I am doing two things in this paper: firstly to ask how it has happened that the consensus of all European governments that the investment in culture, especially in contemporary art, is economically reasonable, has been shaken, and even reversed by many. Don’t tell me it’s “the crisis”. Secondly, I would like to look at the economic side of art production in general, not to offer something completely new, but to propose a slightly different, but of course related, angle to the one I use in my book On (Surplus) Value in Art (Diederichsen, 2008).
It is perhaps not so surprising to talk about the topic of this conference in relation to works of art, given the relation to the art world, or one of the art worlds, in the professional histories and biographies of many of the participants and organisers. But artworks are normally not considered to be produced by the multitude; they are not even considered to be interesting from the perspective of labour. They are debated aesthetically or economically as objects; objects which carry values, messages, aesthetic decisions, ideology and other immaterial items, but, particularly since conceptualism and neo-conceptualism, they seem not to be made and produced by human physical labour, and even the mental labour is often delegated to social processes and a willing participating audience, which loves to produce content for free. That, of course, is a mistake. Even though the labour in works of art so often disappears in the shadows – assistants are invisible and, unlike every driver, gaffer and intern in Hollywood, receive no credit – it is a crucial factor in relation to value. However, in this case I am not so much interested in the exploitation of the labour of others, but will look at the labour of the artist her- or himself, and the time he or she spends while making art in one way or another. In the contemporary economic set up all time spent by humans with anything is a form of production and an economic factor, including browsing the internet, reading a newspaper, staring into the setting sun over Poland from a train from Berlin. All these moments generate possible decisions in my brain; consumerist decisions or productive decisions. They lead to consequences, which would not have been if this time had been spent otherwise, or not at all.
Nearly everything in our world is at some level about objectifying human time. Every human-made object can be seen as a petrification of the time spent producing it. There are seemingly at least two types of time that you can buy from human beings. There is mechanical and rational time; the kind of time, when we directly become an instrument of an intention, a telos. On the other hand, there is affective, receptive, mental and even irrational time. In both cases I refer to humans who spend time in that way. Humans plus machines or tools equals human time of the first kind; humans plus institutions, education, informal learning, art reception, processing of cultural data etc. equals human time of the second kind. Of course, they are not as easily separable in the practical reality of a profession or a job. Rational tool-using of the first kind needs informal and institutional education of the second kind as well. But one can talk about this distinction in terms of tendencies: one type of labour is more dependent on the first or the second kind of time-spending.
Artworks are at first glance a kind of objectification of the second kind of time; of course, they are not the only type. But they are a specific type; so specific that one needs to put them into an extra category. So we can divide objects into three types, in relation to the time spent making them. First: Objects which mechanically consumed the time it took to make them, by humans and machines, like the famous box by Robert Morris (“Box with the Sound of Its Own Making”, 1961; see also M. Berger: Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s. New York: Harper & Row). To make an object there is a need for a certain number of labour hours. These are largely only the human plus machine hours that have been invested in the making of the object. The factor of the machine and the making of the machine, or the extra surplus value necessary to buy the machine, can be neglected since they are clearly less than 10 % of the hours spent by men and women just producing a specific object with the machine.
The second type is the object in which it is not the actual time spent on making it that dominates, but time spent on the education of the person making it; time spent on the building and rebuilding of the institution providing that education, and also the informal time to develop the necessary emotional and behavioural framework. Even divided by the number of goods produced in a given time, and divided again by the number of people educated in the same university, or informally educated in the same leisure hours, is still much higher than the time spent on the work. This is the case for many services, for lawyers’ and doctors’ work, and of course for so called knowledge products.
But the proportion of the formal education invested in these products is much higher than that of informal knowledge; the chaotic and irrationally produced knowledge and the type of education which is the basis for the production of art. In artworks, much as in type 2 products, the human time necessary to produce them is to a far larger degree time spent with education, preparation and symbol processing of all kinds than with working with a tool on the actual product. But, in contrast to type 2 products, the majority of time necessary for the production of artworks is not spent on formal but on informal education. State sponsored art academies organise the informal, with the formal largely on an institutional level in connection with other institutions. At the same time there is another milieu around them, which takes care of the informal or the extra-institutional informal part of education: bars, alternative lifestyles, projects, communes etc. So the human time necessary to produce artworks is to a very high degree informally spent time; time spent outside the rules that apply for workers, employees and students of other kinds. We call this the exceptionalism of art, which is an element of the function of art in bourgeois history, but also in many versions of bourgeois ideology.
