art escapes criticism, or adorno's museum

Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno's MuseumAuthor(s): Catherine LuiSource: Cultural Critique, No. 60 (Spring, 2005), pp. 217-244Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489215Accessed: 24/10/2010 12:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CulturalCritique.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489215?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress

ART ESCAPES CRITICISM, OR ADORNO'S MUSEUM

Catherine Lui

The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better.

-Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS

Theodor Adorno belongs to a generation of intellectuals who did not celebrate the pleasures provided by popular culture: as a con-

sequence, he has been identified with a kind of elitist condescen- sion that generations of academics have worked to overthrow. Being identified with elitism implied that one was consigned to a special dustbin of history reserved for embarrassing relics of Leftism gone wrong. Dancing upon the grave of the Frankfurt School may not be as popular as it once was, but for a while, it was a jubilatory activ-

ity. Adorno himself wrote about the inescapable conflict between elitist and amateur in the essay "Valery Proust Museum," and in it, he shows remarkable sympathy for Proust's defense of bad taste and superficiality. In this essay, Adorno demonstrates that Valery and Proust represent two perspectives on art that are "diametrically opposed, but not directed polemically against each other, nor in fact does either betray any acquaintance of the other."1 The difference between Valery and Proust is irremediable: to travel the abyss that

separates them is to venture onto the faultline that slices through the landscape of modernity. Both Proust and Val ry rebelled against the increasingly rational disposition of art objects, but like two prisoners plotting separate escapes from the prison house of moder-

nity's contradictions, they did so without paying any attention to the efforts of the other.

Cultural Critique 60-Spring 2005-Copyright 2005 Regents of the University of Minnesota

218 CATHERINE LUI

In Adorno's essay, Valery represents the unhappy elitist, and Proust the enthusiastic dilettante. Adorno demonstrates that for both these critics, pleasure is the point of departure in any discussion of art. Pleasure in art, or the pleasure of art, is inextricably linked to museums.

The German word, "museal" [museum-like], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital rela-

tionship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. They testify to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are hoarded in them and their market value leaves no room for the pleasure of looking at them. Nevertheless, that pleasure is dependent on the existence of museums.2

"Historical respect" is opposed to "the needs of the present": the

respect of history institutionalizes and places the art object under

quarantine, at a safe distance from the tensions of contemporary contradictions. Neutralized culture still has its pleasures. In Adomo's Aesthetic Theory, aesthetic pleasure is inextricably linked to a promise of happiness both evoked and renounced by the artwork, which bears the traces of its struggle with "the instinctual conflicts of its

genesis."3 Moreover, realization of "historical respect" takes place as a disciplining of both art object and the museum goer: the latter is

produced as a subject of the Enlightenment and a citizen of the

nation-state, while the former is psychologized as an expression of individual creativity and agency. In this way, the museological art

object underwrites modern individuality. According to Donald Prezi-

osi, the disposition of works of art in museums participates in the endless construction and reconstruction of a model of individual

agency-as an idealized image of secretive genius at work.4

Preziosi argues that the modern museum establishes the Kant- ian "aesthetic" as "a separate and distinguishable realm of cognition" and thus promotes an idealized realm of coherence and commensu-

rability between the objects themselves. If we understand the art

object in the museum as an "ideal vision" of the modern subject, then the museum goer is taught to assume the correct posture with

regard to a continuum of models and ideals to which she may be

compared. Like Preziosi, media theorist and historian Wolfgang Ernst

ART ESCAPES CRITICISM 219

emphasizes the museum's relation to other Enlightenment institutions that aspired to display not only discreet objects but a new form of interrelatedness: "The category of the universal interrelation of

things (nexus rerum universalis), borrowed from Enlightenment think-

ing, became temporalized in nineteenth-century museology."' Ernst reminds us that the radical restructuring of orders of knowledge that occurred during the eighteenth century produced the modern museum. He argues that the museum became a medium that organized art objects to be apprehended by the new discipline known as art history: "The specialization and compartmentalization of arts and sciences in the late 18th century necessitated a specific memory appropriate to the fine arts in order to keep them distinct from other discourses. The results were art history and the modern museum

... the museum as difference engine distinguishes the new from the old."6

In J. Pedro Lorente's Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: The First Museums of Contemporary Art (1800-1930), the relationship between museums and the construction of modern subjectivity is further

complicated by his findings on the museum of contemporary art that emerged during the nineteenth century.' Lorente notes that it was the anxious Restoration monarch Louis XVIII who opened up the Luxembourg Palace to the public as the Mus6e des Artistes Vivants or Museum of Living Artists. Contemporary art museums were established by elites eager to legitimize their own modernity by promoting the work of living artists: Lorente adds that "the first museums of contemporary art, like national pavilions in universal

exhibitions, were produced as a parade ground of patriotic pride."8 Other European capitals took up the challenge of the Parisian Mu- seum of Living Artists: in the case of Great Britain, it was private philanthropy that funded these new galleries. Rich individuals and self-made men such as John Sheepshanks (baron of cloth manufac-

turing) and Henry Tate (sugar magnate) "offered either a purpose- built edifice or a large collection (or occasionally both) for the creation of a new museum, under the condition that the public powers provided the rest."9 Lorente adds that the social history of the

founding of new museums is deeply implicated in the aspirations of the nineteenth-century nouveaux riches for social respectability.

Museum patriarchs hoped that in their acts of cultural philanthropy

220 I CATHERINE LUI

the "discreditable origins" of an immense fortune based on the bru- tal exploitation of the working classes and the colonies could be either rewritten or forgotten. In both the British and French cases, the new museum of contemporary art played a crucial role in legitimizing monarchy and capital while producing a new sense of urbanity and

promoting an image of citizenship within the nineteenth-century city and state. The museums of contemporary art were explicitly nation- alist and chauvinist in their policies:

This cult coupling nationalism and the love of the new was not a particularity of the biggest capitals: it could be observed in museums of

provincial cities as well. Art being simultaneously recent and national- or better still, local-was the favorite hobby-horse of an urban public of cultural consumers, with a combined interest for novelty and

parochialism. Following the doctrines of influential books like Modern

Painters, by John Ruskin, lay citizens and art-critics shared an almost

religious belief in the progress of art, which implied they unashamedly proclaimed as the climax of art history the art of their time-and that of their own countries in particular.0o

Lorente points out that in this spirit the nineteenth-century reorga- nization of the Grande Galerie at the Louvre, the paintings of Ital- ian Renaissance masters were replaced by the works of recently deceased French artists. The sanctum sanctorum had been violated.

