Ignored works

Abstract

This essay interrogates ignored works of art as a special kind of object that can shed some light on the nature of contemporary art worlds, as well as on wider social processes regarding our relationship with things and with our past. It provides a materialist perspective focused on discarded objects as an alternative to a mystifying view of the artworld that takes artistic autonomy for granted and obliterates the social conditions of creativity and success. Ignored works are normally outside the reach of art history and the sociology of art, yet the increasingly bigger realm of unrecognized and unvalued art provides, after the failure of the historical avant-garde, a space where critical autonomy can still develop. This essay attempts to illuminate this mostly invisible realm by relating it to other similar categories such as waste and forgetting. Finally, ignored works’ connection to notions of authenticity is pointed out.

Keywords

authenticity collecting forgetting ignored works of art waste

…like a work of art, enclosed by a beginning and an end. Like a dream, it gathers all passions into itself and yet, like a dream, is destined to be forgotten. (Georg Simmel, ‘The Adventure’)

Seldom are we led to reflect upon the works of art that lay dormant in attics and cellars, or in the hired storage units of unknown artists’ more space-deprived descendants and heirs, who become their zealous guardians. These objects do not have a place in the sociology of art, for even if traditional notions of aesthetics and genius are challenged and the social complexity surrounding the artistic object revealed, they can never be more than absent shadows in what is defined as its field of study. If we believe that artistic value results from the articulation of artistic field and the market (Moulin, 2012), we cannot but be led to conclude that they are valueless, that is, non-entities from the point of view of both the artistic field and the market. The rubble that is left behind after a life dedicated to artistic pursuits, eschewing the tenets of bourgeois existence, is not posthumously transformed into gold, as in romantic dreams, but revealed for what it is worth in all its crudeness. Yet, it is precisely what is devoid of value, abandoned and discarded, that can offer an alternative to a world in which resistance towards utilitarian pursuits becomes increasingly difficult. These forgotten but ubiquitous rags retain a multiplicity of meanings, a complexity that demands interrogation. On the other hand, in the same way that garbage, as its residue, points to the principles through which we organize and make sense of the world (Scanlan, 2015), these spectral presences provide, like old photographic negatives, an invaluable portrait of the nature and functioning of art worlds.

In their materiality and singularity, objects can offer a corrective to the traps of idealism and historicism, which are perhaps nowhere more present than in our approaches to the social significance of culture, and more specifically of art. The realm of art thrives precisely through the denial of its economic logic and promotes an image of the artist as uncreated creator that obscures the consecrating powers of key cultural agents like dealers and curators (Bourdieu, 1993). Ignored works break with the notions of canon and tradition and interrogate our present with their mute existence. This is why Benjamin attended to the figure of the collector as an antidote to the mirages of cultural history. Thus, Edward Fuchs, as a collector, was able to shake the historicist presuppositions of the cultural historian and theoretician, and to alert his pioneering gaze to a consideration of mass art, reproduction and iconography (Benjamin, 1997). Invisible to conventional art history, these neglected forms shatter the false continuity in which objects and traditions have been deposited and silenced, calling attention to reception and challenging the notion of individual creator or genius. For Benjamin, the collector’s intention is not contemplative but destructive: he makes objects speak to the present. Benjamin, an avid collector himself, precisely chooses the moment of unpacking his library, when his books are ‘not yet touched by the mild boredom of order’ (Benjamin, 2007: 61), to introduce readers to a notion of ownership as the most intimate form of relating to objects.

Ignored objects normally go unnoticed except to the eyes of collectors, ‘the most passionate people that walk the earth’ (Balzac in Benjamin, 1997: 372). Benjamin emphasizes how Balzac uses ‘millionaire’ as a synonym for collector. Collectors’ excess makes them rich, although the wealth they possess is not in the form of capital or commodities. Collectors rescue and accumulate apparently valueless objects. The most miscellaneous items, from transport tickets to old cups or postcards, are the province of the collector. It is precisely the voraciousness and passion of collectors that directs their gaze to works and forms that cannot find a place in conventional art history, such as caricature or pornography, in the case of Fuchs.

The collector’s typical aversion to museums is today more difficult to sustain, as the latter’s traditional focus on showpieces – a culture ‘dressed up in its Sunday best’ (Fuchs in Benjamin, 1997: 383) – has shifted towards mass culture, and the museum itself has been turned into ‘a hybrid space somewhere between public fair and department store’ (Huyssen, 1995: 15). However, the collector’s gaze still retains all its significance in liberating objects from their usefulness, on the one hand, and from their market value, on the other. Not bound by utilitarian concerns, collectors are like children who in the abundance and indeterminacy of play renew the world and fill it with unchecked possibility. Perhaps most significant at a time when the purpose of the historical avant-garde is no more than a distant memory is the collector’s genuine engagement with the work, made increasingly impossible in our society by its all-embracing commodity form. What appears through these ignored objects to their faithful heirs and guardians, accidental collectors,¹ are the works no longer hidden under the fetish of their price or of the master’s name.

