rosler-take the money and run

8/18/2019 Rosler-Take the Money and Run

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Martha Rosler

Take the Moneyand Run? Can

Political andSocio-criticalArt ÒSurviveÓ?

Just a few months before the real estate marketbrought down much of the world economy, takingthe art market with it, I was asked to respond tothe question whether Òpolitical and socio-criticalartÓ can survive in an overheated marketenvironment. Two years on, this may be a goodmoment to revisit the parameters of such work(now that the fascination with large-scale,bravura, high wow-factor work, primarily in

painting and sculpture, has cooled Ð if onlytemporarily). Categories of criticality have evolved overtime, but their taxonomic history is short. Thenaming process is itself frequently a method ofrecuperation, importing expressions of critiqueinto the system being criticized, freezing intoacademic formulas things that were put togetheroff the cuff. In considering the long history ofartistic production in human societies, thequestion of ÒpoliticalÓ or ÒcriticalÓ art seemsalmost bizarre; how shall we characterize the

ancient Greek plays, for example? Why did Platowish to ban music and poetry from his Republic?What was to be understood from English nurseryrhymes, which we now see as benign jingles? Astrange look in the eye of a character in aRenaissance scene? A portrait of a duke with avacant expression? A popular print with acaricature of the king? The buzz around works ofart is surely less now than when art was notcompeting with other forms of representationand with a wide array of public narratives; callingsome art ÒpoliticalÓ reveals the role of particularforms of thematic enunciation.1 Art, we may nowhear, is meant to speak past particularunderstandings or narratives, and all the more soacross national borders or creedal lines.Criticality that manifests as a subtle thread iniconographic details is unlikely to beapprehended by wide audiences across nationalborders. The veiled criticality of art underrepressive regimes, generally manifesting asallegory or symbolism, needs no explanation forthose who share that repression, but audiencesoutside that policed universe will need a studyguide. In either case, it is not the general

audience but the educated castes andprofessional artists or writers who are mostattuned to such hermeneutics. I expand a bit onthis below. But attending to the present moment,the following question from an intelligent youngscenester may be taken as a tongue-in-cheekprovocation rooted in the zeitgeist, reminding usthat political and socio-critical art is at best aniche production:

We were talking about whether choosing tobe an artist means aspiring to serve the

rich. . . . that seems to be the dominatingeconomic model for artists in this country.

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n u a r y 2 0 1 0 M a r t h a R o s l e r

T a k e t h e M o n e y a n d R u n ? C a n P o l i t i c a l a n d S o c i o - c r i t i c a l A r t Ò S u r v i v e Ó ?

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The Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) demonstration in front of Pablo PicassoÕs Guernica at the MoMA in 1970.

The most visible artists are very good atserving the rich. . . . the ones who go toCologne to do business seem to do thebest. . . . She told me this is where Europe'srichest people go . . . .

Let us pause to think about how art first becamecharacterized by a critical dimension. The historyof such work is often presented in a fragmented,

distorted fashion; art that exhibits an imperfectallegiance to the ideological structures of socialelites has often been poorly received.2 Steppingoutside the ambit of patronage or receivedopinion without losing oneÕs livelihood or, inextreme situations, oneÕs life, became possiblefor painters and sculptors only a couple ofhundred years ago, as the old political ordercrumbled under the changes wrought by theIndustrial Revolution, and direct patronage andcommissions from the Church and aristocratsdeclined.3

Members of the ascendant new class, thebourgeoisie, as they gained economic andpolitical advantage over previous elites, alsosought to adopt their elevated cultural pursuits;but these new adherents were more likely to becustomers than patrons.4 Artists working in avariety of media and cultural registers, from high

to low, expressed positions on the politicalferment of the early Industrial Revolution. Onemight find European artists exhibiting robustsupport for revolutionary ideals or displayingidentification with provincial localism, with thepeasantry or with the urban working classes,especially using fairly ephemeral forms (such asthe low-cost prints available in great numbers);smiling bourgeois subjects were depicted as

disporting and bettering themselves whiledecked out in the newest brushstrokes andmodes of visual representation. New forms ofsubjectivity and sensibility were defined andaddressed in different modalities (the nineteenthcentury saw the development of popular novels,mass-market newspapers, popular prints,theater, and art), even as censorship, sometimeswith severe penalties for transgression, wassporadically imposed from above. The development of these mass audiencescompelled certain artists to separate themselves

from mass taste, as Pierre Bourdieu hassuggested,5 or to waffle across the line. Artisticautonomy, framed as a form of insurgency, cameto be identified by a military term, the avant-

garde, or its derivative, the vanguard.6 In times ofrevanchism and repression, of course, artistsassert independence from political ideologies

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Vittore Carpaccio, Two Venetian Ladies, c. 1490. Oil on Panel, 37" ! 25".

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Erich Salomon, Haya Conference, 1930.

and political masters through ambiguous orallegorical structures Ð critique by indirection.Even manifestoes for the freeing of the poeticalImagination, a potent element of the burgeoningRomantic movements, might be traced to thetransformations within entrenched ideology andof sensibility itself as an attribute of theÒcultivatedÓ person. The expectation thatÒadvancedÓ or vanguard art would be

autonomous Ð independent of direct ideologicalties to patrons Ð created a predisposition towardthe privileging of its formal qualities. Drawing onthe traditions of Romanticism, it also underlinedits insistence on subjects both more personaland more universal Ð but rooted in theexperiential world, not in churchly dogmas ofsalvation.7 The poetic imagination was positedas a form of knowing that vied with materialist,rationalist, and ÒscientificÓ epistemologies Ð onesuperior, moreover, in negotiating the utopianreconception and reorganization of human life.8

The Impressionist painters, advancing theprofessionalization of art beyond the bounds ofsimple craft, developed stylistic approachesbased on interpretations of advanced opticaltheory, while other routes to inspiration, such aspsychotropic drugs, remained common enough.Artistic avant-gardes even at their most formal

retained a utopian horizon that kept their workfrom being simply exercises in decor andarrangement; disengagement from recognizablenarratives, in fact, was critical in advancing theclaims of art to speak of higher things from itsown vantage point or, more specifically, from theoriginal and unique point of view of individual,named producers. Following John Fekete, wemay interpret the positive reception of extreme

aestheticism or Òart for artÕs sakeÓ as a panickedlate-nineteenth-century bourgeois response to alargely imaginary siege from the political left.9

But even such aestheticism, in its demand forabsolute disengagement, offered a possibleopening to an implied political critique, throughthe abstract, Hegel-derived, social negativitythat was later a central element of the FrankfurtSchool, as exemplified by AdornoÕs insistence,against Brecht and Walter Benjamin, that art inorder to be appropriately negative must remainautonomous, above partisan political struggles.

The turn of the twentieth century, a time ofprodigious industrialization and capitalformation, witnessed population flows from theimpoverished European countryside to sites ofproduction and inspired millenarian conceitsthat impelled artists and social critics of everystripe to imagine the future. We may as well call

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this modernism. And we might observe, briefly,that modernism (inextricably linked, needless tosay, to modernity) incorporates technologicaloptimism and its belief in progress, whileantimodernism sees the narrative oftechnological change as a tale of broadcivilizational decline, and thus tends toward aromantic view of nature. Art history allows that in revolutionary

Russia many artists mobilized their skills to worktoward the socially transformative goals ofsocialist revolution, adopting new art forms (film)and adapting older ones (theater, poetry, popularfiction, and traditional crafts such as sewing andchina decorating, but in mechanized production),while others outside the Soviet Union expressedsolidarity with worldwide revolution. In theUnited States and Europe, in perhaps a lesslauded Ð though increasingly documented Ðhistory, there were proletarian and communistpainters, writers, philosophers, poets,

photographers . . .

