This is an excerpt from a longer article by Anton Vidokle in e-flux magazine. Read the full article here.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, What I Do For A Living/What I Really Do?, 2007. Binders with vynil letters.
Anton Vidokle
Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art
[...]
Early modernist poets like Baudelaire were extremely influential in
shaping the attitudes of artists towards commerce and business. Implicit
in the way of life of “bohemian” artists and writers in the Latin
Quarter was a rejection of bourgeois professional and commercial
pursuits, as was a rejection of industrialization and emergent
capitalism. Baudelaire was actually rather critical of the bohemians,
being very much a radical dandy, an aristocrat who despised the squalor
of bohemian life. Nevertheless, he spent much of his life in this milieu
and immortalized it in his work: “In murky corners of old cities where
everything—horror too—is magical, I study, servile to my moods, the odd
and charming refuse of humanity.”
Despite the marginality and political insignificance of bohemia, its
cultural impact was absolutely enormous. It remains ever-present, a
specter that reappears in various times and places.
Andy Warhol’s Factory is fascinating in this respect: both a murky,
magical corner for misfits and eccentrics, and simultaneously the
workplace of the first self-proclaimed Business Artist. Warhol’s
artistic position is very interesting insofar as it combined stances
that were thought to be diametrically opposed: he was at once a dandy, a
bohemian, but also someone who did not disguise his interest in
business and commerce. His interest in business did not only extend to
sale of his artwork; he also pursued the publication of a commercial
magazine, film production, a television show—what amounted to his own
media industry. To my mind, Warhol’s position was much more honest and
productive than that of artists who pretend that the artist can or
should stay innocent by delegating (or appearing to delegate)
business-related activity to gallerists or other agents, and who
maintain that this is the only condition in which critical or culturally
significant art can be produced. By turning his art into a kind of a
business, Warhol managed to achieve independence, though not
independence from the art market.
But since his time, Warhol’s economic independence seems to have been
misunderstood. The independence that came from his bridging of the
bohemian sphere and the sphere of day-to-day commerce has been converted
into a vast proliferation of so-called artistic practices that treat
art as a profession. But art is not a profession. What does being
professional actually mean under the current conditions of de-skilling
in art? We should probably be less concerned with being full-time,
art-school-trained, professional artists, writers, or curators—less
concerned with measuring our artistic worth in these ways. Since most of
us are not expected to perfect any specific techniques or master any
craft—unlike athletes or classical musicians, for example—and given that
we are no longer tied to working in specific mediums, perhaps it’s fine
to be a part-time artist? After all, what is the expertise of a
contemporary artist? Perhaps a certain type of passionate hobbyism, a
committed amateurism, is okay: after all, we still live in a reality
largely shaped by talented amateurs of the nineteenth century, like
Thomas Edison and so many others.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the
arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art:
sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work
than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials. Ilya
Kabakov supported himself for decades by being a children’s book
illustrator. Marcel Duchamp worked as a librarian and later sold
Brancusi’s work to make a living, while refusing to be dependent on
sales of his own work.
It interesting to note that this emphasis on professionalization
emerged simultaneously with the disappearance of bohemia, which is
usually described as a shared creative space that allowed for fluid
communication between poets, artists, dancers, writers, musicians, and
so forth. The notion of bohemia as something to aspire to went out the
window a few decades ago; it vanished at the same time as the visual art
sphere was becoming more segregated from other fields of art.
“Bohemian” has become a primarily derogatory term that seems to imply a
kind of uncommitted, naive dilettantism, but within the history of art
it has a greater significance. According to T.J. Clark, bohemia refers
to a movement by a group of artists, writers, and poets who apparently
renounced the normative bourgeois society, a move that, unlike the
gestures of the avant-garde, was not a calculated temporary tactic
intended only so that one could return to the salon of art in a more
advantageous position, but a more permanent departure. The bohemian artist would absolutely reject the notion of
professionalism in the arts—this was something for lawyers, accountants,
and bankers, not artists.
These days it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine the
production of significant art without a training system that educates
future producers of art, its administrators and, to some extent, its
consumers. However, until only a few decades ago, many if not most
artists, curators, and critics, never attended masters programs or
studied curatorship and critical writing in specialized training
programs. The field of art is becoming professionalized in a very, very
narrow way. There’s still the old problem that professionalization is
really about a division of labor, and a division of labor produces
alienation.
It’s a contradiction that a lot of people go into the arts because they
want to be a little less alienated from what they do in life, even as
what is increasingly imposed on artists, curators, writers—and it
comes both from the market and public sector—is the
professionalization and precarization of their activity.
The problem of professionalization is connected to the proliferation
of MFA programs, which have become a prerequisite for young people
entering the arts. In a sense, universities and academies have created a
perfect economic feedback loop that perpetuates their own existence:
most artists depend on having a teaching position. This is because, as
Walid Raad recently pointed out, the average life-span of
financial success in the art market (in places where there is such a
thing)—a period during which a successful artist’s work is in active
demand by collectors—is a mere four years.
How do you support yourself when your work does not sell anymore? You
teach—and to qualify for a teaching position, you need an MFA degree.
This means that most artists who aspire to a life-long practice have
little choice but to enroll in MFA programs and often pay astronomical
fees and go into debt in order to have a chance of teaching in the
future or selling their work in the lucrative art market. But unlike
other fields, such as law or medicine, where graduates can reasonably
expect a job upon graduation, there are no guarantees that an artist
with an MFA degree will find a teaching job. With recent shifts in
hiring policies at most universities—towards part-time, untenured,
adjunct labor—very few artists ever get a tenured, secure position. To
me, this resembles a kind of pyramid scheme or institutional blackmail
in which money is extracted using false promises, with the benefits
going to very few—primarily the institutions themselves.