Perhaps this violation is what Valdry deplores when he describes the overabundance of treasures at the Louvre, arranged in what is for him a chaotic jumble that seemed designed to produce disori- entation and confusion in the sensitive viewer or connoisseur.

According to Val"ry, the art objects in the Louvre can no longer exist in "proper relation to each other" because their mother, archi-

tecture, is dead." Since they can no longer have an organic and nat- ural relationship to one another, the art object is reduced to an object of education and information. The "progress of art" has produced a kind of homogenization and democratization that the true art lover will have to reject. What Valhry is nostalgic for is the space to which the art object belonged: the architecture of that space allegorizes the

feudal genealogy where treasures stayed in the family. In the modern museum, the forced intimacy of art objects ancient and modern

destroys their singularity by neutralizing their capacity for destruction. "The more beautiful a picture is, the more it is distinct from


all others.... This picture, one sometimes says, kills the ones around it." If this is forgotten, Valery warns, the heritage of art that museums were meant to conserve will be destroyed."12 His ruined enjoyment is based on his "specialization" or his capacity for distinguishing one particular form of beauty that might be fatal to all others.

If for Valery, looking at art is the model of an incommensurable

experience whose pleasure lies in the isolation of a dangerous and

incomparable beauty, Proust's description of looking at art recognizes its fungibility with regard to other experiences of the modern

city. In fact, as Adorno points out in his reading of Proust, the museum exists as an associative space in which aesthetic experience, contemporary art, and everyday life are temporarily conjoined. The

sky seen through the glass dome of the Gare St.-Lazare is compared with certain skies painted by Mantegna or Veronese: the association of these two skies is made possible by an unnamed object in the novel-the Monet paintings of the Gare St.-Lazare that Proust loved. Of the glass ceiling that was built on iron scaffolding over the Gare St.-Lazare he writes,

Over a sprawling city it stretched its wide, wasted heaven full of omi- nous dramas. Certain skies of Mantegna or Veronese are as modern, almost Parisian--under such a vaulting sky only terrible and solemn

things can happen, the departure of a train or the raising of a cross.13

To Adorno, the museum and the train station are both associated with death, but death managed in a modernized and rationalized

way. In these spaces, the subject is submitted to chronological order and timetables that, in the first case, define the rationalization and historicization of the art work that Valery deplores, while, in the sec-

ond, she is interpellated as a passenger whose individual and particular journey is determined by railroad schedule.14 Both museum and train station are also places inhabited by the nineteenth-century crowd. The crowd is also encrypted in Proust's descriptions of the

"museal" art object and the train station. Proust was certainly not alone in his love of the Monet paintings; he gave himself to their

popularity. According to Lorente, "public displays of contemporary art enjoyed the highest success amongst lay citizens. That popularity is difficult to imagine nowadays, because our museums of con-

temporary art rather intimidate popular crowds .... Indeed, before

222 I CATHERINE LUI

the popularization of cinemas, public displays of the latest art were one of the most highly attended urban amenities."'"

The museum and the train station were disciplinary sites where the modern subject had to orient herself with regard to the intimate

stranger, to long-distance travel, to leisure time, and to the urban crowd seeking distractions and temporary escape from the infernal

rhythms of working life. From Proust's point of view, the traveler has to accept the tragic potentiality of this new temporality. After

hearing from Swann about the remarkable beauty of the little Persian- Norman church at Balbec, Marcel studies the train schedule from Paris to Normandy, investing the one twenty-two train from the Gare St.-Lazare with the power to cut a groove and mark the very contours of his world.16 The miraculous quality of train travel has less to do with the distance covered than with the radical difference it can call up. For Proust, the rail lines connect two distinct indi- vidualities that are the place names one can read at the train station: these names are separate from the cities they serve insofar as

they are containers of the essence of the place. Adorno points out that it is following the paragraph about the one twenty-two to Balbec that Proust's own itinerary takes us into the museum by drawing an analogy between the placards of train stations and the signage of museums.

Proust writes "terrible and solemn things" can happen under skies perceived through the immense glass rooftops of the Gare St.-

Lazare.17 Between the train station and the traveler's experience lies the association between the skies in the paintings of Mantegna and Veronese and the skies perceived through the modern iron frame and glass ceiling of the Gare St.-Lazare, the skies of "Parisian moder-

nity": in this network of associations appears the concept of tragic modernity, a crystal image or prism in which what is made visible is Monet's painting. Beneath the glass ceiling of the train station, Marcel takes leave of his mother, and this terrible event gives him an intimation of a future when the woman whom he adored would become a stranger to him.'s The radical particularity of Marcel's suf-

fering appears as one moment in a series of associations between

place names, timetables, paintings, museums, and train stations.

According to Adorno, Valdry mourns the artwork reduced to relic because he clings to a craftsmanlike relationship to writing. In


work, he retreats into the "studio" where he can mourn the loss of art's immediacy with regard to life: he takes refuge in the concept and refuses to attribute to poetic language any representational qualities. Pure aesthetic experience is guaranteed by such a retreat. For

Proust, there is a pleasure particular to the museum as a space for

viewing art. A masterpiece can only be properly viewed in a mu-

seum, and not in a collector's home where one might be dining. The hostess will have been too concerned with doing research about re-

constituting (through interior decor) the artwork's original milieu. For Proust, only the museum's austerity can transport us into the

"espaces interieurs" into which the artist disappears, "s'abstrait" or abstracts himself in order to create the art object. In fact, it is the

public gallery that best evokes the artist's ability to disappear into his work. The self-abstraction, or self-subtraction, that defines Valery's particular understanding of poetic modernism that he inherited from Mallarme is spatialized by Proust's apprehension of museum space as allegorical of the artist's disappearance act. As Didier Maleuvre

puts it,

~'i~iiiiiiiiiii~ -i:;:i iiii i !i:i

iiii....! ... . .

ii i ~ ~ ~~~iiiii"~ iii!ii••ii~iii iiiiiii i iiiiiiiiiiiiii iiii!iiii• •

:;;!ii-i-iii:!: iii'•ii ii• !iii

•:. : iiiii

i:i••iii~iii ii:iiiii!i•!:iii:l; i; :; . ..........

i~i i~ l li!!:•!i ii i• '•iiii;ii! ~iii i iiiiii-i il :iiiiiiii i:-',iiii•i

ii i i:ii!•;!:

il i iiil i ! i i iiiiiil iii i i:,•;:: :•i:•': .i N i ~ ~si ii! i iiii i:iiii iilii i!!l

i- ii iii- -:,•:•,,• , ,,::,,,,,•i _-:_-- :::::::::_:-: : ::-:-_-i~I X X Ic~'-~iiii GEM.:. :---: ?i-:::::: ::.:-"'i~i~":i~iiiiiIBMiiii8i

