We live in, react to and confront different forms of artistic production which highly values individuality, uniqueness and abstraction. Artistic production is said to be the new secular religion in which art and those producing art are invested with magical almost religious qualities of reverence and awe. Visit any art gallery and it feels sometimes like going into a church. The New Tate in London and the Baltic Exchange in Gateshead, for example, have been stripped of industrial significance to embody the aspirations of a metropolitan bourgeoisie mirrored in the commercialisation of the ground floor art supermarket, smart cafes, and the modern art contained within spaces of cathedral like proportions.
Today, most art, music and architecture symbolise a cultural nationalism of prestige, act as a by-product for commercialism, and as a reference point in the art market where authenticity, novelty, critical and institutional validation carry high price levels. For the capitalist wanting to invest and protect their wealth the art market is as important as the stock exchange and other forms of financial investment. The possession of art objects in particular confers on the owner a semblance of power, wealth and privilege.
Recently, Channel 4 broadcast a programme, Private View, in which the billionaire, Ahmut Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, took the actress Angelica Houston on a guided tour of his paintings and sculptures. What mattered to the programme makers was the projection of the patron’s prestige in owning this private art collection. The content of the art on display was irrelevant.
Capitalism has its own Medicis and Borgias each one seeking their own immortality through becoming great patrons of Art. The Mellons, father and son, the Sainsbury family, Charles Saatchi, and the Getty clan, to name but a few have used their wealth to give their name to art galleries, theatres, opera houses and museums as monuments to their power and largesse. They want to gain an eternal legacy through commissioning “signature” architects to design in architectural form and space enduring monuments to their lives. It is an arrogant and egotistical conceit. Like the rich buried in sarcophaguses outside churches their names are quickly forgotten and their memories fade away with time. When visiting the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford who remembers the Royalist, Elias Ashmole whose wealth derived from marriages to rich widows and by Royal patronage of Charles II? And who cares?
Of course, artists do rebel against the commercialisation of artistic production and their own function in the art market. During the 1960’s, auto-destructive art was very fashionable; one artist produced self-destructive machine sculptures, another reproduced his works in ways to make them commercially worthless and another sculpture was destroyed by acid.
For the pop group The Who, destruction rather than creativity “is where it all ends” with the demolition of their musical equipment at Monterey Pop over the track “Talking About My Generation”. However, as Tony Hancock showed in his film The Rebel, most rebellion in art is childish, ineffectual and petulant. Politically, it challenges and changes nothing. So too does nihilism masquerading as art. Rich and aging pop stars do not “want to die before we get too old”. And Art, even politically motivated art extolling all the political authenticity demanded by fashionable Art critics like Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) and Marcuse (The Aesthetic Dimension), cannot change the world. Art increasingly becomes for intellectuals a refuge from the real world where they are impotently reduced to reverentially talk about plays, books and exhibitions on late night cultural television programmes. The escapism of aesthetic sensibility merely replaces the “opiate” of religious sensibility.
And the failure of Art as politics can be seen in the artistic production of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni who died in 1963. He created a limited edition artwork to attack the idea that what he created had a price. Manzoni produced no fewer than ninety 30g cans filled with his own excrement, bearing the label “merda d’artista”. You might call it crap art, but the Tate Modern defeated Manzoni’s rebellious intention in buying-up one of the cans for £22,300. This makes Manzoni’s excrement, at £743.33 a gram, more expensive than gold (about £500 a gram when this article was written). True there aren’t that many of the original cans left – 45 have since exploded – but it does highlight the absurdity of the art market under capitalism and the failure of artists to successfully rebel against it.
Of course, Manzoni’s “ready-made” art does have a political point worth considering. Artistic production does not take place in a rarefied atmosphere away from the rest of society. As a consequence, art historians have gradually become, directly or indirectly advisers to art traders. Art history has increasingly become an activity whose raison d’etre is to prepare the ground for auctions and the sale of art as luxury commodities for the rich. The artist has become a well-paid celebrity. The art market has to know, through expert knowledge, whether a painting is by a Rembrandt or by one of his students in order to protect its price.
One art movement which does deserve a positive mention is the group known as Dada whose production of “anti-Art” came out of their experience and criticism of the First World War and the society that caused it. Not only did one of the artists, Marcel Duchamp, turn a urinal into a “work of art” by signing it “R. Mutt” (the original is known affectionately as “The Fountain”); they all met at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 Zurich where their mixture of Jazz and African music upset the sensibilities of Lenin who was planning his bourgeois revolution in a house nearby.
Even in musical production, how a piece of work locates itself within a specific set of social relationships has undergone radical transformation over time as social relationships shift, dissolve and re-make themselves within history. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, for example, began life as an 18th century opera for the amusement of a bored aristocracy but includes within its musical score a subversive libretto based on sex, class and power which questions Feudal Rights and privileges. Some 250 or so years later the consumption of opera music is now sold for profit through cheap, mass-produced commodities either as CD’s or iTunes computer down-loads. As a social form of public display, a Mozart opera is produced now as an expensive luxury commodity to be enjoyed by the ruling class and their politicians at Covent Garden (£54k for corporate membership) and Glyndebourne (equally expensive but the management more reticent to give the cost of their corporate membership) from the vantage point of boxes overlooking a largely working class audience sitting in the seats below.
