From the cultural contradictions of capitalism to the creative economy

The antagonistic symbiosis of bohemians and bourgeois

A subculture of artists, writers and intellectuals appeared in the metropolitan centres of Europe in the course of the 19th century in response to the spread of finance capital and of industrial production with its utilitarian and profit-oriented ethos. Paris was the prototype of the bohemian city. There the boheme emerged as a recognizable phenomenon at the point during the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe when the post-revolutionary goals of the bourgeoisie had been attained and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the Romantic generation of 1830 disintegrated. Paris was the birthplace of the boheme, of the idea of the avant-garde, of utopian socialism and of Marx’s analysis of economic alienation. We may date the classic epoch of the boheme from the 1830 Revolution, immortalized by Delacroix’s painting of Liberty on the barricades, through to the avant-garde’s confusion of cultural and political revolution across the decade of the First World War. The relation of the bohemian artistic subculture to the host society in this period is best described as one of ‘antagonistic complementarity’ (Kreuzer 1968: 45), in the sense that the bourgeoisie and bohemia implied, required, and attracted each other (Seigel 1986: 5). This complementarity was subject, however, to a fundamental misreading by the bohemians. Instead of recognizing the structural nature of this complementary division of labour, bohemians tended to grasp this relationship dynamically as an irreconcilable opposition, in which the bohemian form of life constituted a living testimony to the incompatibility of art and commerce, aestheticism and utilitarianism. As a result, the denizens of bohemia could only conceive of their own marginal existence in alienated form. The accusation and experience of alienation, so central to the 19th-century revolutionary-romantic critique of bourgeois society, was integral to the self-image of the various marginal groupings of artists and intellectuals who formulated the artistic critique of capitalism and tended to identify with the social critique of capitalism.

The paradoxes of bohemian self-understanding and of bohemian politics were tied up with the personal and social paradoxes of autonomy, which followed from the emancipation of the intelligentsia from direct social and political control and seemed to point the way, as Saint-Simon had announced, of the intellectuals to class power. Intellectual and artistic emancipation since the French Revolution was confronted and confounded, however, by economic dependence. The conflict between cultural and commercial values determined the marginal status of the artistic boheme, whose autonomy was simultaneously given and negated by the market. It must be added, however, that if artists were economically dependent, bourgeois society for its part, despite the patronage of academic art, was culturally dependent on the artists. Bourgeois society was the first social formation in which the economic hegemony of the dominant classes no longer extended to the cultural sphere: the art of bourgeois society was anti-bourgeois in nature. The scandals of artistic provocation, the ideology of the artist as anti-social genius reflected the tensions of this structural antagonism and fed at the same time bohemian political illusions. In retrospect it seems clear that the antagonistic symbiosis between bohemians and bourgeois corresponds to the intermediary stage between the social function of the arts in hierarchical societies and the arts as a function of the market in the de-hierarchized cultures of consumer capitalism.

The contradiction between independence and dependence makes the concept of alienation central to sociological interpretations of the boheme and goes far towards explaining the boheme’s attraction to the dreams of total revolution. Alienation and revolution acted as mutually reinforcing dimensions of the antagonism between society and its other, which exploded into the open in 1848 and 1871 in Paris, and was actualized by the crisis of the European order after 1900. The revolutionary upheavals set in motion by the Great War mark the end of what we may call the natural history of the boheme. What followed in Europe was the unnatural history of the tragedy of political romanticism in the form of the self-destructive alliance of a radicalized cultural intelligentsia with the totalitarian revolutions of the Left and Right – a suicidal embrace of total revolution prefigured and prepared by the avant-garde’s radical assault on tradition. ‘Bakunin’s anarchist maxim, “To destroy is to create,” is actually applicable to most of the activities of the twentieth-century avant-garde’ (Calinescu 1974).

