Art as Counterbalance

When the arts are under attack, artists generally defend their disciplines as providing a counterbalance to contemporary Western culture’s obsession with getting and spending, And while the attacks are increasing, artists have a decreasing ability to argue convincingly that the arts are relevant. What could, in previous decades, have been described as a general lack of interest in the arts, appears to be blossoming into antipathy towards the arts in general & painting in particular. One of the reasons for this is the sheer impossibility for art to capture the scale of the disaster the planet faces as the anthropocene age progresses through mass species extinction,

climate change,

rising sea levels,

and so on, all of which creates a widening gap between rich & poor.

In Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, Oxfam calculated that the richest 1% of people in the world owned nearly half (48%) of the world’s wealth. The vast majority of the remaining 52% of the world’s wealth was owned by the next 19% of the world’s richest people (which would probably include everybody reading this post) leaving just 5.5% of the world’s wealth for the poorest 80% of people in the world.

Artists are faced with the dilemma that the works we create are entirely unlikely to make a difference to the onslaught of late-capitalist destruction.This dilemma is nicely described by the writer, Rick Bass:
“What story, what painting, does one offer to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC? What story or painting does one offer up or create to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions?”

Painting is especially helpless in this regard as it cannot compete with installations designed to shock viewers into recognition of the crisis we are part of, or photography that can record the disasters in relentless detail.

Artists are faced with the dilemma that the works we create are entirely unlikely to make a difference to the onslaught of late-capitalist destruction.This dilemma is nicely described by the writer, Rick Bass:
“What story, what painting, does one offer to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC? What story or painting does one offer up or create to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions?”

But then he goes on to say, “Paint me a picture or tell me a story as beautiful as other things in the world today are terrible. If such stories and paintings are out there, I’m not seeing them.”

He is referring to the fact that, instead of acting as a counterbalance to the misery humans are creating, intellectual discussions on the role of art promote the idea that creating beautiful paintings, and indeed beauty itself, is part of the problem instead of part of the solution.  Bass suggests that,

“Rampant beauty will return”, but in the meantime, “activism is becoming the shell, the husk or where art once was….The activist is for a real and physical thing, as the artist was once for the metaphorical; the activist, or brittle husk-of-artist, is for life, for sensations, for senses deeply touched…The activist is the artist’s ashes”.

Is this true or are artist/activists arising, Phoenix-like from these ashes imbued with creativity and meaning?

Art & Gentrification

An ambivalent view of arts and activism is bolstered not only because artists themselves are rejecting the creation of art but because urban activists have focused on artists and galleries as the enemy – the thin edge of gentrification’s wedge.  Artist-driven urban renewal typically leads to artists being priced out of the neighborhoods they have helped to revive. This is sometimes referred to as “the SoHo effect.” Artists are complicit in the gentrification process, which has an impact not only on the artists themselves, but on other residents of neighborhoods that are being gentrified. This process is called “artwashing”—a term for adding a cultural sheen to a developing neighborhood that then sends rental prices up, forcing out the original inhabitants.

Artists find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being inadvertently complicit in driving gentrification, even as they are being victimized by the trend.

The term appears to have first been used in mainstream media in 2014 by Feargus O’Sullivan of The Atlantic, in an article about a tower in once-destitute East London that had been redeveloped for high-paying tenants. They were being enticed, in part, by suggestions that they wouldn’t be gentrifiers but, rather, original members of a new artistic community. “The artist community’s short-term occupancy is being used for a classic profit-driven regeneration manoeuver,” O’Sullivan wrote. He labelled the process “artwashing.” Years later, the conflict is escalating, and someone shot a potato gun at the attendees of an art show, and someone spray-painted “Fuck white art” on the walls of several galleries.

As explained by Jillian Billard in the online journal Artspace, artwashing takes place “when artists and galleries move into what is branded as a “newly established art community,” they generally don’t think of themselves as gentrifiers so much as they think of themselves as pioneers of a “new community,” (as opposed to new members of the pre-existing, already culturally-rich community).

Activists in cities with the highest levels of gentrification and displacement of longstanding residents, such as LA and New York, disrupt exhibitions and readings in new galleries. As Billard says, “It’s not that they don’t like art; rather their efforts proactively address the historically damaging effects that art spaces can have on a community’s deep-rooted residents. When developers see a neighborhood flourishing with art galleries and bougie cafes, they see a potential for exorbitant profit. Art galleries are part of a broader effort by planners and politicians and developers who want to artwash gentrification.”

