On February 25, 2020, the Christian Dior Autumn-Winter 2020 fashion show took place in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, in a 1.000 m2 building erected for the event. Over the delicately crème colored building entrance are four black letters: “Dior.” Underneath, on a wall inside the building, a neon light panel reads “I Say I.” The select audience mounts the seven steps stair to arrive in an ample white space with rows of seating on all four sides. The scenography is minimalistic, the space serene like a cathedral. But 15 neon light color panels hanging from the ceiling, spelling out feminist slogans like “Consent”, “Patriarchy = CO2”, “Patriarchy = Climate Emergency” and “Women’s Love Is Unpaid Labour,” bring us swiftly back to the earthly realm.
The neon light panels are, unmistakably, the work of Claire Fontaine: the much-acclaimed ready-made artist composed of James Turnhill and Fulvia Carnevale. To some, the name Carnevale will be associated with the Tiqqun collective that around the turn of the millennium became known for its distinct post-Situationist critique and its involvement in the spectacular Tarnac Nine arrests.[1]
In keeping with Claire Fontaine’s radical chic image, the feminist slogans originate with the Italian revolutionary feminist, Carla Lonzi, who has become a key reference for politicized parts of the contemporary art world. In the fashion industry, too, hardcore separatist feminist slogans now serve as the backdrop for haute couture or are printed on ready-to-wear Dior T-shirts flashed on the runway and sold for 620 euro apiece.
It was Maria Grazia Chiuri, the artistic director of Dior, who asked Claire Fontaine to do the scenography for her 2020 fashion show. Chiuri was a long-time admirer of Carla Lonzi, and already in her first season as creative director for the women line of Dior in 2016 she made a T-shirt that sported a Lonzi-sentence: “I Say I”.[2] Since then, statement T-shirts have become a stable in Chiuri’s collections.
In 2019, the slogan was picked from the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We Should All Be Feminists.” To the average customer, shopping online or in one of the 210 Dior-stores worldwide, these references remain opaque. Instead of crediting the authors and feminists, Dior opts for a somewhat looser sales speak. Referring generically to “the feminist inspiration of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s collections” is apparently a more tolerable way to push a “casual fit” T-shirt “that pairs easily with a multitude of styles” than to signal its anti-capitalist and radical feminist origins.
In the pavilion in the Tuileries Garden, fashion models paced the runway underneath flickering red, orange, and green lights. The word “consent” bent in neon, not one but three times. A strong statement that impressed fashion press reviewers. As Nicole Phelps wrote in Vogue:“What women have been saying for years is having real-life consequences.”[3] She was, of course, referring to the verdict of Harvey Weinstein. The day before the show, a New York court sentenced Weinstein to 23 years in prison for rape and criminal sexual assault. “This afternoon, as we sat assembled underneath the flashing neon signs made in collaboration with the anonymous artist collective Claire Fontaine, it was impossible not to feel a twinge of vindication.” The “we” present at the show included a select group from the fashion press and an impressive list of celebrities, actors, singers, and models like Demi Moore, Sigourney Weaver, Cara Delevingne, Carla Bruni, Keira Knightley, and Nina Dobrev.
Weinstein’s trial had become a rallying point in a global feminist protest wave aimed at dismantling patriarchy everywhere. In countries like Argentina and Poland, women and feminized bodies had taken to the streets since 2016, protesting the intersection of financial and domestic violence. What became globally known as the #MeToo movement contained radical anti-capitalist perspectives but also reformist stances that did not seriously challenge patriarchal capitalist society. In many situations, feminist critique came dangerously close to an individualized aesthetic gesture.
As Weinstein was sentenced in New York, Chiuri was seated at the table of honor across from Emmanuel Macron in the Élysée Palace. The president fêted creatives from the Paris fashion community with a gilded soirée: asparagus, scallops and chocolate cake were washed down with white Mercurey 1er Cru 2018 from Domaine Michel Juillot, a 2009 Château Gazin from Pomeral and Jacquart Cuvée Alpha 2010 champagne. Meanwhile, on the streets of Paris, masses of people continuously protested a controversial pension reform that Macron’s government first proposed in December 2019. Throughout 2019 and the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic hit France, numerous strike actions and demonstrations took place in Paris and elsewhere in the country. As with the Yellow Vest protests, the police answered with violence. On January 9, 2020, a police officer fired a riot control gun point-blank at protesters.
That autonomist feminism ends up as the glittering décor of a multi-million dollar fashion conglomerate like Dior is significant beyond the fact that Claire Fontaine now willingly lends her radical chic brand to this oligarchic mess of filthy rich art collectors, venture capitalists, and neo-liberal politicians. The roots of this contemporary “farce” lie deeper than what art critics typically refer to as the neo-liberalization of art. Neo-liberalism is not an explanation, but what remains to be explained. Claire Fontaine’s selling out to the fashion industry is not a question of an artist’s moral defeat but a late capitalist cryptogram that needs to be deciphered in political economic terms. That is to say, we need to address the contradictions of the art world through an examination of the capitalist mode of production in which it is embedded. This is the task of materialist art criticism.
How to formulate a materialist art criticism today? In this essay we will present some preliminary notes arguing for the need of a “value-theoretical” framework for the critique of contemporary art. We will be using Claire Fontaine and “the intersectional ready-made artist’s” collaboration with Dior as a starting point for a discussion of the relation between art and the capitalist mode of production. We will reassess the Marxist critique of the “culture industry” in the light of recent developments in contemporary art and argue that we have reached a point when it seems more clear than ever, that the idea of art, like the value-form of the commodity to which it is inextricably tied, is becoming obsolete.
