Art for whose sake?
It might come across as slightly perplexing to start what might be termed a critical piece of writing with an open-ended question such as this. However, truth be told, the initial impetus for this essay was very much the result of my own shortcomings and the frustration I experienced when it came to finding a convincing answer. No matter how much I thought about it, examining the question through different theoretical perspectives and analytical frameworks, I couldn’t seem to pin it down to a single, simple solution. Who are we making art for today? Or perhaps more poignantly, why are we making it?
Of course, the question in itself wasn’t unprompted by any means. It stemmed from a conglomeration of ongoing beefs that I have with the contemporary art scene — specifically the visual arts, but arguably an exasperation that can be extended to all forms of creative output, including cinema, literature, music and contemporary media in general. Noteworthy mentions spring to mind, such as Maurizio Cattelan’s The Comedian [1], which sold for 120,000 USD at Miami’s Art Basel in December 2019, or Sebastian Bieniek’s Barrier Tape Art — described by the artist as an “up-to-date corona inspired oeuvre”.[2]
I have no objection to conceptual art per se. I acknowledge that the paradoxes, social commentary and ironic framing it often presents can be very thought-provoking, if not moving at times. This being said, I can’t help but feel that we’ve reached a sort of creative dead-end, or perhaps more of a cyclical loop when it comes to our expectations of what art is supposed to represent and, by extension, the associated responses it is capable of imbuing in us. There are exceptions to this of course, and while the aforementioned conceptual pieces can be viewed as operating on the extreme end of an arguably over-saturated artistic market, there will always be creative individuals that continue to challenge the boundaries of their medium — be it visual, conceptual or otherwise.
Taking this into account, the following discussion doesn’t aim to pinpoint particular individuals or single actors as accountable perpetrators. Indeed, personal attacks of this sort would be rather fruitless, if not overly vulnerable to counter-opposition. Instead, I wish to provoke or spark a kind of broader debate, which addresses the question of what it means to make things for the purpose of aesthetic reflection today, in our age of creative mass consumption.
Through broadening the scope of the enquiry in this way it becomes apparent, at least to me, that the core of the problem is perhaps more insipid than it first appears on the surface. Beyond criticising the dealers, the blue-chip gallerists, the art fair coordinators, the critics, the sensation-driven artists themselves or even the quick-fix aesthetics that they seemingly stand for, it also worth scrutinising the broader structures and value systems that they all contribute to and help perpetuate.
In this case, I find it useful to evoke Bruno Latour’s “Actor-Network-Theory”, as it demonstrates how individual actors rarely, if ever, operate in complete isolation.[3] Rather, each action takes place through a process of dialogical interaction with another, or indeed multiple other actions. Moreoever, these dialogues or exchanges are in turn rarely fixed. That is to say, our creative output continues to be inspired by and imbued with impetuses that are both spatially and temporally distant from our own reality. One might even argue that this is perhaps the true undercurrent of artistic development — the creation of the new through a process of syncretic dialogue between the old.
Complicit in this dialogue we find not only the obvious culprits, such as the artist, client, or market mediator, but also the often more silent or passive general audience. This “audience” can refer to a number of different groups, be they cinema-goers, readers of lyric and prose, listeners of music, or viewers of visual art. Regardless of the medium, they are collected in the sense that they are creative consumers, and also that they form part of the established network of actors that together make up our contemporary artistic climate.
Also of value within Latour’s theory is the notion of “material agency”, or the idea that non-anthropomorphic, non-subject “actants” can influence an action in similar ways to human actors.[4] Using this broader framework of influence, it becomes possible to include other, less fixed entities, such as our post-capitalist economic structures, political ideologies, advertising outlets, streaming platforms and social media sites — not to mention the artworks themselves. Together, all of these actors and actants form a kind of consortium that continuously dictates and re-negotiates the different formal and conceptual values that we’ve come to expect from our creative products.
This brings me back to my initial point; the notion of a creative dead-end or artistic loop-cycle. To be more specific, it seems to me that the vast majority of today’s artistic output can be characterised through the shared element of predictability. Indeed, the proliferation of sub-cultures and sub-genre groups has become so prevalent within our hyper-digitised, globalised age that any opposition to the notion of a “mainstream” has ironically become conformist in itself. Speaking from an art historical viewpoint, it quickly becomes clear that this oppositional or anti-establishment stance is to a great extent reflective of our western modernist inheritance — distilled in the notion that art in its ultimate form is and ought to be a tangible manifestation of rebellion; a challenge to the status quo of all things.
Of course, there’s no denying that art has historically fulfilled this function, and indeed continues to do so today. Both the Impressionists and the later avant-garde have showed us as much. However, be it an explicit challenge — for example in the form of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain — or something more subtle, the argument still stands: originality is the most desired trait of all “good art”, and also that our understanding of such novelty is founded on the principle of opposition.
