Public spaces and the end of art

Introduction

Democratic theory has recently experienced a welcome shift from a purely theoretical interest in the discursive conditions necessary to an appropriate exercise of political judgement to a more empirically informed study of the public spaces in which the latter is thought to take shape. At the heart of this enterprise lies a healthy scepticism about the idea that deliberative rationality may, alone, be sufficiently solid to nurture citizens’ critically informed assessment of their political institutions and facilitate their engagement in open democratic deliberation. Public spaces, whether geographical or virtual, institutional or cultural, have come to represent an appropriate object of enquiry, both from an explanatory perspective, concerning the way in which the constitution of public spaces affects citizens’ interactions in their public role, and from a critical point of view reflecting on the possibilities of designing public spaces so that a certain kind of democratic engagement is fostered. ¹

Interestingly enough, in the industry of literature on the different articulations of public space and their relationship to democracy, one sphere appears notably excluded: that of visual arts. ² A similar exclusion is all the more surprising given the relevance of the public meaning of art in an imposing tradition of thought, starting with the Enlightenment and culminating in a number of relevant studies on the emergence and transformation of the public sphere from the 18th century onwards. ³ In line with that tradition of thought, this article contributes to studies in democratic theory and civic engagement by critically reflecting on the role of contemporary visual art for the transformation of the public sphere. It argues, somewhat sceptically, that many dominant strands of contemporary art are progressively losing the ability to perform an emancipatory role in society. ⁴ Following a number of recent critiques, the article identifies the reasons for such failure in some of the philosophical theories endorsed to support these forms of contemporary visual art, and illustrates the related risks of commercial manipulation and political instrumentalization. ⁵ Compatibly with the ‘end of art’ thesis announced by Hegel in the opening quote of this article, much contemporary art often fails to present itself as a privileged sphere where a cultural or political community might find critical resources for reflecting upon its development; it no longer seems to satisfy the demand for social self-understanding through aesthetic communication. Considered from this emancipatory perspective, art – as Hegel claimed – seems indeed a thing of the past. Yet there are few reasons to indulge in intellectual celebration when contemplating a similar fate.

This article begins with a short historical-philosophical excursus on the critical role of art during the Enlightenment, when the communicative function and the emancipatory role of art were most clearly articulated. ⁶ Exploring the analogies between aesthetic and political judgement is important in order to understand the critical role of artistic production within a philosophical project centred on reason’s capacity to liberate itself from the dogmatism of authority and from the errors of superstition, both elements considered crucial to the development of a discursively open, democratic, public sphere. It also helps to understand the historical transformation of art following a number of philosophical and sociological critiques to the project of the Enlightenment and to assess the attempt of historical avant-gardes to appropriate this critique yet maintain art’s emancipatory function in society. Having examined some limits of these attempts, I turn, in a second step, to contemporary artistic production. The domination of most contemporary art by avant-garde techniques combined with the privileging of certain interpretive categories (e.g. ‘the body’) over others, it is argued, has contributed to rendering art even more vulnerable to economic manipulation and political instrumentalization. Without rethinking the democratic function of art in a way that places emphasis on reason’s capacity for critical and constructive self-understanding, without reconsidering art theory in a way that brings back the emphasis on the emancipatory role of aesthetic communication, most contemporary art might not contribute to the creation of a vibrant, deliberative, public sphere. On the contrary, this article concludes, it might accelerate its decline.

I The public role of art

The conception of aesthetic judgement as a vehicle of reconciliation between the sensuous sphere of needs and the realm of abstract moral imperatives, the idea that art expresses a particular form of communicative reason cultivating moral virtue and contributing to the political emancipation of an enlightened public, was one of the defining features of the social critique articulated by intellectual elites during the 18th century. From Pope’s Essay on Criticism to Diderot’s analysis of moral art, from Lessing’s analysis of the redeeming function of art in his Hamburgische Drammaturgie to Schiller’s praise of art’s ability to compensate for the failures of politics, the contribution of the Enlightenment to conceptualizing the role of art in the public sphere has been widely acknowledged and need not be repeated here. ⁷ It may be worthwhile, however, to focus on a few key points in the reflection of one of its most representative authors, Immanuel Kant, not simply out of interest in the political-theoretical implications of Kant’s analysis of the maxims orienting the claims of taste in the Critique of Judgment but also because they constitute the target of a number of subsequent and still influential aesthetic theories and artistic trends.