Art into fashion
The collaboration between Claire Fontaine and Dior marks the culmination of a historical process where experimental art has become ever more closely knitted into the fashion industry.The case of how Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings ended up as the décor of a photo shoot for Vogue in 1951 provides a useful historical vantage point from which to begin analyzing the contemporary fusion of art and fashion. The Vogue image spread shows haute couture models draped in that season’s choicest gowns posing in front of Pollock drip paintings then exhibited in Betty Parsons Gallery. The colors of the dresses duplicate the colors in the paintings, art and its representations merge seamlessly into instantly enjoyable color images.
As a proxy for the blind fate of modern art as a whole, Pollock was in over his head, unable to control the way his art circulated in the geo-politics of the Cold War and in the booming post-war economy.[4] T.J. Clark, famously described the 1951 Vogue image spread as depicting the “bad dream of modernism,” a confirmation of the most depressing suspicion that modern art was part of the general policing of previously uncharted spaces outside the reach of market and capital.[5]
Pollock, a signature artist of his times, was complacent through and through. Before the postwar generation spearheaded by the “American super avantgarde” chose the path of least resistance to capitalism, some artists attempted to confront the emerging consumer culture head-on by twerking or twisting its meanings; subversion through subtle or excessive mimicry. Take Salvador Dali or Wilhelm Freddie, super suave surrealist artist impresarios, both of whom got into fashion to beat the industry at its own game. By small, subtle displacements or outrageous provocations, such artists tried to expose the surrealist marvelous hidden in the abode of capitalism.
Freddie made a series of dresses for the Danish designer Carli Gry in 1944. On the chest of one blue dress, Freddie placed a big red female mouth. Underneath the lips, a green branch with a white leaf was attached.[6] The blurring of the boundaries between dress and body, human and nature, was intended as an exposition of the ecstatic core of life; it was about the mysteries of existence, ghosts and spirits, imagined but also real. Freddie might come off looking ironic, but he was dead serious.
The marvelous was not merely a sales trick. To Freddie, the handmade dress was a deliberate contrast to the culture industry’s subjecting of still more dimensions of human life, including art, to the market dictates of standardized commodity production. Freddie made small material and symbolic changes as gestures towards an outside, or even an inside, a transcendence of some kind, a passageway to freedom. The difference between Freddie’s defiant gesture and our world of serialized exaggerations can hardly be overestimated.
The company Christian Dior S.A is owned by Groupe Arnault SAS, the family holding company of the French billionaire Bernard Arnault – incidentally one of the most influential art collectors in the world. The Dior brand is the 14th most valuable brand in the world and is valued at 6 billion dollars in 2020. The Groupe Arnault owns the LVMH Moët Hennesy Louis Vuitton conglomerate, which comprises among other brands Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs and Kenzo. An op-ed in the Financial Times called the LVMH “the most valuable European company.” The op-ed further noted: “that ought to worry Europeans” because “LVMH is just a collection of established luxury brands.”[7] In our late capitalist celebrity culture, brands are important. But can the still more massive investments in high fashion brands and contemporary art refuel a capitalist growth engine running on empty?
More than four decades of economic downturn suggests that capital’s recent flight into the contemporary art-and-fashion-stratosphere is part of a general pattern of financialization ongoing since the 1970s. In our age of deindustrialization, falling productivity rates across the industrial sector has provided a strong incentive for billionaires to start pouring money into culture, and into (the privatized) institution of art in particular. Art and fashion share a peculiar structural feat that makes them attractive to venture capitalists: the measure of “value” in the lofty realm of the Dior cathedral is obscured in equal measure by a persistent bourgeois art metaphysics and the constantly changing whims of the art market.
Although capital investments increasingly flow in that direction, it is hard to imagine that anyone truly believes that the art-and-fashion industry’s make-believe world of constantly renewable cycles of inspired “novelty” will translate into sustained economic growth. The upshot for the billionaires is that “the suspension of disbelief” is part of the magic that keeps stupidly oversized Triple S Balenciaga sneakers, or a Supreme jacket with a beautiful stitching of a burning police car, hot on the market as the capitalist world economy stands on the brink of collapse.
Claire Fontaine’s neon signs in the Dior show makes Freddie’s experiments seem like they belong to a different world. A lost miniature world of competing visions and programmes, parties and organizations, reformists and revolutionaries. A world where some artists were still almost fanatically dedicated to the idea that art could be used a lever for revolution: Debord and the Situationists, famously, excluded from their ranks Gruppe SPUR and Jørgen Nash because the latter refused to leave their artistic identities behind and wanted to engage in a here-and-now activism through artistic pranks.
Debord and his Parisian faction strongly objected to the idea that individual art works created by an artist could be truly critical. Only as elements of a ‘constructed situation’ could artistic gestures be true to the critical project of modern art, Debord argued. Despite their differences, however, both Situationist factions shared a die-hard commitment to the idea of “realizing art” as a step towards the revolutionary supersession of the capitalist economy. Today there’s apparently nothing to refuse. How could someone like Freddie imagine that the surreal existed, and that art had a transcendent dimension of refusal to be tapped into? Why did Debord even bother with all Hegelian-Marxist talk about “negation” and the end of art?Why not join the fun – or the horror – get paid and get on with it?
There is no point in belaboring the apparent endlessness of art. And to take recourse to the tired notion of “recuperation” would require a belief in critique that is evidently missing from the picture today. And has been missing for a while. From the perspective of Claire Fontaine’s Dior show, 2020, even someone like Andy Warhol—who carefully fostered an image of himself as cool and detached—comes off looking like a disillusioned modern artist hopelessly embedded in a vanished class politics.[8] A reworking of brand images that ironically cater to an élite clientele’s nostalgia for the “real” by pointing, repeatedly, to the extravagances of late capitalist society.