Paul Strand, Portrait - New York, 1916. Platinum print.

Photographic modernism in the United

States (stemming largely from Paul Strand, butwith something of a trailing English legacy),

married a documentary impulse to formalinnovation. It inevitably strayed into the territoryof Soviet and German photographic innovators,many of whom had utopian socialist orcommunist allegiances, although few of theAmerican photographic modernists aside fromStrand shared these political viewpoints. Pro-ruralist sentiments were transformed frombackward-looking, romantic, pastoral longing to

a focus on labor (perhaps with a different sort ofromanticism) and on workersÕ milieux, bothurban and rural.10

The turn of the century broughtdevelopments in photography and printing (suchas the new photolithographic printing technologyof 1890 and the new small cameras, notably theLeica in 1924) that gave birth to photojournalismand facilitated political agitation. The ÒsocialdocumentaryÓ impulse is not, of course,traceable to technology, and other cameratechnologies, although more cumbersome, were

also employed.11

Many photographers wereeager to use photographs to inform and mobilizepolitical movements Ð primarily by publishingtheir work in the form of journal and newspaperarticles and photo essays. In the early part of thecentury, until the end of the 1930s, photographywas used to reveal the processes of State behindclosed doors (Erich Salomon); to offer publicexposŽs of urban poverty and degradation (LewisHine, Paul Strand; German photographers likeAlfred Eisenstaedt or Felix Mann who wereworking for the popular photo press); to provide adispassionate visual ÒanatomizationÓ of socialstructure (August SanderÕs interpretation ofNeue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity); to serveas a call to arms, both literally (the newlypossible war photography, such as that by RobertCapa, Gerda Taro, David Seymour) andfiguratively (the activist photo and newsreelgroups in various countries, such as the WorkersFilm and Photo leagues in various U.S. cities);and to support government reforms (in theUnited States, RooseveltÕs Farm SecurityAdministration). Photography, for these andother reasons, is generally excluded from

standard art histories, which thoroughly skewsthe question of political commitment orcritique.12 In the contemporary moment,however, the history of photography is far morerespectable, since photography has become afavored contemporary commodity and needs ahistorical tail (which itself constitutes a newmarket); but the proscription of politicallyengaged topicality is still widespread.13

European-style avant-gardism made a fairlylate appearance in the United States, but itsformally inscribed social critique offered,

approximately from the 1930s through the late1940s, an updated, legible version of the

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Still from Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 1978.

antimaterialist, and eventually anticonsumerist,critique previously offered by turn-of-the-twentieth-century antimodernism. Modernismis, inter alia, a conversation about progress, theprospects of utopia, and the fear, doubt, andhorror over its costs, especially as seen from thevantage point of the members of the intellectualclass. One strand of modernism led to FuturismÕscatastrophic worship of the machine and war

(and eventually to political fascism) but also toutopian urbanism and International Stylearchitecture.14

Modernism notoriously exhibited a kind ofambiguity or existential angst Ð typical problemsof intellectuals, one imagines, whoseidentification, if any, with workers, peasants, andproletarianized farm workers is maintainedalmost wholly by sheer force of conviction in themidst of a very different way of life Ð perhapslinked experientially by related, though verydifferent, forms of alienation. Such hesitancy,

suspicion, or indifference is a fair approximationof independence Ð albeit ÒblessedlyÓ well-behaved in not screaming for revolution Ð butmodernism, as suggested earlier, was suffusedwith a belief in the transformative power of (high)art. What do (most) modern intellectual elites doif not distance themselves from power and

express suspicion, sometimes bordering ondespair, of the entire sphere of life and masscultural production (the ideological apparatuses,to borrow a term from Althusser)?15

Enlightenment beliefs in the transformativepower of culture, having recovered fromdisillusionment with the French Revolution,which had led to the Terror, were again shatteredby the monstrosity of trench warfare and aerial

bombing in the First World War (as with themillenarianism of the present century, that of theturn of the twentieth century was smashed bywar). Utopian hopes for human progress wererevived along with the left-leaning universalismof interwar Europe but were soon to be groundunder by the Second World War. The successiveÒextra-institutionalÓ European avant-gardemovements that had challenged dominantculture and industrial exploitation between thewars, notably Dada and Surrealism, with theirvery different routes to resisting social

domination and bourgeois aestheticism, haddissipated before the war began. Such dynamicgestures and outbursts are perhapsunsustainable as long-term movements, but theyhave had continued resonance in modernmoments of criticality.

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Germany had seen itself as the pinnacle ofEnlightenment culture; its wartime barbarism,including the NazisÕ perverse, cruel, totalitarianre-imaginings of German history and culture, wasan especial blow to the belief in thetranscendent powers of culture. Postwar Europehad plenty to be critical about, but it was alsostaring into the abyss of existentialist angst andthe loneliness of Being and Nothingness (and

Year Zero). In Western(ized) cultures during thepostwar period, a world-historical momentcentering on nuclear catastrophism, communistArmageddon, and postcoloniality (empire shift),the art that seemed best equipped to carry themodernist burden was abstract painting, with itsavoidance of incident in favor of formalinvestigations and a continued search for thesublime. In a word, it was painting byprofessionals, communicating in codes knownonly to the select few, in a conscious echo ofother professional elites, such as research

scientists (a favorite analogy among itsadmirers). Abstract painting was both seriousand impeccably uninflected with politicalimagery, unlike the social realism of much ofAmerican interwar painting. As culturalhegemony was passing from France to the UnitedStates, critical culture was muted, taking place

mostly at the margins, among poets, musicians,novelists, and a few photographers and socialphilosophers, including the New York Schoolpoets and painters, among them those who cameto be called Abstract Expressionists. The moment was brief: the double-barreledshotgun of popular recognition and financialsuccess brought Abstract Expressionism low.Any art that depends on critical distance from

social elites Ð but especially an art associatedrhetorically with transcendence, whichpresupposes, one should think, a search forauthenticity and the expectations of approachingit Ð has trouble defending itself from charges ofcapitulation to the prejudices of a clientele. ForAbstract Expressionism, with its necessarytrappings of authenticity, grand success wasuntenable. Suddenly well capitalized, as well aslionized, as a high-class export by sophisticatedgovernment internationalists, and increasinglyÒappreciatedÓ by mass-culture outlets, the

Abstract Expressionist enclave, a bohemianmixture of native-born and ŽmigrŽ artists, fizzledinto irrelevance, with many of its participantsprematurely dead. Abstract Expressionism, like all modernisthigh culture, was understood to be a critical art,yet it appeared, against the backdrop of ebullient

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Jesse Jones, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany , 2009. video still.

Resistanbul protesters demonstrating on September 5, 2009.