In the past year, across North America, artist/activists are voicing their discontent with developer-driven artwashing and displacement. The Chinatown Art Brigade, an anti-gentrification group of artists and activists in New York, protested an exhibition by a Berlin-based artist. Their banner read “RACISM DISGUISED AS ART” as the installation included a room replete with objects indicating a sparsely merchandised Chinatown business that visitors walked through in order to view an artwork screening in the back of the gallery.

In Vancouver BC, a member of the Chinatown Action Group likened the artwashing taking place in New York’s Chinatown to developers and new businesses in Vancouver. These employ stereotypically Chinese imagery or aesthetics to gain authenticity, pay a misguided homage, or clumsily conceal an exclusionary agenda.

Though the movement is often called Anti-Art, some powerful art is being created by these activists, such as the art washing hands image shown earlier, the above image and the following by an unidentified artist on the Defend Boyle Heights Facebook page:

Another compelling image emerged from Vancouver, B.C activists protesting developer Westbank’s arrogant use of art-washing discussed in the blog Anti Art. This is a strong piece of activist art using the format of Westbank’s advertising blitz and capturing its hypocrisy and contempt for neighbourhoods. Westbank is the largest real-estate developer in Vancouver and it launched a disingenuous ad campaign called “The Fight for Beauty” for its new condo development that would displace many residents of the city. On its website, the activists posted the following:

“Everything Westbank does serves to displace culture created by the people. The real estate development company is not a cultural pioneer or patron, but a corporate entity that takes advantage of culture as a facade to push forward their profit-making agenda at all cost. They distribute their manufactured “culture” as soulless condos globally to offshore investors, while they wipe out Vancouver’s neighbourhoods and affordability. Westbank is not a culture company; it is a vulture company.“

The activists oppose artists and galleries that act as vehicles for gentrification & displacement but ironically, the images arising from that struggle are some of the most evocative being produced today. Perhaps that is because these images are coming from strong feeling and beliefs as opposed to what tends to be the coldly intellectual art promoted by the arts establishment.

Role of Arts Establishment

In addition to galleries, the arts establishment contributes to gentrification & displacement in cities under pressure from development interests. A  good example of this in Vancouver is Artscape,  an arts and culture non-profit with a multi-million dollar budget used to “revitalize” neighborhoods and promote mixed use developments.

Artscape’s method is to purchase or lease underused properties, more often than not  in low-income neighbourhoods. The spaces are then rented out to professional artists and registered not-for-profits at below-market rates. In the case of BC Artscape, the project was also helped with $900,000 – from the City of Vancouver, the credit union, VanCity and the J.W. McConnell Foundation: a match made in real estate heaven. Over the past decade  Artscape has become a very attractive partner for developers because developers can build bigger condos if they provide “community benefits” such as arts studios.

The New Avant-Guard

The arts establishment and some artists continue to be guided by the pursuit of such non-issues as whether an artist should ” move away from …the imagistic and textual and toward a probing of the real and historical” as discussed in a recent work of art criticism. But the artworks that are promoted by what the arts establishment would term, “progressive debate” have done little to counterbalance “Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC”. And as we have seen, the arts have been complicit in localized class wars, also called gentrification.

Palestinians search for casualties at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023. REUTERS / Anas al-Shareef

However, the work of the artist/activists explored in this blog are pointing the way forward and that direction is one of meaningful (as opposed to theoretical) day-to-day involvement in the ongoing struggle to protect common social and economic values from the ravages of greed and opportunism.

An article in the online journal colouringinculture.org  suggests that, “The radical avant-garde today can therefore be seen to exist in the cracks of neoliberalism as re-politicised acts of resistance against the totality of capitalism, grounded in collectivism and …nonaesthetic reason…in keeping with the radical avant-garde, disobedience and dissent, non-compliance and non-conformity, are what make us human and make us creative.” It is an interesting that anti-art activists are art’s newest avant-garde.