In discussing the status of aesthetic judgements, Kant underlined that even though the claims of taste are always rooted in a particular experience of the subject and do not rely upon an ideal concept of what counts as beautiful in art, they nevertheless aim to be generally valid. Unlike private sensations and feelings, aesthetic judgements are not merely assertions of subjective preferences but require to be shared by a broader public. Claims of taste are grounded on the presupposition of a kind of communal sense which brings all discursive participants to abstract from contingent circumstances and private interests and hypothetically take into account the representations of everybody else. Because aesthetic judgements are cognitively autonomous, morally disinterested and inherently inter-subjective, the kind of relation that they aim to establish between the perception of a beautiful product of art or nature and its assessment in a particular claim of taste is thought to be universally valid. ⁸

According to Kant, it is possible to illustrate the status of aesthetic judgements and the reasons for which those who perform them expect a general agreement of all participants, by enlisting three maxims upon which the presupposition of a communal sense is grounded. These are: (1) to think for ourselves; (2) to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else; and (3) always to think consistently. ⁹ Every time a product of nature or art is described as beautiful we make use, in the first case, of unprejudiced thought because we do not ground the assessment of the object on its utility for us or in a private interest of the subject but on its pure aesthetic value; in the second, of enlarged thought because we assume it would produce the same disinterested feeling of pleasure in any other impartial observer; in the third, of consecutive thought because we coherently combine the first two and formulate a judgement that we believe to be exemplarily valid.

Now it is interesting to notice how the first two maxims that Kant thought could illustrate some of the fundamental features of his critique of taste are reminiscent of the principles that ought to guide the citizens of an enlightened society in their assessment of political institutions. ¹⁰ The first idea, autonomous and unprejudiced thought, promotes emancipation from the errors of superstition and the dogmatic acceptance of any given authority and therefore prepares citizens to be active members of a self-legislating collective. This enlightened disposition which Kant defines as ‘the emergence of men from their self-incurred immaturity’ together with the imperative of obeying only the laws that one has autonomously prescribed to oneself are necessary preconditions for that critical exercise of public reason upon which the idea of political legitimacy rests. ¹¹ As Kant puts it, the unprejudiced use of public reason constitutes an essential requirement ‘in so far as this or that individual who acts as part of the machine also considers himself as a member of a complete commonwealth or even of cosmopolitan society’. ¹²

Moreover, the ability to make use of enlarged thought while reflecting on a beautiful product of art is the same displayed by the members of an enlightened public in their assessment of relevant political events. Indeed it was the capacity of external observers to participate in a disinterested, yet enthusiastic, manner in the affirmation of the French Revolution that Kant perceived as a sign of moral progress in history. ¹³ Judging political issues with a representative attitude which requires the spectator to put himself or herself in the place of everybody else, even at the risk of his or her own prospects, reveals an important disposition. This disposition constitutes a revolution in the ‘mode of thinking’ whereby the public shows disinterested sympathy to the deeds of those who are brought to sacrifice their own lives for the realization of certain moral principles. Just as human beings reveal a moral disposition when experiencing ‘enthusiasm’ on the face of sublime products of nature and art which stretch the powers of imagination, the universal admiration and unselfish ‘enthusiasm’ with which the public assists at the unfolding of progressive political events represents a ‘sign’ of humanity’s moral emancipation. ¹⁴

The conditions under which judgements occasioned by the observation of works of art are delivered constitute exemplary experiences of the ability of individuals to act following enlightened, enlarged and consecutive maxims. They display the kind of communal sense upon which the search for agreement in inter-subjective deliberation is grounded. In light of these theoretical reflections it is possible to understand Schiller’s subsequent emphasis on the contribution of art to the public sphere and his analysis of art as a preparing ground for the moral emancipation of humanity. Writing in times of great social upheaval, when existent political institutions either tyrannized people in the name of abstract moral imperatives or appealed to the dogmas of authority to obstruct political transformation, Schiller identified in the expressive means of art the most appropriate vehicle through which to render the public sphere sensitive to the historical requirements of a particular age. Given the risks implanted in the use of political coercion as a vehicle of moral motivation, the most urgent need of the present time, he argued in the Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Humankind, is ‘to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render efficacious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call this improvement into existence’. ¹⁵ For ‘subject to the influence of a social constitution still barbarous’ – he asked – how can character ‘become ennobled’? The answer lies in the necessity to ‘seek for this end an instrument that the state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption. This instrument is the art of the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal models.’ ¹⁶

