby an artist does

certain acts, or assemblages, for a specific set of reasons

which it is then left for a friendly critic or curator to

write about on whatever basis he or she can make the act or

assemblage intelligible. This is then taken to be what the

work is ‘about’.

In this context, meaning is ‘privatized’ in a

logical sense, becoming no more than a relation of intentions

and imagined recognition of them by a managerial elite of

critics, gallery owners, curators and art historians. The

fact that the burden of ‘meaning’ is put on the artist’s

intentions and desires, rather than the making of an artifact

28

destroys its general social intelligibility. Without this

feature, the work cannot be said to function either as art or

as theory.

Now, it might be argued that the lack of such

intelligibility characterizes all abstracting and abstract

tendencies in modern art, and that conceptual works cannot,

accordingly, be picked out for criticism in this respect.

However, against this, it should be emphasized that

abstracting and abstract tendencies are not only embedded in

bodies of theory (that are far more philosophically potent

than is often imagined) but that they have an iterable surplus

of meaning which is intelligible beyond the immediate

circumstances in which their works were produced 13 .

This iterable character can also extend to some

Conceptual works 14 , but even if it extended to all of them

(which it does not) this would give no justification for

treating them as anything other than marginal. The status of

marginality is warranted insofar as their claim to the status

of art is logically parasitic on them following the presentational

formats and semantic aspirations of art in its core sense of

formative imaging. Given this core, it is best to regard

29

Conceptual works as, at best, marginal pieces of primarily

western orientation, rather than ones which demand a re-

definition of art in order to accommodate them.

There is however an alternative justification which

might appear to, rightly, assign centrality to such works. It

holds that conceptual idioms overcome the hegemony of

traditional, essentially western modes of painting and

sculpture, thus allowing a voice to hitherto marginalized

social, ethnic, and gender issues. However, whilst it is a

fact that multicultural themes are frequent players in recent

Conceptualism, it is highly contentious as to whether they

offer any viable theoretical ratification of it. We have

already noted the grossly western bias of Conceptualism, and

now another problem arises.

It is the opposite of the one just discussed and

centres on clarity of documentation rather than obscurity of

theory. In this respect, it should be emphasized that it is

not in terms of their own indigenous idioms that

multicultural groups usually find expression in contemporary

art. Rather, they are assimilated within the display spectacle

of Conceptualism, and the exhibition system. There is a

30

pressure indeed for the artists to function in this context

only as victim-objects for the sympathetic western

spectatorial gaze.

An interesting case in point is that of Fred Wilson,

the ‘star’ of the 2003 Venice Biennale. In a Washington Post

review, Blake Gopnik unwittingly reveals the spectatorial

attitude just described, and what it can further imply.

‘At its best, Wilson’s art acts as a kind of anthropological

survey of where blackness has fit, now fits into our

cultures, both high and low. Or you can think of Wilson as a

documentary photographer, not altering the world but simply

presenting unnoticed aspects of it to us.

Unfortunately, some of his new work here has become much less

direct, and therefore less compelling: he dilutes the strong

evidence he’s gathered with a heavy dose of artiness. A

standing black figure is turned into evident, self-conscious

“art” by having its head replaced with a globe. Another has a

chessboard painted onto its serving tray; all the white chess

pieces have been removed, while the black ones now lie

scattered. Approach one of those borrowed Old Master

31

paintings and you trigger a portentous recording of the words

“I am you and the others, too” spoken in a half-dozen

different languages.’ 15

On Gopnik’s terms Wilson is not doing the

postcolonialist project he ought to be doing. Instead of being a

good-little- native (offering a documentary and

anthropological survey of ‘blackness’ and its sufferings for

the edification of the postcolonial elite) Wilson is

interpreted as selling out – for, in effect, wanting to

explore ethnicity in a broader artistic context through the

creation of striking images.

