I have already scratched out a few general statements on my position regarding art. One way to complicate this a bit is by way of contrast. There are a number of art theorists and critics I hold in high regard and whose notions would provide some significantly different nuances to what I am about to attempt, and perhaps fail, to articulate.
For the sake of brevity, I will deal with only two here to delineate the background for my position. They are Donald Kuspit and Leo Bersani. Both were writers for October, Artforum and other publications. Bersani, in particular, has had a varied and expansive career covering many different art forms and darting off in various (not entirely reconcilable) directions. Kuspit has been much more limited, focused, and repetitive, working in a vein influenced primarily by Adorno. I find myself only partially agreeing with either of them most of the time, but I think they each provide some useful direction for art criticism. The following is not intended to be full précis of their arguments, but only to critically tease out the elements relevant to my project.
The first position, held by Kuspit, is the redemptive one.
The second position, that held by Bersani, is the diremptive one.
Kuspit is fundamentally a humanist and Bersani is not. For Kuspit, his whole theoretical apparatus relies on exaggerating the conflicts of dialectics while Bersani implodes them and looks elsewhere. Both are hyperbolic strategies that transform criticism into melodrama. Despite the opposition that this juxtaposition may suggest, there is fruitful overlap between them.
Kuspit’s polemics against the institutionalization of art are, I think, essentially correct. They are also of particular relevance for the situation of art in Canada, which has been so heavily “repressed” (to use the kind of terminology he would prefer) by the myth of culture (if anything his critique of culture is far more under-developed than his relatively unimpressive critique of formalism).
But he is correct in advancing the position (borrowed from Stella) that the ongoing revisiting of early Modernism, split from previous concerns with movements to more vapid notions like “people, place and thing,” transforms art into the banal; it is just a part of "everyday life" as its exponents claim, this art of nouns. No longer part of a critical, alien, or high position, but another exchangeable and reproducible cultural form; art just becomes another social space (and in Canada, explicitly an extension of the welfare state). It would be politically incorrect, and undemocratic, for it to be placed in any other role. From the reigning cultural studies perspective, the artist must be subverted, they lose their alienation and critical autonomy, simply becoming a representative of social belonging, the aesthetic losing its value as the unique or radical.
Certainly, one of the primary ends of criticism in Canada -- both in an ethical and epistemological sense -- ought to be the devaluation and degradation of the cultural premise. Not because it is politically reactionary not to do so (which is artistically irrelevant), but because it is intellectually vacuous and philistine not to do so. Contemporary Art, no less than state-produced television and the country’s dubious literary industry, tends to be orchestrated around this governing premise (culture) which I have outlined at some length as the political economy of Contemporary Art in the city and country.
As to our two critics: It should be noted from the outset that both rely far too much on psychoanalysis. At least in Bersani, one gets the impression that this is largely a perverse game (played with Freud, Lacan, Klein, and Laplanche) whereas Kuspit seems to believe in it and relies on it to inject pathos into his image of art history.
For the sake of even greater brevity I am here using only one short and succinct essay by Kuspit -- “Deadministering art” as published in the collection Redeeming Art (2000) -- which provides an explanation of his general critical programme. A more in-depth version is available in his book, The End of Art (2004).
From Adorno, Kuspit takes the task of attacking the administration of art. In this role, the critic is at best a pariah: “to be a critic is to suffer the scorn of both artist and society. Like Tristram and Iseult, they are so eager to fall into one another's arms, they cannot suffer the critical sword between them.” [15] Authentic works of art have to withstand “the culture industry’s insistence upon its consumability (which is what standard art-historical education unconsciously emphasizes) and the ideological use to which it is put as an instrument of society’s self-validation.” [15]
The “justice” accorded to art is in its evaluation as a tool in society’s self-justification; art’s appropriation and deployment for social signifying is a process reducing art to a vulgarity whose only trophy is the “necrophiliac delight” of some minor contemplation. [16]
Treated as a tool of “recognition,” it renders art just another material to be consumed and referenced as a sign of taste (political or otherwise). Art, appropriated by the market and society, often to the wilful glee of artists either cynically exploiting or delusionally mistaking this process, is employed to ratify the norm of “social appearances” and operationalized by institutions and the market as another means of control.