In the case of Claire Fontaine, it is not just irony and pastiche. There is a feminist stance in the belated Brechtian gesture of juxtaposing models in expensive clothes to radical slogans. But it is less a question of Claire Fontaine intervening in fashion or ironically collaborating with Dior – the 1990s look distant by now, Bernadette Corporation or Art club 2000 as heavy-handed New York insider/outsider ‘critique’ – than Dior instrumentalizing feminist art as a temporary filler for the emptiness of fashion. Claire Fontaine’s contribution to the Dior brand extends all the way down the catwalk: A new version of their Newsfloor installation consisting of spreads from Le Monde. Due to copyright issues, the news pages that made up the catwalk had been pixelated to form an unreadable pattern. Like a parable of contemporary art, this fashion carpet references an outside world without any specificity.
The limits of art criticism
If Pollock’s abstract art in Vogue 1951 signals the “tragedy” of modern art, then Claire Fontaine’s collaboration with Dior half a century later is a straightforward example of what art critic Hal Foster, recalling Marx’s famous quip about historical repetition, would call a “farce.”[9] The tragedy-farce pattern was originally applied to modern art by the German literary historian Peter Bürger, who contrasted the interwar avantgarde’s tragic defeat by fascism, Stalinism and war with the “empty play” of neo-avantgardes in the postwar period.[10] In his collection of essays, What Comes After Farce, Foster extends the notion of “farce” from late modern to contemporary art.[11]
The context for Foster’s book is the recent Trump-era’s fascist creep into all corners of the cultural realm and the increasing difficulty to distinguish between “the critical and the dystopian.” In contrast to Bürger, however, Foster surmises that there is still a potential for genuine critique in the institution of art – in spite of everything collapsing around it.[12] Extreme situations call for extreme responses. And in Foster’s view, contemporary artists like Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Claire Fontaine are at the forefront pushing against the limits of the historical situation. But even with these “critical” artists, “sometimes, too, the ambient nihilism of the neoliberal order seems redoubled as much as challenged”.[13]
In light of this situation, Foster is hard pressed to come up with a framework for the study of art that can explain the contradictions of the current moment. In the introduction to his book, Foster critically revisits his claims from The Return of the Real from 1996 and concludes that the “coherence” of the neo-avantgarde project that he argued for then is no longer self-evident. Foster’s reference to Marx (alongside the fact that he now publishes with the Left-wing flagship Verso) might at first glance come off as a step in the direction of a materialist art history of the kind that his now deceased German colleague practiced in his day. Foster, however, is reluctant to cede too much ground to Bürger’s bleak Marxist art history. Unfortunately, he has little to offer in its place.
Foster’s defunct Freudian model of artistic development continues to loom in the background of his otherwise crisp art criticism. And Freud is still not that appropriate when it comes to explaining historically recurring cycles of events. But the real problem for a postmodern art critic like Foster is something like this: to extend the tragedy-farce pattern to encompass historical transformations to the institution of art since the 1960s, and to contemporary art since 1989 in particular, is admitting to a recurring cultural loop, a historical “logic” even, that sits uneasily with October-doxa. The cardinal sin for postmodernists, of course, is to let any overarching historical narrative slip in through the backdoor. But the refusal to think systematically about the relationship between art and capital accumulation means that the question that Foster raises – what comes after farce? – necessarily remains unanswered. As Foster willingly admits: “I suck at predictions.”[14]
To us, the fact that Foster is unable, or unwilling, to take the next logical step in his own analysis is something like a symptomatic expression of the historical limits of contemporary art criticism. Foster’s reading of Claire Fontaine’s art practice in the essay “Human Strike” exemplifies how such faux materialist art criticism fails to see beyond the artistic duo’s critical self-discursivation. To be fair, Foster’s essay was published before Claire Fontaine openly declared her “shared vision of the world” with the largest European fashion company. But does it make a difference?
While some art critics might see Claire Fontaine’s brazen move into the fashion industry as some kind of “betrayal” to the critical cause (akin to when European social democrats are charged with treason time and again…), we find it completely in line with her art project. After all, as the French painter Gustave Courbet stated as early as in 1861, “the real artists are those who drive their epoch right up to the point where others left off”.[15] If there is any “coherence” to the history of the neo-avantgarde and its continuation into contemporary art, Claire Fontaine merely draws its comical conclusion. She should be recommended for carrying through.
Foster seems reluctant to give up on the idea of art as a refuge for critical reflection, so he is “clutching at etymological straws” to produce the argument that the present farce points to something beyond its original French meaning as “a comic interlude in a religious play”.[16] To Foster, the idea of an “interlude” suggests, at the least, that “another time will arrive.” A time for which (as we can infer from the corresponding footnote) “new models of art-historical time are needed.” What other models? Foster’s reluctance to return to Bürger’s schematic and teleologic Marxist model of art history seems reasonable. However, by renouncing Bürger’s materialist model, Foster misses the opportunity to think about what might come after farce, politically as well as artistically, what happens after the end of the end of history, how artists might respond to dada politicians that replace politics with nonsense and buffoonery, or at least try to understand why contemporary art in many ways appears as an extended farce to begin with.
Claire Fontaine’s collaboration with Dior offers an opportunity to rethink the historical analysis of art. Claire Fontaine brings into sharp relief the difficulty of analyzing the merger of art and fashion through radical feminism. We are not merely confronted with a problem of art being recuperated by capital, of critical gestures being confined to what we, pace Bürger, could call the art institution’s expanded arena of “empty play.” Rather, from the point of view of the “total” social function of art, Claire Fontaine’s art is a “realism” that bespeaks the historical impasse of capitalism at large.
There’s nothing particularly new to what we are saying about Claire Fontaine here. After more than a decade of “new materialism” it bears repeating that to analyze individual artists one must zoom out to the level of the social totality. This, in a sense, has been the task of real materialist art history since its beginning. Think of Max Raphael’s analysis of Picasso as “the organized individualism” of monopoly capitalism, or Werckmeister on Kiefer as “the greatest German artist in the era of the Gulf War.”[17] A materialist rethinking of any given individual artistic practice or art movement must address the possibilities and limits of the historical situation in which it is pronounced.
