Valuing modernism: prejudices, markets, traditionalism, future‐value, criticism, ethics
2014; Wiley; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/criq.12088
ISSN1467-8705
Autores Tópico(s)Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
ResumoCritical QuarterlyVolume 56, Issue 1 p. 56-79 CRITICISM Valuing modernism: prejudices, markets, traditionalism, future-value, criticism, ethics Andrew Brighton, Andrew BrightonSearch for more papers by this author Andrew Brighton, Andrew BrightonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 April 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12088Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Notes 1 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 117. 2‘The Old Testament says that God created humans in his image and let them dominate all animals, from whom they fundamentally differ (Genesis 1:26). It might not be entirely accidental that in cognitive science some form of omniscience (knowledge of all relevant probabilities and utilities, for instance) and omnipotence (the ability to compute complex functions in a split second) has shaped models of human cognition … Viewing humans as Homo heuristicus challenges widely held beliefs about the nature of cognitive processing and explains why less processing can result in better inferences’ (Gerd Gigerenzer and Henry Brighton, ‘Homo Heuristicus: Why Biased Minds Make Better Inferences’, Topics in Cognitive Science, 1:1 (January 2009), 108; http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Homo_2009.pdf (accessed 1 February 2013). 3 John Latham's Art and Culture (1966–9) is now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It consists of a leather case containing a copy of Art and Culture, letters, photostats and labelled vials filled with powders and liquid. It includes a postcard from the St Martins library, which says, ‘student in urgent need of art and culture’. I claim to be and remain that student, albeit there may have been others making the same request. As a result of his transformation of library property, Latham lost his part-time job at St Martins. A pity – he was a committed, challenging and serious tutor. 4 Clement Greenberg, ‘ Modernist Painting’, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85– 93. 5I suspect some of the seriousness and urgency of art criticism in the USA can be understood as deriving and inflected by an undeclared enemy in the public sphere absent in the UK, a powerful tradition of reactionary populism. On the positive role attributed to the professions and professionalism in US sociology up to the 1970s, see Keith M. Macdonald, The Sociology of the Professions (London: Sage, 1999), 2– 3. 6 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, David Joselit (eds), Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011). 7 T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 22. 8 Pascendi Dominici Gregis, On the Doctrine of the Modernists, Encyclical of Pope Pius X, 8 September 1907, 39; www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm (accessed 13 November 2013). 9The history of the art market is a developing if unintegrated research programme in art history; the editors give a brief outline of the field and a bibliography in The Rise of the Art Market in London, 1850–1939, ed. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). For a collection of more theoretical/critical texts and bibliography, see Natash Degen (ed.), The Market: Documents of Contemporary Art (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2013). 10 Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 42. 11Viviana Zelizer has identified the ‘nothing but’ and ‘hostile worlds’ view of commodification. In these views the rationality of markets is nothing but economic interests, from which it follows that the market and social, cultural, ethical or aesthetic values are hostile worlds. I am working within what Zelizer calls the multiple-markets model. See Vivian A. Zelizer, Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. An objection to ‘The market’ is that it hides from realistic criticism the ethical assumptions of economic actors in a single model of market rationality. Rather, markets have a rationality and ethical assumptions specific to them. 12 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 63. 13See Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (London: Verso, 1999); Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and for a published PhD written under his supervision at the Courtauld Institute, see Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 14 Andrew Brighton, Nicholas Pearson, Jose Parry, The Economic Situation of the Visual Artist (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1985). 15Much published writing about the art market is about the secondary market. It is often lazy; it takes the most easily researched area, public auctions, and calls them the art market. The distinction between the primary and secondary market is important but not clear-cut. In the economy of modernist primary galleries, secondary dealing is often a means to support their activities as primary dealers. There are primary galleries whose stable is made up of artists whose reputations were initiated and built by other galleries. The secondary market does corroborate or undermine the valuations of the primary market. But much of the activities of the secondary market contributes little to the endogenous economy of modernism and derives its profits from speculation on the future-value creating work of the primary market and other constituents of the modernist ecology. 