While representing models of virtue or fictitious reconstructions of the order of the social world, art anticipates the possibility of reconciling the tensions of modern life and acts as an unrivalled means of political emancipation. It undertakes a moral and political reform which is not forced either to sacrifice the purity of moral imperatives or to surrender the possibility of modifying sensible inclinations in order to serve morality’s higher purposes. Against the dissolution of art in life advocated later by surrealists, Schiller defended the autonomy of pure appearance in the organic fusion of form and content. In so doing he rendered the harmonic work of art a necessary means for the development of moral communication in an inter-subjective dimension.

One might argue here that this interpretation of the relationship between art and society, together with the emphasis on the relevance for the Enlightenment of the public role of art, overlooks one important dimension in the reflections of both Kant and Schiller: their insistence on the absence of interest in aesthetic judgements. It would indeed be difficult to understand this point without drawing a distinction between a theory of art in which the moral dimension constitutes a teleological horizon that can only be exhibited symbolically in the free interplay of human cognitive capacities ¹⁷ and one in which moral interests enter aesthetic production in an unmediated way, undermining the necessity of individual interpretation and neglecting the purely aesthetic dimension at the expense of moral learning. Where interests enter works of art in an unmediated way, art loses its evocative power. Its capacity to represent the conflict between different moral motives, to rely on the interplay of feelings and to develop the subjective experiences of the contemplating subject, ends up being undermined. In this case aesthetic productions might just as well be replaced by moral treatises. The persistence of a symbolic relation to the dimension of moral interests, a relation explicated in the harmonization of form and content of a specific aesthetic product, should therefore not be confused with the attempt to display that relation in a schematic way and independently from its reception by the public. ¹⁸ To stress this point does not imply to downplay the relevance of the moral sphere at the expense of the aesthetic one or to elevate the role of sensitivity and imagination above that of reason. Yet the distinction is important in order to understand properly the relationship between aesthetic and moral ideals in an overall project designed to articulate the emancipatory role of art in society such as the one that the Enlightenment tried to provide. It also needs to be kept in mind when observing how a similar relation is absent from many contemporary works of art, where the moral dimension to which aesthetic judgements relate (albeit in a mediated, symbolic way) becomes very difficult to identify. I shall return to some of these issues in the remainder of this article.

II The end of art?

When, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel declared that art, considered in its highest vocation, had become for us a thing of the past, he was reflecting critically on the development of a conception of art similar to the one we outlined above. Even though his brief discussion of the reasons for art’s decline is offered merely in a passing reference to the position of ‘those who delight in lamenting and blaming’, the processes mentioned as conducive to a similar outcome are interestingly the same as those that inspired Schiller’s analysis of the emancipatory role of art in the Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Humankind. Like Schiller, Hegel was concerned with the development of modern society; however, contrary to Schiller’s programmatic suggestions, the diagnosis of modern society brought him to draw attention on the end of art rather than celebrating its therapeutic function. The triumph of passions and interests over impartial reason, the present state of civil and political life, and the difficulty of abstracting from petty interests, are exactly what determine art’s impossibility to act as a privileged sphere of embodiment of reason’s communicative ideal. The conflicts of modern life, the processes of multiplication and differentiation of human needs, followed by the division of labour, social atomization and the creation of a destitute social class – all processes that Hegel so aptly describes in his Philosophy of Right – have made it impossible to reconcile the tensions of a divided society through any simple recurrence to the superior evocative power of art. In this sense, the narrative of those Enlightenment theorists who insisted on art’s autonomy appeared largely an illusion, cultivated in the naive aspiration to reach a better society by invoking the power of communicative rationality. Rather than isolating art from others’ spheres of social life and making it a privileged realm for cultivating human moral emancipation, Hegel believed that the project of the Enlightenment could only be completed through a more radical examination of the dialectic of political and social conflict.