While the arts can do little to halt the ravages of the anthropocene age and the totality of capitalism on the environment, they are able to have a meaningful impact on local issues of gentrification and displacement. But as previous blogs have argued, they continue to enrich our lives in dark times. To quote Joseph Conrad (ignore his use of the gender-specific pronouns this was written in early 1900’s):
“the artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mysteries surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of enumerable hearts, to the solidarity… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

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As a place to start this exploration, we can use the 2017 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition called Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting. A review by Robin Laurence titled, “Entangled shows contemporary Canadian painting is alive and well” said the painters exhibited, “found ingenious and sometimes revisionist ways of revitalizing the object and justifying their medium”.  But the paintings, such as the those shown below, uniformly rejected the notion that beauty has any role to play in painting. As this show was designed to represent the cutting edge of contemporary painting in Vancouver, why was it so clearly adverse to aesthetics? Is this anti-art or simply a redefinition of art, especially painting, as a discipline that must eschew aesthetics in order to be contemporary?

While Laurence’s review agreed that painting is considered a dead art form, he describes the painters of Entangled as not entirely convinced of its demise. “Human beings, after all, had been applying pigment to receptive surfaces for tens of thousands of years.”

Why do painters continue to paint if the medium has  been declared “dead, defunct, or worse, irrelevant”?  One good reason was given by Gamlin, the maker of oil paints  who describe painting as the most complicated, all-encompassing, and rewarding experience, “because painting requires us to see, think, feel, and perform complicated physical tasks all at the same time, striving for something meaningful, striving to make order out of the very raw material that is oil colors” and because painting makes the painter “feel so good to be so alive.”

Clearly other art forms offer the same experience, which is why artists persist despite a general lack of pecuniary benefits and worldly disinterest.  In his book, The Blue Guitar, John Banville‘s goal is not narrative but “linguistic beauty …pursued as an end in itself “. In one passage, he describes what happens to the painter protagonist as he “…sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the centre of a great hollow stillness…In it I would seem suspended at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form”. Banville hints that in much of writing or painting this state of hyper-awareness eludes us. “How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint.”

So why was there so little attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself, in the Entangled show?  No artist wants their work to be irrelevant, so the works shown were largely concerned with challenging modernist ideas of aesthetics rather than breaking new painterly ground, with the possible exception of a few works such as this one:

The primary goal of most of the exhibition’s painters appeared to be to challenge the idea of paintings as objects of beauty, value or egotism. While clever and in some cases original, many, if not most, paid no attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself.

Some, like the piece to the right are a replay of ideas that have been done many times over the last half-century. Such works reflect the dominant art paradigm in which emotions or any feelings other than amused irony are part of an outdated modernist sensibility and strictly renounced.

So why has visual beauty, pursued as an end in itself,  become an unacceptable pursuit for a self-respecting contemporary artist? And is the Anti-Art movement a logical culmination of the antipathy to aesthetics?  The following investigates a number of very good reasons why aesthetics and art itself have become suspect.

1) Looks Good Over the Couch
The most obvious reason for disavowing aesthetics in painting is its use as decoration.  Paintings are generally chosen not for their technical skill or visual discoveries but because they complement the decor. Painters at the beginning of their careers often strive for stereotypically beautiful paintings of landscapes, bunches of flowers, nubile nudes etc.

Those who persevere realize that beauty is a snare and a delusion – the more a painter strives for beauty in a familiar form that has been portrayed by other artists and recognized as such, the farther s/he gets from it. Those who make a profession of creating “beautiful” paintings that look good over the couch never set out on the life-long journey to scale painting’s  insurmountable cliffs, at the top of which is another insurmountable cliff and so on.

2) Artwork as Investment
The second most obvious reason is that paintings exemplify the commodification of art. As in this article in the Huffington Post the wealthy looking for safe investments are advised to buy real estate and artworks, especially paintings.

“The art market rebounded quickly after the last recession, faster than traditional investments. High net worth individuals (HNWI) with a portfolio diversified into art assets were not as greatly affected. Additionally, rather than investing in stocks or bonds, art provides investors with an alternative, tangible opportunity.”

They are not, of course, buying paintings they like, but works attached to a highly valued brand (aka artist). Artists have always had to deal with the philistinism of the market, but there has likely never been a period in history when the art market, with its focus solely on profit, has  so dominated artistic production and public understanding of the value of art.

3) Art & Big Egos
In the contemporary visual art world  there is the belief is that artists who create large, grand or durable artworks are egotists. To avoid this damning charge, a generation of artists has been careful to ensure that their works are small, self-effacing, unserious and/or constructed of waste products.

Large paintings are viewed as a throwback to the modernist era when gigantic artistic egos created giant canvases.

In an attempt to democratize art, especially painting, the post-modernists discarded distinctions between “high” and “low” art. Into this aesthetic vacuum stepped the phenomenon of the artist as personality and the unprecedented importance placed by the market on the personality of the artist rather than the artworks themselves.