And this indeed is the real importance of Wilson’s

work. He redirects Conceptualism’s ready-made idioms towards

the kind of artifactual imaging which constitutes art’s

central core. For Conceptualism per se there are no remaining

experimental vistas – anything can be art if designated so by

the artist, so the item selected is hardly likely to surprise

or instruct. Where there is room for surprise and real

experimental worth is in trying to bridge the divide between

ready-made artifacts and formative imaging.

32

It is possible, for example, to use ready-made

objects assembled or modified so as to engender a level of

visual and poetic interest which is only accessible through

direct perceptual acquaintance with the work. This is the key

test of aesthetic relevance. If a work can pass it then it

has good claim to at least marginal artistic status by virtue

of aesthetically exceeding its ‘conceptual’ content. (Mere

functional artifice can be adequately identified on the basis

of description alone).

Fred Wilson’s works can, of course, be nominally

identified by specifying their ready-made content. But we

cannot even begin to recognize his work’s poetic richness and

good spirits, except through sustained perceptual exploration

of it. In this context, the ready-made elements are not

simply pointers to some vague idea about art. The works’

specific sensuous phenomenal values are an integral part of

their meaning. By means of this, the ready-made aspects

transcend themselves and cohere as an image which interprets

ethnicity in an aesthetically explorative way. Here, and in

related cases, Conceptualism is able to occupy an imaginative

33

position at the margins of art, but one whose marginality

does not make it any the less aesthetically viable.

The fact that Gopnik does not comprehend the full

significance of Wilson’s work is entirely symptomatic of the

restrictiveness of multiculturalism as a justification of

Conceptualism and its ratifications. The marginal groups are

presented primarily as documents of marginality. They are

allowed to function only within postcolonial discourse.

Through this, the colonial mentality absolutizes

itself through a dialectical image, wherein its discourses

not only perpetuate the mind-set which they are officially in

opposition to, but do so through the precise character of

their ‘oppositional’ stance The colonial subject is treated

as one who should be documenting the conditions and

character of their (as it were) coloniality.

But, in addition to the insidious dialectical

image at work here, one should also ask, why ‘art’ which has

this character should amount to anything more than

documentation, per se? Surely, the very fact that such work is

presented as art rather than as documentation will tend to

34

subvert the status of the latter, rather than the hegemony of

the former?

Having argued, then, that Conceptual tendencies

cannot be adequately ratified on Institutional or

multiculturalist grounds, the question arises as to why they

have such centrality in the theory and practice of

contemporary art. It is at this point we must make some key

connections between these factors, global consumerism and

symbolic arrest.

A first point is that since Conceptual Art can be

created in principle by acts of designation alone, then the

artist, in effect, simply shops around for the right kind of

items, which can satisfy the relevant intentions or desires.

The term ‘shop around’ is entirely pertinent here, since the

designation process can involve literally as well as

metaphorically shopping around for constituent ‘ready-made’

parts or wholes. The omission or diminution of processes of

making makes for a new western dream, namely an art which is

not only consumer-orientated, but in large part, consumer-

created as well.

35

Earlier we saw the indeterminacy or incoherence of

Conceptualism and its ratifications. Kant spoke disparagingly

of original nonsense 16 and that is, in effect, what is

ultimately at issue here. One’s overriding impression of

recent Conceptualism is that it aims to produce

configurations, which are new or sensational just for the

sake of it, rather than for the sake of developing

significant artistic possibilities.

This means that the creation and exchange of

empty signifiers become the raison d’etre of artistic creation.

We find a level of symbolic-arrest in art, which is on a par,

if not greater than the poststructuralist and related

cultural theories, which try to explain and ratify it.

Conclusion

In this discussion, I have outlined the nature of

global consumerism and its main cultural expression – namely

36

the phenomenon of symbolic arrest. I have also argued that

the dominant poststructuralist mode of cultural theory is

unable to offer an adequate critique of symbolic arrest,

because it is itself profoundly implicated in the phenomenon.