Now, as even the most distracted reader of Hegel’s Aesthetic will recall, such succinctly stated ‘end of art’ thesis does not imply either the conclusion of any kind of artistic production in a historical-chronological way or the erosion of art’s capacity to awaken the imagination and occupy a middle ground between the sphere of feelings and that of abstract imperatives, as Kant had underlined. It means simply that art is in no privileged position to offer the community of human beings a unique vehicle for discursive self-understanding and, consequently, that art can claim no superior status in the trajectory of human development that leads to a progressive clarification of the errors and dogmas corrupting the public sphere, as emphasized by partisans of the Enlightenment. Art, in other words, cannot perform its emancipatory role in isolation from other spheres of society.

As it has often been remarked, Hegel’s claims can only be understood with reference to the modern experience of alienation and to the specificity of the ‘sensuous’ element through which effective art is considered to fulfil its cathartic function. ¹⁹ If the modern age is affected by deep tensions that one can only attempt to overcome in an effort to reconstruct unity through rational concepts, this rationality is displayed in a historical process leading in many different directions and which has ceased to manifest itself purely in the public function of art. The particularistic, sensuous component of art is constantly undermined in an attempt to emulate what other spheres of spiritual activity (philosophy, for example) achieve through reflective introspection. In so doing, however, art sacrifices something of its exemplary function; its response to the challenge of providing access to a deeper understanding of a complex social reality ends up appearing inauthentic.

This conceptual attack on the superiority of art understood as a privileged space of cultural self-understanding is echoed in a number of sociological critiques on the enthusiasm of the Enlightenment for the critical role of art in the public sphere. As it has often been observed, some of the most acute interpreters of aesthetic modernity emphasized how the processes of modernization, of mass industrialization, of commercialization of culture, and of technical reproducibility of works of art have destroyed the ‘aura’ of aesthetic productions and undermined the prospects of art’s critical and emancipatory function in society. ²⁰ Any attempt to revive the artists’ public role in the way articulated during the Enlightenment, would have to deal with such historical limitations in the expressive possibilities of art. Could this really mean that art’s progressive role in the public sphere had come to an end?

On the face of this question, the art world seems to have been confronted with two alternatives. The first one was to accept its historical fate and return to past traditions of artistic production but lose its autonomy and symbolic efficacy and cease to play a culturally emancipatory role. The second one was to internalize the critique and attempt to transcend existent ways of representation in favour of aesthetic experimentation. ²¹ The combination of the latter route with an ideal of art that, while coming to terms with its internal limitations, resisted any unreflective assimilation of the end of art thesis is precisely what gave a raison d’être to the historical avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By relinquishing art’s sensuous element and embracing formalism, avant-garde works would retain aesthetic vitality and continue to exercise an emancipatory function in society. Or so it seemed.

A summary of the dilemma to which aesthetic theory was exposed after the critique of the Enlightenment may help to understand both the developments and the concerns of the art world following the critique of the public role of art that we have outlined above. Art can either be immanent in society or attempt to transcend it. If art is considered an immanent spiritual activity, which inevitably reflects larger patterns of society, its dissolution into mass culture seems to undermine its capacity to act as the critical voice of any given tradition. Art comes to represent merely a vehicle of popular entertainment and runs the risk of conveying nothing distinctive from a culturally progressive perspective. If on the other hand art becomes transcendent and is cultivated in opposition to the commodification of mass culture, it needs to embrace a way of representation as far removed from mundane considerations as it can be. This latter route was exactly the one that, for better or worse, the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century pursued in an attempt to purify art from the cognitive and moral features that accompanied its popular reception. ²² As one of the most fervent supporters of this aesthetic revolution emphasized, ‘after the destruction of the aura, only the formalist work of art, inaccessible to the masses, resists the pressures toward assimilation to the needs and attitudes of the consumer as determined by the market’. ²³ An internal assimilation of the ‘end of art’ thesis was thought to lead to a renovated function for artistic production thus creating the conditions for a subversion of art’s modern predicament from within. In the words of Adorno, ‘if art is to remain faithful to its content, art must pass into anti-art’. ²⁴ This motto, combined with the critique of the ideal of rationality, generated the well-known aesthetics of negativity: ‘content can no longer be identified with reason in the manner of idealism. … Content is critical of the omnipotence of reason; therefore, it can no longer be rational in accordance with the norms of discursive thinking.’ ²⁵