Artists such as Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami, are not so much artists as brands marketed on the strength of name recognition.

4) Relativism
An offshoot of identity politics has been a revival of the relativist philosophy that Socrates opposed.  Socrates believed that virtue was something that should be aspired to and is immutable, permanent and unchanging – a moral absolute.

His antagonists, the Sophists, did “not offer true knowledge, but only an opinion of things” and held a relativistic view on cognition and knowledge.  In a relativist universe where there is no right and wrong or standards of excellence, every person can only act in their own interests and neo-liberalism is the modern version of this thinking.

The implication of relativism for the arts has been that, since Clement Greenberg, no one feels they can say whether an artwork is good or bad, or even if an object can rightly be called art. Who can judge excellence in a world without right or wrong,  good or bad?  So for contemporary artists it is safer not produce something that clearly strives for excellence but to produce works that abjure technical skill and aesthetics .

5) Truth is Beauty & Beauty Truth
Our culture and its tools have changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 1900, so that it is no longer a changing culture but a culture of change. It is a culture where change has attained a god-like status of inevitability and determinism.

In this philosophical climate, there is no potential for art to reveal truths as there can be no absolute truths , so what is the point of art? If painting is not metaphysical or about making money or beautiful objects to please the bourgeoisie, it can only be an in-your-face repudiation of all pretentious, presumptuous, egotistical aims and a reminder of all that is wrong with society. Thus contemporary artists produce works that eschew aesthetics.

6) Art & Gentrification
A new argument against aesthetics, art & culture has surfaced that goes a long way toward explaining the hostility to art and the rise of an anti-art sensibility. This argument appeared in an article by Dorothy Woodend in the online journal The Tyee.

The article states, “Beauty doesn’t need any help. How about we fight for ugly?”  This statement is odd because, after 30 years of exploitative, poorly planned, free-for-all growth, beauty in Vancouver has been effectively expunged. However, Woodend was referring to a PR campaign by one of the more neighbourhood-unfriendly developers in the city. They are running a marketing bonanza under the guise of an art exhibition featuring giant pink billboards, transit ads, posters and pink cars emblazoned with the words “Fight for Beauty”  that are currently everywhere.

This PR campaign highlights a debate about art & culture that is gaining momentum in all cities where housing is an international commodity, locals are displaced and artists who remain are forced to scramble for studio space and affordable housing. The displacement is a result of gentrification where local governments allow the demolition of affordable dwellings and their replacement with unaffordable condos. In the cities where this is taking place, activists rightly term it class war as the less wealthy are replaced by higher-income earners.

One of the tools local governments and developers use to create acceptance of this process has been termed art washing. The Vancouver Mural Festival amply demonstrated this approach. In the same way that condominium marketing campaigns re-purpose words like “community” and “regeneration” to sell boxes of air, art is used to divert attention away from the gentrification and displacement taking place. As Woodend says, “..it is difficult not to lose respect for the very idea of art itself”.

All those pretty murals, full of blandishments  like “The Present is a Gift” were a quick way for the city to run with a branding scheme for neighbourhoods in a way that ultimately served the interests of developers, realtors, and property owners – stakeholders the then ruling municipal party, Vision Vancouver is beholden to more than working class residents who live in these areas.

Ironically, given Vancouver Mural Festival’s message of improving neighbourhoods and communities, their flagship mural, titled “The Present is a Gift,” adorns The Belvedere and its painting was the catalyst that began the renoviction process of the dozens of artists who lived in the building some for over the last 30 years.

Conclusion

The reasons above provide convincing arguments for contemporary painters to eschew painterly aesthetics. Painting has been commercialized and successful painters are entrepreneurs. The connection between art & gentrification overshadows all other concerns about the arts as it is a scourge in every major city in the world. This issue warrants further exploration and research.

However, the nagging question remains – why anti-art? The commercialized consumer culture touches every aspect of contemporary society from food to games, so why have visual artists felt their disciplines must not search for visual beauty, “pursued as an end in itself “?  Clearly this question deserves  further study so I have continued the discussion in my next blog.

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The question is whether painting is relevant and can have an impact on the wider society, or whether it is an art form that is only about the painters’ connection to the painting and the viewer’s personal connection to the painting. Is it a passive art form or can it make the leap from canvas to galvanizing political action?