Similar considerations hold in relation to Conceptual art and

its justification by analytic aesthetics in the age of global

consumerism. These are conceptually flawed practices and

ratifications which converge upon the generation, exchange,

and consumption of signs for their own sake i.e. symbolic-

arrest in its purest form. All these factors are an integral

expression of the global consumerist mentality.

The question arises, then, of where to look for a

genuinely alternative critical analysis of global consumerism

in the spheres of culture and art. The Frankfurt school has

provided work of great value, but its critical substance

derives from a deeply restricted negative utopianism. In the

case of Adorno 17, for example, much is made of the capacity

of the aesthetic object to resist commodification through its

complex referential layers, and its negation of patterns of

mundane production in an administered society. However, an

aesthetic of resistance will always be negative at heart and

37

not, accordingly, in itself. sufficient as an alternative to

global consumerist degradations of art and culture.

Adorno makes moves in a more positive direction by

arguing that the structure of the aesthetic object

anticipates a liberated society. However, the engine of his

critique is a dreamy image of a rationally organized society

(wherein the advanced means of production are geared towards

the satisfaction of genuine human need) which stands in a

relation of ‘determinate negation’ or opposition to the

current oppressive ‘administered society’.

Unfortunately, this is, at best, a poetic image.

Like all images, it is one which is only compelling to the

degree that it eliminates those real, detailed and always

fallible networks of social reality which sustain real human

relationships, and whose detailed analysis and understanding

offer the only basis for achieving concrete societal goals.

Adorno’s utopian image of rationality and

enlightenment, in other words, is only an image. And in the

gap between the goal it presents, and the opacity of real

human collective activity and its outcomes, there is a space

for terrors and violence in the image’s concrete realization

38

which might render the utopian impulse both unrealizable,

and, in the final analysis, morally culpable.

Putting this in the most charitable terms, the

notion of a classless society or, for that matter, cognate

notions such as that of ‘communicative consensus’ or

‘cognitive mapping’ are far too abstract to give real

normative substance to Frankfurt school and related Marxist

strategies of critique. We are left at the level of empty

cultural theory rather than that of a genuinely critical

standpoint.

A better alternative to this is a phenomenology

of culture, and, especially, of the artwork. In respect of

the former, for example, the analysis of freedom and those

symbolic forms and cultural practices which both enable it,

and allow it to develop, is demanded. Some extremely

promising moves in this direction are found in the much

neglected work of Cassirer. By re-working his notion of

symbolic form, the relation between culture and freedom can

be shown to be both intrinsic, and developable to higher

levels. The idea of progression – if not progress – can be

brought into play. This project, however, depends on linking

39

symbolic form to the notion of individual agency at a level

that Cassirer himself never carried through.

It should also be noted that Cassirer always wished

to write a systematic work on philosophy of art but never

carried it through. Such offerings as he made in this

direction are too generalized to be of much reconstructive

use. However, there are alternative possibilities.

Earlier, for example, I mentioned that non-western

cultures have been especially aware of the intrinsic

formative power of artifactual imaging. If this can be linked

to the aesthetic, then there is scope for a phenomenology of

the artwork which links canonic features to the historical

refinement of the symbolic scope of art, and to the

enhancement of freedom that such a refinement entails.

In this task, there are two enormously useful

starting points. The first is the work of Merleau-Ponty, and

in particular, the links he makes between art and embodiment.

The second source is – ironically – Adorno. For whilst the

Marxist engine that drives his critical analysis of cultural

and aesthetic phenomena is flawed, a truly massive amount can

be learned along the way.

40

In particular, Adorno offers unsurpassed resources

for developing our understanding of the dialectical

complexity of the experience of art.. And if this can be fed

back into the phenomenology of freedom, then we may well have

the basis for a justification of high culture and art that

resists the crude, reductive, orthodoxies of the neo-

consumerist mentality. We would have the return of the Real

as a concrete cultural project.

Notes and References

41