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democratic/consumer culture, as detached fromthe concerns of the everyday. How can there bepoetry after Auschwitz, or, indeed, pace Adorno,after television? Bohemia itself (that semi-artistic, semi-intellectual subculture, voluntarilyimpoverished, disaffected, and anti-bourgeois)could not long survive the changed conditions ofcultural production and, indeed, the pattern ofdaily life in the postwar West. Peter BŸrgerÕs

canonical thesis on the failure of the Europeanavant-gardes in prewar Europe has exercised apowerful grip on subsequent narratives of thealways-already-dead avant-gardes.16 As I havewritten elsewhere, expressionism, Dada, andSurrealism were intended to reach beyond theart world to disrupt conventional social realityand thereby become instruments of liberation.As BŸrger suggests, the avant-garde intended toreplace individualized production with a morecollectivized and anonymous practice andsimultaneously to evade the individualized

address and restricted reception of art.17

The artworld was not destroyed as a consequence Ð farfrom it: as BŸrger notes, the art world, in amaneuver that has become familiar, swelled toencompass the avant-gardes, and theirtechniques of shock and transgression wereabsorbed as the production of the new.18 Anti-artbecame Art, to use the terms set in opposition byAllan Kaprow in the early 1970s, in his (similarlycanonical) articles in ArtNews and Art in Americaon Òthe education of the un-artist.Ó19

In the United States, at least, after the warthe search for authenticity was reinterpreted asa search for privatized, personal self-realization,and there was general impatience withaestheticism and the sublime. By the end of the1950s, dissatisfaction with life in McCarthyist,ÒconformistÓ America Ð in segregated, male-dominated America Ð rose from a whisper,cloistered in little magazines and journals, to ahubbub. More was demanded of criticality Ð anda lot less. Its fetishized concerns fallen by thewayside, Abstract Expressionism wassuperseded by Pop art, which Ð unlike its

predecessor Ð stepped onto the world stage as acommercially viable mode of artistic endeavor,unburdened by the need to be anything butflamboyantly inauthentic, eschewing nature forhuman-made (or, more properly, corporate)Òsecond nature.Ó Pop, as figured in the brilliantpersona of Andy Warhol Ð the Michael Jackson ofthe 1960s Ð gained adulation from the masses byappearing to flatter them while spurning them.For buyers of Campbell Soup trash cans, postersof Marilyn or Jackie multiples, and bananadecals, no insult was apprehended nor criticism

taken, just as the absurdist costumes of BritainÕsmods and rockers, or even, later, the clothing

fetishes of punks or hip-hop artists, or of surfersor teen skateboarders, were soon enough takenas cool fashion cues by many adult observers Ðeven those far from the capitals of fashion, insmall towns and suburban malls.20

The 1960s were a robust moment, if not ofoutspoken criticality in art, then of artistsÕunrest, while the culture at large, especially theÒcivil rights / youth culture / counterculture /

antiwar movement,Ó was more than restive,attempting to re-envision and remake thecultural and political landscape. Whether theyabjured or expressed the critical attitudes thatwere still powerfully dominant in intellectualculture, artists were chafing against what theyperceived as a lack of autonomy, made plain bythe grip of the market, the tightening noose ofsuccess (though still nothing in comparison tothe powerful market forces and institutionalprofessionalization at work in the current artworld). In the face of institutional and market

ebullience, the 1960s saw several forms of revoltby artists against commodification, includingdeflationary tactics against glorification. Onemay argue about each of these efforts, but theynevertheless asserted artistic autonomy fromdealers, museums, and markets, rather than,say, producing fungible items in a signaturebrand of object production. So-calledÒdematerializationÓ: the production of low-priced, often self-distributed multiples;collaborations with scientists (a continuedinsistence on the experimentalism of unfetteredartistic imagination); the development ofmultimedia or intermedia and other ephemeralforms such as smoke art or performances thatdefied documentation; dance based on ordinarymovements; the intrusion or foregrounding oflanguage, violating a foundational modernisttaboo, and even the displacement of the imageby words in Wittgensteinian language games andconceptual art; the use of mass-marketphotography; sculpture made of industrialelements; earth art; architecturaldeconstructions and fascinations; the adoptionof cheap video formats; ecological explorations;

and, quite prominently, feministsÕ overarchingcritique . . . all these resisted the specialmaterial valuation of the work of art above allother elements of culture, while simultaneouslydisregarding its critical voice and the ability ofartists to think rationally without the aid ofinterpreters. These market-resistant forms(which were also of course casting aside thegenre boundaries of Greenbergian highmodernism), an evasive relation to commodityand professionalization (careers), carriedforward the questioning of craft. The insistence

on seeing culture (and, perhaps more widely,human civilization) as primarily characterized by

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rational choice Ð see under conceptualism Ðchallenged isolated genius as an essentialcharacteristic of artists and furthered the(imaginary) alignment with workers in otherfields. These were not arts of profoundly directcriticality of the social order. An exception is art world feminism, which,beginning in the late 1960s, as part of a larger,vigorously critical and political movement,

offered an overt critique of the received wisdomabout the characteristics of art and artists andhelped mount ultimately successful challengesto the reigning paradigm by which artists wereranked and interpretation controlled. FeminismÕsfar-reaching critique was quite effective inforcing all institutions, whether involved ineducation, publicity, or exhibition, to rethinkwhat and who an artist is and might be, whatmaterials art might be made of, and what artmeant (whether that occurred by way of overtsignification or through meaning sedimented into

formal expectations), replacing this with farbroader, more heterodox, and dynamiccategories. Whether feminist work took the formof trenchant social observation or re-envisionedformal approaches such as pattern painting, noone failed to understand critiques posed byworks still seen as embedded in their socialmatrix (thus rekindling, however temporarily, awider apprehension of coded ÒsubtextsÓ in evennon-narrative work). Another exception to the prevailing reactivegambits in 1960s art was presented by twolargely Paris-based neo-Dada, neo-Surrealistavant-garde movements, Lettrism and theSituationist International (SI), both of whichmounted direct critiques of domination ineveryday life. The SI eventually split, in goodmeasure over whether to cease all participationin the art world, with founding member GuyDebord, a filmmaker and writer, among thosewho chose to abandon that milieu.21 Naturally,this group of rejectionists is the SI group whoseappreciation in the art world was revived in the1980s following a fresh look at DebordÕs Society of the Spectacle (1967). The book proposes to

explain, in an elegant series of numberedstatements or propositions, how the commodityform has evolved into a spectacular worldpicture; in the postwar world, domination of thelabor force (most of the worldÕs people) bycapitalist and state capitalist societies ismaintained by the constant construction andmaintenance of an essentially false picture ofthe world retailed by all forms of media, butparticularly by movies, television, and the like.The spectacle, he is at pains to explain, is arelationship among people, not among images,

thus offering a materialist, Marxistinterpretation. Interest in Debord was

symptomatic of the general trend toward a newtheoretical preoccupation with (in particular)media theory, in post-Beaux Arts, post-Bauhaus,postmodern art education in the United Statesbeginning in the late 1970s. The new artacademicism nurtured criticality in art and otherforms of theory-driven production, since artistswere being officially trained to teach art as asource of income to fund their production rather

than simply to find markets.22

There had been a general presumptionamong postwar government elites and theirorgans (including the Ford Foundation) thatnurturing ÒcreativityÓ in whatever form was goodfor the national brand; predispositions towardoriginal research in science and technology andart unencumbered by prescribed messages werepotent symbols of American freedom (of thought,of choice . . .), further troubling artistsÕ ratherfrantic dance of disengagement from market andideological mechanisms throughout the sixties.