To return an intellectual strength to criticism, he suggests, “Criticism’s job is to save art from itself by going against the grain of conventional categorizations of it, perversely setting it in a defiantly deviant context.” [19] The critic is a romanticizer of art in Novalis’ sense of the term, namely one who gives infinity to the finite, who gives art the second self it requires to integrate negativity. The critic remains “authentic” by restlessly disbelieving in the integrity of any style. [26] In a final hyperbole, he adds that the critic is self-crucifying, their work a passion.
“The autonomy of art is always limited and tenuous, more of an unreality, an illusion, than a positive reality,” he warns, “for reality is insane, negative.” [20] In this context, aesthetic autonomy serves as a “healing effect,” one that is not totally reducible to lived experience or subjectivity because it is what exceeds their limits. Autonomy appears “insane” to the possibilities of the subject. [22] Yet, again following Adorno, he insists that art’s autonomy can only appear through the heterogenous model of a whole self that is capable of assimilating both instinct and ego.
The critic gives a strong sense of selfhood back to the work of art not in the formalist sense of neutral and autonomous formal facts or the equally reductive cultural sense of the work as meaning-making, expression, or intersubjectivity.
The flight into formalism is in turn pathologized, the anatomy he accords to this providing one of the most condensed images of his general conceptualization of art:
This self, the self that has not been empathized with, finds succor in the happy prison of the artwork, but is made to realize, by criticism which explores the psychosocial effects of art, that the consoling artwork is in fact a distorted mirror image of the integrated self it would like to be — the untragic self that is not the victim of an indifferent reality, a social reality that couldn't care less whether the self lives or dies, or has any particular reason for doing one or the other. (The feeling of the lifeworld’s nihilistic indifference is a general effect of experience in the totally administered society.) That is, the fabulously integrated artwork, by virtue of the mythical absoluteness of its integrity understandable as an abstract analogue of the ideally integrated self — the self equal to the negativity of reality — is a perversely narcissistic reflection of the tragic self, in a sense, the image which with it empathizes with or comforts itself. The perversely ideal self — the autonomous self — represented by the subtly, complexly integrated artwork, has a tragically narcissistic function; it is rooted in a tragic experience of social reality as nihilistically indifferent. Narcissism to overcome nihilism — that is the formula of the best art. [24]
As with all dialectical arguments, of course, this can be inverted once again. Against Kuspit, one can argue for nihilism to overcome narcissism. One can claim that the integrative function of the work of art is the positive and comic (untragic) dissolution of the self and this dissolution into apathy is the affirmation of reality and art’s true, rather than mythical, autonomy as an unhuman, even “romantic” force. It should be added that this extends beyond the weak appeal to reality he makes which reifies “the social” rather than understanding that it is only a fabulously misrepresented artifact, a misrepresentation which sinks his argument into idealism.
I would add the “psychodrama” (to use one of his preferred terms) that he constructs to fabulate the social dialectic of art is too naive both in granting an undue epistemic prestige to sociological representation and in according an excessive poverty to the place of art in history (and of history as art). Kuspit’s notion of society or the social is usually maddeningly vague, sometimes spectral, and sometimes just a kind of functionality that hardly seems moored.
Additionally, I would say that Kuspit confuses aesthetics too much with art when neither is necessary to the other and this ends up being only slightly more than a negative double to the figure that he critiques to begin with.
While I agree, albeit much more pessimistically, with Kuspit’s definition of the proper end of criticism, and to varying degrees accept some of his interpretation of the history of “postart,” I think the meta-historical and ontological modelling from which he tries to suspend these is less than tenable.
A more convincing (in part because non-psychoanalytic) variation of Kuspit’s attempt to revamp what is effectively a more sophisticated form of Modernist criticism came from Jay Bernstein in Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006):
The conceit upon which my argument turns is that the arts have become the bearers of our now delegitimated capacity for significant sensory encounter: emphatic experience—and it is because the arts do (or did) fulfill this role that, apparently beyond any reasonable accounting, seemingly beyond our reflective capacity to account for this fact, the arts matter and possess authority. The arts are just now the defused authority of emphatic experience. Only through emphatic experience could we be ‘in touch’ with what is other to the products of the spontaneity of the mind, hence others in themselves rather than their being mere mirrors reflecting what has been imposed upon them by the mind’s spontaneous, general forms, hence truly sensible others. The arts provide, so to speak, the sensory experience of particulars writ large, writ as a complex and overdetermined social practice with its own distinctive history. More precisely, the institutional practice of producing, exhibiting, and interpreting works of a modernist kind is the bearer of the rationality potential of the repressed intuitive moment of the concept, repressed nature within and without. Hence what the arts configure, offer a reminder or promise of (in effigy), is the rationality potential of intuitions and intuiting—say, again, the arts are brute material inscriptions of an evacuated subjectivity. The task of the arts is to rescue from cognitive and rational oblivion our embodied experience and the standing of unique, particular things as the proper objects of such experience, albeit only in the form of a reminder or a promise. [7]
Hounded to the margins by social rationality, art evinces its autonomy in the form of an anti-skeptical quest to produce the irreducibly particular. Placed in this position, it is always already reduced into autonomy (as social and empirical illegitimacy); a bastard of modernity that always comes too late.