Thus, in a final twist of the paradoxical relation of bohemians to the host society, revolution formed not only the limiting condition but also the suicidal goal of the boheme. Daniel Bell identifies the fratricidal tension between bourgeois society and modernism as one of the three cultural contradictions of capitalism. In turn, François Furet’s understanding of the antagonistic complementarity between bohemians and bourgeois as the expression of bourgeois self-hatred helps to explain the suicidal affinity to the idea of total revolution. And it is certainly true that as a class the French and continental bourgeoisie was prone to self-hatred. It was a class without status, lacking the will to political power and deficient in capitalist spirit, even though it was defined entirely economically (Furet 1999: 7). The fundamental motif of modern society, according to Furet, is not the struggle of workers against bourgeois; much more important was the driving force of bourgeois self-hatred. When the monarchic and aristocratic components of the 19th-century political compromise collapsed after the First World War, the bourgeois anti-bourgeois forces of revolutionary communism and fascism were unleashed (1999: 16–19). The fact that the critique of bourgeois society appeared in its most radical form in France and Germany before the industrial revolution had even taken hold indicates a fundamental difference between continental Europe and England and America. As Furet puts it, the USA never had a bourgeoisie but it did have a bourgeois people (1999: 7). And just as there was no bourgeoisie, in the French sense of an alliance with patrimonial landed interests (Boltanski 2002), in either country, so we cannot speak of a romantic-revolutionary bohemian intelligentsia as a significant presence in England or America, that is, in neither country was there an internal class war between owners of capital and owners of creative or educational capital.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism Boltanski and Chiapello draw a useful distinction between the two components of the 19th-century critique of capitalism, the social and the artistic. The authors identify a common origin of both critiques in what Bernhard Yack has called the longing for total revolution, elaborated in the spirit of Rousseau by German artists and philosophers around 1800 and after (Yack 1986; the term ‘total revolution’ comes from Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man). Their denunciation of the obstacles placed in the way of the realization of man’s full powers called for a radical transformation of the social order, which by mid-century had come to be identified with capitalism as the prime source of human and social alienation. Although the Left embraced both forms of critique, social critique was carried by the workers’ movements and the artistic critique by the bohemian subculture. Whereas social critique emphasized ‘inequalities, poverty, exploitation and the egoism of a world that encourages individualism as opposed to solidarity’, artistic critique, the province of small artistic and intellectual circles, emphasized ‘oppression in the capitalist world (the domination of the market, the discipline of the factory), the uniformity of mass society and the commodification of everything’ and valorized ‘an ideal of liberation and individual autonomy, of uniqueness and authenticity’ (Boltanski 2002: 6). Marx combined both forms of critique by developing the original imaginary of alienation and revolution into a powerful Promethean critique of the artificial society of liberalism and the dehumanizing effects of capitalist relations of production, which have destroyed all the creative dimensions of work and stand in the way of humanity’s powers of self-creation. In practice, however, the artistic components of Marx’s vision became subordinated after 1848 to scientific analysis of the laws of capitalism, just as the bohemian and avant-garde dreams of political and cultural revolution remained wholly marginal to the workers’ movement. There was in fact a deep contradiction between the claims of a self-styled aristocracy of genius and those of socialist egalitarianism, reflected in the intelligentsia’s oscillation between individualist and collective positions, that came to the fore around 1900 as artists and intellectuals under the pervasive influence of Nietzsche started to articulate and embrace the ideology of proto-fascist movements (Sternhell 1994).

Boltanski posits an intrinsic connection between the European Left and the longing for total revolution. But does this revolutionary heritage, still evident in the events of May 1968 in Paris, signify continuity with the 19th-century artistic critique of bourgeois-capitalist society across the great divide of the totalitarian interregnum of the 20th century, which buried the revolutionary hopes of workers, or rather their leaders, and a bohemian intelligentsia? If we are to speak of continuity, it can only be in terms of a replay in 1968 of the old revolutionary imaginary, which provided the satyr-play to the tragedy of the century’s total revolutions. In fact the symbolism of the student protests re-enacted in Surrealistic fashion the characteristic feature of the classic boheme: the ‘dramatization of ambivalence towards their own social identities and destinies’ (Seigel 1986: 11). And here too we observe a comparable ‘revolutionary’ misunderstanding of this ambivalence, which in fact masked a fundamental change in the hitherto tense relations between artistic critique and capitalism, recognized by Bell only negatively in terms of the dissolution of the cultural contradiction between bourgeois asceticism and bohemian hedonism. Out of this fundamental change there emerged a new spirit of capitalism but also a new spirit of art.