In the United States in the late 1960s, PresidentJohnsonÕs Great Society included an expansivevision of public support for the arts. In additionto direct grants to institutions, to critics, and toartists, nonprofit, artist-initiated galleries andrelated venues received Federal money. This ledto a great expansion of the seeminglyuncapitalizable arts like performance, and video,whose main audience was other artists.Throughout the 1970s, the ideologicalapparatuses of media, museum, and commercialgallery were deployed in attempts to limit artistsÕautonomy, bring them back inside theinstitutions, and recapitalize art.23 A small Euro-American group of dealers, at the end of thedecade, successfully imposed a new marketdiscipline by instituting a new regime of verylarge, highly salable neo-expressionist painting,

just as Reaganism set out to cripple, if notdestroy, public support for art. Art educatorsbegan slowly adopting the idea that they couldsell their departments and schools as effectivein helping their students find galleryrepresentation by producing a fresh new line ofwork. The slow decline of Òtheoretical cultureÓ Ð

in art school, at least Ð had begun.The Right-Republican assault on relatively

autonomous symbolic expression that began inthe mid-1980s and extended into the 1990sbecame known as the Òculture warsÓ; itcontinues, although with far less prominentattacks on art than on other forms of culturalexpression.24 Right-wing elites managed tostigmatize and to restrict public funding ofcertain types of art. Efforts to brand some workas Òcommunist,Ó meaning politically engaged orsubversive of public order, no longer worked by

the 1980s. Instead, U.S. censorship campaignshave mostly taken the form of moral panics

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Art Basel Miami. Photo Bill Wisser.

meant to mobilize authoritarian-minded religiousfundamentalists in the service of destroying thenarrative and the reality of the liberal welfarestate, of Òcommunity,Ó echoing the ÒdegenerateartÓ smear campaigns of the Nazis. Collectorsand some collecting institutions perceived theŽclat of such work Ð which thematized mostlysex and sexual inequality (in what came to becalled Òidentity politicsÓ) as opposed to, say,

questions of labor and governance, which werethe targets in earlier periods of cultural combat Ðas a plus, with notoriety no impediment tofortune.25 The most vilified artists in questionhave not suffered in the marketplace; on thecontrary. But most public exhibiting institutionsfelt stung and reacted accordingly Ð by shunningcriticality, since their funding and museumemployment were tied to public funding.Subsequent generations of artists, divining thatÒdifficultÓ content might restrict their entry intothe success cycle, have engaged in self-

censorship. Somewhat perversely, the publicsuccess of the censorship campaigns stemspartly from the myth of a classless, unitaryculture: the pretense that in the United States,art and culture belong to all and that very littlespecific knowledge or education is, or should be,necessary for understanding art. But legibility

itself is generally a matter of education, whichaddresses a relatively small audience alreadyequipped with appropriate tools ofdecipherment, as I have claimed throughout thepresent work and elsewhere. But there is another dimension to thisstruggle over symbolic capital. The art world hasexpanded enormously over the past few decadesand unified to a great degree, although there are

still local markets. This market is ÒglobalÓ inscope and occupied with questions very far fromwhether its artistic practices are political orcritical. But thirty years of theory-driven artproduction and critical reception Ð whichbrought part of the discursive matrix of art insidethe academy, where it was both shielded fromand could appear to be un-implicated in themarket, thereby providing a cover for directadvocacy Ð helped produce artists whosepractices were themselves swimming in a sea ofcriticality and apparently anti-commodity

forms.26

The term Òpolitical artÓ reappeared afterart world commentators used it to ghettoize workin the 1970s, with some hoping to grant suchwork a modicum of respectability while otherswielded it dismissively, but for the most part itsvalence was drifting toward positive. Even betterwere other, better-behaved forms of Òcriticality,Ó

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such as the nicely bureaucratic-soundingÒinstitutional critiqueÓ and the slightly moreominous Òinterventionism.Ó I will leave it toothers to explore the nuances of these (certainlymeaningful) distinctions, remarking only that theformer posits a location within the veryinstitutions that artists were attempting tooutwit in the 1960/70s, whereas the latter positsits opposite, a motion outside the institution Ð

but also staged from within. These, then, are notabandonments of art world participation butacceptance that these institutions are the properÐ perhaps the only Ð platform for artists.27 Afurther sign of such institutionality is theemergence of a curatorial subgenre called ÒnewinstitutionalismÓ (borrowing a term from a whollyunrelated branch of sociology) that encompassesthe work of sympathetic young curators wishingto make these ÒengagedÓ practices intramural. This suggests a broad consensus that theart world, as it expands, is a special kind of sub-

universe (or parallel universe) of discourses andpractices whose walls may seem transparent butwhich floats in a sea of larger cultures. That maybe the means of coming to terms with theovertaking of high-cultural meaning by massculture and its structures of celebrity, which hadsent 1960s artists into panic. Perhaps artists arenow self-described art workers, but they alsohope to be privileged members within theirparticular sphere of culture, actually ÒworkingÓ Ðlike financial speculators Ð relatively little, whiledepending on brain power and salesmanship toscore big gains. Seen in this context, categorieslike political art, critical art, institutionalcritique, and interventionism are ways of slicingand dicing the offspring of art under the broadrubric of conceptualism Ð some approachesfavor analyses and symbolic ÒinterventionsÓ intothe institutions in question, others moreexternalized, publicly visible actions. Perhaps a more general consideration of thenature of work itself and of education is in order.I have suggested that we are witnessing theabandonment of the model of art education as asearch for meaning (and of the liberal model of

higher education in general) in favor of what hascome to be called the success model . . . ÒDownwith critical studies!Ó Many observers havecommented on the changing characteristics ofthe international work force, with especialattention to the Ònew flexible personality,Ó anideal worker type for a life without job security,one who is able to construct a marketablepersonality and to persuade employers of oneÕsadaptability to the changing needs of the jobmarket. Commentators like Brian Holmes (manyof them based in Europe) have noted the

applicability of this model to art andintellectuals.28 Bill Readings, until his death a

Canadian professor of comparative literature atthe UniversitŽ de MontrŽal, in his posthumouslypublished book, The University in Ruins (1997),observes that universities are no longerÒguardians of the national cultureÓ but effectivelyempty institutions that sell an abstract notion ofexcellence.29 The university, Readings writes, isÒan autonomous bureaucratic corporationÓaimed at educating for Òeconomic managementÓ

rather than Òcultural conflict.Ó The Anglo-American urban geographer David Harvey,reviewing ReadingsÕ book in the Atlantic Monthly ,noted that the modern university Òno longercares about values, specific ideologies, or evensuch mundane matters as learning how to think.It is simply a market for the production,exchange, and consumption of usefulinformation Ð useful, that is, to corporations,governments, and their prospectiveemployees.Ó30 In considering the Òproduction ofsubjectivityÓ in this context, Readings writes Ð

citing the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben Ðthat it is no longer a matter of either shop-floorobedience or managerial rationality but ratherthe much touted Òflexibility,Ó Òpersonalresponsibility,Ó Òcommunication skills,Ó and othersimilarly Òabstract images of affliction.Ó31

Agamben has provocatively argued thatmost of the worldÕs educated classes are nowpart of the new planetary petite bourgeoisie,which has dissolved all social classes, displacingor joining the old petite bourgeoisie and theurban proletariat and inheriting their economicvulnerability. In this end to recognizable nationalculture, Agamben sees a confrontation withdeath out of which a new self-definition may beborn Ð or not. Another Italian philosopher, PaoloVirno, is also concerned with the character of thenew global workforce in the present post-Fordistmoment, but his position takes a different tackin works like The Grammar of the Multitude, aslim book based on his lectures.32

The affinity between a pianist and a waiter,which Marx had foreseen, finds anunexpected confirmation in the epoch in

which all wage labor has something incommon with the Òperforming artist.Ó Thesalient traits of post-Fordist experience(servile virtuosity, exploitation of the veryfaculty of language, unfailing relation to theÒpresence of others,Ó etc.) postulate, as aform of conflictual retaliation, nothing lessthan a radically new form of democracy.33

Virno argues that the new forms of globalizedÒflexible laborÓ allow for the creation of newforms of democracy. The long-established dyads

of public/private and collective/individual nolonger have meaning, and collectivity is enacted

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Mark Lombardi, World FinanceCorporation, Miami, Florida, c.