But both Kuspit and Bernstein are still being too sentimental about what art is or does, and still leaving it too vulnerable to being incorporated into the art of nouns. It is necessary to go further in understanding art as evacuation and its positive function as the delegitimation of the subjective (conceived either socially or personally).
Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption (1990) is a series of polemical essays. What is the redemptive notion of art? Primarily it is the idea, a moral one, that art can provide a faithful account of experience. Not only that, but its faithfulness is a form of redemption, a way of healing or repairing damaged or traumatic experience by repetition. The work of art is conceptualized as a work of authority, mastering the materials of the world, and transforming its catastrophes into forms of compensation, ways of creating value. [1] Art’s reconstruction of the world is a way of “correcting” existence, usually by offering examples or illustrations. However, he objects, this basically misunderstands art, which has little to do with truth or knowledge; art provides no unity to life and, in fact, destabilizes it.
The centre of Bersani’s argument is made through critically engaging with three of the primary early theorists of modernity and its aesthetics: Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin.
Definitions in terms of time tend to be ideologically bent. Modernism was one good example of this. The conceptualization of the past as the lost, something to be elegiacally mourned or celebrated, also gave both it and the present greater glamour and gravitas, providing those in the present with the impression that they were reinventing the world. “Tradition” could be imbued with all manner of occult value, positive and negative. Modernism was unique in how much it mourned, how much it stressed its discontinuity, one inscribed in time, which was far greater than any distinction between presumably different cultures or societies. It was not a matter of otherness but of apocalypse.
“For in Benjamin we find the traits most deeply characteristic of this culture: the scrupulous registering of experience in order to annihilate it, and the magical and nihilistic belief that immersion in the most minute details of a material content will not only reduce that content but simultaneously unveil its hidden redemptive double.” [54] Within this variant of the modernist quest, “Art can be redeemed only by being remystified. That we are dealing with a mystification—and, as I will argue in a moment, with an inescapably political mystification…” [59]
I would add that the political-religious exploitation of art, represented here by Benjamin, is substantially generalizable to a major strata of Contemporary Art in its therapeutic and culturalist modes (postcolonial, feminist, queer, Marxist, conservative, Christian, etc.), and reaching its pinnacle in something like The Oprah Winfrey Show [see Eva Illouz’s Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (2003)]. If, as Bernstein suggests, art testifies to an empiricity of excess, Contemporary Art redeems and curates (taxidermies, decontaminates) it by supplementation and enframing (cultural mediation) as part of the state’s reterritorialization and humanization of art. However, “[a]rt is blind to the redemptive possibilities inherent in its representations of fallen being. The culture of redemption ultimately depends on a supplemental voice, the authoritative core of the critical, philosophical, or psychoanalytic interpreter, of the one who knows.” [62]
Clearly, one can nominate Kuspit as one of these knowers, but with the important caveat that for him the act of criticism is neither mediation nor translation but perversion, not the production of knowledge but a deviancy of ends which, as we saw, leads at least as plausibly to an ahumanist de-culturation as it does to a humanist redemption despite the culture industry. All of this is expressed by Kuspit in a strong critique of one form of redemption (the administrative or socio-cultural treatment of art) in a bid to salvage a different one (autonomous consciousness). In Bersani, something a bit different occurs.
Beransi’s observation that the logical end of Benjamin’s work is simply elitist collection as the final safeguard of “aura” is apt, but one could add that the reactionary occult function of art was better emblemized by the rise of happenings and performance art, which rely on a far more dubious sentimentalization of experience (or “participation”) than the autonomy of the object does. The ultimate point of this mystification is the idea of the cultural itself.
One could add that Bersani’s opposition between the theological and historical (which amounts it seems to the phenomenological over that which has been removed from experience) is as dubious as the bifurcations of Benjamin that form the basis of his critique of him.
