#29

David Harvey, in "The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture," presented at the Conference on Global and Local, held at the Tate Modern, Feb 2001:

"If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents, then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environmental characteristics (including, of course, the built, social and cultural environments)? All such claims are, as in the wine trade, as much an outcome of discursive constructions and struggles as they are grounded in material fact. Many rest upon historical narratives, interpretations and meanings of collective memories, significations of cultural practices, and the like: there is always a strong social and discursive element at work in the construction of such claims. Once established, however, such claims can be pressed home hard in the cause of extracting monopoly rents since there will be, in many people's minds at least, no other place than London, Cairo, Barcelona, Milan, Istanbul, San Francisco or wherever, in which to gain access to whatever it is that is supposedly unique to such places.

The most obvious example is contemporary tourism, but I think it would be a mistake to let the matt er rest there. For what is at stake here is the power of collective symbolic capital, of special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power upon the flows of capital more generally. Bourdieu, to whom we owe the general usage of these terms, unfortunately restricts them to individuals (rather like atoms floating in a sea of structured aesthetic judgements) when it seems to me that the collective forms (and the relation of individuals to those collective forms) might be of even greater interest.14 The collective symbolic capital which attaches to names and places like Paris, Athens, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Rome is of great import and gives such places great economic advantages relative to, say, Baltimore, Liverpool, Essen, Lille and Glasgow. The problem for these latter places is to raise their quotient of symbolic capital and to increase their marks of distinction so as to better ground their claims to the uniqueness that yields monopoly rent. Given the general loss of other monopoly powers through easier transport and communications and the reduction of other barriers to trade, the struggle for collective symbolic capital becomes even more important as a basis for monopoly rents. How else can we explain the splash made by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao with its signature Gehry architecture? And how else can we explain the willingness of major financial institutions, with considerable international interests, to finance such a signature project?"

According to Harvey’s model, artists are like winemakers in that their livelihood is based on the production of “signature,” hence monopolizable, goods. Just as a patch of soil in the Bordeaux region of France is bound to yield Bordeaux wine rather than Burgundy or Syrah, an artist is expected to produce works of a unique style and sensibility. Although artists don’t usually think of it in these terms, one could say that the job of an artist, or of an aspiring artist, is to produce a steady supply of monopolizable products from out of thin air. And it is the job of the curator and the critic in turn to distinguish the monopolizable from the ubiquitous, i.e. the authentic from the derivative. (Curators and critics would seem, on the face of it, to represent a force of destabilization with regard to the monopoly prices of works of art, since their relatively free exercise of taste, even if patterned on predictable, repeatable criteria, can and does demote and promote unpredictably the value of art and the careers of artists – if only because it remains difficult to predict exactly who will be discovered by a curator at any given moment, and moreover because the tide of taste can (and very often does) turn quickly against “yesterday’s” artists once anything recognizably new comes into vogue. But this destabilization weighs against artists, not against the proprietors of cultural institutions.)

For the gallery world, Harvey’s analysis rings true, since galleries operate in much the same way as vineyard owners, by acquiring exclusive ownership of unique goods, which they then dispense at monopoly prices. Museums, on the other hand, along with “alternative” art spaces and other similar institutions, did not originally operate as monopoly firms, though they now do. It is this phenomenon rather than the gallery monopoly that demands investigation, since it cannot be theorized according to the terms of Harvey’s “gallery=vineyard” equation. In my view, the situation is this: museums have moved from possessing a monopoly on exhibition space—one that artists competed for access to, but which represented a qualitatively distinct arena and economy from that of the studio or atelier—to possessing a monopoly on the space of artistic production. Artists have become tenants in the present-day cultural economy; they have been dispossessed of their property without even realizing it. Museums, in turn, have become rentiers, though they too imagine otherwise.