Claire Fontaine’s art practice is an expression of contemporary art’s conflicted relationship with a slowing capital accumulation, it is a symptom of its time, and any attempt to decipher its peculiar aesthetics or “style” references must begin from this simple fact. As Meyer Shapiro argued in his 1937 essay on “The Nature of Abstract Art,” to examine the succession of artistic movements and period styles in terms of “a theory of immanent exhaustion and reaction” alone is insufficient.[18] Realism today means something entirely different from what it used to mean.
Much has changed in art and society since Benjamin celebrated the cinematic apparatus, and Adorno dismissed jazz out-of-hand (as a false cipher of individualism in the age of conformism). The Western Marxist analysis of art remains the starting point, no doubt, but we have to bring the analysis up to date. Historical specificity remains key in any materialist analysis as Korsch repeatedly stressed.[19] Although we have to start from the tradition of Marxist art history, it is not a question of going back to Western Marxism, or “returning” to Bürger, Werckmeister, or T.J. Clark. The task is rather to bring Bürger et al into the 21st century and continuing the materialist analysis of art.
Some have interpreted Western Marxism’s “obsession” with culture and the study of art as a philosophical regression—alongside the demise of the “organic” intellectual, the author’s alienation from the working class, the Marxist politician losing touch with its proletarian constituency, etc. We think that art and culture moved to the forefront of the most clear-sighted critical analyses of the 20th century for historically immanent reasons.[20] When Western Marxists analyzed art in the 1930s it was with a view to art’s conflicted relation to the then newly emerging phenomenon of mass politics. And although today’s political mobilization happens mostly by means of social media logics, the method of materialist art analysis remains largely valid.
Today we have exited “the short 20th century” and are living through the end of capitalism. Marxist analyses of art took a heavy blow but have remained pivotal to any critical understanding of capitalist society. Since the 1960s, various new readings of Marx have dispensed with problematic core assumptions of “traditional Marxism.” The changing political climate since the death of Stalin, the demise of his cult of followers, the emergence of a feminist and an anti-racist expansion of the Marxian notion of class along with a rediscovery of certain key texts by Marx and by his most astute interpreters—the works of I.I. Rubin and E. Pashukani are key in this context—contributed to radical reinterpretations of Marxist methods, particularly in countries such as Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, and Norway.[21]
One of the key theoretical outcomes of the 1960s’ and 70s’ Marxist revisionism was a renewed focus on the “riddle of the of the commodity-structure” that carried over into the field of inquiry that is now broadly referred to as “value-form theory” or “value-critique.”[22]Unfortunately, for all its theoretical sophistication, value-form theory has surprisingly little to say about culture and art.
The anachronism of art
One way to approach the task of analyzing contemporary art as part of a global social totality is to try to use insights from value theory. To understand the institution of art in capitalist society, in order to critique and surpass it, we need a self-reflexive and embedded theoretical apparatus akin to that which Moishe Postone provided in his reinterpretation of Marx in Time, Labor, and Social Domination.[23] Marxist critics like Marina Vishmidt, Dave Beech, Jasper Bernes, Daniel Spaulding, Sianne Ngai, Annie McClanahan, or Jaleh Mansoor, to name a few, have all taken important steps in that direction.[24] Drawing on their analyses, what would it mean to rethink the case of Claire Fontaine—as a proxy for contemporary art as a whole—from the point of view of Marxist value-theory?
First of all, attention to how trends in contemporary art are historically tied to the social matrix of the capital-labor relation calls into question traditional art historical methods that claim "the work of art" as a category of universal, transhistorical validity. A value-critical analysis of contemporary art would have to begin by dispensing the idea that “art” is an unchanging social fact rooted in human nature. Considered from a value-theoretical perspective, what we call “art” is a historically specific category inseparable from the categories of bourgeois political economy with which it arose, not a transcendental anchor point for the history of art.
Within a value-theoretical framework, the category of “art” becomes the object of critique, not the standpoint of art criticism, just as labor is the object of critique and not the standpoint from which to critique the capitalist mode of production. It is not a question of “realizing” art anymore than it is a question of “liberating” labor. The end of “programmatism”—the affirmation of labor and the worker’s identity that was built around it—coincides with the historical impossibility to go on affirming “art” as holding critical or revolutionary potential.[25]
What adds a sense of urgency to these preliminary notes as we move deeper yet into the uneven pattern of global crisis and insurrection is that the current mash-up of fashion, art, and aesthetics is at the forefront of today’s political struggle for mastery in the cultural realm. As we write these notes, late capitalist fascists like Steve Bannon are organizing behind the scenes of Biden’s “Keynesianism” to manufacture an alternative reality mediated by a constant bombardment of contradictory images, protocols, and ideas.
It’s about time to heed Benjamin’s call to disabuse ourselves of the last remnants of bourgeois art mysticism beginning with the cherished belief in the “autonomy of art.” [26] The “autonomy of art” is a repository for all kinds of potential regressions to the cultic and a catalyst for the bourgeois re-enchantment of the work of art. As observers and critics of contemporary art, it is not sufficient to rely on the would-be “critical” intent of artists like Claire Fontaine as they continue to pursue their tactics of “over-identification” that apparently share in form what they (supposedly) refuse in content.[27]
Rather than critiquing the moral shortcomings of individual artists for colluding with capital we need to advance a categorical critique of “art” as such. It is no longer a particular aesthetic or “style” that must replace another, as when Courbet’s realism supplanted romanticism, it is the idea of “art” that we must bid farewell (again, or still). We must get rid of ourselves as artists and art critics not so much on the grounds that art cannot be a vehicle for revolution, a substitute for political critique, or a place for disappointed nostalgia, but because the idea of art, like the value-form of the commodity to which it is tied, has proven itself increasingly “anachronistic” if not altogether obsolete.[28]
The paradoxes of the work of art
To analyze art is to analyze capitalism: those days when artists, critics, and curators could still meaningfully appeal to the ancient dictum that art’s social function is to “instruct and delight” are long gone. The nature of artistic work has changed since Courbet, and representation has been declared dead and resurrected more times than anyone can count. But the nature of the contradictions of the work of art remains the same as in the hey-day of French realism debates. Art professionals are apparently still invested in the idea of “art” as something that in and by itself transcends the material realm and offers respite from the harsh realities of day-to-day life.