Paintings in History

In many periods of history, painting has played a powerful role as political propaganda. Earlier civilizations such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans used murals, bas-reliefs and sculptures to celebrate political triumphs and the power of the elites. This tradition continued through the 20th century with the commissioning of paintings and sculptures commemorating battles won and their victorious winners. As the last centuries’ winners have been outed as ruthless and immoral by any standards, there has been demands for removal of these sculptures and paintings from the public realm. So in that sense, paintings depicting the triumphs of ruthless men have had a strong political impact even in the present day.

There have been powerful paintings that generated controversy and influenced public attitudes and even political outcomes that were not sanctioned by ruling elites. For example, the painting below, Raft of the Medusa, had scandalous political implications in France; the incompetent captain, who had gained the position because of connections to the Bourbon Restoration government, fought to save himself and senior officers while leaving the lower ranks to die, so Géricault’s picture of the raft and its inhabitants was greeted with hostility by the government. As Jake Hirsch-Allen says in his analysis, “the power of The Raft as a political tool of propaganda was immediately apparent and has been its most enduring historical facet. As the story of the Medusa became a cause célebré, embroiled in the complexities of
Bourbon-restoration politics and tensions between the Liberal and Royalist factions…and, as
events progressed, with the highly emotive subject of the slave trade, the Raft of the Medusa
itself became a symbol these debates.”

Though Géricault’s painting was still part of in the heroic “history painting” style, this muscular work was transformative in re-defining the scope of painting’s subjects and impacts.

The Impressionists

While Impressonists such as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet are not usually associated with shaping political attitudes, their work had influence. As art historian Nancy Locke said in transcripts of her talk to students at Penn State University, “By painting the homeless, for example, Manet depicted the social implications of poverty. Similarly, by painting scenes which blurred class lines (like many subjects of the Impressionist canvas), artists influenced shifts in society.”

In his paper on Intersections of Art and Politics, John Kim Munholland, argues that Monet also communicated a strong political message, “The Rue Montorgueil, Celebration of June 30,1878 and its twin The Rue Saint-Denis, Celebration of June 30, 1878, in which the words “Vive la République” appear on a flag…blurred class differences with their patriotic, republican messages. Set in the streets of a popular quarter of Paris, they reminded viewers that the Commune uprising also had been an expression of outraged and frustrated nationalism among the people of Paris, who had held out against the Prussians during the siege, but had been forced to capitulate by the Versailles government.”

Early-Modernism

The “history painters” and Impressionists sought to influence the direction of their societies through content, or depiction of their subjects. The modernists scorned content and expressed themselves only through form. For instance, Piet Mondrian, working during the appalling upheavals in Europe during the 1930’s & 40’s, believed that his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balanced relationships”.

According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Mondrian’s artistic direction was “Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual, arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a new, harmonious view of life. This kind of magical thinking is like a poignant glimmer of a previous era’s optimism about art and the human imagination. Mondrian’s philosophy could be thought of as self-indulgent navel-gazing, except for the fact that it produced these astounding works of art and revolutionized thinking about painting.

Modernism

From a twenty-first century perspective, the conviction that rigidly controlled lines and blocks of colour could contribute to world peace seemed laughable. Modernists, like the Minimalists who came after Mondrian, did not share his belief in the power of art to transform society. Like Frank Stella they had a reductionist approach to art, wanting only to demonstrate that every painting is “a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more”, and rejected the idea art as a means of expressing emotion. He summarized his apolitical and anti-social approach by saying, “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object… All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…. What you see is what you see.“

So with Modernism, painting became what in another blog is described as “self-reflexive”, or concerned only about itself. This could be considered to be a political statement as it is in keeping with the growing individualism of the second half of the twentieth century. Ties to community were weakening and western governments pressured their citizens to become individualistic consumers to bolster the economy.

The drive for purity by Modernists like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Kenneth Noland influenced, and was strongly influenced by, the thinking of the American art critic, Clement Greenberg. His theories could be said to have built on the ideas about purity that inspired Mondrian, but lacked the painter’s Calvinist & Theosophical zeal.

Greenberg believed in progressively purifying painting of all representation and illusion and promoted the hard-edged and colour-field abstractions of his favourite artists. Mondrian believed that his painting would contribute to a more harmonious and peaceful world. The only rationale provided by the Modernists for cleansing away any spatial depth or sculptural qualities in painting, was that it is ridiculous to try to create spatial illusions on a flat surface. Modernists did not feel that art should play a role in the larger world, but believed in “art for art’s sake”. The rise of a consumer culture and the commodification of art during this period was not a concern.

