sort of coherent political formation. Visual artists, in fact, are not unlike the peasants Marx memorably described in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as being “formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.”50 Peasants’ lives were rooted in the form of small property; their collective interests didn’t fuse into anything greater but merely formed an aggregation of individual units, making them politically weak though numerically vast.
Contemporary artists—highly educated, concentrated in urban centers where they often interact professionally, and moreover thrown back into the working class because of the capricious nature of the art market—are generally much more naturally radical than the peasantry that formed the backbone of reaction in France. Their conditions are similar, however, in that as artists their collective labor doesn’t really add up to anything larger and is not related to any larger institution that they could take control of collectively. Artists merely form a collection of individualities, of individual franchises jostling to distinguish themselves from one another.
The upshot is that visual artists’ middle-class position is not merely a limit on their relation to larger social struggle but also on their ability to organize to transform their own conditions. Attempts to organize artists to address inequality have generally run aground on a simple but crucial issue: what institution is there to which they could relate in order to make collective demands? What power do they have besides moral authority? As Carl Andre, once an advocate of identifying radical art with blue-collar labor, said in 1979 when asked to join in a global “artist strike” against the system, “From whom would artists be withholding their art if they did go on strike? Alas, from no one but themselves.”51
Still, this reality doesn’t mean that artists’ protests cannot have a real and vital impact. In some ways, you could even say that the very unattached nature of artistic struggle gives it a certain mercurial power that can help serve as a detonator for wider change. To return to the example of the Art Workers’ Coalition, after forming in the late sixties to take on a wide range of issues affecting artists—from MoMA’s silence on the war in Vietnam to the museum’s “blackmail” of painters into donating work to its collection52—it collapsed after a few short years, undone by its wildly eclectic nature and endless squabbling. However, in the meantime, its highly visible pickets and outspoken protests at MoMA played a role in inspiring the museum’s workers to unionize.53
Consequences and Contradictions
At the end of this long journey, what has been gained by clarifying the class dynamics of contemporary artistic labor?
Among other things, clearly mapping the relation of art and class helps to sharpen our understanding of what continues to make visual art unique and therefore aids our understanding of what makes it interesting. Whatever the twists and turns of art-making in its “post-conceptual,” “post-studio,” “relational” era, visual art still remains rooted in a notion of labor that puts it at a right angle to the way work is experienced in much of the rest of our capitalist world. Visual art still holds the allure of being basically a middle-class field, where personal agency and professional ambition overlap. Such an admission saves you to some degree from the Manichean position of seeing art as either commercial and corrupt or noncommercial and pure (á la Stallabrass).
But there’s something else. A clear idea of class can also give a sense of the real stakes of art, providing a much-needed dose of realism. Even the best art theory can make fantastically overblown claims (Adorno’s notion of art as consciousness’s last tortured stand against capitalism or Hardt’s idea of art as a model for postindustrial “immaterial labor” in general). Art theory, in other words, suffers from an overinflated sense of its own importance. In a society overwhelmingly dominated by corporations and wage labor, accepting that visual art is middle class in nature also means beginning to see the natural limits of what you can promise for it as a critic or expect of it as an artist. That gives you a more realistic starting point for action.
I wrote earlier that the theory of class might provide the missing center of the debate about art. But in some ways, I confess, I think of it as decentering. Very intelligent people used to believe fervently that the heavens revolved around the Earth, a model inherited from a superannuated past and maintained by adding greater and greater layers of useless intellectual refinement as new phenomena were observed. For artists and critics, accepting the middle-class definition of artistic labor might be something like the shift away from the geocentric cosmology. It might allow them to cut through casuistic arguments and provide a much more reliable model for understanding the motion of the “art world” as it sails through the cultural firmament.
What is lost may be the mystified but comforting sense of self-importance that comes with believing that you are at the center of the universe. What is gained in return, however, will be a more scientific understanding of the forces that actually govern that universe—and that is worth the trade.
TWO
9.5 Theses on Art and Class
1.0 Class is an issue of fundamental importance for art.
1.1 Inasmuch as art is part of and not independent of society, and society is marked by class divisions, these will also affect the functioning and character of the sphere of the visual arts.
1.2 Since different classes have different interests and “art” is affected by these different interests, art has different values depending on from which class standpoint it is approached.
1.3 Understanding art means understanding class relations outside the sphere of the visual arts and how they affect that sphere as well as understanding class relations within the sphere of the visual arts itself.
1.4 In general, the idea of the “art world” serves as a way to deflect consideration of both these sets of relations.
1.5 The notion of an “art world” implies a sphere that is separate or set aside from the issues of the non-art world (and so separates it from class issues outside that sphere).
1.6 The notion of an “art world” also visualizes the sphere of the visual arts not as a set of conflicting interests, but as a confluence of professionals with a common interest: “art” (and so denies class relations within that sphere).
1.7 Anxiety about class in the sphere of the visual arts manifests in critiques of the “art market”; however, a critique of the art market is not the same as a critique of class in the sphere of the visual arts. Class is an issue that is more fundamental and determinate than the market.
1.8 The “art market” is approached differently by different classes; discussing the art market in the absence of understanding class interests serves to obscure the actual forces determining art’s situation.
1.9 Since class is a fundamental issue for art, art can’t have any clear idea of its own nature unless it has a clear idea of the interests of different classes.
2.0 Today, the ruling class, which is capitalist, dominates the sphere of the visual arts.
2.1 It is part of the definition of a ruling class that it controls the material resources of society.
2.2 The ruling ideologies of society, which serve to reproduce this material situation, also represent the interests of the ruling class.
2.3 The dominant values given to art, therefore, will be ones that serve the interests of the current ruling class.
2.4 Concretely, within the sphere of the contemporary visual arts, the agents whose interests determine the dominant values of art are: large corporations, including auction houses and corporate