Out of circulation

Ignored works by forgotten artists are the anonymous doubles of the numerous pieces that are stored, but not displayed, in museums – an accumulation of old objects that are obligingly preserved but can never be entirely protected from advancing deterioration and decay. However, the works that concern me here differ from those kept in museums in one important respect: they are worthless, unlisted, unpublicized. Having never been the product of commercial exchange and only marginally, if at all, related to the art market, they do not possess an exchange value and are, at most, only potential commodities.² Having never entered the institution of art, they are not recognized and remain within the private sphere, unknown and invisible.

Ignored works are not unlike the multitude of objects that we use, produce or relate to in many different ways in the conduct of our daily lives: objects that we routinely discard when they no longer serve their purpose or when we no longer need them, or that we inadvertently leave behind. However, although they may appear abandoned and forgotten, ignored works cannot be discarded like ordinary objects. They are the unique products of a life’s artistic engagement with the world, each inextricably linked to the passions and experience of their creator, each a meaningful, autonomous totality that resists obliteration. They still bear the mark of their maker’s sensuous and expressive pursuits, an uncertain promise of happiness that is the mark of art as ‘the social antithesis of society’ (Adorno, 1997: 8). Their accumulation in the artist’s studio mirrors their posthumous survival in the cellars and attics of heirs. Wealth is here inversely correlated to success, as the richest involuntary collectors are those who benefit from the lack of commercial value of works. An inverse heirloom, as failure to make a name and to build a reputation in the art world, is the condition of the collection’s very preservation.

Ignored works belie the empty pretence of art worlds, obsessed with masterpieces and celebrities. Here, the most accomplished pieces share their space with sketches and proofs, anonymous and often unsigned. Ostensibly outside time, the after-life of these works transports us to a place where neither personalities nor their accomplishments matter any longer. Their apparent agelessness is immune to the fast pacing of artistic reputations in contemporary art worlds, where recognition has become coupled with youth and fame. Unlike modernist understandings of negativity or projects of radical social transformation, which could justify artistic pursuits that defied the existing world, disappearance and oblivion is today the most certain fate of an art that can no longer exist at a distance from a world where the economy has deeply penetrated both public and intimate life to an unprecedented extent. These shadowy non-presences obliterate the strategic position-takings of artistic careers at a time when autonomy has become a lucrative means for the rapid conversion of cultural capital into economic capital. Their slow decay contrasts with the acceleration of art worlds, which is part of widespread acceleration processes in social life that, although characteristic of modernity, have experienced a dramatic increase in the last decades. As Andreas Huyssen has argued,

the speed with which the work of art moves from studio to collector, to dealer to museum to retrospective, and not always in this order, has been dramatically increased…the distance between collector and dealer seems to move toward a vanishing point, and given the increasingly poor performance of museums at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, some would cynically argue that the museum is left in the cold while art itself is moving toward the vanishing point: the work disappearing into a bank deposit and emerging into visibility only when it is put back on the auction block. (Huyssen, 1995: 23)

Not only do museums, with their consecrating powers, help to drive up the price of art, thus paradoxically putting it beyond their reach; the auction house – where works are not only converted into capital but also shown and appreciated by discerning audiences – has in many ways replaced the museum as the temple of high art. Sotheby’s can thus exhibit seldom-viewed Bauhaus works for a few days before selling them, as its head of impressionist and modern art sales comments that ‘auctions are often the first chance people get to see these things in the UK’ (Connolly, 2019). The move of the major auction houses into contemporary art has been a key development of the art market since the 1980s. Together with the growth of private – particularly corporate – sponsorship, commissioning and collecting, it marks a new epoch characterized by the close familiarity between art and business. Julian Stallabrass has explored how this new proximity between art and capital leads to the proliferation of expensive, spectacular works without manifest critical content. Such works help to validate industry’s emphasis on creativity and brand image, can be reproduced well in magazines, and swiftly become part of fashion and celebrity culture (Stallabrass, 2004).

Devoid of exchange value, ignored works are confined to their condition as useless material objects, beyond art’s pretence or illusion of uselessness. Like entities from a different world, they merely exist in a state of absolute isolation. Successful works, by contrast, the most magical of commodities, are almost entirely reduced to exchange value, which increasingly renders their character as material objects incidental:

Thus art, a material manifestation of exchange-value, approaches the condition of that most abstract of commodities, money – and it is actually used like that by the rich, as a quasi-liquid form of speculative capital, with the consequence that great numbers of the objects in which that value inheres are locked away unseen in secure, purpose-built depositories. (Stallabrass, 2004: 90)

The vanishing of the work under the preponderance of exchange value alluded to by both Huyssen and Stallabrass thus constitutes successful works, the most coveted and mysterious of commodities, into mirror images of ignored works. Both simply disappear, are concealed from view and locked away, reduced to their condition as mere decaying matter, in the case of ignored works, or liquid assets, in the case of successful works.