M I. - ::-:i'i:.-i ::":i: sisiii iisl':iiii 9iiii:-i--

224 CATHERINE LUI

The museum represents the absence of a place .... Proust's critique avoids the trap of a second-order contextualism by saying that the artwork only belongs to the museum because the museum represents the least amount of context: artworks belong to museums because there

they are most free from belonging.19

Maleuvre also points out the logical consequences of Valery's rejec- tion of museums: if the art object is deprived of its original context, it loses its distinctive power. This implies that the art object itself is "subsumable" as one element among others of contextual ground- ing. If Valery plays on the singular pathos of orphaned art objects, abandoned to places they do not belong, Proust situates Marcel's

painful separation from his mother in the midst of a teeming train

platform and its infernal crowd of Benjaminian and Baudelairean associations. Proust's view takes in the historical landscape that Don- ald Preziosi and J. Pedro Lorente lay out for us. As Adorno pointed out, Proust's "mode of perception" endows him with an ability to

perceive "history as landscape": in fact, for him names are as vivid as individuals.20

Just as we learn how to be in the city from our visits to the

museum, we learn how to be in relationship with others by travel-

ing on the train and identifying with the individuality of places. Adorno ends his essay with the following sentence: "In the Jeu de

Paume, where the "Gare St.-Lazare" now hangs, Proust's Elstir and

Valery's D6gas live peacefully next to each other in discrete separation."21 It is, of course, a great historical irony that Monet's Gare St.-Lazare hangs today at the Musee d'Orsay, a former train station. The abandoned station was remade into a museum by architect Gae Aulenti to house the Impressionist works that once hung in the Jeu de Paume, the handball courts where the Third Estate declared the

founding of the National Assembly in 1789.22 Aestheticization of his-

tory takes place as urban renewal.

ART LOVER

Museums are ambiguous and tragedy-bound features of the land-

scape of urban modernity where difference, distance, and names are


displayed in such a way that the museum goer can recognize in them the spatialization of his own experiences of temporality and

everyday life. Proust's understanding of the novelistic enterprise was deeply informed by its history as an optic through which the

bourgeoisie could explore new forms of being in the world and being in history that had everything to do with learning how to be around art.23

Proust is able to liberate himself from the fetishism of art objects as such; he is not invested in art for art's sake or other homilies re-

peated by outraged snobs. For him, art has lost its immediacy to life

only because it exceeds its aesthetic qualities. In this way, novelistic

language overturns hierarchies of taste and order and is related, as Bakhtin insisted, to linguistic reversals of the carnival and the feast: "Proust the novelist, virtually begins where Valery the poet, stopped- with the afterlife of works of art."24 And what follows is Adorno's

extraordinary analysis of Proust's attitude of "admiring consumer- ism" that allows him to anticipate the attempted negation of his own

critique of the culture industry. Adorno sees in Proust the unleash-

ing of hyperbolic admiration or fandom as an infernally productive and authentically innovative position with regard to the commodi- fication of culture.

For Proust's primary relationship to art is the precise opposite of that of the expert and producer. He is first of all an admiring consumer, an

amateur, inclined to that effusive and for artists highly suspect awe before works that characterizes only those separated from them as

though by an abyss. One could almost say that his genius consisted not least of all in assuming this attitude . . . so completely and accu-

rately that it became a new type of productivity, and the power of inner and outer contemplation, thus intensified, turned into recollection, involuntary memory. The amateur is incomparably more com- fortable in the museum than is the expert. Val ry feels himself at home in the studio; Proust strolls through an exhibition. There is something extraterritorial about his relation to art and many of his false judgments, as in questions of music display traces of the dilettante to the end.25

Although Adorno recognizes the significance of Proust's enthusiastic dilettantism and the value of his bad taste or "false judgments" (at least in music), he does not suggest that we can dismiss Valdry's

226 I CATHERINE LUI

condemnation of the museum's "barbarity" and his pleas on behalf of the art object. In contrast to Valery's quixotic campaign against museums, Adorno condemns Proust for a capacity for adaptation to the inevitable. Adorno points to complementary blind spots in both

Valery's and Proust's positions, which exist in homeopathic sympathy with each other:

For it is only in museums, where paintings are offered for contem-

plation as ends in themselves, that they become as absolute as Valery desired, and he shrinks back in terror from the realization of his dream. Proust knows the cure for this. In a sense works of art return home when they become elements of the observer's subjective stream of consciousness.26

It is only by injecting a small amount of superficiality and dilettan- tishness into the "deadly seriousness" with which we must treat both world and art that we can arrive at a rigorous relationship to aesthetic experience. Finally, Adorno writes, "Works of art can fully embody the promesse de bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set along the path to their own destruction"27 Nothing could be more dangerous and more threatening to the singularity of the art object than the commodity: hence the

exhilarating fearlessness of those art objects that recklessly mimic the

high production values and diabolical attractiveness of commodities. The assertion of art for art's sake was a form of modernism that

was apotheosized in the Cold War programs of American cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art.28 Valdry's position on art's objective autonomy from history as well as social and economic forces has also become institutionalized wisdom. More re-

cently, however, when confronting declines in public funding and

public attendance, there has been an acknowledgment that the "elitist" attitude consigns art and museums to a gilded obsolescence in the age of the spectacle. Elitism has become the ground of critique against the academy as well as the museum.29 Proust can hardly be considered the populist here, but his radical subjectivism has been

appropriated by educational initiatives and community outreach in the hope of "empowering" the amateur, which for museum education departments entails integrating new communities of museum

goers into its constituency.30 One could say in the perpetual crisis of


the museum, its contemporary incarnations have tried to resolve the

contradictory purposes into which it was born as indoctrination by entertainment.31

Museums participate inevitably and fatefully in the "dialectic of

enlightenment." By rationalizing and organizing art objects, museums distinguish the arts from the sciences while providing spaces for modern and urban recreation. On the one hand, the subject of

modernity must learn to experience the correct amount of reverence with regard to a cultural history increasingly institutionalized and rationalized along the lines of mnemotechnics and its various media. On the other hand, he or she must also assume the burden of an

individuality formed along the lines of a radical subjectivism. Ratio- nalization and individuation produce specific forms of backlash or reaction. If Max Weber has shown that capitalism is dependent on the internalization of a certain disposition with regard to both renun- ciation and experience, Freud took very seriously the price that this vexed and difficult process exacted upon psychic life. He identified a wellspring of "Unbehagen" or discontent and discomfiture that was

produced by the exigencies of "Kultur," but, in so doing, he dem- onstrated that reactions against "Kultur" or civilization often took the form of a regressive group psychology. In 1930, the year Freud

published Das Unbehagen in der Kultur or Civilization and its Discon-

tents, the reactionary movements were gaining momentum in Ger-

many by speaking to the discontentment of a large part of the

population against its liberal and parliamentarian government. Adorno shared Freud's critical view of Massenpsychologie: the regressive aspect of popular culture would dominate Adorno's study of the culture

industry, with its impoverished pleasures and cynical promises of

happiness.