Artistic critique and the new spirit of capitalism

Boltanski and Chiapello work with a ‘scenography with three key components: capitalism, the spirit of capitalism and critique, the latter divided into social and artistic critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 7). Capitalism, understood as the drive for unlimited accumulation through competition and employment, is confronted with the constant need to mobilize and motivate large numbers of employees by means of moral and ideological justification. Boltanski and Chiapello reconstruct the three successive spirits of capitalism in the 20th century in the light of the emancipatory claims advanced by capitalism in response to critique. The first, entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism responded to the critics of the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from status to contract, which had led to a new form of wage slavery and to the dissolution of social bonds, by highlighting the promise of liberation from traditional society through the workings of the market, which opened the possibility of choice in regard to occupation, place of residence, goods and services. The second, managerial spirit of capitalism with its planning and bureaucracy increased state involvement and welfare provisions, recognized the force of social critique by promising liberation from subjection to market forces. The new planning spirit of capitalism was not simply a response to social unrest, however. It took shape under the impact of the war economy, imposed on the combatants by the First World War, and its postwar continuations in fascist Italy and Soviet Russia in the context of the interwar crisis of capitalism. Thus it was not until the return of prosperity of the 1960s that critiques of mass production and mass consumption gained traction and the liberation from social insecurity could appear as oppressive. Only at that point did the two different meanings of liberation, associated with the social and artistic critique of capitalism, come to play a socially significant role.

Boltanski and Chiapello attribute the newfound importance of artistic critique in the 1960s to the growth of student numbers and to the growing requirements for highly skilled engineers and technicians in the production process. The mantra of the ’68 revolt in France was participation, reflecting the push for self-management, individual autonomy and creativity in the work situation, as opposed to the traditional social demands, led by the communist unions, for pay rises and reductions in inequality. 1968 thus appears as the symbolic moment of divergence between the hitherto dominant social critique, based on the class structure of industrial society, and the rise of an artistic critique, which corresponded to the post-industrial needs of capitalism for skilled and self-motivated employees and prefigured the rise of Florida’s new ‘creative class’. Previously confined to the bohemian margins of society, the artistic critique of alienation moved to centre stage to become the driving force of protest and of ongoing social change. A whole series of demands for liberation came together: the refusal of one-dimensional man and mass society was allied to calls for personal autonomy and emancipation from the traditional forms of patriarchy, most notably in Women’s Lib. These demands translated the old artistic critique into an idiom inspired by Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, which had been incubated in the political and artistic avant-gardes of the 1950s.

Boltanski and Chiapello base their theory of the new artistic spirit of capitalism on a comparative analysis of the management literature of the 1960s and the 1990s. The transformation of the planning spirit of industrial mass production into the new paradigm of the network society is nicely summed up by a French management theorist: ‘from quantity production to quality production, from pyramid to network, from territory to flow, from simple delegation to the principle of subsidiarity, from centralized organization to self-organization … from personnel to persons … from reduction to order at any cost to recognition of the dynamic virtues of the paradoxical, the contradictory, the ambiguous, from regulations to the rule’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 159). Boltanski and Chiapello’s term for this new spirit of capitalism, which offers liberation from oppressive industrial work practices, is the projective city, the organization and justification of work around the project: ‘lean firms working as networks in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction, and a general mobilization of workers thanks to the leaders’ vision’ (2005: 73). As opposed to the work ethic of the first spirit of capitalism – the rational asceticism of the entrepreneur – and of the second spirit – managerial responsibility and knowledge – the third spirit is manifested in activity. The ideal networker thus exhibits the following capacities: the ability to generate and participate in projects, to make connections and extend networks, to move from project to project, to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability and arouse enthusiasm, act as innovator and mediator through his/her communicative skills and mastery of communication technologies (2005: 108–118). In short, the ideal networker is the person who can master the three dimensions of networks – complexity, communication, and self-organizing chaos. It is worth noting that we have here a complete revision of the whole notion of the network, which had been previously viewed in relation to human organization in clandestine, illegal or subversive terms (2005: 139, 141).