This radical move in the self-understanding of art was accompanied, as it is obvious, by a thorough critique of the Enlightenment ideal of rationality, a theoretical perspective that continues to exercise great appeal on a number of contemporary artists and art theorists. If only the ‘negative’ work of art can defy its historical-philosophical destiny and become the authentic way of expressing the discomforts of modernity, it is because the Enlightenment’s project of collective self-understanding, the communicative ideal of reason, can never find a way out of the dilemmas of modern life. Contrary to Hegel’s writings, where art is subordinated to philosophy and the latter continues to manifest its rational potential in the institutions of the modern state and in the administration of civil society, the avant-garde work of art can only preserve its symbolic efficacy for as long as it reveals a fundamental persistence of conflict yet relinquishes any rational cathartic function. The further away from ordinary understandings and everyday life-experiences a work of art remains, the better able it will be to resist commodification and assimilation in the culture industry.

However, the exclusion of the reflexive element from the work of art, its appeal to the darkest aspects of human consciousness, and the progressive abandonment of Kant’s ideal of a positive relation between reason and imagination appear hazardous from a progressive perspective. Even though the formalism of early avant-garde works initially supported resistance to assimilation in the ‘culture industry’, it did not necessarily succeed in cultivating the critical utopia to which artistic avant-gardes initially aspired. ²⁶ Failing to construct a positive dialogue with the tradition that they were attempting to overcome and deprived of a positive philosophical message, historical avant-gardes grew alien to the majority of those active in the so-called public sphere. Their focus on a self-centred language of personal expression and the absence of a meaningful communication with the normative aspirations and cognitive beliefs of the broader public condemned visual arts to a position of subordination compared with other domains of mass culture. ²⁷ Even if historical avant-gardes initially tried to convey a message, it was not one that could be understood by the mass of citizens. In the absence of any relation to past experiences of artistic experimentation and of a positive understanding of the role of art within a broader range of social relations, that experience was condemned to be shared only by a few cultural elites. ²⁸

III Recent developments (1): art and the public

The art world of the last two decades seems to have experienced a return of artistic techniques and aesthetic models reminiscent of those embraced both by the historical avant-gardes of the 1930s and by the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s: minimalism, fluxus, performance art, conceptual art and so forth. The feeling of déjà-vu provoked by such works in several biennales and curated exhibitions has led art critics and social theorists to wonder about their meaning and question their contribution in articulating the public role of art. Do these experiences represent more than trifling repetitions of failed attempts to subvert from within the prophecy of the end of art in advanced capitalist societies? Or does their very existence confirm the view that contemporary art has exhausted its autonomous emancipatory resources and should turn to a more productive dialogue with other spheres of social life? ²⁹

At first sight, the theory that inspires similar movements has not changed: it draws its force from the same refusal to succumb to the instrumental force of rationality exhibited by modern societies and it embraces the autonomy of subjectivity as a cure against the alienating and dividing powers of capitalist economic and administrative life. ³⁰ Like the old avant-gardes, often contemporary artists are seen to inhabit the realm of the possible: scornful of established conventions, suspicious of existent moral, political, or social norms, and proudly celebrating all that is prohibited, mysterious, repulsive, or Dionysian. ³¹ Artists freely use raw materials, dead animals, other human beings or even their own bodies to create the most spectacular or unexpected works of art. The problem of the relationship between art and life is here raised by evoking emotional participation rather than reflexive contemplation. In these works, questioning reality seldom takes the form of rationally oriented critique; rather they are designed to surprise, shock, provoke and disturb. What is more, the reaction of the public to the work of art is not expected to have a cathartic effect for here there is nothing to be purified and little to uncover, but for the emptiness, despair, monotony and spiritual aridity of contemporary life.