ELITISM IN THEORY

In the United States, the accusation of elitism has a special reso-

nance. It echoes a powerful refrain in the language of insurgency dating from the heyday of the Populist movement of the 1890s, when the label was reserved for the enemy in an American-style class war that eventually gave birth to radical, governmentally imposed

228 j CATHERINE LUI

reforms on robber-baron capitalism. Whereas the original Populists of the People's Party denounced the economic oligarchs of the East

Coast, in recent years, culture has become the battleground upon which a self-styled right-wing insurgency wanted to wage war

against liberals and their effete tastes. The Populist movement was an authentic revolt of small farmers and Midwestern laborers against the oligarchs and was the most successful attempt to establish a third party in American history. The Populist movement preached rebellion against the elites of the East Coast: it was made up of self-

styled "producers," farmers and laborers of the Midwest who were saddled with debt and struggling to survive during the economic crises of the 1890s.32 In St. Louis, the People's Party gathered in 1892 to battle the corruption of the "moneyed aristocracy" or the venal

plutocrats who were sapping the economic and moral strength of "rural and urban labor alike."33 Membership in the People's Party was based less on one's actual economic standing than on one's moral and political probity: this was class consciousness with an American and Evangelical twist. The producers of the Midwest lay claim to higher moral ground than the corrupt East Coasters. William Jennings Bryan, the Christian fundamentalist from Ne-

braska, became the presidential candidate upon whom the progres- sive insurgency pinned its ardent hopes for change. Bryan lost the

election, but the energy of Populist insurgency only swelled into the twentieth century, eventually sweeping Franklin Delano Roosevelt into office.

In the 1980s and 1990s, backlash politics staged a revolt on behalf of the people against "elitism" by reinvoking the moral outrage of the People's Party, but all the issues upon which they focused were cultural rather than economic affronts to the Moral and Silent Major- ity. The Right spoke in the incendiary language of outraged moral rectitude calculated to resonate with the average American or the common people, who were more often than not, white, working class, and struggling. As Thomas Frank has shown, "elitism" was used to describe dissent with regard to what he calls "market populism"-a volatile cocktail of free-market capitalism and antigovern- ment libertarianism. Elitists could be anyone from critics who did not believe that the stock market would set us free to trade union-

ists and "Keynesians,"-or worse yet, they could be liberals who


believed in the integrity of democratic institutions such as public education but did not believe in Jesus Christ.34

In academia, the enemy of the common people's popular enjoy- ments was, more often than not, Theodor Adorno. Adorno bashing seemed to have become the preferred way in which the art critic or

philosopher could reassure an expanded readership that he was not a coddled snob. Frank has shown that recent revolts against elitism dress themselves up in the revolutionary outrage of Populist in-

surgencies past: Ann Coulter and David Brooks have appropriated the jargon of authenticity in their pseudoheroic forays against the

supposed corruption of the liberal elites.35 The tactics of reactionary politics make use of the language of insurgency in order to ventril-

oquize the "voice of the people." The appropriation of revolution-

ary rhetoric by the forces of reaction is described in Karl Marx's tour de force of political journalism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bona-

parte. Marx analyzes this counterrevolutionary strategy of usurpa- tion by showing how Napoleon Bonaparte's power-hungry nephew, Louis Bonaparte, seized power after the revolution of 1848.36

Through a combination of rabble rousing, illegal parliamen- tarism, and sheer terror, he seized power for himself in 1852. The French revolutionaries of 1848 had gotten rid of the Restoration mon- archs only to see their newly minted government and National As-

sembly usurped by a strongman opportunist who claimed to have a direct connection to the "people." Marx's critique here was directed both at Louis Bonaparte's opportunism and at the blindness of bour-

geois parliamentarians who were so busy storming from victory to

victory that they did not notice that the National Assembly along with universal suffrage were conjured away before their very eyes. When Ronald Reagan swept to power in 1980, the Democratic Party and the American New Left were stunned to discover that the Right had successfully appealed to the white working class by appropri- ating the language of populism and using it against a liberal agenda. Even as Ronald Reagan was undoing the very moorings of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, he professed in his honey-voiced tones his deepest admiration for his predecessor. Using culture to mobilize the so-called Moral Majority, the right wing succeeded in

rallying the working class to its side in wars over culture and values. Again and again, the liberal Left allowed itself to be waylaid

230 I CATHERINE LUI

by battles increasingly defined by their conservative opponents. By neglecting the economic issues that were the core of the Populist move-

ment, the American Left ceded its base of support to the Republican Party, which conjured up the phantom menace of elitism whenever it needed to cement its consensus. The Right was engaged upon a relentless campaign of cultural criticism that threw its adversaries

increasingly off balance. Reinhart Koselleck's genealogy of criticism as an Enlightenment

institution is a trenchant critique of the institution of criticism itself: the conclusions he draws lead to an affirmation of the liberal and en-

lightened state and casts in stark relief the danger of cultural criticism that takes the moral high ground. For Koselleck, the institution of criticism denies its own compromised and complicitous status with

regard to the state. Koselleck puts this complicated situation best:

Just as the Masons, by virtue of the secret, kept aloof from the State,

initially in order to elude its influence but later in order, through that

very separation, to occupy the State seemingly non-politically, so criticism initially kept aloof from the State so that later, through that very separation it could, seemingly neutral, extend its reach to the State and

subject it to its judgment. Criticism, as we shall see, became the vic- tim of its ostensible neutrality; it turned into hypocrisy.37