The theory of networks, driven by the information revolution, was taken over by management theory from the social and natural sciences. Network society owes nothing to artistic critique, even if it is associated with a life-style without a clear division between private and professional life, akin to that of artists or scientists. The bohemian city can therefore be seen as an appropriate counterpart to the projective city. Conversely, the key notion of creativity derives from the sphere of art, even though it amounts to a complete revision of the commonly accepted idea of creativity, rooted in the 19th-century conception of the artist as inspired genius. The transformation of the old artistic critique of capitalism into the new spirit of capitalism, born of the cooption of artistic critique, gives rise to a number of new social paradoxes.

Artistic critique becomes the new defining critique of capitalist society. 1968 marks the symbolic crossover to a socially transformative artistic critique, in which the bohemian counter-image to bourgeois society becomes a model for a libertarian renegotiation of human relations, above all in the emancipation of women from the domestic sphere.

The insistence on the new spirit of capitalism, the new creative class, the ‘cultural creatives’, the new economy, the creative economy, the cultural economy, the entertainment or the aesthetic economy, the role of the creative and cultural industries in ‘commercial culture’, in the ‘creative age’, the creative or the global city combine an strong emphasis on discontinuity with reference to underlying continuities (capitalism, class, creativity, the city) (Cowen 1998; Ray 2000; Seltzer 1999). It is clear that we have a real paradigm shift in the theorizing of creativity in comparison to older inspirational models. Does this represent, as Daniel Bell sensed in 1976 and repeated in 1996, a final exhaustion of modernism, indeed of culture? Or does it signify a fundamentally new conception of the arts beyond modernism in the new economy? This is the question I want to explore through a comparison between the changing spirits of capitalism and the changing spirits of art in the 20th century.

Beyond modernism: A new spirit of art?

There exists for Bell on the one hand a fundamental tension, a fundamental contradiction between bourgeois society and modernism: ‘Though both were born in the same womb, so to speak – the rejection of the past, the commitment to ceaseless change, and the idea that nothing is sacred – the fratricide was there … from the start’ (Bell 1996: 283). This self-hatred (Furet) found its structural expression in the sharp contrast between bohemian life-styles and the ascetic work ethic that epitomized the split between beauty and utility introduced by industrial production. On the other hand, Bell also discerns an equally essential affinity between the bourgeois entrepreneur and the independent artist, each driven by the restless need ‘to search out the new, to rework nature, and to refashion consciousness’ (1996: 16). Artist and entrepreneur shared the same revolutionary spirit of modernism, whose destructive consequences came to the fore after 1900. The ‘perennial gale of creative destruction’, in Schumpeter’s famous formulation, unleashed by capitalist innovation turned, like the avant-garde’s assaults on tradition, against the parent society. In turning against its own, the spirit of creative destruction, in the form of the artist or entrepreneur as Nietzschean superman, achieved a Pyrrhic victory amid the ruins of the 19th-century bourgeois world.

The new collectivist ethos, born of the total mobilization of the Great War and reflected in the rise of mass society, mass politics, Taylorism and five-year plans, replaced the entrepreneur by bureaucrats as managers of the new planning spirit of (state) capitalism. The implosion of bourgeois individualism and the self-destruction of European society was already announced in Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto of 1909 with its vision of the man-machine and glorification of war. From Russian Constructivism to the Bauhaus in Germany, Futurism in Italy and the architecture of Le Corbusier in France, artists embraced the new collectivism and the cult of the machine and technology in the 1920s. The mechanical ballets, the machine music of these years, Mondrian and De Stijl’s geometric utopianism, Brecht’s didactic plays for massed choruses, Battleship Potemkin or Metropolis, all expressed a will to collective reconstruction that took its cue from the new spirit of industrial production. It was the last productive phase of modernism before it mutated into the sterile and streamlined ideology of the 1950s.