Discussing recent attacks on the capitalist institution of art in the US—from “Decolonize this Place” to the “Strike MoMA” campaign—one art critic tellingly imagines a less confrontative approach to transforming the institution: contemplating French modern painting, where nothing less than “a granular level of information manifests itself in a cognitive bounty lost even a few feet away.”[29] Instead of supporting the call to decolonize the museum and decouple it from the circuits of capitalist valorization, this art critic envisions a more “modest” museum where “the external apparatus of prestige falls away when the actual traces of human ingenuity, bearing their replete messages from the past, fill one’s field of vision—beside which even the most accurate reproduction is still a kind of insult.”[30]
Claire Fontaine can imagine no such thing as a more modest museum, and besides, she does not fancy painting much. Instead of tinkering with perspective, composition, color, and motif, the readymade artist prefers to “work through metonymic displacements, and she creates much of her meaning through metaphorical condensations” as Foster observes.[31] Discussing the artwork Change (2006), Foster sees the transformation of American quarters (“pocket change”) into box-cutter blades as an example of how Claire Fontaine “updates the readymade” by way of subtle material and discursive displacements.[32]
The “ready-made” artist Claire Fontaine, the name comes from a French branch of stationery supplies, adds insult to insult to the bourgeois conceptions of art, originality, and genius. Still, she appears to go nowhere. And perhaps that is the point of her all-too-subtle displacements in which she rehearses well-worn avantgarde tropes. But why does she even bother? As opposed to in Courbet’s time, there is nothing inherently radical about espousing realism today. At best, this is admitting defeat and making a spectacular show of one’s political incompetence. Is this what our current moment calls for?
The forerunners in the art of displacements, Foster teaches, are Brecht and the Situationists.[33] But one major difference between, say, the Situationist practice of détournement and Claire Fontaine’s displacements, is that the first was an experimental method directed at subverting “the institution of art” with a view to the suppression of politics whereas the latter is an aesthetic refined to meet the social demands of “ambiguity” and “complexity” currently placed on works of art.
Most critics and art professionals today remain committed to a theoretical view of art that our current crisis renders practically obsolete. The idea that art possesses a critical or even emancipatory potential by virtue of the artist’s critical intentions or, conversely, by virtue of the work of art’s complex formal achievements, or its “cognitive bounty,” relies on a basic contradictory assumption about art that continues to haunt bourgeois art criticism. Bürger identified this contradiction as constitutive of the institution of art in bourgeois society, and we see no reason why not to extend this observation to the contemporary art world: “On the one hand, art is called upon to be the alternative to the real world, which it can be only if it is set up in total opposition to that world; on the other hand, it is precisely this isolation that puts art in danger of becoming ‘empty play’.”[34]
By posing as an avant-garde without political illusions, Claire Fontaine holds up a mirror to the endless farce that is contemporary art. The virtue of Claire Fontaine’s Dior show, positively speaking, is that it exposes the artist for what she is: a social construct mirroring our current influencer culture: “I say I.” Contemporary art criticism reveals its game by the fact that it takes the most banal reiteration of the readymade gesture and interprets it as critical in intent even if (or, in a kind of inversion, particularly so because) blatantly affirmative.
After modern art
Much speaks for the fact – as T.J. Clark suggests in his analysis of Pollock’s drip paintings in Vogue as an end-point “in the line of art we call modernist” – that modern art was involved with capitalist modernity to the degree that it, too, was “tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets.”[35] If capital accumulation is the motor of artistic production, Claire Fontaine’s statement in Vogue that she shares “a vision of the world” with Dior, should be interpreted as a performative acceptance of art’s capitalist fate, a fully conscious reckoning with the fact that the market was always, and remains, the true “element” of art.
The ready-made artist has woken from the “bad dream of modernism” to realize that, unlike her modernist predecessor, art does not offer a glimpse of utopia anymore. And “I say I” is surely a statement that leaves little room for the modernist assumption that “art would absolve or transfigure its circumstances, and find a way back to totality.”[36] However, contrary to when Pollock’s drip paintings appeared as a backdrop for a fashion statement in Vogue, this time over the circumstances are not “external” to the work of art.
One might feel urged to jump to conclusions here about how art is now integral to the market, or, in Marxist terms, how art is now fully “subsumed.” But as Dave Beech has convincingly argued in his important book Art and Value, art is “exceptional” to the capitalist mode of production insofar as artistic labor is not directly generative of value.[37] As Beech explains, art work is not value-productive work in any straightforward sense. Though works of art are evidently bought and sold like any other commodity, the work of art is not compatible with the capitalist mode of production. In economic terms, the work of art is an “anomaly.”
Even though the nature of contemporary artistic work is increasingly similar to late capitalist forms of “creative” work, it makes little sense to apply to art production a Marxist analysis centering on the extraction of “surplus value.”[38] Although many artists find themselves working at some point in their career as underpaid assistants to other artists or as art workers laboring under extremely precarious, and, in extreme cases even deadly, conditions (to be crushed under a Richard Serra sculpture, as it happened to rigger Raymond Johnson in 1971, is a particularly grim death), the artist as such is not a wage-laborer but something closer to an individual entrepreneur. Moreover, there is little to no correlation between an art work’s selling price and the socially necessary labor time expended on making it.