Consider, for example, how one might react to one of the favourite candidates (often cited as the winner) of the 1999 Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’, a messy double bed, surrounded by a number of things such as drink bottles, bedroom slippers, blood-stained knickers, condoms and other personal belongings of the artist. Or to the 2004 winner of the same prize, Andrea Fraser’s ‘The Collector’, a video documenting her sexual experience in a hotel room with a collector who had agreed to finance the costs for filming the encounter. As one critic and curator puts it:

But what is the effect of similar representations on the mass public? What kind of communicative resources do such forms of art disclose? What deeper insights do they provide into a collective’s self-understanding? What is the social or (dare one say it) ‘emancipatory’, role performed by such works of art? Despite the controversies they provoke, artists themselves seem to have renounced intervening to settle such cultural disputes. As Martin Creed, the 2001 winner of the Turner Prize with ‘Lights Going On and Off’, an installation of lights switching on and off in an empty room, commented on receiving the prize: ‘I think people can make of it what they like. It is not for me to explain.’ ³³

Of course one does not expect artists to be the most accurate critics or even interpreters of their own work. What one might object to a similar approach is not so much that artists fail to communicate explicitly with the public about the meaning of their productions. It is rather that these works (and often the theories that are endorsed to support them) deliberately seek to avoid the possibility of reflective interaction with the public; they proudly embrace populism to celebrate an unmediated, unreflective, unintellectual engagement with the crudest aspects of everyday life. ³⁴ As one sympathetic critic puts it when discussing the growing success of so-called young British art: ‘The truth is, playing dumb, shouting “ARSE” and taking your knickers down has become an attractive move in the face of the institutionalisation of critical theory in art.’ ³⁵ If the public is expecting anything that goes significantly beyond that, it might be looking in the wrong direction.

Many popular strands of contemporary visual art then explicitly distance themselves from the public (emancipatory) role that we have seen the philosophy of the Enlightenment assign to art. They do so in the name of a resistance to the distinction between high art and popular forms of pleasure – a move allegedly considered crucial to bringing art closer to the concerns of the mass public, rather than the restricted intellectual elite. It is precisely on the basis of these assumptions, that a new aesthetic category, that of the ‘philistine’, has recently been evoked to emphasize the critical potential of works (similar to the ones mentioned above) that one might initially consider at odds with what we have called the communicative function of art in the public sphere. ³⁶ The philistine, a character introduced and under-theorized by Adorno, is defined as ‘insensitive, uncouth, and brutal especially in matters related to art’, a ‘partisan’ of vulgar taste, excluded bodily pleasures and abject forms of aesthetic representation. Yet the philistine is also considered to occupy a particular favourable position in disclosing possible meanings of the relationship between art and mass culture. ³⁷ Taking seriously the critical potential of these ‘philistine’ forms of art, its advocates claim, implies that ‘we shouldn’t treat the widespread adoption of the pornographic, vulgar and profane in the new art as the coat-tailing of media-sensationalism, but a refusal on the part of artists to feel shame about engaging with the categories of the everyday through the abject’. This might in turn develop not only ‘a new sensitivity to the brutalizing rituals and tropes and late capitalist mass culture, but also a greater tolerance for the profane and vulgar as forms of working-class dissidence’. ³⁸

The philistine is then seen as another way of talking about the ‘positional politics of the avant-garde’ but of an avant-garde that has renounced all ambition really to lead the way as the bearer of advanced taste. ³⁹ But if this is the case, where does the social critique inspiring similar works find its theoretical sources? If a similar avant-garde work of art can only exhibit the impossibility of saying anything rational about the surrounding social world because of the difficulty for such art both to engage with a specific content and to subvert traditional narrative methods, how does contemporary art reach the communicative effect that is so important for its public role?