The subject of absolutism accepted submission to the state in order to be protected from the threat of Civil War, only to reemerge as the citizen who would begin to question the legitimacy of all institutions. Hobbes's subject is metamorphosed into Rousseau's critic, and it is here that Koselleck finds the ground of criticism most shaky, for it is on the basis of a personal, interior, higher order of morality and justice that the citizen dissents and demands a relegitimization of all categories. That higher moral order is generally associated with

religious experience, or what has been called "the higher Father," whose counsel and will trumps all political institutions and actual- ities. It is on the grounds of a secret genealogy of criticism that Kosel- leck builds his critique of a political aberration that seeks to legitimize itself and its own judgments by declaring a state of emergency in which the moral prerogative of rule would devolve to the delegitimators. When critics on both Left and Right skirmish to take the moral high ground in political debates, politics suffers: delegitimization of democratic


institutions of dissent is the eventual outcome of such strategies of

engagement. During the eighties, hypnotized by the success of going for the

moral high ground, Leftists in the academy began to cast its own

enemy within: "elitism" emerged as one of the most damning criticisms. In the world of museums, elitism became identified with modernism itself and museums were criticized by a new generation of art critics who found themselves armed with "theory" or sometimes "poststructuralist theory" or "postmodernist theory." Douglas Crimp was among the most prominent of these critics: in trying to demonstrate the ways the curatorial practices of museums contin- ued to propagate oppressive modernist myths, he wanted to heal the famous divide between art and life. In his deft historiography of the criticism of museums, Didier Maleuvre has shown that the modern museum has had to face such charges from its very birth in the violence of the French Revolution.38 The very existence of a museum in which are housed the treasures of a deposed ancien

regime betrays the ruin of art itself. For Crimp, however, "postmodernist practice" and AIDS activism were presented as a critical antidote to the steady institutionalization of an exhausted aesthetic.39 In this vision of intellectual history, theory arrives like a messianic force that will liberate the art critic from the contradictory demands of contemporary practices and academic disciplinarity. In addition,

theory would abolish the difference between high and low cultures, between art and politics, between art and life. Crimp writes,

It is as if the creative powers of modernism had migrated into theory and come to full self-consciousness in the poststructuralist text-the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the fall of dusk. Poststruc- turalism offers a theory of modernism characterized by Nachtrdglichkeit, both in the psychoanalytic and historical sense.40

For Crimp, the "poststructuralist text" arrives like the Absolute Master when the winged owl of Minerva takes flight. Jean-Michel Rabat6's The Future of Theory takes a rather sanguine and therapeu- tic view of this kind of overinvestment in the power of theory: he does so by analyzing its haunting by Hegel. For Rabat6, theory in the United States inspires an excessive devotion: it hystericizes philosophy, calling us to confront the challenge that Hegel threw down

232 I CATHERINE LUI

in Phenomenology of Spirit regarding the thinker's relationship to Ab- solute Knowledge.41

In her critique of museological practices, Abigail Solomon-Godeau draws conclusions that are dependent upon criticism's "aloofness" or neutrality: legitimacy devolves only to the critic, and the post- modern, feminist critic at that. Her indictment of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department and of John Swarowski for

canonizing Eugene Atget's work as art photography resounds with

passionate outrage:

Specifically, the increased emphasis on blockbuster exhibitions, the structural changes in museum financing, the new importance of cor-

porate funding in lieu of individual private support, all contributed to a heightened need to create an artistic star system. A canonical figure, in addition to everything else, was now expected to generate a certain box office.42

What Solomon-Godeau identified in 1986 as the museum's designs upon blockbuster shows is even more evident today. In such an envi-

ronment, criticism has become unmoored from its "normal" position as a mediator between the "frenzied pluralism" of the market and the sacralizing rituals of the museum.

[T]he art critic normally functions as a kind of intermediary between the frenzied pluralism of the marketplace and the sacralized judgment seat that is the museum. Recently, however, even this mediating process has been bypassed; artists such as Julian Schnabel, to take one

particularly egregious example, have been propelled from obscurity to the pantheon without one single serious critical text ever having been

produced in support of their work.43

Criticism was once the site of rational and disinterested judgment, but the critic is now reduced to playing the servant to both market and museum. What emerges in the ruins of criticism is the nimbus of the art star. As a way out of the contradictions of art criticism and museological practices, Solomon-Godeau describes a process of

"putting into question traditional conceptions of political correct-

ness, of determinate and fixed positions of address, or exhortative and didactic modes of critique." This has been "exclusively the project of feminism and a part of the Left."44 Such a statement, while


explicitly antididactic, is primarily proscriptive. Nostalgia for private philanthropy casts Solomon-Godeau and John Swarowski in a strange battle: the latter is the futurist and the populist (if even in a reac-

tionary way), the former the traditionalist, still holding on to an idea of critic as mediating visionary.

Solomon-Godeau's own rhetoric breaks down at crucial mo- ments and leaves us with a few shiny kernels of mystification. The last essay of Photography at the Dock ends in the following way:

To the extent that photography has been a particularly effective master's tool, it is incumbent upon feminist art practice to try to use it in

different-critical-ways. As a feminist and a critic, wearing, in this

instance, a curatorial hat, I would less wish to assert a dubious author-

ity than to affirm a collective solidarity with the project of claiming the camera for more humanly satisfying ends.45

Reclaiming the camera for "more humanly satisfying ends" is a sen- timental and irreproachable gesture, and here she would seem to be in agreement with Dave Hickey, whose own writing is explicitly antiauthoritarian and whose work has had as its goal the destruction of institutionalized wisdom and stultifying curatorial practices. Of humanness, Hickey writes,

Human art and language (as opposed to institutional art and language) always cite the exception, and it was Norman Rockwell's great gift to see that life in twentieth-century America, though far from perfect, has been exceptional in the extreme.46

But this is a critical odd couple, even less compatible at first glance than Valery and Proust. Solomon-Godeau's critique of MOMA and Swarowski is based upon her intellectual/critical capacity to see the conservative museological practices for what they are: attempts to

monopolize the reception and understanding of Atget's photography as "art photography," i.e., products of artistic genius. Hickey's rumi- nations on Rockwell arise from a childhood memory of accom-

panying his father to a jam session in post-World War II suburban Dallas and his various attempts at describing the beauty of art and life reconciled on that exceptional afternoon. Solomon-Godeau's crit-

icism of patriarchy and Hickey's criticism of institutionality depend on restoring the dignity of human experience: they are not so far

apart after all.

