Some Call It Art

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Matthew Barney exhibition poster
located inside an air terminal in
Europe.

SOME CALL IT ART
From Imaginary Autonomy to
Autonomous Collectivity
Isn’t it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended
on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the other’s
face: what am I worth?
—Balzac

T

his paper is a response to certain questions that I will paraphrase as follows: What is the social value of art? Is it symbolic, or is art’s signification something to manipulate, a strategy
for other, more practical, even political ends? Does it matter if what we
do is called “art” or if we call ourselves artists as long as we have some
effect on society? If I identify myself as an artist, do I automatically
share a set of unique social and economic concerns with artists elsewhere? Who are “we” artists? Do these questions relate to the Austrian
art experience at the turn of the century, or is this a debate specific to
the United States? Granted that if the writings surrounding my text
seem more qualified than I am to debate this last question perhaps it is
because we continue to believe that despite the current globalization
This text is being made available for scholarly purposes only. You are free to copy
an distribute it, but never for commercial profit. Please attribute the author whenever quoted
or cited. All illustrations are included here solely for educational purposes.
This essay was first presented as a paper at the conference “Dürfen die das?” organized
by Stella Rollig and Eva Stürm for the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria in
March of 2000. The organizers later published a version of the text in their book Duerfen Die
Das?: Kunst als sozialer Raum: Art/Education/Cultural Work/Communities (Verlag Turia &
Kant, Wein, Austria, 2002). Pages 161 to 184. In addition, the short version is available on
the website of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies EIPCP at: http://www.
eipcp.net/diskurs/d07/text/sholette_en.html

2 GREGORY SHOLETTE

Cover of leading industry tradejournal from 1999 for the first
issue dedicated to recuperating the
rag-tag “East Village” art scene of the
1980s for the market.

of markets there still exists specific cultural effects brought about by local history and national identity. Yet, writing as
an interloper, and from the position of an
artist living and working within the particular urban context of Chicago and New
York City, I will attempt to explain why
I am ambivalent about the category of art
and the appellation artist. Furthermore, I
want to propose in a cautious way, that
this outsider’s story may soon become
a familiar one to you in Austria. If this
suggestion of future congruity reflects
the arrogance of an American speaking to
you abroad, it may indeed be this same
immodest inclination, backed by a command economy of unprecedented proportions, that is at the troubled heart of this
essay and its theme: the changing status of the artist within the present
social and economic circumstances.

1. Some Call It Art
Western culture has, at least since the enlightenment, defined the artist as set apart from the rest of society. The best known version of this
artistic autonomy is the constitution of the solitary genius. Today, that
imaginary realm of independence is increasingly visible as an ideological construction. Yet, like other myths, including those of nationalism
and race, the manifest falsity of artistic autonomy remains operative
within specific circles as a mechanism of control. (As Slavoj Zizek
quips, the subject of ideology knows very well, but... 1) The target
of this control is artistic production and it includes the administration
of the artist herself, a practice that dates back at least as far as Plato’s
writings about the ideal republic. One part of this paper will selectively
sketch a history of this regulatory logic as it appears in the writings of
Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx and their successors before concluding with
the question if it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to retool the discredited idea of artistic autonomy, not as a means of withdrawing once
more into a closed-off aesthetic sovereignty, but instead as a model
for sedition, intervention and ultimately political transformation that
reaches beyond the realm of art itself. However, if such a redemption
is conceivable, it will first require a final, emptying-out of the ideology
of artistic autonomy. That task raises another set of questions. How
and for whom is this evident fiction useful? Perhaps this is more clearly
stated in terms of when is the term art invoked and in whose presence?
It is an inquiry that can not be addressed without taking into account
the social and economic changes taking place at both the local and in-

SOME CALL IT ART 3

ternational level that are in turn directly affecting the actual practices
of artists themselves. For, on one hand, it is this transformation of the
production of art itself and on the other hand the changing recognition
of what culture is by the multitude, that has virtually eclipsed art’s
symbolic status at the turn of the century.
My argument is that the battle waged over art’s symbolic value and
against its strategic and activist application, is already lost. Consider
the term cultural capital employed by Pierre Bourdieu. 2 It is a phrase
that appears to “save face” for some sort of sophisticated artistic practice, and yet implicitly acknowledges the triumph of the marketplace
over every aspect of life. 3All of this leaves the problem of deciding
what is art and who can identify themselves as an artist in a precarious
state that is both curious and of little importance. It is curious because
it is bound up with a certain history of (Western) aesthetics and notions
of civic culture including ideas of individuality and social autonomy.
It is also of importance to artists and those who are invested in reproducing the cultural capital known as “fine art”. However, at the same
time it is a bit late to be concerned with this designation because for all
practical purposes that which has been called art today lies “in state”
within museums, or in its most animated form, as electrons circulating
within the writing programs of truculent art historians. This is not the
case simply because art is a relatively specialized slice of the overall
leisure and entertainment industry”4. Nor is it the result of internal
artistic debates as revealed by the increasingly popular term “community-based” or “new genre” public art in which artists are encouraged
to venture into local communities and work with homeless people, “at
risk” youth, and even assist in crime prevention, a point I return to below. 5 In each of these cases art still remains a privileged (if sidelined)
activity, that is carried out by a specialist practitioner. Instead, the
current crisis of artistic autonomy stems, at least in the U.S. context,
from two relatively prosaic circumstances. One of these is the growing
privatization of the art industry in the post cold-war, global economy.
The other factor is the increasing conspicuousness of non-professional
or informal, creative activity in general. Before examining these issues
in more depth let me sketch a portrait of the so-called “new” economy
and the working artist in the United States today.

2. Back in the U.S.A.
Despite the so-called “boom” years of the 1980s or the purported
“new” economy of the 1990s, most working people today are financially worse off than their counterparts of the 1960s who enjoyed far
more evenly distributed income levels, lower housing costs, and strong
welfare support systems. 6 According to economist Doug Henwood
“Overwork is at least as characteristic of the labor market now as is
underwork. Nearly twice as many people hold down multiple jobs as
are involuntarily limited to part-time work (7.8 million vs. 4.3 million)
- and well over half the multiply employed hold at least one full-time

Cover of leading industry tradejournal from 1999 for the first
issue dedicated to recuperating the
rag-tag “East Village” art scene of the
1980s for the market.

