The modern practice of art, they argue, epitomizes possessive individualism, and pace the many romantic art-historical accounts that find the history of modernism and contemporary art replete with heroic critiques of capitalism, the figure of the artist, in the curators’ view, is the very archetype of liberalism (or neoliberalism) owing to its close association with independence—or, in avant-garde terms, its autonomy. Franke and Stakemeier have therefore placed themselves in something of a double bind, since they want to see the world of art as a repressive infrastructure for enclosing artistic labor as property, while as curators they implicitly celebrate, or at least consent to publicizing, the art world’s cultural legitimacy. This double bind leads to some rather convoluted prose in various contributions to their ambitious catalogue, but however inelegant the language used to explore it, the problem is a real and very pressing one. Its clearest statement is in the curators’ introduction to a useful and comprehensive free brochure available to exhibitiongoers: “The practices that are here being placed in relation with one another materialize the illiberalism at the core of modern liberality as a series of ruptures of modern property forms.” In other words, if we cut through the jargon, what unites the twenty-seven artists and groups included in “Illiberal Arts” is that they each explore, in quite distinct ways, how to make art while avoiding wielding one’s own identity—or anyone else’s—as property. Some critics have argued that we are currently experiencing a return to identity politics, but “Illiberal Arts” demonstrates how urgently we need to rethink how claiming an identity slips almost imperceptibly into a form of exclusive property in oneself. The politics of this moment—rife with nativism on both the Right and the Left—calls for the collapse of modes of self-possession that fuel identity politics. It calls for a kind of abolition of property in oneself through a set of aesthetic strategies identified in the exhibition.
David Joselit on “Illiberal Arts”