Now I would like to briefly introduce – albeit unnecessarily, given the high degree of Marxological knowledge evident in all of your contributions here – the notion of socially necessary labour time. This Marxian category means the average amount of a type of a labour time or human work hours necessary to produce a product. One can say that art pieces are so many different things that it does not make sense to construct such an average. But if you include in the calculation the sheer number of hours which all artists have spent at the same institutional and extra-institutional, informal and exceptional places seemingly doing nothing but enjoying their life while in reality learning how to be an artist, you come to such a high number that the average starts to make sense. You will then look at the originally large difference between projects and products in the art market and the large variety of prices with different eyes. You will realize that they are as different as car prices in relation to a factory producing different models, or the prices of different dental care procedures or operations in relation to the education of dentists and the decades they spent in universities and colleges. There is, however, a big difference between cars and dental care, and even old paintings on the one hand, and contemporary art on the other. Of course I am talking here less about visual arts of the conventional type, like painting, but rather about genres like performance art, technology based media art, conceptual and project based art. This difference is that the hours spent learning that went into car production were hours of being taught to do something, and be someone else at the same time, just as later in the factory: do something, use your craft, but dream of your leisure time. Live expertly in other people’s teeth, but write a poem at home later. Dream of the other side of town while drilling in that rotten mouth! Whereas artists were not learning to do something and think of something else, but learning to be someone – and the product would come automatically from their being what they were. The crucial element – the existential factor, the sensitivity, the sensuality, the criticality – were not crafts or skills but elements of their personality which they acquired while living the exceptional life, learning informally at Cedar Tavern1 and Max’s Kansas City2. So the classical worker or doctor learned to be semi-attentive, being here to a degree, but only as much as is necessary to do the job, but the artist learned to be just where he or she was, but there fully – and the production would come magically just out of this concentration of the self.
But their patrons were people who worked their way to the top. They were a bourgeoisie that was still mainly shaped by old Protestant or even puritan values. Even if it was old money, put into a collection, which in the case of the Sculls, Ludwigs and many others, it was not, this money was built from accumulated chunks of surplus value which had been generated by exploiting people who would not live an exceptional life. Their masters and exploiters had themselves to adopt the ideology necessary for this, at least in some spheres of their lives. So this bourgeoisie which collected art in the long 20th century was buying and collecting in order to reliquify petrifications of a very special kind: petrifications of a good life, a meaningful life; sometimes an excessive life, sometimes a heroic life, sometimes an erotic life; a scandalous life, a drugged life, a psychedelic life, a homosexual life, a critical life, a radical life, a drunken life – all these lives they could not have lived.
Their specific reliquifying activity was not an attempt to get this other life after they had missed it. They knew they could not have it, they might not even have wanted it, but they wanted the trophy; they wanted these other products, indexes, traces of those good lives. They could have them too, without having produced them, paid for by the surplus value they generated from discipline and exploitation. This bourgeoisie also laid the foundation for the idea that it is good to build institutions around contemporary art. After their death, or even before, collectors gave to institutions – in the USA – or they contributed by philanthropic and not-so-philanthropic acts and deeds to the general desire to build and nurture museums and academies in the hands of the state in Europe. It is the Protestant backbone of the EU – Scandinavia, Holland, parts of Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, but of course northern and Catholic countries as well, who contributed to that consensus – a consensus which made a compromise with sin, with the good life on earth, firmly placing in art as petrified index of its existence to edify us all, and from time to time allow some of us to even live it.
It is important that the notion of compensatory culture, which is a key idea of critical theory, is not limited to its traditional area of explanation, namely those cases where it was meant to keep the masses quiet; in order to keep them from rebellion they were pacified by spectacles and colourful candy experiences. It also kept the bourgeois actors quiet by giving them the opportunity to acquire the trophies which witnessed the life they had missed when busy exploiting, or representing father’s exploitations.