4 GREGORY SHOLETTE

job.” 7 Furthermore, Henwood argues that “We see plenty of wage
polarization, a disappearance of middle-income jobs, the loss of fringe
benefits, longer hours, speedup, and rising stress ..” 8
What has brought about this polarization? Art Historian Chin-tao
Wu is not alone when she argues that the Reagan and Thatcher regimes
initiated a “fundamental political transformation” that affected all aspects of contemporary society, including art practice.
Postwar social democratic consensus of welfare-state
capitalism in Britain, and to a lesser degree in America...
was replaced by an aggressive advocacy of the so-called free
market economy...This transformation called on every corner
of society to endorse a philosophy of “limited government,
deregulation, privatization and enterprise culture. 9
One key strategy of this shift included the undermining or outright
elimination of social welfare programs. By taking away the so-called
safety net while increasing unemployment, workers were forced to
compete with each other and with overseas labor while intensifying
productivity. Longer work hours and multiple job holdings now extend
the work-week beyond the forty hour limit once fought and died over
by working class movements in the nineteenth century. Again, Henwood points out that “Since 1969, full-time employees in the United
States have increased by a full workday the hours they put in each
week, and in the past two decades, the number of people working over
50 hours a week has increased by a third.” 10 The cumulative effect of
this move towards privatization and what might be described as neoproletariatization is today bearing fruit in the self-proclaimed liberalcentralist economies of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. However, while
the working class in the United States is enjoying an unprecedented
absence of unemployment as well as rising wages, in the mean time the
lack of health care for over 42 million Americans, an overall indebtedness to credit providers and an immense and growing gap between the
income of average workers and the wealthy managerial class also reveals the potentially disastrous side-effects of this so-called economic
miracle. 11 As theoreticians Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue,
this structural disparity, as well as the imperative to control dissent
against the world market, are part of an emerging global system they
term “Empire” which is

...characterized by the close proximity of extremely unequal
populations, which creates a situation of permanent social
danger and requires the powerful apparatuses of the new
society of control to ensure separation and guarantee the new
management of space.” 12
Artists, especially sculptors, painters, and crafts people, are in an
even poorer state than most working people in the United States, especially when compared to other specialized professionals. While the

SOME CALL IT ART 5

overall artist population has grown considerably (doubling between
1970 and 1990 13) and while some 164 programs offering graduate
and undergraduate art degrees became available in 1980, the actual median income of visual artists today remains concentrated in the 10,000
to 20,000 dollar range, not enough to even afford housing in cities
like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. 14 In addition, the rate of
unemployment for artists during the past few decades has averaged
about twice that of other professional workers.15 Since approximately
half earned less than $3000 from their art and a quarter earned only
$500 from art sales in 1990, not surprisingly, most have little choice
but to work several jobs, often in an all-together different field, in order to maintain a close to living wage.16 The “drop-out” rate among
artists is also high and unlike in other professions carries a financial
reward. According to an unpublished study, one third of those who
graduated from a major U.S. art school in 1963 had given up making
art by 1981 and were actually earning more money than those who
continued being artists.17 At the same time it is a mistake to picture the
contemporary artist as a bohemian or social outcast. While U.S. artist’s
economic situation is far less secure they remain strong participants in
civic society. For one thing, they are better educated than most other
specialized professionals and over eighty percent of artists surveyed
in a 1999 study by Columbia University voted in local, state and federal elections. Seventy five percent of these people were registered
Democrats and those earning less than thirty thousand dollars reported
performing one to four hours of community service each week during
the previous two years. 18 All of which points to a reality gap between
the image of the autonomous artist and the actual, working conditions
of artists themselves. Could it be that from this same discontinuity the
symbolic and strategic potential of art is generated? Would this be the
place to begin a reconditioning of artistic autonomy? Before speculating further there is still more bad news to present regarding the U.S.
working environment for contemporary artists.
As difficult as it has always been to be a practicing artist in the
U.S., artists today must also contend with the withering of public support and an increasing dependency on private money. In practical terms
this means learning how to market oneself. While museums and other
support structures for artists claim cultural autonomy from capital, as
Chin-tao Wu points out the new corporate enterprise culture only appears to be at odds with the institutions of art.
“Indeed multinational museums and multinational corporations
have become in may ways inseparable bed-fellows. Despite the fact
their proclaimed aims and purposes may be worlds apart, they share
an insatiable appetite for improving their share of a competitive global
market, their ambition involves them in physical expansion and the
occupation of space in other countries. It also involves making aggressive deals in an open marketplace and maneuvering capital (money
and/or art) across different borders.” 19

Thomas Krens brought a corporate
management style to the
directorship of the Guggenheim
Museum.

6 GREGORY SHOLETTE

Perhaps this new global cultural hegemony is best summarized by
one of its own: the director of the Guggenheim Museum chain Thomas
Krens who, without a trace of self-doubt boasts of the museum’s corporate alliance stating, “We have put this program of global partners
in place, where we have long-term associations with institutions like
Deutsche Bank and Hugo Boss and Samsung..” If the museums and
palaces of high culture have appeared in the past as a shelter for civic
life, set apart from the vulgarities of capitalism, less than two decades
later the effect of the massive economic restructuring that started in the
1980s is evinced by the increasingly eager and unashamed embrace
not only of corporate money but also of corporate values. This open
display of affection for the private sector flows not only from artists
and museum administrators, but also from institutions of public education, civic welfare, even criminal incarceration. Nor is this condition
of privatization likely to remain localized within the United States or
Great Briton. As the entrepreneurial model gradually replaces museums as well as state and civic institutions of every kind, the aura of
artistic autonomy can not help but collapse. According to cultural critic
Masao Miyoshi, under pressure from the totalizing influence of transcorporate capitalism:
...museums, exhibitions, and theatrical performances will
be swiftly appropriated by tourism and other forms of
commercialism. No matter how subversive at the beginning,
variants will be appropriated aggressively by branches of
consumerism. 20
Even if Myoshi’s bleak prophecy is not our collective future, the
effect of corporate hegemony has already forced into view a confrontation between the symbolic position and actual practices of art, at least
this is true in the United States. It is most apparent when one looks at
changes in the institution that occupies the symbolic center of American high culture: The National Endowment for the Arts. Recently the
National Endowment or NEA has been involved in heavy campaigning
to regain the support of the United States Congress and the populace
at large. It has approached this by attempting to prove that art is not a
purely symbolic or autonomous activity, but is instead a kind of labor
that contributes to the overall well-being of society in direct ways including public education and community service. A recent document
entitled the American Canvas Report sponsored by the NEA supplies
the blueprint for a post-cold war approach to public patronage in which
artists and art’s agencies are encouraged to venture into:
a broad range of community-based activities. In 1996, fully
two-thirds of the 50 largest LAAs [local arts agencies]
addressed five or more of the [following] issues: Community
Development Issues, Cultural/Racial Awareness, Youth at
Risk, Economic Development, Crime Prevention, Illiteracy,
AIDS, Environment, Substance Abuse, Housing, Teen