If we consider the impact of similar works not just as art critics but as political and social theorists interested in the wider articulations of the public sphere, if we are interested to establish in what ways such works develop art’s critical potential, it is hard to understand how their communicative function evolves. One might argue here that since the role of avant-garde art is only to subvert expectations by disorienting and shocking the public, the further task of developing a critical and communicative perspective belongs to the spectator and the public. The avant-garde work, that is, performs its maieutic function only at the point of interchange with the perspective of the observer, when the latter intervenes to complete a fragmented work by advancing a critical interpretation of the specific aesthetic product which then affects her or his way of understanding the relation between art and society. ⁴⁰ However, as it is often emphasized, the transition from the stage of disorientation to that of theoretical recognition of a critical perspective is not an easy one – a point well taken if one considers the frequent misunderstanding and even hostility with which works of avant-garde art are often received in the public. ⁴¹ As the controversy surrounding Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc commission and the debate preceding its removal from the Federal Building Plaza in New York City has paradigmatically illustrated, a similar reaction follows even when artists explicitly attempt to make the observer a protagonist of the work of art. ⁴²

In Kant, as we saw, art’s communicative function is grounded in the presupposition of a communal sense, which in turn relies on the normative power of reason and its constituting a point of reference in the free interplay of cognitive capacities stimulated by the faculty of imagination. Hegel’s argument that the modern work of art is unable to achieve its communicative goals without the intervention of reflection, while being critical of an over-idealized and eschatological vision of art similar to the one Kant and Schiller advanced, is not necessarily in contrast with their points. Precisely because art has historically exhausted the possibility of acting autonomously as a unique voice of social critique, art needs to rely on philosophy to cultivate its emancipatory potential. However – and here is the crucial feature to bear in mind – since the communicative effect of artistic products cannot be obtained without the reflective intervention of theory, artistic works can perform a progressive role only when the presuppositions upon which the theory is constructed do not undermine reason’s communicative potential and its ability to obtain a critical understanding of society. Otherwise the sort of normative premises that are supposed to guide our claims of taste when observing artistic products end up being just as obscure as the work that they are trying to illuminate. More dramatically, even if we concede that the theory guiding our attempts to communicate over artistic products ought to express a passive engagement with the vulgar, the eccentric, or even the psychologically disturbing, as in the philistine approaches we outlined above, there is no guarantee that art so conceived will be immune to the commercial manipulation and political instrumentalization of the public sphere. This, at least, is what some of the examples introduced in the next section clearly show.

IV Recent developments (2): the commercialization of visual arts

The philistine critique of the relationship between artistic theory and artistic production in contemporary visual arts and the domination of the former by the critique of rationality is not an entirely novel phenomenon. As already observed, that critique of rationality, the exaltation of crude and vulgar pleasures, the glorification of abject forms of representation, has often been offered as a theoretical rationale for art’s way of coping with the tensions of modern society. The idea that only by becoming perplexing, strange and provocative could art resist the tendency to commodification of late capitalist society, was at the heart of the strategy endorsed both by historical avant-gardes and by the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet there are reasons to doubt the effectiveness of that strategy. Most of the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, just like the artistic movements mimicking them in the last two decades, did not manage to resist commercialization or, failing that, use the media to convey their own critical political messages. ⁴³ On the contrary, the expansion of globalization over the art world, together with the need to establish an international profile, has led artists to make increasing concessions to financial and political elites and has often brought them to sacrifice their ability to communicate with the local public. Deprived of the rationalist sources necessary to cultivate art’s emancipatory potential, the theory endorsed to link contemporary artistic production to avant-garde methods has been unable to prevent the commercial corruption of some of the most influential strands in contemporary visual art.

Examples of cases where local artists are either ignored or forced to change character so as to match the expectations of international curators are hardly difficult to find. In Asia, for example, the curator Gao Minglu has illustrated how the avant-garde Chinese movement that flourished in the mid-1980s through spontaneously formed groups of critical, idealist artists has turned into a ‘pragmatic avant-garde that strives to transcend the local so as to be accepted by the international art scene’. ⁴⁴ In Africa, for another example, the controversies surrounding both the Johannesburg biennale of 1995 and that of 1997–8 (established to celebrate the country’s recent reconciliation to and integration in the cultural world) have illustrated the difficulty of the art world in communicating with local artists (very few of whom were black) and the indifference or even hostility with which the event was perceived by the South African population. As Carol Becker has put it when commenting on the event, the biennale and the occurrences that surrounded them, they

But even in the few cases where avant-garde artists try to resist cooptation and remain faithful to the example of their historical predecessors, serious obstacles are encountered. Such difficulties are not merely of a financial or educational nature, as illustrated by the example of the Johannesburg biennale mentioned above. They can also be political. As a paradigmatic illustration of the latter case one might mention the work of Alfredo Jaar: ‘One Million Finnish Passports’ presented at an international arts festival in Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art. This representation of lightly modified copies of 1 million Finnish passports, arranged behind a security screen, symbolized the rate of immigrants that would have entered the country if Finland had endorsed the same immigration policy as other countries in Europe. ⁴⁶ Upon insistent request of the Finnish immigration authorities, whose image it was thought to damage, the work was later destroyed.