1970-79 (6th Version), 1999,Graphite and Colored Pencilon Paper, 35.5 x 46.25", detail.

in other ways. The multitude and immateriallabor produce subjects who occupy Òa middleregion between Ôindividual and collectiveÕÓ and sohave the possibility of engineering a differentrelationship to society, state, and capital. It istempting to assign the new forms ofcommunication to this work of the creation of Òaradically new form of democracy.Ó Let us tease out of these accounts of the

nature of modern labor Ð in an era in whichbusiness types (like Richard Florida) describe thedesired work force, typically urban residents, asÒcreativesÓ Ð some observations about artists-in-training: art students have by now learned tofocus not on an object-centered brand signatureso much as on a personality-centered one. Thecultivation of this personality is evidently seen bysome anxious school administrators Ð feelingpressure to define ÒartÓ less by the adherence ofan artistÕs practice to a highly restricteddiscourse and more in the terms used for other

cultural objects Ð as hindered by critical studiesand only to be found behind a wall of craft. (Crafthere is not to be understood in the medievalsense, as bound up in guild organization and theprotection of knowledge that thereby holds downthe number of practitioners, but as reinsertedinto the context of individualized, bravura

production Ð commodity production inparticular.) Class and study time give way tostudio preparation and exposure to a train ofinvited, and paid, reviewers/critics (with theformer smacking of boot camp, and the lattersending up whiffs of corruption). It might be assumed that we art worlddenizens, too, have become neoliberals, findingvalidation only within the commodity-driven

system of galleries, museums, foundations, andmagazines, and in effect competing acrossborders (though some of us are equipped withadvantages apart from our artistic talents), aposition evoked at the start of this essay in thequestion posed by an artist in his twentiesconcerning whether it is standard practice forambitious artists to seek to sell themselves tothe rich in overseas venues. But now consider the art world as acommunity Ð in Benedict AndersonÕs terms, animagined community Ð of the most powerful

kind, a postnational one kept in ever-closercontact by emerging systems of publicity andcommunication alongside other, more traditionalprint journals, publicity releases, and informalorgans (although it does not quite achieveimaginary nationhood, which is AndersonÕs trueconcern).34

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The international art world (I am treating ithere as a system) is entering into the globalizingmoment of Òflexible accumulationÓ Ð a termpreferred by some on the left to Ò(economic)postmodernismÓ as a historical periodization.After hesitating over the new global image game(in which the main competition is mass culture),the art world has responded by developingseveral systems for regularizing standards and

markets. Let me now take a minute to look at thisnewly evolving system itself.35

The art world had an earlier moment ofinternationalization, especially in the interwarperiod, in which International Style architecture,design, and art helped unify the look of elitecultural products and the built environment ofcities around the globe. Emergent nationalismsmodified this only somewhat, but InternationalStyle lost favor in the latter half of the twentiethcentury. In recent times, under the new ÒglobalÓimperative, three systemic developments have

raised art world visibility and power. First,localities have sought to capitalize on their artworld holdings by commissioning buildingsdesigned by celebrity architects. But high-profilearchitecture is a minor, small-scale maneuver,attracting tourists, to be sure, but functioningprimarily as a symbolic assertion that thatparticular urban locale is serious about beingviewed as a ÒplayerÓ in the world economicsystem. The Bilbao effect is not always aspowerful as hoped. The era of blockbuster showsÐ invented in the 1970s to draw in crowds, somesay by the recently deceased Thomas P. F. Hovingin his tenure at New YorkÕs Metropolitan Museumof Art Ð may be drawing to a close, savingmuseums from ever-rising expenditures oncollateral costs such as insurance; it is thecontainer more than the contents that is theattractant. More important have been the two othertemporary but recurrent, processualdevelopments. First came the hypostatizingbiennials of the 1990s. Their frantic proliferationhas elicited derision, but these internationalexhibitions were a necessary moment in the

integration of the art system, allowing localinstitutional players to put in their chips. Thebiennials have served to insert an urban locale,often of some national significance, into theinternational circuit, offering a new physical siteattracting art and art world members, howevertemporarily. That the local audience is educatedabout new international style imperatives is asecondary effect to the elevation of the localvenue itself to what might crudely be termedÒworld classÓ status; for the biennials to be trulyeffective, the important audience must arrive

from elsewhere. The biennial model provides notonly a physical circuit but also a regime of

production and normalization. In ÒperipheralÓvenues it is not untypical for artists chosen torepresent the local culture to have moved toartist enclaves in fully Òmetropolitan,Ó ÒfirstworldÓ cities (London, New York, Berlin, Paris Ðregarded as portals to the global artmarket/system), before returning to theircountries of origin to be Òdiscovered.Ó Theairplane allows a continued relationship with the

homeland; expatriation can be prolonged,punctuated by time back home. This condition, ofcourse, defines migrant and itinerant labor of allvarieties under current conditions, as it followsthe flow of capital.Ó36

I recently received a lengthy, manifesto-style e-mail, part of an Òopen letter to theIstanbul Biennial,Ó that illustrates the critique ofbiennials with pretensions to political art(characteristic also of the past three iterations ofdocumenta Ð a ÒpentennialÓ or ÒquinquennialÓ ifyou will, rather than a biennial Ð in Kassel,

Germany).37

It is signed by a group calling itselfthe Resistanbul Commissariat of Culture:

We have to stop pretending that thepopularity of politically engaged art withinthe museums and markets over the last fewyears has anything to do with reallychanging the world. We have to stoppretending that taking risks in the space ofart, pushing boundaries of form, anddisobeying the conventions of culture,making art about politics makes anydifference. We have to stop pretending thatart is a free space, autonomous from websof capital and power. . . .

We have long understood that the IstanbulBiennial aims at being one of the mostpolitically engaged transnational artevents. . . . This year the Biennial is quotingcomrade Brecht, dropping notions such asneoliberal hegemony, and riding highagainst global capitalism. We kindlyappreciate the stance but we recognizethat art should have never existed as a

separate category from life. Therefore weare writing you to stop collaborating witharms dealers. . . .

The curators wonder whether BrechtÕsquestion ÒWhat Keeps Mankind AliveÓ isequally urgent today for us living under theneoliberal hegemony. We add the question:ÒWhat Keeps Mankind Not-Alive?Ó Weacknowledge the urgency in these timeswhen we do not have the right to work, wedo not get free healthcare and education,

our right to our cities, our squares, andstreets are taken by corporations, our land,

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our seeds and water are stolen, we aredriven into precarity and a life withoutsecurity, when we are killed crossing theirborders and left alone to live an uncertainfuture with their potential crises. But wefight. And we resist in the streets not incorporate spaces reserved for toleratedinstitutional critique so as to help themclear their conscience. We fought when

they wanted to kick us out of ourneighborhoods É..