SOME CALL IT ART 7

Pregnancy and, Homelessness.21
If the death of artistic autonomy has given birth to the artist as
social worker, the consequences of cultural utilitarianism in a capitalist economy are just as predictable. Let me again quote from the NEA
American Canvas Report which celebrates this shift in the most unselfcritical language.
While there are no one-size-fits-all models for the integration
of the arts into community life, two areas in particular - urban revitalization and cultural tourism -- are especially
popular right now, and both were the subject of much
attention at the American Canvas forums. In many respects,
of course, revitalization and tourism are simply two sides
of the same coin: as cities become more “livable” and more
attractive, they’ll prove increasingly alluring to tourists,
whose expenditures, in turn, will help revitalize cities. As
mutually reinforcing pieces of the same puzzle, moreover,
both urban revitalization and cultural tourism invite the
participation of arts organizations. The arts can come to
these particular “tables,” in other words, confident that they
won’t be turned away.22
Here is a new, post-public, post-cold-war artistic pragmatism. It
accepts the need to “translate” the value of the arts into more general
civic, social and educational terms that will in turn be more readily
understood, by the general public and by their elected officials alike.
As Terry Eagleton has argued:
Art itself may thus be an increasingly marginal pursuit,
but aesthetics is not. Indeed one might risk the rather
exaggerated formulation that aesthetics is born at the
moment of art’s effective demise as a political force,
flourishes on the corpse of its social relevance. Though
artistic production itself plays less and less of a significant
role in the social order (Marx reminds us that the bourgeoisie
have absolutely no time for it), what it is able to bequeath
to that order, as it were, is a certain ideological model
which may help it out of its mess -- the mess which has
marginalized pleasure and the body, reified reason, and
struck morality entirely empty.23
Yet such phenomena as gentrification and the displacement of low
income residents that accompanies the movement of artists into cities is apparently a social problem not even on the NEA radar screen.
Meanwhile, cultural tourism and community-based art practice must
be thought of as a local consequence of the move towards a privatized
and global economy. While the remnants of public, civic culture aim to
make art appear useful to local economies and tourism, how long can
the idea of artistic autonomy and its celebration of individual freedom,

8 GREGORY SHOLETTE

Artist Laurie Parsons installation,
“Arrangement.”

even in its current, transparently bankrupt
form, remain useful to the de-territorialized
needs of global capital? In other words, what
position can artists expect to hold, symbolically and economically, in the coming, transnational corporate hegemony?
Indeed, rather than presenting artistic
freedom and autonomy as a colorful (if imaginary) life-style choice for the overstressed
and over worked professional (consider the
way lawyers, brokers and psychiatrists rush
to buy “lofts” in gentrified art ghettos), perhaps it is the actual productive constitution
of the contemporary artist that, in terms of
Hardt and Negri’s thesis, serves as the very
prototype of a new global subject. Far more than most other workers,
artists are in fact trained - or train themselves - to adapt to changing
and unstable economic conditions. Consider the way the artist is at
once highly specialized, yet infinitely re-trainable, willing to volunteer
enormous time and labor to generate cultural capital (that is typically
accumulated by others), while in theory remaining subversive towards
institutional power, even if seldom is the artist willing to subvert the
power that most affects her: the art industry itself.

3. When Is It Art?

Tony Feher installation in a New
York gallery.

Privatization and the “new” economy also have other, more immediate
consequences for artists who continue to think of themselves as autonomous producers making work for galleries and museums. For one
thing, expanded work schedules (in those other paid jobs that support
one’s artistic career) simply allow less time for making art. This might
be seen reflected even in the choice of materials contemporary artists
employ. Think of easel painting, modeling in clay or casting in bronze.
During the early twentieth century these were overpowered by more
direct methods of art making such as collage,
photography, steel welding and assemblage. As
life (and production) speeds up, time consuming
methods are broken down or eliminated. Today,
even these relatively instantaneous techniques
for producing art require quantities of time beyond the means of most artists. For many the
computer combined with graphic applications
are the art studio of our day. This is especially
true in such hot real estate markets as New York
City. Nor is it unlikely to be a coincidence that
when it does come to large-scale installations
that grace international biennials and kunst-

SOME CALL IT ART 9

halles, production demands armies of assistants and professional art
fabricators.
The late artist and art historian Ian Burn described this post-war art
practice as a “de-skilling” of artistic craft. Together with critic Lucy R.
Lippard, Burn argues that in the 1960s conceptual art did away with
artistic proficiency as a means of avoiding the commodification of art.
According to Lippard the process culminated in the total disappearance
of the art object. 24 This process of de-skilling has produced a generation of contemporary artists that serve as aesthetic service providers.25
While those who still do produce objects typically pay skilled crafts
people to execute their ideas. Perhaps the clearest example of this shift
is visible not so much in the work of any particular artist, but in the
changing operation of many contemporary art spaces. A case in point
is The Renaissance Center in Chicago. Its director, Suzanne Getz, seldom displays work that has already been fabricated but instead scouts
out a promising young artist who is then directly contracted to produce
a new work specifically for the Renaissance Center itself. Getz and
her staff then raise the needed capital for the artist’s project, primarily
from private donors and after the work is executed and displayed it is
typically donated to another institution that has a permanent collection.
The Renaissance Center has recently established a special capital fund
explicitly for the commissioning of such work. Getz herself perceives
the role of the kunstahalle as undergoing a fundamental change from
primarily an exhibition venue to a site of both the display and production of art. 26 Such practices raise important questions regarding the
growing inter-dependence of private foundations, collectors, art fabricators and movers, museums, and project spaces like the Renaissance
Center. It is possible to see in this vertical integration of art production
a corollary to the de-regulation of the banking industry that allows for
banks to act as brokerage firms, credit card providers, financial managers and real estate merchants. Capital is saved, invested, speculated on,
used to purchase assets and liquidated again, never traveling outside
the circulatory route of a given fiscal institution. Like a Hollywood
film studio, Getz role is that of the producer, while the artist is hired to
conceive and direct the project.
Granted, the majority of people who identity themselves as artists
are not fortunate enough to be offered such commissions. Yet here too
the effects of de-skilling and the diminishment of time and space on
artistic production can be seen. This might help explain the emergence
of what art historian Brandon Taylor refers to as “slack art”, which he
describes as the use of ephemeral materials, vapid performances and
home video that not only avoids major investments of labor (their own
or others) and materials but thumbs its nose at the over-produced art of
the late 1980s (such as Koons, Holzer, or Longo). 27 Part of my closing
argument depends upon seeing the way this “slack art” is, with a very
slight shift of context, indistinguishable from informal practices among
people who do not identify as artists. How, for instance, is an arrange-

10 GREGORY SHOLETTE

New York Times Magazine
advertisement.