Looking back at the whole period of modernism, it seems to me that we can recognize a correspondence between the spirit of capitalism and the spirit of art, especially during the last avant-garde phase with its contrasting impulses of creative destruction and collective reconstruction. The correspondence is most evident in the 1920s but it is also the most one-sided. In no sense can we speak of a real convergence between art and industry. The avant-garde mirroring – or should we say mimicry? – of the collective-constructivist spirit of production remained an unreciprocated declaration of love. Their dreams of a revolutionary fusion of art and industrial technology were rapidly disabused. Can we, however, see this love affair as an imaginary anticipation of the creative economy of today? Or is the creative economy something distinct in kind from the correspondence I am suggesting between the spirit of art and of capitalism in modernism? To put the question differently: how do we get from the cultural contradictions of capitalism to the creative economy?

According to Bell, modern culture has triumphed over society and institutionalized the avant-gardist refusal of limits. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, modern culture in the form of artistic critique is the bearer of values that challenge the dominant social practices but is unable of itself to effect social transformation. Where the one sees the dissolving acid of modernist culture, the other sees capitalism’s capacity to co-opt and neutralize the critical spirit of modernism. ‘By helping to overthrow the conventions bound up with the domestic world, and also to overcome the inflexibilities of the industrial order – bureaucratic hierarchies and standardized production – the artistic critique opened up an opportunity for capitalism to base itself on new forms of control and commercialization, new, more individualized and “authentic” goals’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 467). Compared with their clear analysis, Bell’s cultural pessimism is more complex and contradictory when he posits the simultaneous exhaustion and triumph of modernism. Moreover, although his audience is American, he views contemporary American developments through the lens of European cultural criticism and its ambivalence towards the high culture that took the place but could not replace the social role of religion.

Bell does, however, hint that avant-gardism prefigures coming revolutionary changes in his 1996 Epilogue to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, ‘The Death of the Bourgeois World-View’, where he connects the avant-garde movements of the first decades of the 20th century to the culture of the 1960s. After having carved out bohemian enclaves of a contrary style of life, the avant-garde went over to the offensive against bourgeois culture between 1910 and 1930, whose outcome is the present radical disjunction between culture and social structure. This disjunction, he adds somewhat ominously, has been historically the harbinger of more direct social revolutions, two aspects of which are already evident: first, the collapse of the distinction between art and life; second, the spread of bohemian life-styles from a tiny elite to a socially and culturally significant minority. This minority, composed of the ‘new, large stratum of the intelligentsia in the society’s knowledge and information industries’ (Bell 1996: 34), which identifies with the culture of modernism and is sufficiently numerous to form a new class, is Florida’s new creative class in all but name. Its emergence testifies to three ‘extraordinary changes’: marginal bohemian life-styles have become the habitus of a new cultural class; majority bourgeois culture has disappeared as an alternative to that of the minority; this minority has achieved a hegemonic influence over the institutions of culture from museums, galleries, and publishers to the mass media and the universities (1996: 40–41).

Stepping back, we can see that Bell’s narrative of the death of the bourgeoisie, of modernism and finally culture operates with a scenario of dis/appearance. By dis/appearance I understand the negative of sublation, that is, the process through which modernism and its socio-aesthetic categories (artist, work, creativity, the avant-garde, the boheme) disappear in their original adversarial incarnation to reappear in a new generalized and affirmative form, as in Bell’s death and posthumous triumph of modernism. Thus the antagonism of capitalism and culture, art and technology, disappears in the creative economy, just as the antagonism of bourgeois society and bohemian subculture disappears in the new cultural class. Artistic inspiration and the unique artwork turn into collective creation and the collaborative project, the avant-garde into institutionalized innovation. The aesthetic sphere disappears in the aestheticization of everyday life. This process of generalization, a reflection of the conjoined working of democracy and capitalism, effects a secularization of modern art and culture (which Bell reads as exhaustion and death), emanating from the USA and spreading to Europe in the wake of the youth movement and student protests.