Where am I going with all of this? The point is that this arguably narrow, modernist-tainted reading of the function and purposes of art limits our ability to comprehend its broader context of making. The desire to label the artist as anti-reactionary has become so entrenched that we often fail to see the external factors that contribute to the processes of creative production — i.e., the “consortium” or “creative network” described above.
For example, it is impossible to deny that even archetypal modernists such as the Impressionists were operating within an established art market and intellectual environment. Just like their academic contemporaries, these painters were more or less forced to conform to the consumer patterns of their period — if not out of a desire for public recognition, then at least out of financial necessity. To view the artist as someone who operates outside the limitations of a profit-driven market is not only historically inaccurate, but also negates the impact of external actors and actants by assigning an undue level of agency to the artist as an individual, and by extension the agency of the resultant artwork.[5]
Of course, the topos of the artist as a priori genius is nothing new. The concept can be traced back to Vasari’s Lives, if not earlier, and is also present in Romanticist philosophies such as Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where it is reflected through the concept of ingenium.[6] While twentieth-century scholars writing within the tradition of social art history may have challenged this virtuosic reading of artists (and other creatives) to a certain extent, there is no denying that the image of the artist as auteur is just as potent in mainstream culture and contemporary criticism as it was during previous centuries. Indeed, recent critical reviews of Cattelan’s banana-wall-duct tape scenario serve to demonstrate as much.[7]
Beyond blindsiding us through downplaying the influence of external mediators, the over-lauded status of the artist also has the knock-on effect of creating passivity within the audience. What I mean by this is that if we assume, as stated, that any meaning or validity relating to our creative products is determined by the artist from the outset, then surely any response or reaction instigated on the part of the viewer becomes redundant.
To counter this claim, we can of course evoke certain post-structuralist theorists — notably Roland Barthes and his “Death of the Author”[8] — as well as simply look towards the self-reflective qualities that we often seem to find appealing when it comes our cultural consumer items (such as political or topical commentary, portrayals of inner psychological states, reflections on the human condition in general etc.). However, what I am positing through this discussion is that due to our relative ignorance of the broader value structures that permit our engagement with works of art, we also remain more or less in the dark when it comes to the ways in which our responses are pre-determined and mediated to us through these networks.
Such a claim might appear outrageous at first, particularly given our post-modernist claim to individualism. Yet, if we consider our creative consumption within the context of these larger, dialogic structures, it becomes possible to see that rarely, if ever, do we engage with artworks — in any format or medium — without some kind of intermediary. I can list a whole bunch of examples: museum and gallery curation, publishing houses, music and film festivals, awards ceremonies, art fairs, critics’ reviews, cultural magazines, podcasts, blog posts and even academic writing, not to mention less official avenues such as Reddit feeds, data-generated algorithms and social media influencers. These days, it is arguably near-impossible not to be influenced by at least one, or more likely multiple external opinions prior to our first encounter with any given creative product.
Given the omnipotent and omnipresent nature of this wider value system, it is perhaps understandable why we remain somewhat blind to its power and also absolutely convinced that the judgments we make are of our own construction entirely. In my view, this couldn’t be further from the truth. What I’m really trying to say (and I’m fully aware of how unpopular this opinion might be) is that we, as creative consumers, have become unwittingly incapable of eliciting our own personal responses to art. That isn’t to say that historical encounters with artworks weren’t also mediated to the viewer by route of external actors and value systems. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any period or cultural production context that wasn’t symbiotically linked with these transactional networks. However, I firmly believe and will argue that in our media-saturated, hyper-digitised, platform-rich day and age our expectations of art and creativity are not so much generated by us as they are mediated to us by these external actors — almost entirely.
At this point it might be useful to give some concrete examples. While writing this essay, I kept returning to the format of the sitcom, or more specifically the canned laughter that we associate with the genre (something that I recently found out extends even to recorded stand-up comedy). In many ways, this example is perhaps the most black and white representation of a mediated emotional response to something, as the reaction being conveyed is an expressed emotion in itself.[9] However, such mediated responses are arguably present in other creative formats, even those that we commonly label “high” or “fine” art.
Take for example the case of the cinematic or literary trope, embodied for instance by the stoic masculine hero, the damsel in distress, the comic sidekick or the traumatised villain. Surely, the medium’s reliance on these formulaic character portraits serves to dictate our expectations from these narratives even before we have the opportunity to consider the plot as a whole. Of course, both authors and screenwriters certainly maintain the capability of challenging and subverting these tropes through the mechanism of parody or satire for instance. However, even in doing so, this act of negation can arguably be viewed as a form of citation in itself — or rather, a kind of anti-citation in the form of opposition.