We have seen how most attempts to preserve the critical potential of art by emphasizing its uniqueness and refusal to abide by the rules of reflective rationality, have ended up themselves manipulated by the very forces they were initially trying to resist. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent alliance between high art and the fashion industry, where the values inspiring contemporary art such as freedom from convention, the exaltation of the body, or emotional transgression are now celebrated on the front page of fashion magazines. So, for example, corporations like Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Prada and Gucci have turned themselves into some of the most active sponsors of the art world whereas the work of photographers such as Corinne Day, Jürgen Teller, or Jürgen Tillmans (2000 winner of the Turner Prize) has occupied both fashion magazines and art galleries. Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist, designs bags for Louis Vuitton and has recently produced a promotional art video for the corporation. Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft has brought fashion models into the museum where they play the role of living works of art, walking around or staring at the public, wearing nothing but a few fashion designer clothes and generally complying with the directives of the artist or with the instructions of photographers.

But the relations between art and the corporate world do not stop at the fashion industry – they also reach the domain of consumer goods. Guillaume Bijl, for example, has opened an exhibition with material from the supermarket Tesco at Tate Liverpool, presenting products from the well-known British chain, with shelves ordered in a way similar to that observed in the shop and maintained by real supermarket staff. On the other hand Sylvie Fleury, a Swiss pop artist, displays her shopping bags on pedestals located in gallery floors causing some trouble in the visitors who often mistake such exhibitions for fashion adverts. Of course one could interpret these performances as attempts to express from a creative perspective the inevitability of the fusion between the art world and the consumer world, an experiment that draws attention on the centrality of commodities for our everyday life by disorienting the observer with their unusual presence in museum spaces. Even so, the contribution of such artistic experiences to develop the public’s critical potential remains hard to grasp. As one critic puts it, ‘such work is modest and weak if taken as critique, strong and strident if taken as celebration, since after all … what is glossily and cannily produced is another set of commodities, and the publicity and sponsorship arrangements through which they are seen and sold’. ⁴⁷

V Conclusion

The social disengagement of much contemporary visual art, of which the alliance between art and fashion design is only one recent expression, suggests that the relationship between the practice of art and the theory that inspires our intellectual enjoyment of aesthetic products needs to be rethought. In a way, the recent alliance between art and fashion design or the cooptation of art in the culture industry are unsurprising. In their most abstract definitions, both art and fashion represent spheres of production involving human creativity, both are inspired by a use of external objects against existent conventions and rules of taste, and both are often considered attempts to capture a subversive, ever receding, self and to locate it between present and past. ⁴⁸ In an age where art defines itself through the endless repetition that ‘anything can be art’, the difference from other spheres of production can only be established in the reflective relationship that art establishes with the public, in its promising to pave the way towards the realization of a radical critical potential. This is the lesson that contemporary art has inherited from the historical avant-gardes (and soon forgotten). But what has often been misunderstood (and today’s relationship of the art world with the public suffers the consequences of such misunderstanding) is that the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of reason may not be the best foundation for avant-garde critical theory. Rather than isolating itself, refusing to engage with everyday political conflicts or ridiculing society’s moral dilemmas, the art world can perform a critical emancipatory function only if it confronts contemporary questions with greater historical awareness and in a rationally constructive fashion. The belief of the Enlightenment in the emancipatory role of reason, its progressive attempt to articulate a coherent body of knowledge and put it at the service of practical moral imperatives, may well have been premature, naive, or ill-directed when it was first conceived. Yet in the absence of that larger emancipatory project, any aesthetic attempt to resist the corruption of our age runs the risk of turning contemporary art into an avant-garde of regress.