Art’s Moral Fetish
Morality and legality are decided chiefly by the prevailing ruling class in whatever geographical variant, not least because a collective morality is too unwieldy and difficult to maintain.
— Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus [1]
British serial killer Ian Brady’s sentiment largely echoes the theory of moral relativism theorized by Marquis de Sade. Regardless of what we think of Brady’s heinous crimes, it’s hard to argue with the pulse of his statement: of course the ruling class sets the parameters of societal morality. In the past, however, great artists sought to question and expose the hypocrisies embedded within that morality: Francis Bacon’s mangled bodies depicted the violent undercurrent beneath the shimmering veneer of modernism and technology; the Viennese Aktionists’ rituals of sadism and sexual catharsis; Honoré Daumier’s illustrative satires that depicted the members of the 19th century French aristocracy as grotesque cretins. As the art world and broader culture industries have internalized the logic of neoliberalism in the 21st century, the critical role of art has collapsed. There’s no more dissent or provocation that dares us to challenge power. Instead, contemporary artists are more likely to both mirror and propagandize on behalf of the constructed morality of the ruling class more than effectively expose its faulty logics.
Study for Self-Portrait, Francis Bacon, 1963. https://francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/study-self-portrait.
Baudrillard, of course, said in his 1996 essay The Conspiracy of Art that art had no more reason to exist [2]. He declared art meaningless and, to use his preferred terminology, null. The philosopher believed that art had lost sight of its mystique due to its divorce with “the desire of illusion” during the commercial explosion of the 1980s, when art was reduced to commodity. But if illusionism in art has found a “second life,” as Baudrillard predicted it might, it’s mostly as propaganda. Contemporary artists and art institutions form a propaganda apparatus that aids neoliberal capitalism in its quest to reinvent itself for compatibility with “wokeness” and intersectionality.
“How are you voting in 2020?” asks a yard sign image posted to Marilyn Minter’s Instagram on August 16. Your choices, according to the sign, are “Democrat” or “Fascist”. The whole digital scene is nauseating, and its message is clear: this is the ideological window of acceptability. Be “woke” or be “fascist.” To paraphrase Mark Fisher, it would appear that there really is no alternative [3]. While art has long maintained a symbiotic relationship with bourgeois state power, there’s still something deeply unsettling about our supposedly “radical” artists manufacturing consent on behalf of one of our two entrenched capitalist parties. Neoliberalism necessitates the threat of something even more horrible – a spectral doom always just beyond the horizon – than the present to justify itself as the status quo. In the early 2000s, public support for the status quo was secured through fear mongering radical Islamic terror. Now, the phantom menace is “fascism”. But Trump isn’t a fascist. He’s a symbol of the transformation of American empire and global capitalism. What Minter is doing is fusing conceptualist aesthetics with neoliberal politics and talking points. In doing so, she’s not just propagandizing on behalf of one faction of the elite, but also neutralizing art of its critical role. The cultural hegemony has shifted in the last 30 years as artists, intellectually trapped in the banal culture wars of the ‘90s and attracted to the intersectional aesthetics of the liberal elite (the DNC and its backers in the surveillance state, Silicon Valley and Wall Street), willfully overlook or latently support the neoliberal and imperial politics of the elite. This is rank conformism. Artists, often precarious actors in a competitive marketplace, regurgitate these “left” liberal reductive narratives simply because there is reward in doing so, or because they have unconsciously capitulated to social pressure, leading to a domino effect. As a result, the role of the artist has been reduced to that of the propagandist. This phenomenon is vampirically exsanguinating creativity itself: the freedom to challenge the orthodoxies of our culture, politics, and society.
Culture war is merely the illusion of politics; it’s what remains when hope for real change has died. As its consequence, the politics of “theater and performance” that Christopher Lasch commented on in Culture of Narcissism has reached its apotheosis. [4] Now, artists allegedly on “the left” partner with any and all bourgeois institutions that are “anti-Trump,” even if those same institutions are more responsible for rampant inequality than Trump is. Think of feminist poet Eileen Myles — still cloaked in an aura of radical politics from their days reading at the St. Marks Poetry Project and their 1992 write-in campaign for president — demanding that Buzzfeed readers support Hilary Clinton for President in 2016 (they supported Elizabeth Warren this year, unsurprisingly). Though Myles’s politics have always been rooted in reductive bourgeois identitarianism lacking in substantive class analysis, they remain heralded as some kind of freedom fighter. In reality, their political role is being little more than a branding strategist for the Democratic Party and its tangled web of corporate infrastructures. But it’s that “freedom fighter” brand that provides the useful mystification for neoliberal hegemony: “If Myles is so radical and supports Clinton, then I can support Clinton and still be radical.” This is bourgeois propaganda aimed at more idiosyncratic thinkers (who perhaps don’t consume mainstream media) that might be temperamentally inclined to reject a two-party system.