Some music can be overtly political like the operas of Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht, notably The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petit Bourgeoisie whose first London production at the Savoy in June 1933 had the last four words dropped and the opera renamed Anne-Anne in case of offending the sensibilities of the audience. And then there is Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, a modern reflection on the question of dictatorship in a musical device known as “speech-song” (it was written in 1942) and uses Byron’s contemptuous Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte (1814) with its lines of bitter denunciation against the concept of political leadership of which Byron had written:
Thine only gift hath been the grave
To those that worshipped thee;
Not to thy fall; could mortals guess
Ambitions less than littleness!
Schoenberg re-used these lines a century or so later to refer to the violent dictatorship of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich and the negative consequence for people who misguidingly follow leaders. Yes, the leader’s gift to his followers has, more often than not “been the grave”.
To continue with the operatic theme, we can look next at the work produced by Gilbert and Sullivan, – dismissed by the arch-liberal boor, Jonathan Millar, as “UKIP set to music” – whose musical content had a political and satirical meaning for the 19th century audience attending their concerts. Gilbert, the lyricist, was a High Tory (a paternalistic conservatism linked to the Anglican establishment and backed by the great aristocratic landowners) and used satire in his lyrics to attack political movements, including Socialism, whom he considered a threat to the way of life of the class interests his satirical verse wanted to preserve. In the first performances of The Mikardo (1885), for example, the Lord High Executioner initially had on his little list for the chop “sponging socialists” – a slur resurrected by the Tory, Peter Lilly, in his 1992 Tory conference speech which included his spiteful reference to “young ladies who get pregnant just to escape the housing queue”. Later day popular “villains” have included “punk rock anarchists” and “bankers and an assortment of politicians – including Peter Lilly” (there’ll none of them be missed).
The weakness and vulnerability of the satirist, from Juvenal, Gilbert to Private Eye, is that they never satirise what they wish to defend – usually a reactionary and mythical past. Today, W. S. Gilbert’s librettos have lost much of their political force but the music is still enjoyed by a wider audience, albeit, dictated to by the ruthless and competitive commercial world of the theatre that has changed very little from the time when the operettas were first performed; the profit motive driving the necessity to ensure “bums on seats”.
Real History versus Fictitious History
In considering artistic production, the principle criticism Marxists make against idealistic interpretations of art history is that the commission, production and consumption of art and music does not exist in a social vacuum and what passes for an art history, the history of philosophy or the history of ideas moving through history as autonomous subjects in their own right are in effect, fictitious histories. Plekhanov argued this position well in a reply to Antonio Labriola’s study, Essay on the Materialist Conception of History (1897);
…it becomes clear that men do not make several distinct histories-the history of law, the history of morals, the history of philosophy, etc.-but only one history, the history of their own social relations, which are determined by the state of the productive forces in each particular period.
(The Materialist Conception of History p54 L&W 1976).
The production, exchange and consumption of art are social relationships and not a discrete set of practices to which the Marxian theory of class, class relations and class struggle either are immune or have no application However we do not
reduce art, philosophy or law to epiphenomenon, a secondary symptom with no
causal status. Engels made this clear in a letter he wrote to Franz Mehring;
Connected with this (form is always neglected at first for content) is the fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres, which play a part in history, we also deny them any effect upon history.
The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregard of interaction…once an historic element has been brought into the
world by other, ultimately economic causes, it reacts, and can react on its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it.
(July 14th 1893 Marx/Engels Selected Correspondence P.435 Moscow edition).
Just to reinforce this position we cite two more warnings by Engels against turning historical materialism into dogma as though it were a philosophy of history in which everything could be explained by either an economic or technological determinism. In a letter to Joseph Bloch, Engels wrote;
According to the materialist view of history, production and reproduction of real life are, in the last instance, the demanding factor in history. Neither Marx nor I have asserted more than that. If anybody twists this into a claim that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms our statement into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phase. The economic situation is the basis, but all the factors of the superstructure-political forms of class struggle and its results, constitutions adopted by the victorious class after winning a battle, forms of law, and, more than that, the reflections of all these real struggles in the minds of the people involved, political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious views both in their early and their more developed, dogmatic form-all these factors also influence the course of historical struggles and in many cases play the dominant role in determining their form.
While, in a letter to Starkenburg he said:
Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, and artistic developments, etc., are based on economic development. But in addition, they all react upon one another and also on the economic base. The economic situation is not an original cause, which alone is active while all else is merely passive effect. There is, rather, mutual action on the basis of economic necessity, which always proves the determining factor in the last instance.
Artistic forms, philosophical ideas and law can and do act back on the way society, social systems and social relations move through history. The key to understanding society is to grasp it as a process of change and not as something static like a house. Metaphors can be “guiding threads” or mental prisons so it is important to remember that ideas located within social relationships and social systems are interactive and capable of change and being changed. Nevertheless, as Engels’ noted; ideas do not enjoy an historical independence and movement in history divorced and autonomous from social existence. The motor force of history is, after all, the class struggle no matter how unpalatable it might be to the aesthetic sensibility of the intellectual. And this intellectual error is precisely what is taught to philosophy, law, art and architectural students in today’s universities.
(photo: Flagstaff Gallery, Auckland. 2020)