234 CATHERINE LUI

BACKLASHES

High Noon is Dave Hickey's favorite image of heroic confrontation: in his showdown, he is the righteous cowboy, taking down the high- brow mandarinism of theory-addled, bean-counting academics and curators. His plea for the legitimacy of aesthetic pleasure was made on behalf of the studio practice of artists, but what he defended with

great fervor against the career bureaucrats and party apparatchiks of "theory" was nothing more than the democratizing powers of

money itself. His writing, with its populist twang, its Baroque in-

flections, its storyteller's seductions, is celebrated by those looking for a homegrown antidote to fancy-pants theorizing. All the essays in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy are attacks on the figure of the bureaucrat, the bean counter, who Hickey describes as the

very incarnation of the demonic-all-powerful, lazy, deceitful, hys- terical, puerile, punitive, useless, but also pretentious, condescend-

ing, ignorant, and perverse. What cuts through the haze of the bureaucrat's fog of war against creativity? Money. Culture vultures

visiting Las Vegas were hopelessly disoriented by the stunning absence of all forms of distinction produced by cultural capital. Only money talked and walked in the desert city that had abjured taste in the name of only two rules, "1) Post the odds, 2) Treat everyone the same. Just as one might in a democracy!"47 In an interview with

zing magazine in 2000, Hickey tells the history of art and theory's unfortunate relationship in the following manner:

And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have

curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureau-

cracy-you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society-the society of contemporaries.48

Hickey's authentic animosity to bureaucracy is enormously appeal- ing. His timing is perfect: he takes a strategic position in the culture


wars by defending marketplace values against the putative corruption of university and museum, the twin towers of liberal elitism

gone mad. Who could possibly argue for the managed dissemina- tion of aesthetic theory? Indeed as incarnations of the spirit of

bureaucracy itself, university and museum appear on the range as the twisted enemies of the righteous dynamism of both democracy and the art market.49 Just as the original Populists described the

exploiting class as a parasitic group of oligarchs living off the labor of the "producers," Hickey's art professors and curators are a bunch of insecure charlatans, fending off with tweedy elbow Hickey's attempts to engage them on the merits of Tristram Shandy while run-

ning to suckle at the teats of an ever-bountiful bureaucracy, bloated

by an infusion of hard-earned, public dollars. His eloquent condemnation of museum curators and tenured professors as petty tyrants of aesthetic experience and social justice are underwritten by his inimitable outsider's innocence. Public funds and bureaucracy produce not only generations of lazy welfare queens but, in Hickey's world, also sunder art from life itself by supporting a bevy of spoiled, tenured professors with sweaty hands extended for their yearly merit raises.50 Hickey makes an impassioned plea for the "frenzied

pluralism" of the market as a form of frontier justice against the enemies of creativity itself.

For Hickey, museums ignore the experience of life and the judgment of the market; for Solomon-Godeau, they are slaves to it. And

yet both critics share a desire for reconciliation and elevation in art

through something called humanness. Hegel called this kind of aesthetic elevation "spiritualization" and traced in its dialectical movement a sign of the end of art itself. For Hegel, Romantic art remains

estranged from and indifferent to sensuous immediacy: this has the

unexpected effect of liberating the aesthetic. Everyday objects are

susceptible to aestheticization because the locus of intensity has been

displaced from the material nature of art to the inner experience of the aesthetic. So Hickey's love of custom cars actually illustrates

Hegel's art history: in classical art, the focus is on the objective mate-

riality of the thing as sensuous manifestation of the immutable distinction of the gods. In Romantic art, it is the intensity of individual

experience and the inadequacy of external forms that creates aesthetic effects."5

236 I CATHERINE LUI

If both Solomon-Godeau and Hickey actually yearn for the re- investment of humanness and dignity in the experience of art, it is Adorno who occupies, from beyond the grave, an authentically dis-

senting position with regard to "elevation." About Kafka, he writes, "Instead of human dignity, the supreme bourgeois concept, there

emerges in him [Kafka] the salutary recollection of the similarity between man and animal."52 How does Kafka remember our bes-

tiality? Kafka's writing endlessly restages the tragicomic agon of heroic individualism facing down an inscrutable, arbitrary, and mas- sive bureaucracy.53 In Kafka's narratives, the individual demand for

justice or truth degenerates into senselessness. While feminist and

populist rage against the infernal museum in the name of a better life and better art, the position of the individual and the outsider is endowed with all the imaginary dignity of fairytale protagonists. Kafka's fiction denies this to his powerless heroes, which is why, in his portrait of bureaucracy, "It is not the powerful, but the impo- tent who appear superfluous."54

HAVING FUN

In the United States, the demand for the reconciliation of art and life takes place as a demand for a democratization of pleasures. Richard Shusterman's essay in the catalogue of the Walker Art Cen- ter's Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures exhibition is a call to arms in the very name of pleasure. This exhibit, organized by Phil-

ippe Vergne, featured a pragmatic but ambivalent affirmation of Guy Debord's society of the spectacle as a space of relentless and endless entertainment. If for Debord the spectacle is the apotheosis of the commodity form, entertainment is its ubiquitous, inescapable, and miniaturized progeny. Vergne abjured the use of the term

spectacle for the more banal term entertainment in order to avoid associations with the Situationists' political ambitions. From Dara Birn- baum to Jeff Koons, from Martin Kippenberger to Damian Hirst, from Dan Graham to Leigh Bowery, the exhibit provided a dark and

dizzying vision of contemporary art's para-entertainment values.

Vergne's conversation with Olekumi Ilesanmi published in the exhibition catalogue takes place in the Rainforest Cafe at the Mall of


America. In it, they reflect on art, Minneapolis, the artist formerly and once again known as Prince, and the broken dreams of the

avant-garde.55 Shusterman's essay hopes to participate in this provocative con-

versation about both art object and the commodity: the mimicry of the language of advertising promoting the transgressive and addic- tive pleasures of cigarettes lets us in on the complicity between the author and the culture industry as Shusterman exercises his hip- hop-powered agency and "appropriates" Madison Avenue's creative

genius.56 Shusterman's "Come Back to Pleasure" offers nothing less than the redemption of visual pleasure for the masses. Shusterman blames the near death of aesthetic pleasure on almost "two centuries of modernity's sacralization of art." He offers us his philosophical training as ammunition against the enemy of unmediated aesthetic

experience--Hegel and his dialectic:

However different the aesthetic philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno and Danto, what they all share, besides their antihedonism, is a common heritage in Hegel. It was Hegel's ambitiously metaphysical idealism that displaced the classical connection of art and pleasure. Founding the fatal modern tradition that makes fun the enemy of true

art, Hegel instead subordinated art's role to the quest for spiritual truth. This quest, he argued, leads us beyond art to the higher realm of reli-

gion but ultimately culminates in the spiritual pinnacle of philosophy.57

For Shusterman, there is no difference between commodified and

aesthetic/sensual pleasure. He argues for the consideration of different kinds of enjoyment but refuses the most important distinction that can be made. Shusterman may counter that this is because he does not want to ascribe to a hierarchy of pleasures promoted by the elitist crypto-Hegelian gang, but like Dave Hickey, Shuster- man joins his voice to that of the market populists who want us to

enjoy popular pleasures most: the condemnation of hierarchy is their

exhortation to enjoy the pleasures that can be most easily purchased. Shusterman uncritically affirms the notion of "fun" because fun is a uniquely American, democratic, and mass-produced notion of

enjoyment that is by definition accessible to everyone. In his essay on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Adorno describes the rationalization of sexual pleasure as being founded on "having fun" with an equally "fun-loving" partner.58 In proposing to put the "fun" back