ment of products purchased through a retail catalog or borrowed from
someone’s attic any different from the work of Jason Rhodes, Lauire
Parsons or Sylvie Fleury? The old argument that context is everything
no longer satisfies. If Marcel Duchamp’s readymades provoked controversy by working against a normalized artistic tradition inside the
museum, in the dissipated, post, post-modern world such subversion in
the art world has become interchangeable with sanctioned cultural activity in general, both high and popular, even including the very legacy
of subversive art itself. Upholding the special category of art under
such conditions is perhaps at the same time more heroic and more desperate than it was even during the hiatus of the classical avant-garde.
Conversely, when a prestigious museum like the Guggenheim sports
motorcycles and Armani suits, is it really so far-fetched to suggest that
this is an inevitalbe response to the practical and theoretical impossibility of holding the line between the fine arts and other forms of
artistic-like production either inside or outside the museum?
Let me conclude this section on the “ontology” of art with another
way artists have survived in the free-market economy. That is by working as graphic designers. The publicity-machine that drives consumer
culture has always required a great deal of visual skilled labor, even
if it is repetitive and uninspired in nature. For every Marcel Breuer or
Olvetti there is an army of lesser artisans who perceive graphic design
not as a profession but as a kind of menial toil that is nevertheless still
preferable to demolition and sheet-rocking or waiting on tables. Graduates of fine art programs are employed laying-out innumerable retail
catalogs, book covers, movie posters, liquor ads, travel brochures; if
trained in media they produce television commercials and industrial
films. With the expansion of on-line shopping the demand for Web
Site design is accelerating this process of artists-as-designer even more
rapidly.
.

W

orking in the graphic design industry today means
learning to operate digital technology. This fact is reflected by the phenomenal growth in communications and
design training at national art schools and the governmental push to get High School and grammar school students
“plugged-in” to new technologies. 28 As the borders that
once separated national economies implodes the demand
for design, packaging, and commodity labeling explodes.
In other words, the more markets grow, the more advertising is needed and with it more jobs for producing and processing what is lately referred to as visual culture. While
visual culture is by definition pervasive and lacking an obvious center, in terms of production and complexion it is
tied to those places where artists coexist with information
and graphics technology, with the economic refugees from

SOME CALL IT ART 11

other countries, and with the regulators of big capital. In other words
visual culture may be found everywhere but it is dependent on the
cultural matrixes of the global city. And today the global city is home
to the ideal consumer of this cosmopolitan visual culture: the highly
educated, cosmopolitan professional.

4 Into the Glamour Zone
Every major urban center that is linked to the new transnational economy is also host to a local franchise of retail and service establishments offering leisure commodities, designer clothing, art objects/object d’arts and gourmet food. According to sociologist Saskia Sassen
each global city’s “glamour zone” is now growing. 29Along with this
new aura of cosmopolitanism comes an increasing demand for the ever
more sophisticated packaging of commodities and services. While the
mass production of undistinguished graphic design may not have altogether disappeared, the visual literacy of young consumers raised on
MTV and the Internet is simply re-writing the rules for publicity. Visual puns, ironic copy, advertising campaigns that use no words and rely
on a corporate logo all appeal to a consumer sensibility that increasingly excludes the visually illiterate. Wearing clothes that display the
Nike “swoop” or the letters DKNY, sends a signal to other specialized
consumers that like them you know what is stylish. The fact that many
of these logos have become ubiquitous symbols of contemporary culture- and after all isn’t that the point of a well-designed logo-- has not
diminished their clique-effect. Often the more expensive and exclusive
the products appeal, the more its brand identification circulates among
people who claim to have specialized tastes. Here then is where the
artist and the art industry enter the story. Consider Thomas Krens again
sounding here like a marketing expert devising a new perfume label
when he states, “Seduction - that’s the business I am in...I’m a professional séducteur.” 30 On one hand the mutual attraction of, for example, art and couture indicates that specialized markets are defined by
similar demographics. On the other hand this conspicuous high culture
“branding” is more evidence that label recognition is what remains
today of art’s symbolic value, a point I will return to shortly.
As individuals trained in the fine arts gravitate to urban areas they
most often reside in low-income, industrial areas or immigrant neighborhoods where housing is more affordable and the local culture provides a certain life-style that is required for a “serious” artist to “come
of age”. Artists and intellectuals, minorities and immigrants, drop-outs
and subcultures intersect providing a site for “avant-garde” culture including couture and food to the fine arts, and design. The Left-Bank of
Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, New York City’s Greenwich Village in
the 1950s and 1960s East Village in the 1970s and early 1980s have all
served this function. Today the cross-over between these sites and the
larger market for brand-name services and goods is omnipresent. One
example is fashion photography in which graffiti-covered walls serve

12 GREGORY SHOLETTE

as a backdrop for Armani and Vercecci clothing. The gritty urban artist
is a sign or label that speaks of creativity and romantic individuality
both necessary myths for an economy that appears ever more homogenized and claustrophobic.
This blurring of commercial design and fashion with the world of
the artist also operates in reverse and has strongly undermined artists’
claims of “critical” or distanced judgment. The stridently anti-capitalist outlook of previous generations - whether based in Greenbergian
autonomy of the 1950s or the counter-culture politics of the 1960s -is
difficult to support when so much in the art world depends on corporate finance. Concurrently, at the level of artistic practice, a very
small gap separates the production of so-called fine art and commercial, visual culture. Simply from a practical perspective, the increasing
throng of artists skilled in digital technology would be hard pressed
to draw an absolute line between the kind of artistic labor done for
money and that done for one’s art. Nor does the world of contemporary
art-from glossy industry magazines to international exhibition venues
to art critics resuscitating the idea of beauty-offer much guidance for
preventing commercial art and the fine art tradition from becoming
superimposed onto each other. While some of this digital production
does continue in the critical tradition of art, and here I am thinking of
the Internet group RTMark, a new ethos appears to be emerging among
some digital practitioners that merges the marketing and entrepreneurial business skills of business with critical theory and neo-avant-garde
practice. All of this puts a new spin on the classical avant-garde call
to transform art into life. Indeed, how could the dadaists and productivists have anticipated that life at the turn of the next century would
be integrated at every level into a totalizing ideology of business and
commerce? If the historian Peter Bürger decried that after the Second
World War the avant-garde had become institutionalized, today, the
post, post-modernist tendency as it is emerging within new media once
again claims to revive the utopianism of the early avant-garde, but now
with one crucial difference: this time around avant-garde practice must
also be a viable business enterprise. 31
All of this means that the typically conflicted relationship alternative spaces during the 1970s and early 1980s had with the market is
gone. 32Under the influence of the anti-establishment counter-culture
of the late 1960s the artist-run, alternative space movement was openly
hostile to a business mentality. One could even say that in many respects
is was this antithesis towards applying professional management skills
that set these non-commercial spaces apart from more established museums far more so than any openly professed, oppositional ideology.
33 Today, in the post-public funding environment artists are actively
encouraged to market themselves, to understand their customer, and
even to be mobile in terms of what they produce. 34 Given the increasingly site-specific and often ephemeral nature of contemporary
art, what is sold, if not an object, is better described as a promise or

SOME CALL IT ART 13

contract. The buyer receives a form of aesthetic association or contagion from the artist. Not unlike
designer couture, the contract extends proof of artistic value to the buyer. Once again it is possible to
see how this contract can be circulated in the same
manner as a corporate logo within the global, cultural market. Yet one remaining challenge remains.
How such a “label” can be authenticated once set
adrift from the artist and put into circulation? 35
This however simply begs the question. If it is not
a hand-made, singular object then what is it that
the artist sells and is it all that different from commercial, visual culture? To get at this problem it
is necessary to produce an abbreviated history of
artistic autonomy.