This is why it was such a shock when, of all countries, the Netherlands announced the terrible cuts of their national spending on the arts; when museums and institutions in the USA were closed after the Lehman Brothers crisis, and when other European governments decided to cut state spending on the arts and art education – because we all took this compromise for granted, not as ideal, but as a basis of our daily negotiations with governments and institutions. Of course, there are many reasons, and some of them are not structural but short term. But a few are new, and they are structural. For example, for the first time in a long period the new right wing governments announced the cultural cuts without apologies, but enjoyed them as long overdue revenge against the cultural left. Moreover, it is also the first time that an open fascist became the director of a state-funded theatre in Europe, as now in Budapest.
But back to the Dutch situation: right wingers would normally not have the chutzpah to behave in such a triumphalist manner and dwell in the enjoyment of humiliating an opponent who is rhetorically their superior. They must be quite confident. They behave in such a way because the very bourgeoisie which had an investment in the state sponsoring of artists’ good times does not believe in them anymore. It does not believe in them because, among other reasons, they now finally want the good life for themselves. They are no longer protestant or quasi-protestant entrepreneurs; they have made their money from money, not from immediate production. The concept of simple surplus value is alien to them, and the combination of long term, state-like investments in infrastructure, in even an informal infrastructure or an infrastructure of the informal, with all its complexities and mechanisms of delay, which used to be the system of state- or fundingsponsored art, is far too complex for their desire to immediately show off. This post-bourgeoisie does not collect cakes or indexes of their being baked, they want to eat them.
To avoid misunderstandings: I am not simply arguing for a classical productive Protestant bourgeoisie and against a post-bourgeoisie of finance-jugglers and speculation-criminals. This is a vulgar-Marxist cliché, at best social-democratic, at worst anti-Semitic. The old construction could not survive the new capitalism anyway, not only because the people who have replaced the ruling class have no sense of culture, which means a sense of its slowness; the slowness of cultivation in the most literal sense: of investment and the postponement of gratifications. I am only offering an argument for why the bad conscience of the old ruling class, which has been one of the economic cornerstones of the old art world, is slowly crumbling away.
Another is of course that the specific informal education of artists, an education that does not teach them a skill, but to become something or someone – and that production will immediately follow from their personality – is now a concept which has taken over regular business anyway. Regular people who work in presentation and service jobs, in performance- and presence-oriented immaterial production, function in this way anyway, and they have never been educated in such a way in specific institutions; they have learned it in the streets. So the specific immaterial object of the “fascinating personality” and its related by-products can be owned without any infrastructure in a far more unconventional manner. It can be bought rough and ready in the favelas and streets, it can be picked up on the high streets and malls, secondary schools and clubs of the global precarious hedonism; it does not need to be nurtured. This basically means that in the long run we cannot rely on any ruling class coming back to sense in their cultural politics in the near future. The ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie, and it will no longer sponsor or support the type of state a bourgeoisie used to need not only for its self-understanding but also to guarantee its business. They don’t need such a state and they buy their culture elsewhere, if it is culture at all.
- The Cedar Tavern (or Cedar Street Tavern) was a bar and restaurant in New York opened in 1866 on Cedar Street. Art historians consider it an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It was famous as a former hangout of many prominent Abstract Expressionist painters: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and beat writers including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Frank O’Hara (see E. Lieber: Willem De Kooning: Reflections in the Studio. New York: Abrams, p. 127). ↩︎
- Max’s Kansas City was a nightclub and restaurant opened by Mickey Ruskin in December 1965 at 213 Park Avenue South, New York, which became a gathering spot for musicians, poets, artists and politicians in the 1960s and 1970s. It quickly became a hangout for artists and sculptors of the New York School, such as John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, as well as Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson, Joseph Kosuth, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Lee Lozano, Philip Glass, William S. Burroughs, Barnett Newman, art critics Lucy Lippard, Clement Greenberg and art dealer Leo Castelli. It was also a favourite hangout of Andy Warhol and his entourage (see S. Kasher: Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll. New York: Abrams). ↩︎