Post-Modernism

The Postmodernists were more aware of consumerism and the emerging role of the art market but the movement tried to neutralize it by absorbing it. Postmodernists reversed the Modernist contempt for popular culture, the mass media and mass consumerism and looked for inspiration in the everyday. In his blog The Postmodern Revolution, David Adams comments that this approach “…seemed much more vital than modernist art. (See for example fig. 7, which also suggests the revival of painting that took place).”

Adams goes on to say, “…postmodernism refers to the end of an epistemologically centered philosophy based on the efforts of a knowing subject to know truth by achieving a true mental representation of objective reality (the Cartesian subject-object dualism). It argues (among many other things) that there is no temporally invariant truth since human understanding is always historically-based (or “contingent”).

Post-modern relativism, which has been discussed in other blogs, was a direct outgrowth of the individualist and anti-social introspection of the Modernist era. In this approach, not only does painting have no relation to anything outside itself, it assumes that there is nothing outside itself that is true – only what a particular individual might happen to believe. This brings us to the present day where relativism is widely held and could be called the dominant paradigm. Part of this paradigm is that there can be no possibility of an authoritative assessment of artistic worth or quality as everything is only relative. Anyone’s taste in art is equal to anyone else’s as there are no absolute or even conventionally accepted criteria. Into this moral and authoritative vacuum, the market has taken on the role that used to be held by what used to be called experts on art.

The Market Monster
In a culture of getting and spending where there are no other standards for gauging excellence in art, the marketplace is the logical arbiter. A painting is worthwhile if it can obtain a high price. A previous post, On Theories of Art, suggested that objective assessments of art are difficult to attain because art is about feelings rather than reason, but feels the need to be justified by some form of reason other than marketability. As in all aspects of life in a capitalist society, the market has skewed relations between artists and their work and between artists and viewers.

Though written in 1975, Harold Rosenberg’s Art on the Edge, contains many ideas that remain highly relevant. Rosenberg calls the influence of the marketplace on the direction of contemporary art “…a process of transformation whose end is not in sight” (p.8) and over 40 years later, this transformation continues to mutate. For an artist, alternatives to the market are either art-as-criticism, (parody, irony, subversion) or making art for oneself. The irony is that ironic, subversive, parodies of art have been absorbed by the establishment so that they happily sponsor shows that are opposed to them. “To create the illusion of an adversary force, everything that has been overthrown must be overthrown again and again”. (p.90)

This relates to a discussion in the previous post describing the current epoch as not a changing culture but a culture of change. The ideology of constant change has, like the end of history, eliminated real change. It will not be possible to rescue art from the market’s perverse influences through renunciation of artistic sins that went before. And it is naive to believe that one art form or another can have an effect on a pervasive economic system that manipulates every aspect of life.

The Contemporary Era

As I am an artist not a scholar, this is a necessarily brief and sketchy overview of the social and political influence of the visual arts, especially painting, over the last 100 years. I have divided art history into three major art movements: Pre-Modernism, Modernism and Post Modernism. These divisions are only visible from historical perspective and the current era is made up of many disparate schools such as Post-Post-Modernism, Anti-Art, Conceptual Art, Site Specific Art, Installation Art, etc. Their commonality is the assumption that easel painting is dead, or at least irrelevant. But as I have argued here, jettisoning easel painting and conventional concepts of aesthetics, has done nothing to bring greater harmony or halt the commodification of art. Western societies teeter on the brink of instability and the art market continues to go from strength to strength. As I update this blog in April of 2024, I include the latest figures for the art market in 2023 from Artsy:

“The art market experienced a down year in 2023. Total sales in the art market fell by 4% year over year to $65 billion. The figure represents the lowest since the COVID-blighted year of 2020, but is still higher than pre-pandemic levels when sales were $64.4 billion”.

However, their good news for art market was:

“Most dealers and auction houses expect stable or improving sales in 2024, and those predicting lower sales were in the minority both for their own businesses and with their peers.“

This is not the Utopian, harmonious culture that Mondrian hoped to bring about through an extreme purity, superb clarity and force in painting. The modernists and post-modernist that followed, and the elimination of aesthetics and painterly painting they endorsed, have been happily absorbed by the market. So where does this leave contemporary art and artists? This is a topic for future blogs about even more on painting.

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