30 years of identity politics haven’t only complicated the role of art in our culture, but have also tremendously diminished the quality of art being produced. An art that supports (a faction of) the power structure doesn’t challenge us to question our reality and search within ourselves, it demands our fealty (“Vote Blue No Matter Who”). Art is now praised for having the “correct” ideological allegiances, not for its complexity or form. The art that casts a critical eye towards our society in its totality, or even just employs ambiguity to inspire criticality in its viewers, is met with skepticism, if not hostility. For example, in 2016 artist Darja Bajagić created a work entitled Bucharest Molly for an exhibition at Romania-based Galeria Nicodim called “Omul Negru” in response to its curatorial theme of “aesthetics of evil and paranoia”. The piece — a motion activated fountain adorned with an appropriated image of a woman wearing jeans emblazoned with the words “HEIL HITLER” and a red teddy bear with a swastika on it — was removed from the show by its curators. Although Bajagić’s work aligned with the show’s theme, it offered no clear moral assessment of its subject matter. It was ambiguous. Thus, the curators of the exhibition weren’t looking for artistic materialization of the experience of evil, but rather for the artists to isolate and cast judgement upon the “evils” most commonly commented on in the art world: racism, white nationalism, authoritarianism, and otherwise. Aesthetic ambiguity inspires us to think for ourselves, and possibly beyond the confines of the system we inhabit. As a propaganda arm of the progressive side of capital, the art world cannot tolerate enigmas.
American Procession (Progressives), Sandow Birk, 2018. https://sandowbirk.com/american-procession.
American Procession (Conservatives), Sandow Birk, 2018. https://sandowbirk.com/american-procession.
Contemporary art has a tendency to wear its diminutive ideology on its sleeve. The worst artwork I’ve seen in recent years was Sandow Birk’s DNC propaganda piece American Procession from 2018. The work features two adjacent woodblock prints. “The Left” print depicts market nihilists like Nancy Pelosi alongside historical labor socialists and civil rights icons like MLK Jr. “The Right” portrays the likes of Trump alongside the Ku Klux Klansmen. Birk makes no distinction between the oppositional political ideologies between the figures on each side, lumping everyone into a simplistic binary: “left” or “right” or “good” or “evil”. Without complexity or nuance, the piece embodies all the incoherence of art world identity politics. In another example of identiarian limitations in contemporary art, Arthur Jafa appropriated the clip of Obama singing “Amazing Grace” (after the Charleston mass shooting by white supremacist Dylann Roof) into his breakout video montage Love is the Message, Love is Death. But why not include the Obama clip in which the former president pretended to drink Flint's poisoned water? Wouldn’t the more provocative and true critique be one in which the artist emphasizes the abandonment of the black working class by the black political elite? Jafa, inadvertently or not, reinforced progressive capitalism’s distortion of realpolitik. But a true work of art should rupture the symbolic order, should it not? Picasso said that “art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth,” but instead we cling to a false truth built on lies. Cleverly, neoliberalism has generated the conditions from which its subjects are its most loyal ministers of propaganda, ensuring that no radical idea or art stays in the public domain for long. Thus, censorship in the art world or “cancel culture” — mimicking the logic of neoliberalism more broadly — isn’t enforced by institutional authorities, but by the social media-fueled collective anger of people embedded within it, and its consumers. By regurgitating the censorship methods of neoliberalism, the art world has become a powerful vindicating tool of bourgeois state ideology and contributed to the conditions from which real art cannot emerge.
The art school has become a kind of “psy-op,” that indoctrinates young artists into identitarian neoliberalism and, by extension, “morally purifies” the art world. The inculcation starts early. Art schools can be understood as what Louis Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses,” institutions formally outside the state but in cahoots with it insofar as they reproduce state ideology. Think of Malcolm MacDowell’s eye sockets surgically peeled open by a pair of specula in A Clockwork Orange. But instead of being made to watch images of violence and depravity as a method of aversion therapy, he is strapped to that chair and howling with indignant discomfort while confronted with images of various “micro-aggressions” and vague oppressions that have nothing to do with the economic realities of inequality. Ironically, the art school educates students on the functionings and inequalities produced by market neoliberalism while teaching them to commodify not just their work, but their identities, orientations, and otherwise, thereby proselytizing them into that very identity privatizing ideology (“sell yourself”) now being used to justify market neoliberalism.
Yale’s MFA program, however laudable for the diversity of its alumni, produces countless artists dealing with tired reiterations of the same stale subject matter (identity, representation, etc). Yale graduate Bajagić, who courageously refuses to bow to art world orthodoxy, opting to create work of vibrant moral complexity, was suggested to go to therapy on school dime by Yale School of the Art’s Dean Robert Storr for the artist’s use of violent and pornographic imagery. The implication here is stunning: if you have creative interests that are different than those of the rest of your class then you must literally be mentally ill. This is the art world enforcing its own ideology in the most abrupt manner, and an example of bourgeois institutions internalizing “woke” ideology.