238 CATHERINE LUI

in art, Shusterman has to perform the ritual sacrifice of noncon- formists who are just no fun. Not only are they not fun, they have

prevented us from having fun ourselves. For Adorno, the intellectual 6migre had to eradicate himself in order to survive in the relentless sunniness of 1940s Southern California: in Shusterman's case, he wants to go after the intellectual in order to receive an invita- tion to the Rainforest Cafe. Shusterman's dismissal of "the fatal modern tradition" is reassuring in a way that flatters our most re-

gressive, group-psychological tendencies. Shusterman's work has been distinguished by a commitment to the reconciliation of aesthetic experience and an expanded notion of philosophical activity and democratic participation. John Dewey's claims for politics and art are crucial to Shusterman's argument for the connectedness of aesthetic experience and political participation, so it is all the more

surprising that he cannot resist Hegel bashing in the name of fun.59 Fun is about survival and self-preservation: it is focused only

on objects and is without any relationship to transgression, extrem-

ity, or even other people, except in group-psychological formations. While Adorno gives Huxley credit for anticipating the American- ization of sex, he also insists on the insufficiency of Huxley's cri-

tique because of its dependency on the category of the individual. Fun is the miniaturization not just of pleasure but of experience in

general. Adorno was trying to redeem something of the notion of

pleasure in the age of its mass and mechanical reproducibility. But Shusterman makes the same claim: instead of the culture industry, however, he has discovered that it is actually idealist philosophy that neglects and flattens out our notions of sensuality and pleasure. In the Aesthetics, Hegel writes,

The sensuous aspect of a work of art, in comparison with the immediate existence of things in nature, is elevated to a pure appearance, and the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but despite its

sensuousness, it is no longer a purely material existent either, like stones, plants, and organic life.60

A careful consideration of this and other passages in Hegel would

prove that the philosopher does not subordinate art to philosophy; he tries to deduce what it is about the art object that makes it


radically different from both thought and immediate existence. What

Hegel introduces in his Aesthetics is an account of art as one part of a larger culture steeped in history and riven by contradictions: the space that art occupies in this larger culture is decidedly non-

empirical. The sensuality of the art object vibrates between "immediate sensuousness" and "ideal thought," evoking the relationship between the two but refusing to reconcile with or subordinate itself to either. Maleuvre writes, "That the work of art is an expression of the intellect seeking to be one with the sensuous does not mean that it achieves such fusion. The work of art does not merely dwell in

being, in the sensate, but raises it to a reflective level."61

Finally, Shusterman's account of pleasure is based on a notion of self-improvement and "profit": aesthetic pleasure can "intensify our active concentration on the work, thus enhancing our perception and understanding."62 In the end, Shusterman instrumentalizes aesthetic pleasure even as he appears to be rescuing it from "trivi- alization" in the hands of Hegelian pessimism. For Shusterman, aesthetic experience is a concentration enhancer, a kind of Viagra for the mind: this is why he relies in the end on evolutionary biology to prove the importance of pleasure in the functioning of the human brain. By implicitly accepting enhancement and profit as final val-

ues, Shusterman offers philosophy up as a slave to actuality. This

is, and has been, the problem with pragmatism. Few of Shuster- man's readers will bother to prosecute him for misreading Hegel; they will trust him to have given a fair representation of the philosopher's thinking. His distortion of philosophy is an apologia for

thinking, and his critical stance cannot actually account for the aesthetic experience of viewing the art in the Let's Entertain exhibition. I would argue that the work of Dara Birnbaum, Martin Kippen- berger, or Mike Kelley should not and cannot be reducible to "fun,"

although it revels in its flirtation with the culture industry and its sometimes cuddly, sometimes shiny supplements. In this sense, con-

temporary art is able to produce an experience of the "new" as described by Adorno:

The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction with its promise of undiminished plenitude. Baudelaire's poetry was the first to codify that, in the midst of the fully developed commodity society, art can

240 1 CATHERINE LUI

ignore this tendency only at the price of its own powerlessness.... Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become elo-

quent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous.63

Contemporary art mimes the "hardened and the alienated" not in order to "entertain." It has to take a risk with regard to commodities and spectacle, or else it becomes "innocuous." Although Crimp, Solomon-Godeau, Hickey, and Shusterman seem to occupy extraor-

dinarily different positions with regard to both museum and aes-

thetic, there is a deep consensus here: all of these critics want the

gap between art and life to be closed, and all propose that hierarchies of judgment should be overturned in favor of a more plural- istic and democratic order. Whether they make their pleas in the name of poststructuralism, feminism, populism, or pleasure, each one seems assured of his or her righteous oppositionality to an enemy who is

interfering with aesthetic pleasure. Adorno thought that Hegel's prophecy about the end of art was actually a cynical confirmation of the status quo. Spiritualization does indeed contribute to the destruction of art: Shusterman was correct about that aspect of Hegel. According to Adorno however,

Spiritualization becomes a counterforce to the gypsy wagon of wan-

dering actors and musicians, the socially outcast. Yet however deep the compulsion may lie that art divest itself of every trace of being a show, of its ancient deceitfulness in society, art no longer exists when that element has been totally eradicated and yet it is unable to pro- vide any protected arena for that element.64

If art is to be rescued from its spiritualization or its transformation into "objects of sensual gratification," a certain amount of mediation is necessary. In fact, the two processes are related: spiritualization wants to reduce art to pure sensuous intuitability, but nonsensu- ousness restores what is singularly resistant to apprehension in the concrete muteness of the art object. To insist that mediation is nec-

essary to any reflection on the crisis in art and the crisis of the museum is to take seriously both pleasure and critical thinking as

vital elements of aesthetic experience and democratic process. Art is indeed related to the sideshow, the carnival, and the whole array of popular and folk culture's most fantastic and cruel entertainments.


A mindless celebration of the museum's and contemporary art's familial relation to megamall or dancing bear produces the same result as the rationalization of art object as a vehicle of a message of reconciliation: to defend either position by excluding the other is to render criticism inane and art, innocuous.