Besides which, Benjamin’s sidestepping of messy phenomenology for the sake of theological time is not really less redemptive than the stress on the phenomenological over the theological. (It is entirely possible that the divine offers no redemption for anyone or anything). This goes to the heart of Bersani’s own problem with “violence” and his desire for a non-relationality that is essentially anti-confrontational rather than the more logical advocacy of an apathy that demonstrates the entire tension to be a phantasm.
This points to a rather substantial lacunae in Bersani’s general body of work, namely that he mystifies history through a moral appeal to phenomenality (rather than empiricity) under the guise of averting the mechanism of redemption. Unless he is suggesting that history is precisely that which cannot be realistically grasped (the emphatic that de-legitimates humanization), “history” conceptualized as a narrative of relationality (the ontological possibility of violence) itself is already the redemptive work that he attacks to begin with, a point extensively demonstrated by metahistorical theory (and for that matter, by Nietzsche’s writings on history). Certainly, history as a form of narrative construction, and cultural history in particular, are likely the best examples of redemptive mystification possible.
Bersani constructs a fantasy of a kind of perpetual undoing that is wholly parasitic on a notion of violence that, while not exactly theological, is as dubious as Benjamin’s. If Benjamin eternalizes the object by rendering it static, Bersani can only make it dynamic by placing it within a masochistic fantasy.
It may be after all that history is what is irreconcilable to human experience, that it ungrounds and undermines the claims of the phenomenal. The artwork as an auratic object then more closely resembles history to the extent that it has undermined the phenomenal. The greater the autonomy it gains, the closer it comes to the real and the more it enacts the splitting central to Bersani’s general programme. So, while it is true that the appeal to the auratic is a form of mystification, it is also the case that the auratic is functionally an undermining of phenomenal redemption.
From the problems of objects we shift to generality and it is here that he turns to Baudelaire. Thanks to their immersion in a world that is not them or theirs and makes them both a total alien and totally at home, he detects in Baudelaire’s idealized flâneur “[w]hat might have been a relatively weak reformulation of a doctrine of empathy becomes a daring identification of aesthetic perception with erotic and divine excess.” [69] Supreme Being is identified with prostitution since it is “in absolute openness, in an unqualified readiness to take others in” and the self is sacrificed, given over to the other’s desires. [69] This is the sacrificial world of God, which is analogized to that of the prostitute and the artist: all here Supreme icons of passivity.
The “I” of the prostitute-God-artist is not an identity, a matter of sameness, but the erasure of the self, the fusion with the non-self (possession by the external). To become complete is to eliminate the self: “Being manifests its ‘memory’ of perfection by aspiring to nothingness.” [70] It is the total transgression of the ego’s limitations. This cannot be reduced to sexuality. Rather, for Baudelaire, the desire of the artist is when “the phenomenal aspires to the noumenal.” [73] The creator is one who is penetrated by the world: “The external stimuli that gravely, and erotically, ‘shake’ us are those that reactivate—faster than they can be mastered—memory traces of other stimuli.” [74]
To extrapolate from this: God and the whore (or public woman) are the ironic demonstration of the delusion of the existential claims of the public sphere, that is the world of representation. This is the world where violence becomes perceived as an ontological possibility. It is the world not only of the political imaginary but of the representational modes of things like journalism and the social sciences.
The artist is the opposite of the dandy, for whom everything hinges on the creation of personal originality and the cult of the self. A particularly modern kind of individual, the dandy relies on other people to infer their uniqueness while refusing the myth of interiority. The dandy forever remains alien, unpenetrated, and unpossessed by the world. They live for a world of mirrors while art mirrors nothing.
When he turns to Nietzsche, Bersani claims that his early work contains the notion that art contains an individuality that is “distinct from subjectivity; it is produced by the appearance of appearances, by an arresting of correspondences that results in visible forms. Correspondences, because they are thus immobilized and inevitably violated in art, are visible only in art.” [82] Art is a “relationality” indifferent to the human subject, and gives to perception that which is alien to the psychological individual. It is metaphysical and sterile rather than physical. Extending this, we can say that to see art and to understand artistically is irreconcilable to understanding the world culturally. Art is arresting; it is the paradoxical violence of demobilization: representation as the ruination of the fantasy of identity.