5. Imagined Autonomies
The special categorization of the arts as a human
activity that transcends the material world depends
upon an a priora separation between nature and
culture. While the fine arts-painting, music, poetry, sculpture-- are made by humans, they are not merely technology
(tools, useful things, even some kinds of architecture) or science (mental tools for understanding the world), but rather art is mysteriously
bonded to a transcendent realm of metaphysics. Yet how can art be
both extra-worldly and still a product of human beings? Through that
singular person known as the genius. According to Kant (*Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement) the genius provides:
...the talent (natural endowment) which gives rule to art.
Since talent, as an innate productive faculty of the artist,
belongs itself to nature, we may put it this way: Genius is
the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature
gives rule to art. 36
Unlike Plato who would cast out the poets and painters from his
Republic because they are capable of making deceitful copies of the
ideal and true, Kant, defender of reason and the enlightenment, offers
artists a passage back into civic society. However, Kant’s redemption
is also qualified. He too fears the power of the artist to dissemble the
truth through the mere gratification of the senses. Cleverly, the philosopher advances the State’s control of artists by ingeniously aligning
aesthetic autonomy with the very foundations of the State itself. Artists
will be trusted only in so far as they “inspire an aesthetic response and
ultimately ennoble what is morally good in the citizen.” 37 Therefor
for Kant, the genius may indeed deploy artifice, yet she is nevertheless
useful once drawn into the orbit of reason and enlightened society.

Ed Harris portrays the tragic life of
artist Jackson Pollock.

14 GREGORY SHOLETTE

The disinterested freedom of the artist that Kant celebrates and Plato
feared is now incorporated directly into the process of enlightenment.
Between Kant and Plato the discipline known today as arts administration is first articulated.38
Meanwhile, Kant’s aesthetic philosophy also ranks the arts according to their proximity to his concept of finality and self-reflection as
formulated by the ideal of disinterested beauty. The more an artistic
category is useful - either as a practical technology or a means of intellectual understanding-the less elevated it is in Kant’s hierarchy of
artistic types. Kant simply eliminates the practical arts and crafts from
serious consideration and then ranks the fine arts starting with poetry
because it “It expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination...”. 39 The more distant and autonomous an artistic form is from
the baser realm of utility and matter, the higher its aesthetic status.
Perhaps the most influential art critic and theoretician of the postwar period, Clement Greenberg, made use of Kant’s theory of disinterested aesthetics to articulate and ground his version of modernism.
Recent scholarship has also uncovered historic alliances between
Greenberg’s promotion of a modernist concept of autonomy and the
cold war politics of the United States. Moreover, one of Greenberg’s
best know essays entitled Modernist Painting first appeared as a pamphlet published in 1960 by the Voice of America.40 In this virtually
canonical text, Greenberg describes Kant as “the first real Modernist.”
According to Greenberg it was Kant who initiated the process of selfcriticism which in turn constitutes the essence of Modernist art. If Kant
“used logic to establish the limits of logic” and “withdrew much from
its old jurisdiction” what was left was “all the more secure.”41 This
same stripping-down process of purification and self-reflection is what
Greenberg believed essential to modernist painting as exemplified by
New Yorker’s William DeKooning and Jackson Polock. The resulting art object affirms its own conditionality and celebrates its freedom
from representation rejecting any association with literature or illusory
space. Yet, if the “common” viewer perceived the abstract canvases
of Pollock and DeKooning as subversive of social order, Greenberg
assured us that such work “never meant anything like a break with the
past.” 42 Rather, it established a continuation (despite some partial unraveling of traditions) of Western traditions that stretch as far back as
paleolithic times. Greenberg’s aesthetic axioms proved especially useful to post-war capitalism because unlike the official culture or Stalinism or Maoism, modernism in Greenberg’s Kantian revision offered
the intellectual an aura of complete freedom from all social constraints.
Meanwhile, the premium this thinking placed on individuality can not
be overestimated. Greenberg’s recasting of the Kantian genius and the
philosophy of disinterested taste are the perfect corollary for the liberal
democratic state at the apex of the cold war era. Yet Greenberg was not
interested in populist democracy but promoted an idea of art that was
itself a complete evasion of low-brow and popular culture. Autonomy

SOME CALL IT ART 15

from kitsch and commercial art was in Greenberg’s terms the only possible salvation for authentic artistic imagination under capitalism.
This same idea of aesthetic autonomy has in one form or another
dominated U.S. culture at least until the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Consider the way the United States government supported the idea of
artistic autonomy following the Second World War only for as long as
it served a specific ideological goal; championing individual freedom
under capitalism in opposition to Soviet expansion. As Chairman of
the NEA Bill Ivey commented recently, “cold war thinking lay just
beneath the cultural policy of the last century.”43 As is well known,
this ideological marketing was carried out by the CIA and State Department using the symbolic power of Abstract Expressionism. 44
Today, supporting the unique artistic genius is no longer needed to
ward off the chill of communism. Public funding agencies, such as the
NEA, struggle to reestablish a rationale for such expenditures even
as citizenship is more and more measured by one’s participation in
the economy as a producer/consumer, rather than by ideological and
transcendent beliefs such as nation. In this post-national environment
the notion of artistic autonomy, together with art’s symbolic value, is
bound to be both marginalized and absorbed by global marketing as
one more brand for specialized leisure products.
What about that other genealogical branch sprouting from the trunk
of the enlightenment? That idea derived from Hegel which views the
artist not as separate from, but dependent upon history? As is well
known, Hegel understood the progress of artistic forms as a gradual
evolution towards self-realization and spiritual perfection, where as
his student Karl Marx understood productive, material conditions and
class opposition as the driving force for historical change. Both of
these ideas in turn influenced the social critic Walter Benjamin who
argued in his essay the Author as Producer that the artist is socially
acceptable only when an ally of the proletariat and a co-conspirator in
revolution. Not since Plato, Benjamin asserts, has “The question of the
poet’s right to exist ... been posed with the same emphasis; but today it
poses itself.” Benjamin continues with the
...question of the autonomy of the poet: of his freedom to
write whatever he pleases. You are not disposed to grant him
this autonomy. You believe that the present social situation
compels him to decide in whose service he is to place his
activity...His decision, taken on the basis of class struggle, is
to side with the proletariat. That puts an end to his autonomy. 45
In a direct attack on the dis-engaged model of Kantian aesthetics, Benjamin calls for artists to produce work that not only forces us
think but also assists in organizing the working class in their struggle
against capitalist exploitation. His examples of this utilitarian art include newspapers authored by their readers, the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, and the photomontages of John Heartfield. If Benjamin
overturns the Kantian order of art by placing highest value on what is