16 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 17For example, see www.burlington.co.uk, www.theartstable.co.uk, www.whitewallgalleries.com, www.heatoncooper.co.uk, www.artgallery.co.uk, www.redraggallery.co.uk and www.oliversart.co.uk (accessed 27 August 2013). 18 Velthuis, Talking Prices, 18. 19 Robert Jenson, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 20Ecology is the metaphor of preference here rather than Bourdieu's ‘field’ as deployed in Distinction and in The Field of Cultural Production. The ‘cultural field’ theorises cultural practices as having a fundamental homology in which their specificity is mere epiphenomenon. In his conflict model, Bourdieu uses dominance/domination as the fundamental descriptive currency for the explanation of social action. Ecology admits to a more complex view in which, for instance, competing claims of constituent practices, logics of survival, mutual-aid, aesthetic and ethical specificity can be recognised. 21 Velthuis, Talking Prices, 161. 22‘An increase in price level of an artist's work therefore conveys the message that her art is developing or that her art is being accepted in the art world; simultaneously, it makes collectors feel secure about acquisitions … The positive meaning of increases encourages dealers to be price rather than profit maximizers’ (Velthuis, Talking Prices, 162). 23For instance, Frank Auerbach and David Shepherd were born in the same year. Shepherd is certainly one of the most successful traditionalist painters of the last forty years. However, while Auerbach is institutionally recognised by artists he is not amongst the most high-priced artists. Nevertheless, the price range of his work is considerably higher than Shepherd's. See www.findartinfo.com. 24This is not a claim that there are no dishonest and venal primary gallerists. I am describing, as it were, the rules of the game, not the morals of the players. Fouls do not mean there are no rules in football; rules tell us what fouls are. 25 Imre Lakatos, ‘ Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 132. 26 The Osborne Studio Gallery ‘About Us’, http://www.osg.uk.com/about_us.shtml (accessed 29 January 2013). 27 Donna Macallister, ‘Dufftown collector celebrates rare find by favourite sculptor of royals’, Aberdeen Press and Journal, 16 October 2010; http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1966497 (accessed 10 November 2012). 28Relatively high education as a feature of museums and gallery attendees and arts audiences is evidenced in many demographic surveys conducted over the last fifty years; for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L'Amour de l'art: les musées d'art Européen et leur public (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1969); Paul DiMaggio and Michael Useem, ‘Social Class and Arts Consumption: The Origins and Consequences of Class Differences to the Arts in America’, Theory and Society, 5:2 (1978), 141– 161, or more recently Arts Council England, Arts Audiences: Insight (London: Arts Council England, 2008); http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/Arts_audiences_insight.pdf (accessed 2 February 2013). 29On the publics for the arts and newspaper readership, see Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe, ‘ Social Status and Newspaper Readership’; http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/papers/ajs2007.pdf (accessed 4 August 2012). While working for the Tate I saw a number of surveys of newspaper readership and gallery attendance; they showed a near constant predominance of the liberal/left Guardian readers amongst Tate UK attendees, whereas the Royal Academy attendees predominantly read the British broadsheet with the largest circulation, the conservative/right Daily Telegraph. These surveys are not in the public domain. 30 Louis Althusser, ‘ Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon’, 1968; http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1968/philosophy-as-weapon.htm (accessed 5 August 2012). 31 Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury Press, 1979). 32 Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989). 33 Michael Bakunin, ‘ Marx, the Bismarck of Socialism’, in Patterns of Anarchy: A Collection of Writing in the Anarchist Tradition, ed. Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 87. 34 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989). 35I schematise the politics of modernism as being on three levels: internal, the contending claims within and between the constituent practices of the modernist ecology; the endogenous politics of the public sphere, the contending claims to purview and competence between the public discourses, e.g. religions, professions, academic disciplines, the media and so on; the external politics of the public sphere, the question of exogenous political and economic interests and their influence and power in and over the public sphere. 36 Velthuis, Talking Prices, 51. 37 Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999), 317. 