Direct and oppositional citation is also prevalent within the visual arts, exemplified by recent exhibitions such as Botticelli Reimagined that was presented at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2016.[10] Here, the influence of the master was channelled by means of several different formats, including parody, pastiches, homages and iconographic appropriation — the collective point being that citation can take many shapes and forms.
Adding a musical comparison to this argument, we might consider Max Richter’s nod to Vivaldi in his Four Season Recompositions or Jun Nagao’s Paganini Lost. Of course, citation through the medium of music can also take the form of lyrical reference, as for instance in the song Emmylou by the Swedish folk-duo First Aid Kit, where the lyrics mention both Johnny Cash and June Carter, as well as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris herself.
Perhaps the latent observation that is being made through all of the above-listed examples — apart from the fact that creativity hardly ever takes place within a Lockian void — is that our expectations are constantly being mediated to us through this mechanism of familiarity. Needless to say, this point is a redundant one to make, as expectations by definition are necessarily grounded in this element of the familiar. However, I still feel that this particular observation is an important one to emphasise, as it arguably represents the very foundation of the cyclical value systems that I have been describing.
Just to clarify briefly here — our expectations and responses to art forms are being mediated to us based on this principle of predictability. In other words, creative products are deemed valuable precisely because they appear familiar to us (and I have already stated that this familiarity can present itself as both affirming and oppositional). Taking this into account then, I suppose the broader topic of discussion becomes why this is the case. If it is possible to claim that art is being made for today’s passive creative consumer, then the follow-up question must be: why is it being made, and why is it necessary to mediate it in this way?
Based on the analysis I have presented in this essay, I conclude that it really just boils down to a single factor — profit. As clichéd and reductionist as that sounds, the argument for a profit-driven creative market becomes more convincing if we broaden our understanding of the term to include gains that extend beyond the mere financial. For what is profit if not a gain of some sort — be it in the form of revenue, social status, public and critical recognition, networking opportunities or a validation of vanity in general?
If we’re able to accept the notion that our creative output it being made expressly for the sake of profit (in the broader sense of the term), then the necessity for mediation becomes apparent by default. Through mediating our expectations and responses to us, this creative value network acts not only to safeguard profit, but also provide a way for the system to ensure its own survival. In other words, the desire for profit necessitates mediation, which is in turn dependent on profit for its continued relevance.
It is precisely for this reason that festival-praised filmmakers continue to produce narratives that are either hyper-violent, over-sexualised, focused on the socially marginalised, unconventionally framed or otherwise obscure — or indeed why certain visual artists will continue to attach fruit to blank surfaces. Regardless of whether something is deemed mainstream, high, fine, minor, low or lesser, all art and creative products that are being produced within our contemporary frameworks will inevitably fall victim to this pernicious system of mediated values.
Writing this last section, I can’t help but find parallels between my reasoning and the discussions put forward by the Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han. Writing in his Agony of Eros, Han states that when it comes to love we are in fact looking for a reflection of ourselves (Self) in our ideal romantic partner, as opposed to an actual, external Other.[11] Similarly, in our era of social media and digital platforms — where we are so far removed from the original source that we might as well be plugged in to an artificial reality — I see little purpose in the “art” we consume beyond that of mediating our expectations to us as mentioned above. Is an Instagram post that you can like and share really art? In the immersive, proximate sense that is — the same could be said for the at-home stream-screening of films, or the idea of “background music” at a party or in a restaurant.
I would say that this excessive focus on mediated outcomes and consequent profitability — apart from being an insipid by-product of the capitalist machine — negates the processes of craftmanship necessarily involved in the act of creativity, as well as what might be termed the more sacred or ritualistic value inherent to making; that is, making as an act of human expression. I would love to see us reclaim some of this metaphysical aura surrounding artworks, which has so inspired both artists and thinkers — not to mention the viewer — since at least Antiquity, if not earlier. Han makes an attempt at this in his Saving Beauty, although I would say it requires at least some sort of collective or grassroots approach in order to make it plausible on a mass scale.[12]
And while some might argue that this kind of cry for a higher order or sublime meaning smacks of an outdated elitism, to those I ask: surely the elitism lies in how little was expected from the audience in the first place?
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan
[2] http://www.barriertapeart.com
[3] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, 2005.
[4] Ibid., 63–86.
[5] On a side note, one might also reflect on whether this is perhaps the most understated shortcoming of contemporary art criticism, namely the inability to recognise these broader value systems through excessive focus on the artist or the creative product itself.
[6] Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of Artists, Oxford University Press, 1998; Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790), J. H. Bernard (trans.), New York, Hafner, 1951, 150.
[7] See footnote 1.
[8] Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
[9] This observation has also been made by Slavoy Zizek in his essay “Will you laugh for me, please?”: https://www.lacan.com/zizeklaugh.htm
[10] https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/botticelli-reimagined
[11] Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, E. Butler (trans.), Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2017.
[12] Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, D. Steuer (trans.), Cambridge, Polity, 2018.