The message goes on to list specific struggles inTurkey for housing, safety, job protections, andso on, which space limitations constrain me toomit.38 I was interested in the implied return ofthe accusation that sociocritical/political work isboring and negative, addressed further in this e-mail:

The curators also point out that one of the

crucial questions of this Biennial is Òhow toÔset pleasure free,Õ how to regainrevolutionary role of enjoyment.Ó We setpleasure free in the streets, in our streets.We were in Prague, Hong Kong, Athens,Seattle, Heilegendamm [sic], Genoa,Chiapas and Oaxaca, Washington, Gaza andIstanbul!39 Revolutionary role of enjoymentis out there and we cherish it everywherebecause we need to survive and we knowthat we are changing the world with ourwords, with our acts, with our laughter. Andour life itself is the source of all sorts ofpleasure.

The Resistanbul Commissariat of Culturemessage ends as follows:

Join the resistance and the insurgence ofimagination! Evacuate corporate spaces,liberate your works. LetÕs prepare worksand visuals (poster, sticker, stencil etc.) forthe streets of the resistance days. LetÕsproduce together, not within the whitecube, but in the streets and squares during

the resistance week! Creativity belongs toeach and every one of us and canÕt besponsored.

Long live global insurrection!

This Òopen letterÓ underlines the criticism towhich biennials or any highly visible exhibitionsopen themselves when they purport to take onpolitical themes, even if participants and visitorsare unlikely to receive such e-mailedmessages.40 As the letter implies, dissent and

dissidence that fall short of insurrection andunruliness are quite regularly incorporated into

exhibitions, as they are into institutions such asuniversities in liberal societies; patronizingattitudes, along the lines of ÒIsnÕt she prettywhen sheÕs angry!Ó are effective Ð even PresidentBush smilingly called protestersÕ shouts a proofof the robustness of ÒourÓ freedom of speechwhile they were being hustled out of the hallwhere he was speaking. But I suggest that theundeniable criticisms expressed by Resistanbul

do not, finally, invalidate the efforts ofinstitutional reform, however provisional. Allmovements against an institutional consensusare dynamic, and provisional. (And see below.) Accusations of purely symbolic display, ofhypocrisy, are easily evaded by turning to, finally,the third method of global discipline, the art fair,for fairs make no promises other than sales andparties; there is no shortage of appeals topleasure. There has been a notable increase inthe number and locations of art fairs in a shortperiod, reflecting the art worldÕs rapid

monetization; art investors, patrons, andclientele have shaken off the need for internalprocesses of quality control in favor of speeded-up multiplication of financial and prestige value.Some important fairs have set up satellitebranches elsewhere.41 Other important fairs aresatellites that outshine their original venues andhave gone from the periphery of the art worldÕsvetting circuit to center stage. At art fairs,artworks are scrutinized for financial-portfoliosuitability, while off-site fun (parties anddinners), fabulousness (conspicuousconsumption), and non-art shopping are theselling points for the best-attended fairs Ð thosein Miami, New York, and London (and of coursethe original, Basel). Dealers pay quite a lot toparticipate, however, and the success of the fairas a business venture depends on the dealersÕability to make decent sales and thus to want toreturn in subsequent years. No discursive matrix is required forsuccessful investments by municipal andnational hosts in this market. Yet art fairs havedelicately tried to pull a blanket of respectabilityover the naked profit motive, by installing a

smattering of curated exhibitions among thedealersÕ booths and hosting on-site conferenceswith invited intellectual luminaries. But perhapsone should say that discursive matrices arealways required, even if they take the form ofbooks and magazines in publishersÕ fair booths;but intellectuals talking in rooms and halls andstalking the floor Ð and being interviewed Ð canÕthurt. Predictions about the road to artisticsuccess in this scene are easy to make, becauseultimately shoppers are in for a quick fix (those

Russians!) and increasingly are unwilling tospend quality time in galleries learning about

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artists and their work: after all, why bother? Theart content of these containers and marketsshould thus avoid being excessively arcane andhard to grasp, love, and own; and to store or lend.Many can literally be carried out under acollectorÕs arm. The work should be painting, ifpossible, for so many reasons, ranging from thesymbolic artisanal value of the handmade to thecontinuity with traditional art historical

discourse and the avoidance of overlyparticularistic political partisanship except ifhighly idiosyncratic or expressionist. The look ofsolemnity will trump depth and incisivecommentary every time; this goes for any form,including museum-friendly video installations,film, animation, computer installations, andsalable performance props (and conceptualism-lite). Young artists (read: recent art-schoolgraduates) are a powerful attraction for buyersbanking on rising prices. The self-described Resistanbul

Commissariat writes of Òthe popularity ofpolitically engaged art within the museums andmarketsÓ Ð well, perhaps. The art world core ofcognoscenti who validate work on the basis ofcriteria that set it apart from a broad audiencemay favor art with a critical edge, though notperhaps for the very best reasons. Work engagedwith real-world issues or exhibiting other formsof criticality may offer a certain satisfaction andflatters the viewer, provided it does not toobaldly implicate the class or subject position ofthe viewer. Criticality can take many forms,including highly abstract ones (what I have calledÒcritique in general,Ó which often, by implicatinglarge swathes of the world or of humankind,tends to let everyone off the hook), and canexecute many artful dodges. Art historyÕsgenealogical dimension often leads to theacceptance of Òpolitico-criticalÓ work from pasteras, and even of some contemporary workdescended from this, which cannot help butunderscore its exchange value. Simply put, tosome connoisseurs and collectors, and possiblyone or two museum collections, criticality is astringently attractive brand. Advising collectors

or museums to acquire critical work can have acertain sadistic attraction, directed both towardthe artist and the work and toward theadvisee/collector.

A final common feature of this new globalart is a readily graspable multiculturalism thatcreates a sort of United Nations of global voiceson the menu of art production. Multiculturalism,born as an effort to bring difference out of thenegative column into the positive with regard toqualities of citizens, long ago became also abureaucratic tool for social control, attempting

to render difference cosmetic. Difference waslong ago pegged as a marketing tool in

constructing taste classes; in a business book ofthe 1980s on global taste, the apparentlyuniversal desire for jeans and pizza (and later,Mexican food) was the signal example: themarketable is different but not too different. Inthis context, there is indeed a certain biastoward global corporate internationalism Ð thatis, neoliberalism Ð but that of course has nothingto do with whether Òcontent providersÓ identify

as politically left, right, independent, or not atall. Political opinions, when they are manifested,can become mannerist tropes. But often the function of biennials andcontemporary art is also to make a geopoliticalsituation visible to the audience, which meansthat art continues to have a mapping and evencritical function in regard to geopoliticalrealities. Artists have the capacity to condense,anatomize, and represent symbolically complexsocial and historical processes. In the context ofinternationalism, this is perhaps where political

or critical art may have its best chance of beingseen and actually understood, for the critiqueembodied in a work is not necessarily a critiqueof the actual locale in which one stands (if itdescribes a specific site, it may be a siteÒelsewhereÓ). Here I ought provisionally tosuspend my criticism of Òcritique in general.Ó Iam additionally willing to suspend my critique ofwork that might be classed under the rubricÒlong ago or far away,Ó which in such a contextmay also have useful educational and historicalfunctions Ð never forgetting, nonetheless, thevulnerability to charges such as those made bythe Resistanbul group. ÒDown with critical studies,Ó I wrote above,and the present has indeed been seen as a post-critical moment, as any market-driven momentmust be . . . but criticality seems to be a modernphoenix: even before the market froze over, therehad never been a greater demand on the part ofyoung art students for an entrŽe into criticalstudies and concomitantly for an understandingof predecessors and traditions of critical andagitational work. I speculate that this is becausethey are chafing under the command to succeed,

on market terms, and therefore to quitexperimenting for the sake of pleasure orindefinable aims. Young people, as the hoaryclichŽ has it, often have idealistic responses toreceived orthodoxy about humanity and wish torepair the world, while some artists too havedirect experience of poverty and social negativityand may wish to elevate others Ð a matter ofsocial justice. Young artists perennially reinventthe idea of collaborative projects, which are thenorm in the rest of the world of work andcommunity and only artificially discouraged, for

the sake of artistic entrepreneurism andÒsignature control,Ó in the art-market world.42