We must distinguish Bell’s sociological scenario of dis/appearance from the revolutionary ‘fury of disappearance’ that possessed the avant-garde movements between 1910 and 1930 as they acted out in ever more radicalized form the death of art and the demolition of tradition. This revolutionary moment of the crisis of modernism, confined to tiny groups, prefigures both the 1960s revival of avant-garde attitudes (cf. the manifestos of the Situationists) and what Bell describes as the collapse of the distinction between art and life. It is, however, an ironic prefiguration, in that the ‘posthumous’ realization of the avant-garde’s dream of the transformation of art into life is condemned in the name of modernist values. Thus Jeremy Rifkin (2000) remains, like Bell, within the critical frame of modernism in his dissection of the transformation of the work ethic into the play ethic. In ‘the age of access’, in which creativity has taken the place of industriousness, ‘lived experience’ has become the ultimate object of commodity reification and culture has disappeared into entertainment, which has supplanted defence spending to become the motor of the new economy. Postmodernism likewise remains within the modernist frame in its endless theoretical deconstructions and decompositions of the spirit of modernism.

Bell and Boltanski register from opposite sides the loss of a productive tension between art and society, artists and capitalism. For both, the end of modernism results in the anaestheticization of art and its critical function in the aesthetic economy of ubiquitous consumerism. This process of dis/appearance is, however, also open to an affirmative reading, which rescues the original idea of the avant-garde launched by Saint-Simon and his disciples, which foresaw an alliance of artists, scientists and industrialists coming together to form the vanguard of social progress. It finds an unexpected echo in Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969), which combines the ‘Great Refusal’ of global capitalism with the romantic-revolutionary longing for the unmediated totality of life through the ‘negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture’. It is difficult to disagree with Kolakowski’s dismissal of Marcuse’s dream of a New World of Happiness, governed by the Pleasure Principle, as a romantic anarchism that has replaced history by unalienated human nature (Kolakowski 2005: 1119). Kolakowski is right to characterize Marcuse’s message as Marxism without the proletariat, but this was precisely why Marcuse could become the guru of the student revolt in the USA and Europe. Moreover, the aesthetic utopia proclaimed by Marcuse turned out to be prophetic in ways that he had not imagined and would have scarcely recognized in the rise of network society, the bohemian city and the creative class, or regarded as the realization of his new Reality Principle, in which beauty is to become the Form of society itself.

The essentially aesthetic quality of this form would make it a work of art, but in as much as the Form is to emerge in the social process of production, art would have changed its traditional locus and function in society: it would become a productive force in the material as well as cultural transformation.… This would mean the Aufhebung of art: the end of the segregation of the aesthetic from the real. (Marcuse 1969: 25, 32)

Marcuse’s utopia belongs to the Californian dreaming, whose actual, effective expression is the creative economy, half Hollywood, half Silicon Valley, which has broken with the old unproductive opposition of art and technology, art and science, art and industry, and left the modernist distinction between high and low culture, aura and mechanical reproduction behind. The Romantic dream of the Aufhebung of art found a more practical realization in the resurrection of the Bauhaus in Chicago in the late 1930s under the directorship of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. It was, says James Allen, a last attempt to give ‘aesthetic form to the modern spirit and unity to modern culture’ (Allen 1983: 295). Moholy-Nagy ‘brought the Bauhaus ideas of industrial and graphic design, art education, and cultural reform to Chicago and, backed by Walter Paepcke as friend and sponsor, made them live again in the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design)’ (Allen 1983: xiii). The industrialist Paepcke, President of the Container Corporation of America, was the driving force of the Chicago crusade for cultural reform, which aimed to overcome the alienation between high culture and capitalism through the introduction of European modernist design into advertising and packaging.