Artists do not literally pay rent to galleries and museums in exchange for use of the exhibition space. They pay, though, with their time—with labor, in other words. In the art world today, artists are required to seek out spaces of exhibition, since most artists are trained to practice exhibition-specific forms of art-making, the work itself taking the form of a temporary installation produced either partly or wholly “on-site.” Of course, there remain artists who work solely in the studio, but for the past 20 years or so, curators and critics have tended to favor artists who think critically about the conditions of their work’s installation and exhibition, hence who are required to be on-hand for this part of the exhibition-making process. Thus, museums have succeeded in shifting the site of artistic production, formerly performed wherever the artist wished (in the studio, in plein air, etc.), to the exhibition space, a site over which the museum exercises exclusive control. As a result, artists are bound more than ever to organize their working lives around the exhibition spaces at which they do their work, and to acquire the requisite social skills for working closely with museum administrators (something that doesn’t come naturally, as all the artists I know will attest to!). Those who make it “in” are granted access not only to coveted exhibition space, but also to the social world of paid-for dinners and parties

Even as the art world expands, artists continue to compete for access to a relatively small patch of monopoly real estate in a handful of metropolitan areas. That they do this, rather than secure spaces of exhibition-making outside the circuits of the art institutions, is a mystery unless one considers the crucial interrelationship of museums and galleries. Now more than ever, galleries must depend on the taste of trusted curators to root through the growing pool of would-be artists, separating wheat and chaff on a global scale.

Museums also demand artists’ time: the schedule of production, installation, exhibition, and de-installation is very much the institution’s prerogative. Artists work on the museum’s clock, at a site the museum owns and operates, earning a predetermined sum of money for their efforts—aren’t these exactly the conditions of wage labor, minus the hourly wage? Indeed, were it not for the existence of the gallery system, artists would have no other option than to demand a wage from their museum employers. In the present day, the museum has become, in effect, a workshop that artists rent out to produce their wares, exhibitions, parts of which might be saleable on the commercial market. During the run of the exhibition, though, the museum is able to extract profits far exceeding what little the artist is able to make by selling the works on view, whether from admissions sales or from grants and donations.

#28

El Lissitzky, 1919 talk given at INKhUK:

“The painted picture has been smashed to bits.... In continuing to paint with brush on canvas, we have seen that we are now building and the picture is burning up. We have seen that the surface of the canvas has ceased to be a picture. It has become a construction and like a house, you have to walk round it, to look at it from above, to study it from beneath. The picture's one perpendicular axis (vis-a-vis the horizon) turns out to have been We have made the canvas rotate.”















Spengler in Decline of the West:

Impressionism signifies "the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality, and all sense- images as [but] secondary and conditioned actualities "within it".... Impressionism is the inverse of the Euclidean world-feeling. It tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that receive and reflect light is made not because the things are there but as though they "in themselves" are not there. The things are not even bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked by the brush-stroke ... if there is one art that must exclude [Impressionism] on principle, it is Classical sculpture.... For the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour.... Everything merges in bodiless infinity" (DWI, pp. 285-86, 292).

According to Spengler, the inception of the decline of Faustian culture into Impressionism begins with Leonardo and Giorgione:

"The technique of oils [became] the basis of an art that [meant] to conquer space and to dissolve things in that space.... While Michelangelo tried to force the whole meaning of human existence into the language of the living body, Leonardo's studies show the exact opposite. His much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space, and as such it is the starting- point of Impressionism. Leonardo begins with the inside ... and when he ends ... the substance of colour lies like a mere breathing over the real structure of the picture, which is something incorporeal and indescribable. ... Leonardo discovered the circulation of the blood.... Leonardo investigated the life in the body . . .and not the body-in-itself as Signorelli did.... [Leonardo's] discovery... signif[ies] the victory of the infinite over the material limitedness of the tangibly present" (DWI, pp. 239, 277-78).

#27

From Arnheim, The Power of the Center:

"Spherical and circular objects are privileged foreigners in our midst. A ball, touching the ground at only one point, is less subject to friction than a cube, a product of the Cartesian grid. The wheel revolutionized transportation because it could roll freely. Since all diameters are equal, no one of them can be singled out. Knowing neither vertical nor horizontal, the sphere or wheel is unrelated to the Cartesian system and exempt from its constraints. It does not belong, and it does not have to obey. Having no angles and no edges, it points nowhere and has no weak spots. It is impregnable and unconcerned. Roundness is the suitable shape for objects that belong nowhere and everywhere. Coins, shields, mirrors, bowls, and plates are round because that makes them move smoothly through space. A round table has o corners to impede traffic. Look at the French miniature showing the Creator as he measures the world. The world is a closed universe, not attached to any particular place in its surroundings. It floats, and the Creator can move it around as he pleases. It has a center of its own, from which the measurement is made. It can turn or be turned without undergoing any change." (115)