Money is the new art is the new speech is the new black.
How can we make art something other than a bangle on the necklace of the uber-rich, a status symbol all the more desirable because the culture pretends it has some other purpose? And the museum something other than the place where the pleebs can access the wonders they can’t afford, wonders mostly because they can’t afford them?
Not even putting a pee-pot in a gallery stopped the rich from appropriating any implicit disgust and turning it into a statement about their high-minded enculturement.
There is something about having to prove oneself, in art – or in anything else – that is already a kind of enslavement. I think of my friend Arthur, sloth that he is, porn-addicted alcoholic genius chess master that he is. He may too be a victim of capital, jobless and often near-homeless. But Arthur’s particular enslavement does not require that he show up anywhere. Ever. Proof, perhaps, of his perverted cleverness.
However one regards the current debate over the legalization of prostitution, brought to the news recently by Amnesty International’s argument that sex work should be decriminalized, it should be admitted that the offenses of prostitution are in line with the offenses corollary to many other lines of work, and I wouldn’t exclude Academia from this. Certainly there are degrees of freedom, but the way that the work of the mind is increasingly put to use to ends that the minds mind is telling.
And art certainly operates similarly.
The Supreme Court says that money is speech. Art too is a form of speech. You see where this is going.
Artrank.com Check it out if you haven’t already.
Who should get the right to have a louder voice? In politics, those who have the money to spend. In art, the loud voice is granted to those who please those who have the money to spend.
John Guillory in his book Cultural Capital discusses the politics debates of the 1990’s regarding the politics of the literature canon and in doing so, he indicates that after all the considerations of the influences of money on literature and on what is accepted as good literature, there is some small other thing, some kernel of aesthetic that is not simply a version of the powerful in culture enacting their will onto the field. He calls it “the remainder.”
For those of us who think that art is about something other than money, Guillory’s term should serve as a warning. A scholar and lover of literature, Guillory nonetheless calls that part of literature that he loves a “remainder,” as if only the tiniest smidgen of it exists in any work.
And in many ways, literature is less influenced (at least in the short term) by the whims of capital. Poetry doesn’t sell, so those who would pander to the wealthy to make their poetry career are fools. Visual art, however, well, well, well.
Which is why some of the work at PS1’s Greater New York show were exciting. In spite of being housed in a museum, there were some works that critiqued money directly -- not even art and money -- but money practices, such as Cameron Rowland’s boring display of incorporation documents related to a shell company that can receive New Market Tax Credits, a federal program designed to help businesses locate in underserved (read: poor) communities. Rowland’s text makes a connection between the boost in finances to these programs and the reduction in direct funding to poor families. The private employer now gets the money for selling to the poor (and perhaps eventually employing them).
John Ahern’s sculptures, famous in a way from Miwon Quon’s book One Place After Another, made a powerful statement, implicitly declaring, from a simplicity of these gesture, that beauty can be seen, perhaps simply is embodied in the acts we usually ignore and in the people the culture often ignores.
There were many young artists and there were very few areas dedicated to a single artist, which was also a relief. The museum as a site of artists engaged in making – lots of artists – lots of making.
But this vibrant display of the myriad possibilities of art might serve to hide the fact that this venue is a career-making one, or can be, that the cacophony of voices here, when it translates across the river to the real MOMA, will be filtered, not just by the accidents of aesthetic pleasure which bear the historical stamp of the moneyed, but by the actual moneyed who sit on the Board and who lend their collections for view. Sarbanes-Oxley addressed some kinds of COI problems, but not that one.
And ascendant to the art pedestal will be those who please the market, either them, or, more likely, the market itself, and from that vantage point the Artist will view the rest of the world and the rest of the art world as well as the aspirants who are trying to clamor over the razorwire to get into the art world – can be gazed down upon. <in a raised voice so as to be heard above the din of the crowd> “How’s the air up there?” Oh Just Great. Thank you! Can you all hear me? “Oh yes, Mr. Picasso. Loud and clear, Mr. Picasso. Why, your voice rings. How are you finding your 14-room sculpture throne?” Comfy. So very very comfy.
Maybe that’s why I like chairs – more conducive to discussion, indeed proportional to one body relating to another, why as if there might be something beneficial to an artist – to an art – who can relate to the concerns of an average person -- an art that doesn’t just speak but listens.
Christopher Janke