Who better than Moholy-Nagy to implement this programme: in The New Vision (1928), which described the first year curriculum at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy had argued that modern art and design would express the true character of contemporary culture, thereby bridging the split between art and industry, aesthetics and technology. In Vision in Motion (1947) he delivered a final statement of his theory of cultural leadership, carried by a Saint-Simonian avant-garde of ‘scientists, sociologists, artists, writers, musicians, technicians and craftsmen’ (Allen 1983: 74), dedicated to the Bauhaus’s vision of a reunified culture. He found kindred spirits at the University of Chicago among the philosophers: John Dewey was a strong supporter, Charles Morris joined the new Bauhaus. Morris’s idea of the need to integrate the activities of artists, scientists, and technologists was shared in turn by the Unity of Science movement, founded by members of the Viennese circle of logical positivists – Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Philip Frank (Allen 1983: 60).

Did this ‘romance of commerce and culture’ attain its goals? Allen suggests that it is open to two readings: on the one hand it can be understood as the mutually beneficial end of the antagonism of the two cultures, and on the other as the capitalist co-option of high culture for its own purposes. Allen opts himself for an ironic reading of the romance: ‘By so successfully allying their cultural aspirations with commercial techniques, artists and intellectuals helped unify modern culture, but at the risk of turning art and ideas into commodities’ (Allen 1983: 294).

The artist who consummated this mutually beneficial but ironic romance was appropriately a product of the American, technologically-oriented version of the Bauhaus curriculum. Andy Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1949. After working in fashion illustration and advertising in New York, he achieved fame in the 1960s through his paintings and readymades of commodity icons – Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes. The works of this period up to the assassination attempt in 1968 define the moment of Warhol, who has come to personify like no other artist the truth of the cultural revolution of the ’60s: the transformation of the cultural contradictions of capitalism into the new capitalist spirit of culture. If Warhol started in the department store and ended in the museum, it is perhaps above all because he recognized that department stores are ‘kind of like museums’, thereby anticipating the merging of the two worlds into the one culture of marketing, display, and installation (the fetishized concept of high art, celebrated in the blockbuster exhibition, now has the same auratic glamour as the commodity).

If the typical instance of Richard Florida’s bohemian city is San Francisco, Los Angeles, the capital of the culture industry, has become the site of the marriage between Adorno’s old culture industry and what we might call the neo-culture industry. Hollywood, the unspectacular home of the spectacle, has found its complement in the spectacular architecture of the contemporary cathedrals of culture. Los Angeles now boasts Richard Meier’s Getty Centre, Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, along with planned rebuilding of the County Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. The spectacularization of culture across the spectrum of the culture industry encompasses Disneyland and the Getty Centre.

Warhol’s genius lay in his extrapolation of the new Bauhaus’s goal of reconciling high art and mass culture to the point of their total indifferentiation. In one stroke Warhol dismissed the political illusions of the 1920s avant-garde and invalidated the formalist ideology of the postwar avant-garde. He thus embodied ‘the moment when culture industry and spectacle massively invade the once relatively autonomous spaces, institutions, and practices of the avant-garde culture and begin to control them’ (Buchloh 2000: xxii). Benjamin Buchloh suggests that ‘Warhol seems to have lived through every stage of the mass culture/high art paradox, from its division through its eventual fusion’. In his work as a commercial artist he delivered a certain notion of creativity in an exhausted ‘artistic’ vein. But as a high artist, his impact and success sprang from his elimination of the exhausted categories of artistry, creativity, and expression. He thus came closer than anyone since Duchamp, says Buchloh, to destroying the auratic dimension of aesthetic experience (Buchloh 2000: 470–482). The charisma of genius was replaced by the social cachet of the outsider as insider; the aura of the unique artwork by what Richard Polsky (2005: 106) aptly terms the ‘overwhelming star quality’ of his portraits of Marilyn Monroe (not to mention the stellar auction prices). The outmoded ideas of originality and authorship had no place in the age of mechanical reproduction. The serial production of artworks became the responsibility of the Factory (Warhol’s ironic tribute to the two driving forces of the bourgeois age – artistic creation and industrial production). As Warhol put it: ‘Mechanical means are today, and using them I can get more art to more people. Art should be for everybody’ (quoted in Buchloh 2000: 465). Just as mass culture is the inevitable outcome of the conjunction of democracy and the market, so the serial artwork not only reflects the aesthetic of the commodity, it becomes indistinguishable from the commodity. The avant-garde dream of the reunion of art and life reaches its terminus in Warhol’s ‘business art business’: ‘Business is the step that comes after Art.… After I did a thing called “art”… I went into business art.… Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art…good business is good art’ (Warhol 1975: 92).