Notes

1. Theodor Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, 173-86 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 176.

2. Ibid., 175. 3. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 12. 4. Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body: Museums and the Phantasms of

Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 39. 5. Wolfgang Ernst. "Archi(ve)textures of Museology," in Museums and

Memory, edited by Susan Crane, 10-35 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 20.

6. Ibid., 18. 7. J. Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: The First Museums of Con-

temporary Art (1800-1930) (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1998). 8. Ibid., 36-37. 9. Ibid., 37.

10. Ibid., 36-37. 11. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," 177-78. 12. Ibid., 177. 13. Ibid., 178. 14. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of

Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

15. Lorente, Cathedrals of Urban Modernity, 38-39. 16. Marcel Proust, "Place Names: The Name," in Swann's Way, trans. C. K.

Moncrieff, (New York: Vintage, 1982). 17. Emile Zola explored the analogization of the human instincts to the rail-

road itself by situating all of the drama of La Bete Humaine on the Gare du Nord- Le Havre line.

18. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 493. 19. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art. (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 65. 20. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," 181. 21. Ibid., 185. 22. The Gare d'Orsay is where French prisoners of war disembarked from

the trains that brought them home from the German camps after the Liberation of

242 I CATHERINE LUI

France. Marguerite Duras's The War describes the "terrible and solemn" waiting, and finally the devastating reunion with her deported husband who arrives back in Paris from the German camps, on the brink of death by starvation. For Stephen Greenblatt, Gae Aulenti's renovation of the Musee d'Orsay "remakes a remarkable group of highly individuated geniuses into engaged participants in a vital,

immensely productive period in French cultural history. The reimagining is guided by many handsomely designed informational boards-cue cards, in effect-

along, of course, with extraordinary building itself" ("Resonance and Wonder," in

Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 42-56 [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991], 54).

23. The Proustian perspective on culture and aesthetics has been success-

fully framed by Alain de Botton as an ironic self-help manual. See de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Vintage, 1998).

24. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," 180. 25. Ibid., 180-81. 26. Ibid., 184. 27. Ibid., 185. 28. Serge Guibaut was the first to point to this in his How New York Stole the

Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). More recently, since the declassification of many Cold War archives, Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001) presents a fascinating and chilling vision of how the CIA influenced cultural intellectual life in the post-World War II period by sponsoring and promoting conferences, journals, and exhibits. The whole notion of consensus has to be re-

thought when confronted with the ways in which the government actively sought to shape intellectual debates and intellectual arguments by funding the journal Encounter and promoting the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

29. See Pierre Bourdieu and Alainn Darbel. L'Amour de l'art: les musies

europdens et leur public (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1966). 30. See Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven Lavine, ed. Muse-

ums and Communities (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1992). 31. See Michael Kimmelman, "New York's Bizarre Museum Moment," New

York Times, July 11, 2004, Al. 32. For a compelling account of the history of the Populist movement, see

Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

33. Ibid., 29. 34. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Pop-

ulism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 30-31. 35. Thomas Frank considers the transformation of his home state of Kansas

from a hotbed of radicalism into a "red state," one that will reliably fall into step, in every election, with the agendas of the right wing. Frank writes, "the backlash itself has been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of stringpullers would have had trouble dreaming it

ART ESCAPES CRITICISM I 243

up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against the 'establishment' that has wound up abolishing the tax on inherited estates" (What's the Matter with Kansas? How Con- servatives Won the Heart of America [New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2004], 7).

36. Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Interna- tional Publishers Company, 1984). Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1852/ 18th-brumaire/ch01 .htm.

37. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 98.

38. See Maleuvre's analysis of Antoine-Chrysostome's criticisms of the establishment of museums by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic governments, published during and after the Restoration of 1815 (Museum Memories, 15).

39. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 40. Ibid., 23. 41. Jean-Michel Rabate, The Future of Theory (London: Blackwell, 2002). 42. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugene Atget," in

Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices,

28-51(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 37. 43. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Living with Contradictions: Critical Prac-

tices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics," in Photography at the Dock: Essays on

Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, 124-48 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 124-25.

44. Ibid., 148. 45. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Cam-

era," in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and

Practices, 256-280 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 280. 46. David Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (New York: Art

Issues Press, 1997), 38. 47. Ibid., 22. 48. http://www.zingmagazine.com/zingl4/hicey/03.html. 49. Hickey admits that there was a reason why he was driven into the ranks

of the cowardly: the health insurance crisis of the late eighties, which made free- lance work increasingly hazardous to one's health. The health insurance crisis

may have contributed as much to the lack of dissent in our democracies as any- thing else.

50. Strangely enough, Hickey's arguments are compatible with those of

Valery's. Disgust with museums proves to be a profitable line of argument. In

1931, Valery was named to the Conseil National des Mus6es. In 2001, Dave

Hickey was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. 51. G. W. E Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Hegel's Aesthetics are also available on-line at

http:/ //www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/. 52. Theodor Adorno, "Notes on Kafka," in Prisms, translated by Samuel and

Shierry Weber, 243-71 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 270.

244 I CATHERINE LUI

53. See Stanley Corngold's "Adorno's 'Notes on Kafka': A Critical Recon-

struction," Monatshefte 94, no. 1 (2002): 24-42. 54. Adorno, "Notes on Kafka," 256. 55. Phillipe Vergne and Olekumi Ilesanmi, Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Plea-

sures (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2000), 18-28. 56. Richard Shusterman, "Come Back to Pleasure," in Let's Entertain: Life's

Guilty Pleasures (Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2000), 33-47. 57. Ibid., 35 (emphasis added). 58. Theodor Adorno, "Aldous Huxley and Utopia," in Prisms, translated by

Samuel and Sherry Weber, 95-118 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 103. 59. In an essay in which he seems less eager to please his popular-culture

masters, Shusterman writes, "Unlike facile pleasure of the subject, 'real aesthetic

experience,' for Adorno, 'requires self-abnegation' and submission to 'the objective constitution of the artwork itself.' This can transform the subject, thereby suggesting new avenues of emancipation and a renewed promesse de bonheur more

potent than simple pleasure" ("The End of Aesthetic Experience," Journal of Art and Art Criticism 55 [1999]: 29-41). This proves that his essay "Come Back to Plea- sure" is not based upon a misreading of Adorno, whom he understands quite well, but a willful distortion of Adorno's work.

60. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:38. 61. Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 38. 62. Shusterman, "Come Back to Pleasure," 48. 63. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 21. 64. Ibid., 94.

art escapes criticism, or adorno's museum

Documents