9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Ben Davis
because he was disgusted by the dominance of the superrich. “Art editors and critics—people like me—have become a courtier class,” he remarked. “All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not worth my time.”4
Even Charles Saatchi—the advertising mogul at least partly responsible for the rise of both neoliberal doyenne Margaret Thatcher (through his “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign) and art-market darling Damien Hirst (through his art collecting)—recoiled in horror from what the art scene had become. “Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar,” he wrote. “It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.”5 Responding to these tantrums, the radical critic Julian Stallabrass attacked Hickey and Saatchi only for seeming to hold out the possibility that contemporary art might be anything more exalted: “If works of art are vulgar and empty, why should people be any more upset by that than by, say, garish packaging on supermarket shelves?” Stallabrass actually seemed to suggest that critics abandon writing about fine art altogether and focus instead on what people were sharing on Facebook.6
He can do that if he likes, but I think he may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For my part, I’m not quite ready to give up on the entire world of art all at once. Since I nevertheless accept the dire state of the situation, what this debate proves to me is that if you are going to have any way to interact with contemporary art positively, you need some theory that is more nuanced than that on offer. In my head, I keep coming back to that discussion at Winkleman Gallery—we are still struggling to find a language with which to engage with the topic of artists’ economic position. And the theory of the classed nature of artistic labor from my Theses, I continue to hope, is the missing piece that might provide the resources for a more constructive critique.
“A Rehash of Marxist Ideology”
Of course, complaints about art and money are not new. Long before the New Museum dustup, anxiety about the art market’s impact on contemporary art had been gathering steam, as had the sense that the theory to understand it was lacking. “We don’t have a way to talk about the market,” the critic Jerry Saltz wrote in the Village Voice in 2006. “There is no effective ‘Theory of the Market’ that isn’t just a rehash of Marxist ideology. There’s no new philosophy to help us address the problem of the way the market is affecting the production and presentation of art, although people are trying.”7
The swipe at “Marxist ideology” made me cringe—but I had to sympathize with where Saltz was coming from. For people not embedded in contemporary art, who have only the outside picture of auctions and galas, it is difficult to explain how deep-rooted is the belief in art-making’s inherent righteousness and radicalism among the cognoscenti. For decades, various strains of Marxist-inspired cultural theory have been, if not the mainstream, then somewhere in the region of the mainstream for art criticism, touted not just by wild-eyed outsiders but by establishment tastemakers. In general, these have left behind a sour aftertaste on account of their self-righteous political abstraction on the one hand and their seeming inability to give account of the pleasures of art-making on the other.
Some of these excesses are inherited from the critical theory pioneered by the so-called Frankfurt School. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously elaborated the idea of the “culture industry,” painting a bleak picture of the psychic consequences of the commodification of aesthetics by capitalism in Hollywood (the objects of their condemnation in Dialectic of Enlightenment include Orson Welles and Mickey Rooney, which seems quaint now).8 For Adorno, repulsion toward popular culture was the flip side of an anguished passion for the more difficult efflorescences of modern art, which he argued—drawing on the rhetoric of Marxist dialectics—held out hope for some kind of experience that wasn’t subordinated to the instrumentalized logic of capitalism: “A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”9
Where does class fit in here? Even for Martin Jay, one of the Frankfurt School’s more enthusiastic chroniclers, the theories of Adorno and the school around him “expressed a growing loss of confidence, which Marxists had traditionally felt, in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.”10 In effect, in Adorno’s aesthetic theory an engagement with the working class’s struggle against capital was displaced onto an investment in the artist’s struggle with the baleful effects of commodification. For later artists and writers, this template provided a way to give outsized social importance to debates about modern and postmodern art that would otherwise have seemed technical and obscure. The result was a widely influential form of cultural criticism that claimed the mantle of Marxist radicalism but lacked any interest in the most vital concern of Marxism: class struggle.
Adorno was writing in the shadow of World War II, against the backdrop of murderous states waging total warfare, marshaling their populations via intensive propaganda. His views were shaped by this experience, as well as by his exposure during his sojourn in the United States to its seemingly monolithic consumer culture, with workers in his view bought off and sated by mindless entertainment. This historical context definitively colored his perspective on culture under capitalism. It is also a thing of the past. Since the 1970s, both the economy and its relation to the state have been decisively transformed, as neoliberalism pulverized old certainties about the social contract. You would, therefore, expect some kind of reevaluation of Marxism’s take on culture and its relation to capitalism. And so there has been.
If the proletariat fades into the background for Adorno, a prominent recent type of Marxist-inflected art criticism has taken a different tack, actually identifying contemporary artists with the proletariat tout court. Artists may not be laborers in the traditional sense, but (so the argument goes) creativity itself has now become a dominant form of “immaterial labor” in our post-industrial economy, as the stable world of factory labor has been replaced by the more mercurial realities of a service economy. Michael Hardt, for instance, has argued flat out that “some of the qualities of artistic production . . . are becoming hegemonic and transforming other labor processes.”11 The economy is now based around manufacturing knowledge and experiences, which in turn makes it creative through and through.
Instead of artists being proletarianized, Hardt and his co-thinkers in effect hold that the entire proletariat has been aestheticized: “[artists] increasingly share labour conditions with a wide array of workers in the biopolitical economy.”12 Bizarrely, the struggles of visual artists are collapsed together with the experiences of a whole motley range of other types of intellectual and service workers—scientists, financial analysts, nurses, and Walmart greeters are mentioned in the same breath—and accorded more or less equal political potential. Any sense of what makes the specific form of labor performed by contemporary artists unique is lost in the miasma of a nebulously conceived postindustrial economy based on “immaterial labor.”
Neither of these seems a particularly promising way of approaching the relationship of art to the economy. But the point here should be that these are examples of botched uses of Marxist analysis, not the real deal. “Marxism,” after all, is a plastic term. It has meant many different things to many different people—from the revolutionary romanticism of Arts and Crafts guru William Morris to the bowdlerized, totalitarian ideologies associated with Stalin and Mao and the soggy, apolitical abstractions taught in the halls of academia. Setting such false interpretations aside and returning to the underexplored Marxist idea of class still promises to do what no new “Theory of the Market” does.
“The Basic Reason that Classes Exist in the First Place”
Mainstream discussion of class starts and ends with the idea that one’s class is synonymous with how much money one has. To say that someone is “working class” is to say that they come from a humble background. A mainstream publication like the Economist has employed a technical definition of “middle class” that encompasses anyone whose income is one-third disposable.13 Many sociologists talk of class as a cultural question, as if the difference between being middle class and working class were a matter of education or social background.
Such