If relations are continuously being recomposed because they are continuously being broken, they never really add up to anything. Not only does this eliminate the possibility of any deep structural order stabilizing particular relational modes; it also means that identity can never be formulated as anything more than a history of successive relational moves. The individual is a passing or contingent event, an event in which each term’s self-completion—its identification with another term—ruins the possibility of an individuating identification. [78]
There are real consequences for representation in this. Phenomenally, empirically and otherwise, it is inevitable that “[g]iven the fictive nature of any ‘I’, there is no representation of the subject that would be more real, more faithful to its referent or origin, than any other representation.” [88] That there are no credible authoritarian grounds for the authenticity of allegedly personal or cultural experiences or works of art poses a significant problem for would-be redeemers.
(It is this kind of identitarian redemption fantasy that dominates much of Contemporary Art, especially in Canada and even more so over the past three decades. As a matter of historical coincidence, if you read the writing of Trudeau and his associates in the construction of multiculturalism from the 1960s onwards, this is often explicitly cast as a moral war against Nietzschean sentiment.)
To this, we can also suggest that the “trauma” of art is that it is the concrete realization of the nullity of the psychological subject and their cultural redemption. Art reminds us that we are only means, not ends: only functions (the romantic idea of inspiration is basically correct because it understands that humans are only husks). If art is “expressive,” it is the expression of something unhuman. This is, of course, completely irreconcilable to how art education, the cultural sector, and culturalist approaches to art operate. Certainly, none of these forms of disciplinary control could accept this:
Art teaches us nothing and does not improve us; as moral and psychological subjects, we can’t even claim to be the creators of works of art. Human pride claims that art mirrors—and reveals the profound sense of—human existence. Nietzsche, on the other hand, strips art of everything except its relation to the metaphysical. And that relation has nothing profound about it; it consists in the reduction of phenomena to the status of mere images and ‘artistic’ projections for the true author at the basis of things, for the primal unity. […] It is at once humbling and exalting for human beings to realize that their existence can have no greater dignity than to be simplified (desire and will are gone, the moral life is gone, knowledge is gone) to a merely metaphysical sense. [90]
Art is a process of simplification (very unlike the complexification of culture). Ethics and morals do not refer to anything real, but only to metaphysical contradictions; they are metaphors that are usually mistaken. “If these contradictions can be represented only in art (and not in a treatise on metaphysics), this is because the metaphysical itself can only be enacted as a representation—not as a symbolic representation but as that of a figure dissolving its own figured state. The figures of art are necessary for their always imminent immolation in the fusions and simultaneities of being that can never be figured in art.” [94]
In this sense “representation” takes on a curious glow, one which is less about rendering concrete an image of the world than of designating a process of implosion. It is here that Bersani detects a paradox in Nietzsche that is distinct from the radical passivity of art that he detected in Baudelaire. In the German, it is the “Dionysian [that] saves us from the redemptive illusion of the individual; it cancels out, and redeems, Apollo’s crime of cutting into being, of defiguring it with figures, with lines and forms.” [100]
To clarify the problem: “Most startlingly from the perspective of my argument about the authority of art in a culture of redemption, The Birth of Tragedy simultaneously attacks that culture and raises the possibility of a metaphysical legitimizing of an aesthetic of redemption.” [87] But what is redeemed here is most certainly not human and not something as sentimental as “life.” (This was the early Schopenhauerian Nietzsche before he went all-in as a redeemer of life through selective affirmation.) It is not the legitimization of a culture, but of the aesthetic. From this vantage “art is superior to life, but life itself can be viewed as art, and this superiority has to do with a certain superficiality or lack of reality. Life and art are both fictions; what we will have to see is how a certain type of fiction can be redemptive.” [90]
Against the redemption of the phenomenal and ephemeral world of the historical subject, however “theological” that history may be conceived as, is the redemption of the metaphysics of noumenality, the in-itself which is the figure that dissolves the symbolic realm, in which representation no longer needs a referent and for which the world is only a medium: “if redemption is both through and from individuation, it is achieved neither by nor for individuals. …the difficult notion of an ontological redemption will be intelligible only if we rigorously banish not only the category of subjective selfhood but also that of art as symbolic or exemplary.” [93]
This “redemption” is itself clearly diremptive, a splintering that is simultaneously a totality. “Art in fact confirms the nonnecessity of the divine in the constituting of a metaphysical dimension; the imagination of fusions and correspondences irreducible to individual identities is the phenomenon of a human consciousness perhaps inherently unsituated, unlocated. The Apollonian is the impulse to save consciousness from the nonidentity, the overfullness of those fusions, of an always potential oneness of being.” [95]