I attended graduate school in the ‘90s. I did all of the coursework
and the final exhibition, wrote the dissertation and submitted it. I
thought I was all done, but then suddenly I found out that in order to
get the degree itself, I needed to package my dissertation and
photographs in a very specific type of a black plastic folder, which
could only be purchased at one stationery store located in
Manhattan near Canal Street. The secretary at the art department told me
that the Chairman kept the folders in a closet in his office, and that
the folders had to conform exactly to the dimensions of the closet’s
irregular shelves. No other folders would be accepted. I was idealistic
and thought that the Master of Fine Arts degree had something to do with
the acquisition of knowledge … but it came down to a surreal formalism.
I never got the folder or the degree!
It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination
that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices
worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and
critical writing programs. At the center of the problem is the black
plastic folder: at the school I attended, the folder itself became the
goal of the program—both the framing and the ultimate content of
graduate studies in art. A folder, identical to hundreds of other
folders arranged on a shelf, became a tool to valuate and legitimize
artistic practice through a forced standardization. My school was not
very different from how most museums, art centers, and galleries operate
today, whereby systemic and logistical needs often demand legibility
according to predefined terms. In the process, the folder replaces art
itself.
The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking
connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors.
Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping
institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a
wide range of activities and occupations including training, research,
development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing,
promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The
standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. For
a few years now I have experienced a certain sense of déjà vu while
walking through art fairs or biennials, a feeling that many other people
have also commented on: that we have already seen all these works that
are supposedly brand new. We are experiencing the impact of contemporary
art as a globally traded commodity that is produced, displayed, and
circulated by an industry of specially trained professionals. The folder
that replaces the art has undergone only a slight modification: into an
investment portfolio.
This is not a new observation: I think Marcel Duchamp already fully
understood this danger a hundred year ago. There are, of course, so many
aspects of his work that could be mentioned in this essay, from his Standard Stoppages
to his peculiar refusal to make a living by selling his artworks. In a
way, one can understand much of Duchamp’s work as a repeated act of
offering the folder back to the art establishment: whether in the shape
of a valise, a box, a collection of notes and photographs, a literal
folder, or even an elaborate gesamkunstwerk like his Etant donné,
containing all the indexical references to his work. However, the
folders he provided contained a bomb: they were capable of bringing down
the shelf they were stored on.
Image Via
Today it would be rather futile to try to reconstitute bohemia—the
free-flowing, organic creative space—because it never really existed
within the constellation of institutions of art, the art market, and the
art academy. If Warhol’s Factory was an entry into art that enabled a
group of people of very different backgrounds to enter a certain kind of
productive modality (both within and in spite of the surrounding
economy), it was a space of free play that no longer exists. Instead,
what we have now are MFA programs: a standardization not even of
bohemia, but only its promise. Just to be clear: I am not advocating
that artists should remain innocent, childlike amateurs; a certain
mobilized dissidence wielded by young people engaging in specialized
study in art structures can amount to something quite powerful. What I
mean is that if one is really looking to produce a different kind of
art, it is necessary to step through the standardization and
professionalization it promises, and discover a way to access whatever
may be on the other side—even if what one finds does not resemble art as
we currently understand it.
This supposes that, somewhere close
to the center of what we all know art to be, there is a kind of open,
undefined quality. And this is something I feel to be increasingly
difficult to develop and maintain both in art and other areas of life,
when there are so many pressures in the market-driven economy to divide
labor, to professionalize. As artists, curators, and writers, we are
increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent
product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in
thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for
professionalism. For emerging artists and curators there is an
ever-increasing number of well-intentioned programs that essentially
indoctrinate them into becoming content providers for an art system
whose values and welfare are wholly defined by its own logic of supply
and demand.
Being a professional should not be the only acceptable way for us to
maintain our households, particularly when most interesting artists are
perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three fields that
are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and
general usefulness. I feel that we have cornered ourselves by denying
the full range of possibilities for developing our economies. In fact,
the economic dimension of art is more often wholly suppressed under the
specter of bohemia, condemning artists to a precarious and often
alienating place in the day-to-day relations that hold other parts of
society together. While artists like Warhol took some pleasure in
operating a frontier economy that produced value and new economic
protocols—much in the way a government might manage an economy—this is
not the concern of most other artists, who would prefer to have a more
straightforward connection to society without at the same time having
their work regarded as mere craft. Unless hard-pressed by circumstances,
we still think that the proper thing to do is to wait for a sponsor or a
patron to solve our household problems and to legitimize our work. In
fact, we don’t need their legitimacy. We are perfectly capable of being
our own sponsors, which in most cases we already are when we do other
kinds of work to support our art-work. This is something that should not
be disavowed, but acknowledged openly. We must find the terms for
articulating what kind of economy artists really want. This can be quite
complicated, since not addressing this question implicitly reinforces
the simplistic myth of the artist as an isolated and alienated genius.
Without a captivating alternative, artists will always defer to this
myth out of habit, in spite of how complex and interesting their real
household economy may be. I suspect that if affirmed fully and
radically, this condition could lead to a fluid, liberated state close
to what Marx envisioned for humanity—the messianic promise at the heart
of communism. After all, we are never one thing at all times.
×
© 2013 e-flux and the author
Anton Vidokle is an editor of e-flux journal.