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I return to the question posed above,Òwhether choosing to be an artist means aspiringto serve the rich . . .Ó Time was when art schooladmonished students not to think this way, buthow long can the success academy hang onwhile galleries are not to be had? (Perhaps theanswer is that scarcity only increasesdesperation; the great pyramid of strugglingartists underpinning the few at the pinnacle

simply broadens at the base.) Nevertheless,artists are stubborn. The ÒResistanbulÓ writerstell us they Òresist in the streets not in corporatespaces reserved for tolerated institutionalcritique,Ó as some artists do in order to Òhelpthem clear their conscience.Ó For sure. There arealways artworks, or art Òactions,Ó that aresituated outside the art world or that Òcross-listÓthemselves in and outside the golden ghettos. Iam still not persuaded that we need to choose.There is so far no end to art that adopts a criticalstance Ð although perhaps not always in the

market and success machine itself, where it isalways in danger of being seriously rewritten,often in a process that just takes time. It is thisgap between the workÕs production and itsabsorption and neutralization that allows for itsproper reading and ability to speak to presentconditions.43 It is not the market alone, after all,with its hordes of hucksters and advisers, andbitter critics, that determines meaning andresonance: there is also the community of artistsand the potential counterpublics they implicate. !

This essay began as a talk at the Shanghai Contemporary Art

Fair in September of 2009, on the symposiumÕs assignedtopic, ÒWhat is Contemporary Art?Ó Ð a perfectly impossiblequestion, in my opinion (although I could imagine beginning,perhaps, by asking, ÒWhat makes contemporary artcontemporary?Ó). Nevertheless, talk I did. My efforts inconverting that talk, developed for a non-U.S. audience, withunknown understandings of my art world, into the presentessay have led me to produce what strikes me as a workwritten by a committee of one Ð me Ð writing at various timesand for various readers. I long ago decided to take to heartBrechtÕs ego-puncturing suggestion Ð to recruit my ownwriting in the service of talking with other audiences,entering other universes of discourses, to cannibalize it ifneed be.

There are lines of argument in this essay that I have made useof at earlier conferences (one of which lent it the title ÒTakethe Money and RunÓ), and there are other self-quotations orparaphrases. I also found myself reformulating some things Ihave written before, returning to the lineage anddevelopment of artistic autonomy, commitment, alienation,and resistance, and to the shape and conditions of artisticreception and education.

I thank Alan Gilbert, Stephen Squibb, and Stephen Wright fortheir excellent readerly help and insights as I tried to imposeclarity, coherence, and some degree of historical adequacy onthe work.

Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiplemedia, including photography, sculpture, video, andinstallation. Her interests are centered on the publicsphere and landscapes of everyday life Ð actual andvirtual Ð especially as they affect women. Relatedprojects focus on housing, on the one hand, andsystems of transportation, on the other. She has longproduced works on war and the Ònational securityclimate,Ó connecting everyday experiences at homewith the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bustours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,

are excavations of history.

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1To belabor the point: if medievalviewers read the symbolicmeaning of a painted lily in awork with a Biblical theme, itwas because iconographic codeswere constantly relayed, whilereligious stories were relativelyfew. In certain late-nineteenth-century Eng lish or French genrepaintings, as social histories ofthe period recount, adisheveled-looking peasant girlwith flowing locks and a jug from

which water pours uncheckedwould be widely understood tosignify the sexual profligacy andavailability of attractive femaleOthers. Art has meanwhile freeditself from the specifics ofstories (especially of historypainting), becoming more andmore abstract and formal in itsemphases and thus finally ableto appeal to a differentuniversality: not that of theuniversal Church but of anequally imaginary universalculture (ultimately bourgeoisculture, but not in its massforms) and philosophy.

2

I am confining my attention toWestern art history. It is helpfulto remember that the relativelyyoung discipline of art historywas developed as an aid toconnoisseurship and collectionand thus can be seen as au fonda system of authentication.

3By this I do not intend to ignorethe many complicating factors,among them theincommensurability of texts andimages, nor to assert that art, inproducing images to illustrateand interpret prescribednarratives, can remotely beconsidered to have followed a

clear-cut doctrinal line withoutinterposing idiosyncratic,critical, subversive, or partisanmessages, but the gaps betweenideas, interpretations, andexecution do not constitute anameable trend.

4What has come to be known asthe Òmiddle classÓ (or classes), ifthis needs clarification,comprised those whoselivelihoods derived fromownership of businesses andindustries; they were situated inthe class structure between thelanded aristocracy which was

losing political power, and thepeasants, artisans, and newlydeveloping urban working class.

5French sociologist PierreBourdieu is the most prominenttheorist of symbolic capital andthe production and circulation ofsymbolic goods; I am looking atÒThe Market of Symbolic Goods,Óin The Field of CulturalProduction, ed. Randal Johnson(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1993). This article, a bitfixed in its categories, sketchesout the structural logic ofseparation.

6The first application of the term

to art is contested, some datingit as late as the Salon desRefusŽs of 1863.

7Forms, rather than being emptyshapes, carry centuries ofPlatonic baggage, most clearlyseen in architecture; formalinnovation in twentieth-centuryhigh modernism, based on bothKant and Hegel, was interpretedas a search for another humandimension.

8In his Biographia Literaria (1817),the poet and theorist SamuelTaylor Coleridge famouslydistinguished between Fancyand Imagination.

9John Fekete, The CriticalTwilight: Explorations in theIdeology of Anglo-AmericanLiterary Theory from Eliot toMcLuhan (New York: Routledge& Keegan Paul, 1977). Especiallyin Europe but also in the UnitedStates, financial panics,proletarian organizing, andpolitical unrest characterized

the latter half of the nineteenthcentury.

10Modernism in the other arts hasa similar trajectory without,perhaps, the direct legacy orinfluence of Sovietism orworkersÕ movements.

11The codification of socialobservation in the nineteenthcentury that included the birthof sociology and anthropologyalso spurred as-yet amateurefforts to record socialdifference and eventually todocument social inequality.

Before the development of theLeica, which uses movie film,other small, portable camerasincluded the Ermanox, whichhad a large lens but requiredsmall glass plates for itsnegatives; it was used, forexample, by the muckrakinglawyer Erich Salomon.

12For example with regard to theblurred line betweenphotography and commercialapplications, from home photosto photojournalism (photographyfor hire), a practice too close tous in time to allow for a

reasoned comparison with thelong, indeed ancient, history ofcommissioned paintings andsculptures.

13There is generally some tinyspace allotted to one or twodocumentarians, above all forthose addressing dire conditionsin the global periphery.

14Modernist linguisticexperiments are beyond myscope here.

15This is to overlook the role of

that major part of theintellectual class directly

engaged in formulating theideological messages of rulingelites. For one historicalperspective on the never-endingdebate over the role ofintellectuals vis-ˆ-vis class andculture, not to mention thenation-state, see Julien BendaÕs1927 book La Trahison des Clercs(The Betrayal of the Intellectuals;literally: ÒThe Treason of theLearnedÓ), once widely read butnow almost quaint.