Andy Warhol exemplifies and stages the dis/appearance of all of Bell’s cultural contradictions through his demonstrations of the collapse of the distinctions between art and non-art and art and commerce. His genius across the decade of the 1960s was to translate the tension between art and the market into a total affirmation and a total critique of capitalist consumerism. He celebrated the marriage of high art and mass culture that integrated art into the culture industry and in the process mocked the idols of Modernism: the unique work of art is replaced by mechanical reproduction (Campbell’s Soup tins); the unique genius by instant but fleeting fame (everybody will be famous for 15 minutes); the boheme by the rebel as trend-setting celebrity; the avant-garde dream of the reunion of art and life by the fusion of creativity and commerce in what he famously called the ‘business art business’.

And yet if we think of Warhol simply as the artist who made greed and fame respectable, we miss precisely the irony of Warhol’s self-extinction. Hal Foster characterizes Warhol’s work as traumatic realism: simultaneously ‘connected and disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent’. Part of his fascination lies in the wish to become a machine – ‘is anyone home inside the automaton?’ (Foster, 1996: 130). Buchloh sees in him not only the victor but also the victim, the mirror of ‘the “all-round reduced personality” of the consumer, who can contemplate in Warhol’s work his own erasure as subject’ (Buchloh 2001: 36).

But what might the Aufhebung of art mean? Oliver Grau, a theorist and practitioner of virtual art, proposes a far more modest utopia than that of Marcuse. He argues that advances in real time interactive computing power are opening up the possibility of a collective art, in which artist, work, and observer begin to converge in a virtual image space: ‘A collective art, which results from the multifarious combinatory talents of its participants and the inspired, virtuoso processing of found elements, stands before further development of media art as a utopia that is within reach’ (Grau 2004: 344). If Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility’ belonged to the age of industrial capitalism, then ‘the work of art in the age of digital production’ belongs to the emerging knowledge economy. The epigraph from Valéry that heads Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay remains as challenging as ever, however.

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have obtained, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.… We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. (Valéry 1964: 125)

Grau corrects Valéry’s bow to technological determinism by insisting that ‘realization of technical innovations was, and is, always preceded by the envisionings of artists’. The imagination of artists, often inspired by the art of the past, now functions as a driving force of media development, and it is reinforced by the coalescence of the various media into one digital hyper-medium. And that means that art is now closely connected with technological development: ‘It is only logical that art is making its way into the centres of high-tech research’ (Grau 2004: 349–50). Are these developments in virtual art to be regarded simply as a new stage in the age-old quest for more powerful media of illusion (for purposes of political power or capitalist profit)? Or can we say that the medium is more than the message, that just as print led to the novel and the moving image to film (the two most important genres of western and now global modernity), so virtual art presages the emergence of a new generic mutation in art, based on a productive alliance between art and technology and art and the economy? Or does it mean that we can no longer look for a new spirit of art corresponding to the new spirit of capitalism, now that the creative economy has co-opted artistic critique and the creative ethos has become the fundamental spirit of our age? Has the avant-garde dream of the Aufhebung of art in fact been realized through the simultaneous contemporary inflation and depotentiation of the concepts of culture, art, and creativity? What we can say is that the end of modernism and the emergence of the new affirmative spirit of the culture industry signal the end of a European-centred conception of art in a new global culture, in which the European legacy may well play its role as the new antiquity of world civilization.