But when the academy fails to brainwash critical dissent out of young artists, socially enforced censorship, or “cancel culture,” is a more than effective method of “othering” if not outright silencing the artists that have managed to uphold the historical role of the artist as challenger of cultural credo. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, it seems all too perfect, that of all the successful artists to be smeared with with absurd sex scandals founded upon nothing other than the petty grievances of the accusers, it was an artist like Jon Rafman. Rafman’s accusers were hyper-versed in the art of cancel culture. Using an Instagram account with aesthetically pleasing graphic design to maximize the visibility and intoxicating cancellation fervor of their campaign against the artist, they were internet savvy and knowledgeable in the weaponization of market logic. Rafman recently stated to Spike Magazine that “The totalitarian desire to dissolve the distinction between art and politics is a sign of regression,” challenging woke capitalism’s stranglehold over contemporary art production. His success could be viewed as a rejection of identitarian orthodoxy in the art world. Call me crazy, call me apophenic, but this is schizoid liquid modernity, and “Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach” [5].
But one needn’t rely on conspiracy theorizing to understand the ways that the art world uses manufactured outrage to police its internal ideological narratives. The aforementioned Bajagić endured peer-driven censorship when she was slated to show her work alongside Boyd Rice, a pioneering industrial musician and artist with a “checkered” ideological history, at Greenspon Gallery in 2018. After the exhibition was announced, an artist listserv known as Invisible Dole led a targeted harassment campaign aimed at the gallery’s owner, Amy Greenspon, accusing the gallerist of showing a “neo-Nazi” artist. When multiculturalism becomes an oppressive and intolerant monoculture, it’s time to start criticizing its philosophical basis.
Back in 2017, the London-based L.D. 50 gallery was forced out of business by an Antifa-led smear and protest campaign. The gallery had hosted talks by the politically idiosyncratic philosopher Nick Land, the unquestionably right-wing writer Brett Stevens, and others of similarly art world atypical political orientations. One of the campaign’s figureheads, British artist Luke Turner, started a Tumblr page entitled Shut Down L.D. 50 to accuse the gallery and a few vocal supporters — the young artists Deanna Havas and Daniel Keller, and the academic DC Miller among them — of “fascism,” “anti-semitism,” “Islamophobia,” and otherwise. Though Turner rarely produced evidence of anti-Semitism beyond the figures previously named making fun of him on Twitter, “SDLD50” insisted on referring to Luke Turner as a “victim” of anti-semitism and homophobia while ignoring Turner’s class position within the bourgeoise. And though Turner has become something of a private joke amongst artists (Mathieu Malouf named a 2019 exhibition “Luke Turner is ReTarded”), his actions had real material consequences. Miller has had to self-publish his critiques, assumedly without pay. Havas’s promising career was severely railroaded. Even the philosopher Nina Power has seen herself the target of harassment campaigns due to Turner’s exploits. The art world is less interesting without them.
It’s important to note that L.D. 50, Miller, and the others never signaled support of the alt-right, but only their desire to understand and dissect its symbols. Much like members of the alt-right then, art world figures like Turner are reactionaries. Together, alt-rightwingers and woke leftists form an incoherent ouroboros of outrage. When artists join cancellation mobs, they attempt to show us their commitments to justice. But in doing so, they reveal the truth: they are just as intolerant of dissent as society’s oppressors. They act upon a mass jouissance: fearful of seeing through the neoliberal illusion of progress, they derive orgiastic thrills from the silencing of creative and critical discourse (and likewise live in latent terror that they might be canceled themselves one day, a form of masochism). As artists have embraced their positions as propagandists for the progressive side of capital, we’ve lost the sense of the artist as the watchful observer; the outsider; the transgressor of norms. In Against Nature, Huysmans writes, “Idiotic sentimentality combined with ruthless commercialism clearly represented the dominant spirit of the age.” [6] This notion couldn’t be truer now. Artists, financially and culturally precarious and in need of institutional approval, dull their work with empty reiterations of the dominant narratives of progressive capitalism. Where is the complexity? Where is the mystery? But there might be an opposition forming. “Cancellation” is, from one perspective, a kind of freedom. Once cancelled, you are unburdened of meeting the expectations placed upon you by the tragically conformist masses. As the spectral moral fatigue haunting the art world slowly materializes at the center of the discourse, cancelled artists will be treated as authorities on the underpinnings of these dynamics. I believe a new criticality will emerge, with artists from across the political spectrum — united in cancellation — dedicated to exposing the contradictions of woke ideology in the art world: Rafman, Bajagić, Havas, Keller, Malouf, and others. These artists offer hope for a heterodox art, and a creative stance that can meaningfully challenge left liberal dogma. Whether or not their artworks will prove valuable as aesthetic objects will depend on the efforts of each artist to circumvent the broader art world’s resignation into bourgeois moralism. //
Read Grant Tyler’s response to this piece here.
[1] Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Analysis by the Moors Murderer Ian Brady (Feral House, 2001).
[2] Jean Baudrillard, “The Conspiracy of Art,” The Conspiracy of Art (Semiotext(e), 2005).
[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2008)
[4] Christopher Lasch, “The Banality of Pseudo-Self-Awareness: Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence,” The Culture of Narcissism (W.W. Norton, 1979)
[5] Don DeLillo, Libra (Viking Press, 1988)
[6] Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Charpentier, 1884)