38 W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, vol. 56 (1956), 167. 39 De Duve, Kant After Duchamp, 52. 40For evidence of householders' refusal of art as a term for the images and artefacts they owned, see Colin Painter, ‘ The Uses of Art’, unpublished PhD, Northumbria University, 1986. 41 Velthuis, Talking Prices, 51. 42For discussions of modernism's estrangement from domestic values, see Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), and Colin Painter (ed.), Contemporary Art and the Home (Oxford: Berg, 2002). 43 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), xiv. 44‘Reasons, he said, in Aesthetics, are “of the nature of further descriptions” … What he, Wittgenstein, has “at the back of his mind” was “the idea that aesthetic discussions were like a discussion in a court of law”, where you try to “clear up the circumstances” of the action which is being tried, hoping that in the end what you say will “appeal to the judge”’. (G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930–33, in Aesthetics, ed. Harold Osborne (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 88. 45 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9– 10. 46 William A Dyrness, ‘ The Arts’, in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, Iain Torrance (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 561– 582. 47 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: WordPress, 2011), xii. However, without establishing a determinate conception of the human good, cultural policy in the UK sought to engineer the arts as an instrument for ‘social cohesion’; see Andrew Brighton, ‘Towards a Command Culture: New Labour's Cultural Policy and Soviet Socialist Realism’, Critical Quarterly, 41:3 (Autumn 1999), 24– 34, and Andrew Brighton, ‘ Consumed by the Political’, in Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts?, ed. Munira Mirza (London: Policy Exchange, 2006), http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/culture%20vultures%20-%20jan%2006.pdf (accessed 1 October 2013). 48 Bernard Williams, In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 154. The distinction was developed in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). 49For instance the interviews with seminal post-World War II curators in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: J.R.P. Ringier, 2008). 50 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 226. 51 Clement Greenberg, ‘ Modernist Painting’, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85– 93. 52For Greenberg's disavowal of some readings of his essay, see ibid, 93– 94. 53 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, David Joselit (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 22. 54‘The drive toward a rationalistic conception of rationality comes from social features of the modern world, which impose on personal deliberations and on the idea of practical reason itself a model drawn from a particular understanding of public rationality. This understanding requires in principle every decision to be based on grounds that can be discursively explained … but the most powerful models of justification now active, and the demands for a single currency of reasons, are certainly expressions of modern bureaucratic rationality’ (Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 18, note 13, 228). 55For the intrinsic incompetence of modern professional expertise, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 79– 109. 56 Bourdieu, Preface to the English-language edition, Distinction, xiv. 57Velthuis takes ‘aristocratic’ from Bourdieu's Distinction. However, Bourdieu acknowledges, ‘the French tradition of the aristocratic model of “court society”, personified by a Parisian haute bourgeoisie which, combining all forms of prestige and all the titles of economic and cultural nobility, has no counterpart elsewhere’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, xi). 58 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1. 59Ibid., 21. 60 The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 371e, 431c. 61Reflection can destroy knowledge, see Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 167– 171. 62 Greenberg, Art and Culture, 15. 63 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 9. 64It is certainly the case that future-value as a precept is under attack and from two directions. The Arts Council of England and other arts funders have for the last twenty years or so required applicants for support to state their target audience. This synthesis of anti-elitism and marketing best practice serves to deny not just the unspecifiable one as the addressee of art, it requires a deserving they to whom art is to be done. From another direction, the inflated prices paid for some contemporary art, given the volatility of the market, indicate a class of collector who are indifferent to future-value as both an aesthetic and a financial concern. This indifference to future-value would seem to be a way of displaying an obscene level of wealth and an assertion of cultural power. It does not follow, however, that art bought with no concern for future-value has no future-value. 65My transcription from Art House 2 – The Cool School, director Morgan Neville, 2008. Volume56, Issue1April 2014Pages 56-79 ReferencesRelatedInformation
Referência(s)