16 GREGORY SHOLETTE

Artist Josh McPhee producing
posters the old fashioned way at
the Chicago Autonomous Territories
event, Hyde Park, Chicago, 2001.

useful and opposing art that is an end in itself, he also opposes Kant in
dismissing the category of the naturally inspired genius. In The Author
as Producer, Benjamin insists that the artist must actively re-tool (umfunktionierung) his or her means of artistic production in the same way
that the revolutionary worker seeks to transform the means of production and thus alter social conditions away from capitalist exploitation.
As argued above, this avant-gardist call to drag art out of the museums and into life is visible today, but in all the wrong places. Museums and foundations now claim to nurture art as social activism,
multiculturalism drives the cultural tourism industry and what remains
of public funding agencies call on artists to end their isolation and become civil servants. If the private sector and corporate supporters do
still uphold an idea of artistic autonomy, their altruism comes with a
leash preventing artists from overtly challenging the economic foundation of their patronage. Today, if the idea of the intellectual serving the
proletariat is politically ludicrous it is in practice a social axiom, while
the implosion of artistic autonomy is evident everywhere. Ultimately,
the collapse of autonomy would not be so profound or irreversible if
not for the changes under way in the post-cold war political economy.
As already noted, one of these changes is the privatization of civic
life and the disappearance of the nation-state. The other permutation is
the generalization of art-like, creative production within the collective
arena of mass culture.

5 Dispensing With Formalities
In the past such things as home made crafts, amateur photography (and
pornography), self-published newsletters, fan-zines and underground
comics had little impact beyond their immediate community of producers and users. Today, an ever more accessible and sophisticated
technology for manufacturing, copying, documenting and distributing
“home-made” or informal art has dramatically ended that isolation.
Today one can not escape the spread of this heterogeneous and informal art-like activity. It radiates from homes and offices, schools and

SOME CALL IT ART 17

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Night-time intervention in Chicago, May 2005

18 GREGORY SHOLETTE

streets, community centers and in cyberspace. Its contents are typically filled with fantasies drawn from popular entertainment as well
as personal trivia and sentimental nostalgia. In form it can range from
the whimsical to the banal and from the absurd to the obscene. It is a
qualitative shift unique to the last ten years and the increased visibility
of amateur and often collectivized cultural production is more than any
other factor accelerating the withering of autonomous artistic practice
as such.
This generalization of artistic activity, mostly visible within digital
form, has sapped the words “art” and “artist” of their previously imagined autonomy. While Joseph Beuys prophesized that his social sculpture would transform everyone into an artist, the ordinary routines of
the populace have done more to achieve that goal without professional
artists to guide them. Indeed, some of this informal art, if stripped of its
context, would be impossible to distinguish from much contemporary
art found in museums and galleries. Meanwhile artists ranging from
Martha Rosler and RTMark to Mike Kelly and Jason Rhodes recognize
the capacity of informal art production and have used it either to critique the art industry in Rosler and RTMark’s case or, deceptively, for
proping-up artistic snobbery with low culture in Rhodes and Kelly’s
work. (think of Taylor’s “slack art”). 46
Therefor, along-side the passive consumption of commodities and
popular entertainment there emerges a different realm in which unofficial and informal cultural capacity is exercised. The more these
informal cultural producers become aware of their own capacity for
creative and transformative action, the more the privileged space once
reserved for “trained” artists recedes. Already, this generalized artistic
activity mixes together consumption, production and exchange as it recycles and redistributes, purchases and appropriates. It is evident when
people download commercial music for free, duplicate copyrighted
images for personal use and in so many ways re-direct or simply loot
institutional power. Many of these activities also circulate within ungoverned or ungovernable economic zones including flea markets or
through the postal system or over the Internet. They vary in form from
the criminal to the patriotic to the insipid. Each garner equal space
within the expanded and informal cultural sphere. Each increasingly
become more visible to each other.
The computer hacker mentality of today is not so far removed from
the organized fence cutting tactics of farmers in Nebraska in the 1880s.
Culture “Jamming” the system is not so different from the tactics of the
Industrial Workers of the World who, at the turn of the century, battled
anti-free speech laws in places like San Diego by overloading the local jails with arrested protestors. However, up to now these activities
remain divided from each other, their political relationship fragmented
and diffused. Yet even the most conservative analysis would find it
difficult to ignore the expansion of unregulated and inventive activities made possible by the growing accessibility of communication and

SOME CALL IT ART 19

Map of Paris Commune 1871

reproductive technologies. Without dismissing the enormous number
of people still laboring in traditional manufacturing and agricultural
industries, especially in developing countries, global capital’s dependency on communications technology virtually assures the spread of
digital networks and information technologies. One of the tasks of activists must be to see to it that the market’s cellular and digital circulatory system is infected by the demands of non-technical laborers. Once
again, it is less that art is being disseminated down into society from
on high, than the social matrix is itself predicated upon a submerged
collective creative capacity. As Negri and Hardt explain:
Labor is productive excess with respect to the existing order
and the rules of its reproduction. This productive excess is at
once the result of a collective force of emancipation and the
substance of the new social virtuality of labor’s productive
and liberatory capacities. 47
Thanks to the exploitative needs of global capital the cost of making visible one’s subjective and creative excesses has fallen dramatically. In theory it is a short distance from group visibility to collective
autonomy.

6. Towards A Provisional, Collective Autonomy?
That a portion of this activity circulates outside official corporate circuits is analogous to the way some practices that are still self-identi-

