Really interesting essays on the relationship between the visual art world, artists, labor, and class. Argues that authority over one’s conditions of work is the key dividing line between working and middle class, making most visual artists middle-class. Artists lack collective institutions that can exercise economic power—going “on strike” wouldn’t deny art to anyone in particular. But the emphasis on creative/intellectual labor and control means that visual artists are constantly faced with the contradiction between ruling-class values and middle-class situations. This emphasis on individual creativity keeps artists thinking about political efficacy in individualistic terms, which is self-defeating. These contradictions also explain why, as the definition of “art” has expanded, it’s harder and harder to get anywhere in the art world without a fancy degree; “you’d have to be a fool to think that any old person could declare any old thing ‘art’ and be taken seriously. The lack of clear formal guidelines demarcating what is or is not art makes institutional approbation and a command of aesthetic discourse all the more important, and these things don’t come naturally or cheaply.” As for political change, I liked the point that “[w]hether a characteristically ironic sense of self gets articulated in a political direction or turns into a kind of consumerist nihilism depends on what kind of social movements there are for it to intersect.”
Visual artists “ceded the field of depicting reality as photographic entrepreneurs and film moguls outflanked the masters of pigments and modeling clay; eventually, they were trumped in sheer imaginative might as the ‘culture industries’ refined their special effects and absorbed increasingly impressive quantities of creative talent,” leaving “a predominantly middle-class tradition in a largely defensive struggle as capitalism progressively undercuts its status.” This uniquely middle-class status, he argues, can explain visual art’s focus on the individual producer and small production. One implication: “art’s need to justify itself as intellectually superior to mass culture … would clearly be as much about raw commerical interst as it is contingent intellectual posturing. It is … a way of justifying its superior cachet to a class of potential consumers.” But unlike the situation in Pierre Bordieu’s day, pop culture is now often more technically sophisticated than modern fine art. The result: aesthetic distance, not mastery, is the aesthetic virtue to which artists appeal. Visual art is more like fashion, “where designers make esoteric prototypes that are then reprocessed for mass consumption, where they find their true home.” Another consequence: production becomes more like architecture or film, with the artist directing others to achieve the artist’s vision. But different works are differently suited to this treatment—they have to be both “suitably iconic and suitably abstract,” so they tend to “deemphasize personal vision and nuance and center more around the familiar values of mass entertainment and consumption,” as Damien Hirst does. But whether art is “traditional” or “conceptual,” its supposed problems compared to the other type are “just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything.” The lesson: “there are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces—only political and economic solutions.” Ultimately, he hopes for a socialism that will allow future theorists to look at art under capitalism the way we now look at older religious art: “We can appreciate how for thousands of years the drama of religion was a primary vehicle for expressing compassion, suffering, and the aspiration for a redeemed world, and still feel that this art is confined to a framework that is narrower than the one from which we now operate.” ( )

Forget Sarah Thornton, this is one of the most lucid and illuminating books on the place of contemporary art in society you'll find. ( )