The claim about art’s anomalous status is a purely economic claim. Beech does not accept ideas about art’s supposedly “transcendent” character and he rightly dismisses all appeals to art’s special degree of self-determination within the social relations of capitalist production. And yet, Beech, too, ends up affirming, despite repeated assurances to the contrary, some version of the problematic idea of art’s critical autonomy: “Art’s critical independence – the very possibility of art’s critique of commodity society –[is] rooted in its anomalous and paradoxical relationship to the capitalist mode of production, namely art’s commodification without commodification.”[39]
As Jasper Bernes and Daniel Spaulding note, the term “commodification without commodification” amply suggests that Beech economic analysis of art runs into trouble at the point when it becomes time to explain art’s exceptional status. One of the main problems in Beech’s analysis, Bernes and Spaulding suggest, is that it is thoroughly “production-centric.”In bracketing the “market,” and the way that art circulates, to center instead on the abstract concept of artistic labor, Beech overlooks how production and circulation are but moments of a historically differentiated—and ideologically mediated—“totality,” the contradictions of which so called Western Marxism has been trying to grasp since the interwar years.
Beech’s one-sided focus on the social-division-of-labor fails to account for the “unity-in-separation” between labor and art under capitalist social relations because it assumes that “labor” is the original unity, and “art” merely a part of the broken whole that doesn’t add up. Beech shares with Marxist “labor-theories of art” a tendency to abstractly oppose different “kinds” of labor (that is: labor differing in content, say, intellectual and manual labor for instance) without asking why “art” appears in a form that is antithetical, or “anomalous,” to the kind of socially necessary labor coded as “work.” As Bernes and Spaulding succinctly put it: “Beech seems to take it as a priori that art (or more accurately, artistic labor) cannot be subsumed to capital. True enough, in practice. However, this fact is not an explanation of art’s exceptional status, but is rather the historical anomaly that remains to be explained.”[40]
Form, not content
Contrary to Marxists that still advocate for a “labor theory of art,” we do not think that one must descend into the hidden abode of production to reveal the secrets of contemporary art. The key to understanding art’s “exceptionalism” lies not in concrete labor but in “abstract labor.” Understanding the political economy of modern through to contemporary art has less to do with changes to the organization of labor in the workplace or artist’s studio, or the material content of artworks produced there, than with the social form which mediates this content and separates art from life.
The term “abstract labor,” of course, is itself an abstraction but one that Marx used to bring attention to the “dual character” of labor under capitalist relations of production. With the consolidation of capitalist society, as Norbert Trenkle explains, drawing on Roswitha Scholz’ theory of value-dissociation, “the historical establishment of labor is accompanied by the formation of further separate spheres of society, into which all those dissociated (abgespaltenen) moments are banished, spheres which themselves take on an exclusive character: leisure, privacy, culture, politics, religion, and so on.”[41]
Art (as an abstract universal category) is no more rooted in human nature than the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” is. It is not until the advent of modern industrial society that art is abstractly set up in opposition to or dissociated from the structural demands of capital accumulation: this is part of the ideological operation of a bourgeois society to which art is something like its constitutive exception, an activity where the anarchist imagination can survive in separate form.
The separation of art and “creative” work from the more mundane aspects of everyday life refracts the total process of capital accumulation historically. The move to “conceptual” art forms in the 1970s clearly index the broader economic situation of the postwar moment. The restructuring of capitalism and art was necessitated by the onset of “deindustrialization,” a concept that relays a more complex dynamic where some lines of industrial work are increasingly made superfluous by a combination of automation, outsourcing, and financialization while yet other lines of “immaterial” work are gradually introduced or economically accentuated.[42]
In a somewhat haphazardly Situationist wording, we can say that the freedom of art inversely mirrors the efficiency of wage labor, the artist is free in so far as her work has “no social consequences,” as Bürger phrases it.[43] This is to say that art is not merely exceptional to the capitalist mode of production as such, but exceptional, more specifically, to “abstract labor”, and, by implication, to economic “value.” Abstract labor thus becomes the pivot, the invisible center, around which all other social activities become organized and “valued.”
Following the German theorist of value Robert Kurz, we might say that compared with social reproduction activities that historically fall outside the wage-labor nexus but are still necessary to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, art plays a less obvious if equally “reproductive” role.As Western Marxists from Walter Benjamin to Peter Bürger have argued, art, on an institutional level, functions as an ideological holding pattern akin to that of organized religion in pre-capitalist religious societies. As Benjamin explained in his artwork essay, art was released from its ties to religious cult and ideologically repurposed in capitalist everyday life.[44]
Art may be, as Beech argues, economically “exceptional” to capitalism but it is integral to the social edifice of power that ensures capital accumulation. In addition to its ideological function, art also plays a key role in a late capitalist economy based largely on what Marx calls “fictitious capital.”Contemporary art, as Marina Vishmidt points out, functions more and more like a financial asset. There is quite clearly a “parallel between capital and contemporary art as they come to constitute the poles of a society structured around speculation.”[45]
Lizards in the Sand
Claire Fontaine’s capitulation (if that is what it is) is not a new “problem.” It is a restatement of one of the constitutive paradoxes of modern art. As Marxist art historians from Lu Märten and Arnold Hauser to David Craven and Gene Ray have long explained, modern art was an internal process of resistance and critical reflection of the larger process of modernization. Unable to effectively challenge modernization, modern art ended up accelerating the creative destructiveness of the capitalist relations of production and internalized capital’s class violence, expropriation, and racialized exclusion through abstraction or primitivism.[46] Contemporary art, as Claire Fontaine underscores, has ceased to believe in abstraction as a placeholder for aesthetic autonomy. Realism is the name of the game.