20 GREGORY SHOLETTE

fied as “art” have organized themselves into collective units of production, distribution, and intervention/disruption that are in certain cases
so borderline that art world discourse largely ignores them. This list
would include some of all of the work of RTMark , Critical Art Ensemble, Reclaim the Streets (various locations, in both digital and actual spaces,) REPOhistory (the NYC based group co-founded by the
author that makes site-specific public art about alternative histories),
ABC No Rio (NYC space dedicated to all forms of counter cultural
practice from music to graffiti to housing activism), Reverend Billy
(also based in NYC, the “reverend” executes anti-corporate performances with his accomplices in Starbuckes at the Disney Store and
the new Times Square), Ultra-Red (an Los Angeles based group of audio-activists), The Center for Land Use Interpretation (also in LA with
projects that produce tours of radioactive and ecologically damaged
environments), Ne Pas Plier ( French activists using art to focus attention on housing for guest workes), Wochenklausur (Austrian group
that stages encounters between elected officials and marginalized peoples), A-Clip (Berlin based media activists), Collectivo Cambalache
(originally from Bogata, CC creates alternative exchange economies in
public spaces), Temporary Services (disseminates art and information
in Chicago streets using newspaper dispensers), Blackstone BicycleWorks/monk prakeet/Dan Peterman (a recycling, organic garden and
art center on Chicago’s South Side), The Stockyrad Institute (Jim Duignan works with urban school children in Chicago to produce “gangproof” armored suits), and the group Ha Ha (Laurie Palmer and John
Ploof develop projects on AIDS, ecology and housing in Chicago and
elsewhere). These informal, politicized micro-institutions have made
art that infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate
Web Sites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines
in ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for either art world discourse or private interests. However, in the
post-cold war and anti-socialist United States the left has joined the
center-liberal establishment in its call for a utilitarian and serviceable
art that integrates “the arts into community life.”48 Under the present
circumstances of global capitalism this might indeed seem the only
possible outcome if one follows to its logical conclusion the once radical avant-garde mandate to take art into life. If Peter Berger insists that
the contemporary neo avant-garde deceptively produces autonomous
art in the guise of social engagement and Terry Eagleton counters that
today’s avant-garde art simply parodies the radical intentions of its
namesake’s once radical agenda, let me suggest that the new, dot.comgardism actually does operate in a van-guard, productivist mode. 49
Using modern marketing techniques they treat the author as a producer
even as their artistic agenda mixes aesthetic play with profiteering.
This new entrepreneurial artist has finally closed the gap between an
imagined bohemian lifestyle and the rest of society. Under these circumstances what possibility does an older idea of art have to forge a

SOME CALL IT ART 21

position that is both accessible and also resistant to the totalizing effects of the global marketplace including the effects of cultural homogeneity, the destruction of private fantasy and local artistic practices,
the privatization of the public sphere and the extinction of civic society
to name those that directly affect this troubled idea of art? 50
Granted, the dissolution of artistic meaning and art’s special status
as cultural symbol is all but total in the United States. What remains of
artistic autonomy is now a specialized marketing tool of both the highculture and mass media industries. As such it now openly manifests
itself for what it has been for some time - a label for a specific brand of
cultural capital called “art”. However, the closer this idea of autonomy
nears extinction or outright exposure the more interesting becomes the
possibility of its rescue. Only when it has hit the floor and gone cold
might a version of this archaic idea possibly be infused with new value. Benjamin argued that only a redeemed mankind could hope to win
back its entire historical legacy. Our redemption of artistic autonomy
therefor would not be a return to the past, especially not the disengaged
and heroic individualism of modernism. Nor would it be grounded in
either the Kantian ideal of disinterested beauty or the Hegelain or even
Marxist notion of an evolving totality. Rather this autonomy would
have to recognize the end of the once powerful contradictions between
artist and society, nature and culture and individual and collective. This
new, critical autonomy would not even be centered on artistic practice
per se, but would recognize the already present potential for political
and economic self-valorization inherent within contemporary social
conditions. Instead of asking what is art, it would instead query what
is politics? Instead of asking if “they are allowed to do that?”, or worry
about the uncertain status of art’s social capital, this critical autonomy
would proceed to activate cells of artistic producers not afraid to utilize
and manipulate the entire range of culture making (and culture-thieving) technologies and strategies that are now multiplying within the
circulatory system of the global body. The autonomous status of these
informal working groups or cells might indeed leverage discursive
power from the lingering aura of the Kantian/Greenbergian aesthetic.
They could for example borrow the idea of freedom (exemplified by
art) for doing politics. What a radical notion! 51 However, they would
do so in a utilitarian (thus anti-Kantian) manner not to insure art’s usefulness to the liberal, corporate state as much new genre public art appears to do, but as a model of political and economic self-valorization
that is applicable for social transformation in the broadest sense. The
point is to begin to recognize and bring to light what already exists and
to re-direct or retool this so that its practitioners become self-conscious
of their already present collectivity, a force potentially independent
from what Negri and Hardt term the Empire.52 Here a final displacement is possible. Politics superimposes itself at all levels as a practical
art that is at the same time symbolic. But it does so only if we understand politics as the exploration of ideas, the pleasure of communica-

22 GREGORY SHOLETTE

tion, the exchange of education, the construction of fantasy all within a
radically defined social practice of collective, critical autonomy.
Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist, writer and a co-founder of the artist
collectives REPOhistory and PAD/D. He is co-editor with Nato Thompson of The
Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT:
2004 & 2005); and Collectivism After Modernism co-edited with Blake Stimson
(University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

NOTES
1 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 33.
2 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 228.
3 Consider a recent report entitled Unseen Wealth: Report of the Brookings Task
Force on Understanding Intangible Sources of Value by Margaret Blair and Steven
Wallman in which the authors argue that “organizational and human capital, “goodwill” and other intangibles, as well as other items that are not usually viewed as
“assets” ... are becoming the real sources of value in corporations.” The authors call
on economists to use such “intangibles” for future analysis “as the dominant drivers
of economic activity and wealth shift away from manufacturing toward informationbased services.”
4 The United States Entertainment business is ranked the 18th largest industry in
Fortune Magazines’s Fortune 500 with Time Warner ranked the 128th largest corporation and Disney the 176th in the global top 500. To get a sense of how small
the “high” art world is by comparison, contrast the combined annual revenue of
$6,763,989 --based on total sales, receipts and shipments --from museums and historic sites in the U.S. to the nearly ten times larger revenue of $60,331,549 just for
gambling, amusement and recreation spending.
5 The American Canvas Report (Washington: National Endowment for the Arts,
August 1997).
6While productivity increased by 20% among workers between 1989 and 1999,
the median real wages of men actually fell according to authors Lawrence Michel,
Jared Bernstein and John Smitt, in State of Working American: 2000-20001 (Economic Policy Institute: 2000). Meanwhile, according to Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood, the incomes of the richest 5% of the population are up by 22%
since 1989 with more than half coming in the last 5 years. “The inequality of family
incomes in 1998 was at its highest ever since the Census Bureau started publishing
annual figures in 1947,” Doug Henwood, “Boom for Whom?,” Left Business Observer #93 (Feb. 2000).
7 “How Jobless the Future?,” Left Business Observer #75 (Dec. 1996).
8 Ibid.
9 Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s,
(London:Verso, forthcoming), p. 10.
10 Henwood, Left Business Observer #75, op. cite.
11 “Over 1.4 million new jobs were created in 1992, and the total since the recession trough [1987] is over 12 million new jobs.” Doug Henwood, ibid. Meanwhile,
some 42 million Americans or 17.8% of the population have no health insurance
coverage according to J. Rhodes, E. Brown, and J. Vistnes in Agency for Health Care
Research and Quality Report, 2000. Americans also carry a total personal debt load
today of one half trillion dollars or $7,564 per household according to a special issue of the New York Times Magazine entitled “Spending: How Americans Part With