16See Peter BŸrger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), trans.Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1984), a work that has greatlyinfluenced other critics Ð in theUnited States, notably BenjaminBuchloh. On BŸrgerÕs thesis, Iwrote, in ÒVideo: Shedding theUtopian MomentÓ (1983), that hehad described the activity of theavant-garde as the self-criticismof art as an institution, turningagainst both Òthe distributionapparatus on which the work ofart depends and the status ofart in bourgeois society asdefined by the concept of

autonomy.Ó I further quotedBŸrger: Òthe intention of theavant-gardists may be definedas the attempt to direct towardthe practical the aestheticexperience (which rebels againstthe praxis of life) thatAestheticism developed. Whatmost strongly conflicts with themeans-end rationality ofbourgeois society is to becomelifeÕs organizing principle.Ó

17Ibid., 53.

18Ibid., 53Ð54.

19Allan Kaprow, ÒThe Education ofthe Un-Artist, Part I,Ó Art News,February 1971; ÒThe Educationof the Un-Artist, Part II,Ó ArtNews, May 1972; ÒThe Educationof the Un-Artist, Part III,Ó Art in

America, January 1974.

20Nevertheless, in pop-relatedsubcultures, from punk to heavymetal to their offshoots inskateboarding culture,authenticity is a dimension withgreat meaning, a necessarydemand of any tight-knit group.

21Debord was also a member, withIsidore Isou, of the Lettrists,which he similarly abandoned.

22Thus the insistence of someuniversity art departments thatthey were fine arts departmentsand did not wish to offer, say,graphic arts or other commercialprograms and courses (a battlegenerally lost).

23Again channeling Althusser.

24The Òculture warsÓ are

embedded in a broader attemptto delegitimize and demonize

social identities, mores, andbehaviors whose publicexpression was associated withthe social movements of the1960s, especially in relation toquestions of difference.

25This is not the place to argue theimportance of the new socialmovements of the 1960s andbeyond, beyond my passingattention to feminism, above;rather, here I am simply pointing

to the ability of art institutionsand the market to strip work ofits resonance. As is easilyobservable, the term ÒpoliticalartÓ is reserved for work that isseen to dwell on analysis orcritique of the state, wage labor,economic relations, and so on,with relations to sexuality andsex work always excepted.

26Recall my earlier remarks aboutboth the academicization of arteducation and the function of arthistory, a function now alsoparceled out to artreviewing/criticism.

27A favorite slogan of the periodwas ÒThere is no outside.ÓAnother, more popularlyrecognizable slogan might beÒThink different,Ó a slogan thatattempts to harness images ofpowerful leaders of socialmovements or ÒpioneersÓ ofscientific revolutions for theservice of commodity branding,thus suggesting motion Òoutsidethe boxÓ while attempting neverto leave it. See the aboveremarks on BŸrger and thetheory of the avant-garde.

28See Brian Holmes, ÒThe Flexible

Personality: For a New CulturalCritiqueÓ (2001),http://theadventure.be/node/253, or athttp://www.16beavergroup.org/pdf/fp.pdf, and numerous othersites; Holmes added a briefforward to its publication ateipcp (european institute forprogressive cultural policies),http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en#redir.

29Bill Readings, The University inRuins (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1997).

The relative invisibility ofReadingsÕ book seems traceableto his sudden death just beforethe book was released, makinghim unavailable for book toursand comment.

30David Harvey, ÒUniversity, Inc.,Óreview of The University in Ruins,by Bill Readings,Ó The Atlantic(October 1998). Available onlineat http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98oct/ruins.htm. Nothingcould be more indicative of thepost-Fordist conditions ofintellectual labor and thereadying of workers for theknowledge industry than the

struggle over the U.S.Õ premierpublic university, the University

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of California system, thebirthplace of the ÒmultiversityÓas envisioned by Clark Kerr inthe development of the UCMaster Plan at the start of the1960s. State public universities,it should be recalled, wereinstituted to producehomegrown professional elites;but remarkably enough, as thebellwether California systemwas undergoing covert and overtprivatization and beingsqueezed mightily by the state

governmentÕs near insolvency,the systemÕs president blithelyopined that higher education is atwentieth-century issue,whereas people today are moreinterested in health care, andhumorously likened theuniversity to a cemetery(Deborah Solomon, ÒBig Man onCampus: Questions for MarkYudoff, New York TimesMagazine, September 24, 2009,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27fob-q4-t.html?ref=magazine). The plan forthe California system seems tobe to reduce the number ofCalifornia residents attending infavor of out-of-staters and

international students, whosetuition costs are much higher.For further comparison, it seemsthat California now spends morethan any other state onincarceration but is forty-eighthin its expenditure on education.

31Readings, The University inRuins, 50.

32Paulo Virno, A Grammar of theMultitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life,trans. Isabella Bertoletti, JamesCascaito, and Andrea Casson(Cambridge, Mass.:

Semiotext(e), 2003), alsoavailable online athttp://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm. I haveimported this discussion ofVirnoÕs work from an onlineessay of mine on left-leaningpolitical blogs in the UnitedStates.

33Ibid, 66Ð67.

34See Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (New

York: Verso, 1983). 35Here I will not take up thequestion of museumsÕ curatorialresponses to this moment ofcrisis in respect to theirdefinition and role in the twenty-first century. I can only observethat some elite museums haveapparently identified a need tooffer a more high-end set ofexperiences, in order to set themapart from the rest of ourburgeoning, highly corporatizedÒexperience economy.Ó Atpresent the main thrust of thateffort to regain primacy seemsto center on the elevation of the

most under-commodified form,performance art the form best

positioned to provide museum-goers with embodied andnonnarrative experiences (andso far decidedly removed fromthe world of the everyday or ofÒpoliticsÓ but situated firmly inthe realm of the aesthetic).

36Since writing this, I have readChin-Tao WuÕs ÒBiennialsWithout Borders?Ó Ð in New LeftReview 57 (May/June 2009):107Ð115 Ð which has excellent

graphs and analyses supportingsimilar points. Wu analyzes theparticular pattern of selection ofartists from countries on theglobal Òperipheries.Ó

37The 11th Istanbul Biennial ranfrom September throughNovember, 2009, under thecuratorship of a Zagreb-basedcollective known as What, How,and for Whom (WHW), whosemembers are Ivet !urlin, Ana

Devi", Nata#a Ili", and Sabina

Sabolovi". Formed in 1999, the

group has run the city-ownedGallery Nova since 2003. Thetitle of this biennial, drawn from

a song by Bertolt Brecht, isÒWhat Keeps Mankind Alive?Ó

38The full version of the letter canbe found online athttp://etcistanbul.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/open-letter/ .

39Important sites of concertedpublic demonstrations againstneoliberal economicorganizations andinternationally sanctioned statedomination and repression.

40But they may well be offered

flyers.

41The Shanghai Contemporary ArtFair (where this paper was firstpresented) is an outpost of theBologna Art Fair.

42I experience some disquiet in therealization that, as in so muchelse, the return of the collectivehas lingering over it not just theworkersÕ councils of councilcommunism (not to mentionFreudÕs primal horde) but thequality circles of ToyotaÕs re-engineering of car production in

the 1970s. 43It is wise not to settle back intothe image-symbolic realm;street actions and publicengagement are basicrequirements of contemporarycitizenship. If the intervalbetween the appearance of newforms of resistance andincorporation is growing evershorter, so is the cycle ofinvention, and the pool of peopleinvolved is manifestly much,much larger.

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