Claire Fontaine’s collaboration with Dior underscores that any contemporary artist, however critical, must eventually “consent” to the changing whims of fashion as much as any individual capitalist must observe the law of value.The merger of contemporary art and fashion is part of a broader development where large parts of global contemporary art has become indissociable from a post-Fordist credit economy that is running on empty. Art is one of the go-to places for investors unwilling to invest in production. Julian Stallabrass termed this development Art Incorporated, Hito Steyerl talks about Duty Free Art.[47] Today, as Arne de Boever explains, artistic “value” is finally recognized for what it is: a financial asset.[48]
In his time, Debord was confronted with a coordinated or centralized spectacle where the state was to some extent still capable of controlling image production and producing “culture” as part of nation building campaigns. Today, the creative powers of the state are no longer centralized and micromanaged by experts. To a large extent, the production of art and culture has been “set free” and “democratized,” precisely as many postwar artists and critics hoped for. In our contemporary influencer culture, we all participate in a “personalization” of a diffuse spectacle that takes on more and more imbecile forms, from QAnon to Yeezy sneakers or Facetune.
Critical art can be a sad, belated respite, or at best, a “comical interlude.” But this is more a question of institutional framing; the virtual realities of the commodity world are already completely broken and no one bothers hiding the emptiness of the whole operation. Art and fashion, same-same. Destitution is an objective process now. It is clear for all to see that we are living through an ever-worsening crisis of profit production with brutal consequences for hundreds of millions of people.[49] Anarchy is the name of the game. The bourgeoisie has no plan. Most attempts to hold things together turn out to accelerate the epochal ending, Macron is probably the most striking and comical example of that.
Today, different breeds of late fascists hold together the political demos through racist attacks and fear mongering. Pro-revolutionaries all over the world are trying to figure out what it would take for the uprisings to become a social revolution. But the lessons of 2011 and 2019 are not particularly good. The bitter lessons of the failed revolution in Syria hangs like the sword of Damocles over any attempt at revolution today. Uprisings turn into apocalyptic civil wars, not revolutions in the present conjuncture.
Everything else but the art world is falling apart. Makes sense that this make-believe world of aesthetic wonders still attracts much hopeful youth. The global disintegration into a state of civil war and ongoing climate disaster, however, still goes mostly unnoticed in the art world, or is aesthetically translated into a spectacle of doom. For many art critics and contemporary artists—Superflex’ Après vous, le déluge (2019) comes to mind here—it is apparently easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to contemporary art’s complacency.
As French billionaires spectacularly compete in hoarding and exhibiting art, would-be critical artists like Claire Fontaine apparently relish the thought that their work is somehow antagonist to the system that has now fully annexed it. Our suggestion is that more artists and art critics take heed of the historical situation and bid this residue of bourgeois art mysticism goodbye. Take Claire’s advice and get rid of yourself. Or follow Lonzi’s example: leave the art world behind, like a lizard loses its skin…
[1] For a presentation of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee in the context of art and revolution, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “Art, Revolution and Communisation”, in: Third Text, vol. 26, nr. 2, pp. 229-242. For a presentation of the case against the so-called Tarnac Nine, see Alberto Toscano: “The War Againdt Pre-Terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection”, in: Radical Philosophy, no. 154, 2009, pp. 2-7. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Carnevale was a student of Alain Brossat at Paris 8 University and part of the milieu of exiled Italian Communists around Oreste Scalzone. The Tiqqun collective was of course also friends with Giorgio Agamben and together they developed the notion of destitution.
[2] The appointment of Chiuri in 2016 was quite a departure from the scandal-ridden years when the British designer John Galliano was head designer of Dior. In 2000 Galliano presented a collection inspired by homeless people and in 2011 he made anti-semitic comments to a Jewish woman in a bar in Paris saying: “People like you would be dead today, your mothers, your forefathers would be fucking gassed and dead.” “I love Hitler.”
[3] Nicole Phelps: “Christian Dior: Fall 2020 Ready-To-Wear”, in: Vogue US, 25 February 2020, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2020-ready-to-wear/christian-dior?utm_medium=internal&utm_source=vogue.co.uk
[4] As was made clear already in the early 1970s by, among others Eva Cockcroft, the so-called New York School, Pollock but also Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman and other painters, was turned into a “political agent” in the Cold War by an emergent class of liberal internationalists in the US State Department promoting America as a free and cultivated society. Eve Cockcroft: “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War”, in: Artforum, vol. 12, no. 10, 1974, pp. 39-41.
[5] T.J. Clark: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 306.
[6] Cf. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “Freddie’s Avant-Garde Strategies”, in: Dorthe Aagesen (ed.): Wilhelm Freddie: Stick the Fork in the Eye (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2009), pp. 124-135.
[7] Martin Wolf: “China is wrong to think the US faces inevitable decline”, in: Financial Times, 27 April, 2021,https://www.ft.com/content/8336169e-d1a8-4be8-b143-308e5b52e355
[8] See Anthony E. Grudin: Warhol’s Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[9] Hal Foster: What Comes After Farce (London & New York: Verso Books, 2020).
[10] See Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde [Theorie der Avantgarde, 1974], trans. Michael Shaw(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984).
[11] Foster explicitly engaged with Bürger’s influential reading of the ‘integration’ of the inter-war avant-garde’s “heroic” attack on the institution of art in post-war neo-avant-garde practices such as Pop Art and Minimal Art in a chapter in his 1996 The Return of the Real. Foster was critical towards Bürger’s rather quick dismissal of post-war practices and levelled a number of relevant critiques towards Bürger’s rather one-dimensional analysis of the expansion of the art work in the different neo-avant-gardes. Foster argued that the neo-avant-garde in a kind of Freudian after-effect showed the meaning of the attack on the institution of art, making explicit its norms and conventions. Neither Bürger nor Foster managed to embed the emergence and disappearance of the avant-gardes in a broader historical analysis that accounts for the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dynamics of the 20th century. Cf. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties (Winchester & Washington: Zero Books, 2018).
[12] Hal Foster: What Comes After Farce, p. ix.
[13] Ibid., p. ix.