SOME CALL IT ART 23
Money,” October, 15, 2000.
12 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire: (Cambridge: Harvard 2000), p.
337.
13 The Number of professional, specialty workers doubled between 1970 and 1990
and the total population of artists more than doubled in that same period with female
artists tripling in number according to Joan Jeffri and Robert Greenblatt in Artists
Who Work with Their Hands: Painters, Sculptors, Craft Artists and Artist Printmakers: A Trend Report, 1970-1990, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts
Research Division, (Washington: NEA, August 1994), p. 28.
14 Note too that the US poverty level in 1998 for a family of four was $16,000 (US
Dept of Labor) while the median income for painters and craft artists in 1990 was
only $18.187. Compare this to the $36.942 average for professional workers in other
fields. Jeffri & Greenblatt, p. 36.
15 Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall, More Than Once In a Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings by American Artists, Research Division Report #40 (Washington:
NEA, 2000), p. 97.
16 According to the same NEA report: The most frequent explanation provided by
artists for holding multiple jobs was that they needed the additional earnings generated by the second jobs to meet their household’s expenses. This was the same reason
most other professionals held a second job. Note that “Visual artists were almost
three times as likely, on average, to have worked in the [professional] service industries than other artists (31% versus 11 %).” Ibid, pp. 44 - 46.
17 A study of 300 graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were
tracked between 1963 to 1980 by researchers Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, Jacob W.
Getzels and Stephen P. Kahn in Talent and Achievement (Chicago:1984, an unpublished report), p. 44.
18 “Information on Artists II,” Research Center for Arts and Culture, 1999, Columbia University p. 8-9. An interesting additional note to this is a recent survey
of leading business CEO’s in the U.S. who’s voting record is exactly the opposite!
See: Lorraine Woellert et al. “Do CEO’s Vote? Not Always and Not Often” Business
Week (November 6, 2000).
19 Chin-tao Wu, op. cite., p. 213.
20 Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism
and the Decline of the Nation State,” Critical Inquiry #19 (Summer 1993), p.747.
21American Canvas Report, op. Cite.
22 Ibid.
23 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basel Blackwell, 1990),
p. 368.
24 Ian Burn, “The ‘Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (Or The Memories of an Ex-Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text (Fall 1981), pp. 49-65. Also see Lucy R. Lippard, Six
Years: the Disappearance of the Art Object (Praeger, 1973).
25 Andrea Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and
Rendered in the Public Sphere?” in October #80 (Spring 1997), pp. 11-116.
26 From a presentation made by Suzanne Getz for the Arts Administration program
at the Art Institute of Chicago, October 8th, 1999.
27 Brandon Taylor , Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York:
Abrams,1995), p. 153.
28 According to the National Center for Education, 63 percent of all U.S. public
school instructional rooms were connected to the Internet and there was approximately one computer for every six students in the entire system in 1999.
29 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 335-337.

24 GREGORY SHOLETTE
30 Joseba Zulaika, “The Seduction of Bilbao,” Architecture (Dec. 1997), p. 61.
31 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: 1984).
32 Here too there is tremendous economic pressure on small non-profits to either
become market savvy fast or vanish. According to a recent survey by William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, over the next three years landlords in San Francisco will
reconfigure one million square feet of studio space for use as dot-com offices while
local non-profits can expect a 500% rent-hikes in their next lease.
33 See Gregory Sholette, “How To Best Serve the New Global Art Matrix,” Seiteneingänge: Museumsidee & Ausstellungsweisn, Roswitha Muttenthaler, Herbert Posch, Eva S. Sturm ed.. (Wein: Turia & Kant, 2000), pp.
146-168.
34 Of course this is not strange to all those artists who produce work specifically
for the kind of commercial galleries that serious artists look down their nose at. Yet
one should stop to reflect if the existence of these less “weighty” venues does not
have a deep and necessary structural relationship with the possibility of making and
accumulating cultural capital of every sort.
35 Returning to the fashion industry metaphor, since knock-off products are themselves an underground economy it may be that the field of digital encryption will
emerge as the next arena for artistic exploration and industry standardization.
36 Immanual Kant, “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,” collected works, (Chicago: William Benton, 1952).
37 Ibid.
38 To be fair, Plato is not above providing for the artist. He does offer a single,
acceptable path by which poets can re-enter his Republic. Those poets who offer
“hymns to the gods and praises of famous men” shall be the only ones that “ought
to be admitted to our State.” He also will allow entrance to the poet who defends her
craft using lyrical speech. In this way Plato’s Republic actually preempts the establishment of an artistic counter-culture at a distance and uncontrolled by the State.
39 Kant, op. cite.
40 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” first published as a pamphlet for the
Voice Of America, 1960, and reprinted in Gregory Batttcok ‘s anthology The New
Art (New York: Dutton, 1966).
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Ivey speaking at the
National Organization of Arts Organizations, Brooklyn, NY, June 2000.
44 Eva Cockroft “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum
(June 1974), pp. 39-41, and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
45 Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott,
(New York: Helen and kurt Wolff, 1978).
46 It could be argued that it is precisely this Kantian/Greenbergian tradition that
provided the theoretical framework for the self-analysis leading to a more politicized
art practice including the work of Hans Haacke, Daniel Burren and later the “institutional critique” of artists like Andrea Fraser and Renee Green. Without dismissing
the logic of this claim I have tried to show elsewhere that this approach gives far
too little credit to non-art world influences including politics and popular culture on
the work of these artists. See Gregory Sholette “News from Nowhere: Activist Art
& After,” Third Text #45 (Winter, 1999), pp. 45-56. For a German version of this
essay see the book Kunst, Kultur und Politik in den Großstädten der 90er Jahre, ed.
by Jutta Held.

SOME CALL IT ART 25
47 Hardt and Negri, op. cite., p. 357.
48 American Canvas Report, op. cite.
49 Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism” in Against The
Grain, (London: Verso, 1986).
50 To this one might add the establishment of extreme economic inequality, the
submission of all human activities to the medium of contract law, the destruction of
local as well as global ecologies, the industrialization of the human body and mind,
the use of military force to achieve the goals of the ideology of the global market.
51 The School of the Art Institute’s student newspaper recently carried an article
proclaiming that art was a “major force binding and guiding” a reawakening of political activism in the United States. While there is an old if unwritten history to this
affiliation the fact that young people are making these connections in the “heartland”
of America is significant. Meanwhile similar links between pirate radio broadcasters,
puppeteers, culture-jammers, and direct action groups is apparent in all of the recent
protests against the World Trade Organization. Joanne Hinkel, “How Art is Helping
Activism” F Newsmagazine (October 2000), pp. 14-15.
52 What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and redefined as a
positive, political power...Empire can only isolate, divide, and segregate...the action
of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and
with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire. It is a
matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them
continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of crossing and breaking down the
limits and segmentations that are imposed on the new collective labor power; it is
a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in
concert against the nerve centers of imperial command.” Negri and Hardt, op. cite.,
pp. 400-401. See also Sholette, “Counting On Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice,” Afterimage (November, 1999), pp.18-20.

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