[14] Hal Foster: “Out of This Disaster, New Approaches to Art May Emerge,” in: Literary Hub, May 2020: https://lithub.com/out-of-this-disaster-new-approaches-to-art-may-emerge/Ibid.
[15] Gustave Courbet: Peut-on enseigner l'art? [1861] (Tusson: L'Échoppe, 2016), p. 11.
[16] Hal Foster: What Comes After Farce, p. ix.
[17] Max Raphael: Proudhon Marx Picasso: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics [Proudhon Marx Picasso. Trois études sur la sociologie de l’art, 1933], trans. Inge Marcuse (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980), pp. 128-129; O.K. Werckmeister: “Der grösste deutsche Künstler und der Krieg am Golf”, in: Kunstforum, no. 123, 1993, pp. 209-21.
[18] Meyer Shapiro: “The Nature of Abstract Art” [1937], in: idem: Modern Art: Selected Papers, Vol. II (New York: George Braziller, 1978), pp. 185-211.
[19] Karl Korsch: Karl Marx [1938][(Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 12-21.
[20] Brilliantly exemplified by Perry Anderson’s dismissal of Western Marxism’s “turn” to art and culture in his Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1971).
[21] Accounting for the different national re-readings of Marx in the early 1970s remains a task to be carried out. Endnotes have begun the work in texts like “Communisation and Value-Form Theory”, in: Endnotes, no. 2, 2010, pp. 68-105. But they have so far not included, among other things, the Danish and Norwegian kapitallogik.
[22] We have sought to give an account of the emergence and development of German value critique, especially the work of Robert Kurz, in: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Dominique Routhier: “Critical Theory and Radical Crisis Theory: Kurz, Krisis and Exit! on Value Theory, the Crisis and the Breakdown of Capitalism”, in: Rethinking Marxism, vol. 31, no. 2, 2019, pp. 187-207.
[23] Moishe Postone: Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[24] See Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Daniel Spaulding: “Value-Form and Avant-Garde”, in: Mute, 2014; https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/value-form-and-avant-garde; Marina Vishmidt: Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018); Sianne Ngai: The Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2020); Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis and Twenty-First Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Jaleeh Mansoor: Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016).
[25] The notion of programmatism is taken from Théorie Communiste’s analysis of the transformation of the revolutionary perspective, see for instance Roland Simon: Fondements critiques d’une théorie de la révolution. Au-delà de la l’affirmation du prolétariat. Théorie du communisme. Volume I (Paris: Senonevero, 2001).
[26] As Alex Callinicos notes it is not very likely Biden will be able to – or will be interested in – imposing anything remotely similar to a New Deal. Cf. Alex Callinicos: “The Three Phases of Biden’s Presidency”, in: Socialist Worker, no. 2765, 2021, https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/52154/The+three+phases+of+Bidens+presidency
[27] In the context of rising fascist tendencies in contemporary art, Dorian Batycka usefully defines the tactic of “overidentification” as “the act of identifying oneself to an excessive degree with ideas or concepts antithetical to one’s own ideology.” Dorian Batycka: “Is Accelerationism a Gateway Aesthetic to Fascism? On the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art”, in: Paletten, no. 319, 2020, p. 28. See also Ana Pinto and Kerstin Stakemeier: “A Brief Glossary of Social Sadism”, in: Texte zur Kunst, no. 116, 2019, pp. 82-102.
[28] Moishe Postone: “The Current Crisis and The Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading,” in: Continental Thought and Theory, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 38-54.
[29] Tom Crow: “The Modest Museum,” in: Artforum, Summer 2021, vol. 59, no. 10: https://www.artforum.com/print/202106/the-modest-museum-85771
[30] Ibid.
[31] Hal Foster: What Comes After Farce, p. 65.
[32] Ibid., p. 66.
[33] Ibid., p. 59.
[34] Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 8.
[35] T. J. Clark: Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, p. 7.
[36] Ibid., pp. 11-12.
[37] Dave Beech: Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015), p. 19.
[38] For an incomplete inventory of deaths and other occupational hazards of the art world, see: Kyle Chayka: “8 Deadly Works of Art”, in: Hyperallergic, October 20, 2010, https://hyperallergic.com/11146/8-deadly-works-of-art/ and Jaime Chu: “Time of Death”, in: Spike, April 26, 2021, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/time-death-m-woods-jaime-chu
[39]Dave Beech: Art and Value, p. 45.
[40] Jasper Bernes & Daniel Spaulding: “Truly Extraordinary”, p. 54.
[41] Norbert Trenkle. “Value and Crisis: Basic Questions” [“Was ist der Wert? Wass soll die Krise?”, 1998], trans. Josh Robinson, in: Neil Larsen et al. (eds): Marxism and the Critique of Value (Chicago: MCM, 2014), p. 3.
[42] For an analysis of this dialectic, see Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization as well as Benjamin Buchloh’s classic analysis of conceptual art: “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions” [1989], in: idem: Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 409-469.
[43] Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 51.
[44] Walter Benjamin: “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” [“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner”, 1935-1936], trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in: Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 24-25.
[45] Marina Vishmidt: Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, p. vIII.
[46] The best analysis of the complex internal/external character of modern art and architecture in the uneven and combined development of capitalism remains Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development [Progretto e utopia. Architetture a sviluppo capitalistico, 1973], trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).
[47] Julian Stallabrass: Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Hito Steyerl: Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London & New York: Verso, 2017).
[48] Arne de Boever: “The End of Art (Once Again)” in: Boundary 2 Online, March, 2021, https://www.boundary2.org/2021/03/arne-de-boever-the-end-of-art-once-again/
[49] For an illuminating analysis of the present situation as seen from the perspective of the bourgeosie, see Deutsche Bank’s Long-Term Asset Return Study 2020 titled An Age of Disorder, https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2020/the-age-of-disorder-the-new-era-for-economics-politics-and-our-way-of-life-en-11670.htm