Ignored works live in a flat present made up of congealed experience. Even though invisible and unacknowledged, they retain a connection with a meaningful past that is increasingly threatened by contemporary processes of acceleration, which are characterized by the shrinking of the present and the ensuing disconnection between past experiences and future expectations (Rosa, 2010, 2013). A break with the past is not only a major drive of Modernist art, it is ingrained in the social nature of art worlds, which are subject to the same widespread processes that endanger meaningful social experience and its transmissibility. The quick making of artistic reputations is perhaps their most obvious sign. The figure of the Modernist artist, who worked in obscurity while hoping for posthumous recognition, has been replaced by a new kind of artist who is fully devoted to the here and now, as those who fail to obtain recognition and fame in their youth are quickly condemned to oblivion. Many artists have wholeheartedly embraced their celebrity status and the allures of fashion and commercial success. However, this development is not just a result of their greed or of their thirst for fame but of the very social mechanisms of acceleration that have transformed the nature of art worlds. Similar processes have been described with reference to the nature of families and work in contemporary society, where growing divorce rates and the practices of flexible capitalism mean that families and occupations no longer last an individual life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Sennett, 1998; see also Rosa, 2010). In art, as in other contexts of social life, acceleration means that vital and artistic trajectories become fragmentary, risky and increasingly illegible.

The works of those who did not want to or were unsuccessful at playing the game in which artistic reputations are made inhabit a different world, an ever-lasting present where the past is rendered equally mute. In this indeterminate space the passing of time is extremely slow, only experienced in terms of degradation and decay. Without a future and increasingly unaffected by their past, ignored works and the vast quantities of experiences, practices and objects that are expelled or left behind in our high-speed society are confined to the ever-growing realm of waste.

Waste

The production of increasing amounts of waste is an intrinsic characteristic of a vigorous capitalist economy. Waste is society’s invisible other, a ghostly shadow. In its permanent pursuit and fascination with the ever new, in its sheer promise of abundance, consumer society cannot escape from being incessantly haunted by its presence. And waste has finally come to chase us all, filling up our oceans with plastic, polluting our air with poisonous particles and cluttering our homes. The ever-growing production of waste coincides with the filling up of available space, in a world where no virgin lands remain and where the spilling out from faraway dumping grounds seems to be getting closer by the day. Popular culture contains revealing elaborations on waste’s growing visibility, from Wall-E’s science fiction dystopia to Marie Kondo’s magical take on tidying up. Kondo’s message that we can successfully eliminate the clutter from our lives by simply disposing of it with a smile has captivated audiences around the world (or rather its most prosperous regions), allowing them to remain oblivious to the waste that is produced by every operation of order. Needless to say, Wall-E’s animated fiction offers a more realistic perspective on waste than Kondo’s reality show.

A particularity of neoliberal or flexible capitalism is that it not only produces superfluous objects and materials in large quantities but that it also relegates individuals and entire population groups to the category of waste. This has been the main consequence of the erosion of a welfare state that fostered inclusive policies and of the collective entities – like class or family – that protected individuals from facing the blows of fate in isolation. Zygmunt Bauman pointed to the flawed consumer as ‘the “dirt” which needs to be “disposed of” in a society solely regulated by the market’ (1997: 14). In contrast to the temporary exclusions of an old capitalism that relied on its industrial reserve army, seeking to extract surplus value from its ranks at times of growth, flawed consumers are no longer seen to be fit for assimilation, deemed useless and permanently excluded. Immigrants and exiles, who have lost their place on earth, become in this context hated reminders of the precariousness and risk of internal exclusion that increasingly threaten us all:

Immigrants, and particularly the fresh arrivals among them, exude the faint odour of the waste disposal tip which in its many disguises haunts the nights of the prospective casualties of rising vulnerability. For their detractors and haters, immigrants embody – visibly, tangibly, in the flesh – the inarticulate yet hurtful and painful presentiment of their own disposability. (Bauman, 2004: 56)

The inexorable advance of waste is also becoming manifest in the world of art where, as Gregory Sholette remarks, ‘dark matter is getting brighter’ (2011: 3). From different perspectives, authors like Nicolas Bourriaud and Gregory Sholette have called attention to the social and political significance of ignored works, of works left behind, of works that are systematically excluded as a result of the normal operations of art worlds. Bourriaud (2016) has referred to the constant generation and expulsion of exforms, identifying an organic link between the aesthetical and the political in the context of an ever-growing realm of waste, which encompasses whatever and whoever resists assimilation: the banished, the unusable, the useless. A more sociologically alert account of the significance of waste in the world of art is found in Sholette, who identifies the bulk of artistic creativity in terms of creative dark matter:

It includes makeshift, amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices – all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible. (Sholette, 2011: 1)

As Sholette convincingly argues, creative dark matter is not only a necessary result of the operations of exclusion on which the social construction of artistic excellence is based, it is also essential for the functioning of art worlds. Thus, an obscure mass of ‘failed’ artists provides the ranks of creative workers and arts administrators without which successful artists would find it difficult to exist, and the arts teachers and restricted publics without which the art world could not reproduce and legitimate itself. Since the 1980s an increasing number of individuals are choosing to become artists, while hierarchies and inequalities in the world of art have become more marked than ever before.³ Most of the many thousands who graduate from art schools are either forced to look for employment in other fields or have to live in conditions of extreme insecurity, precariousness and poverty as they join the ranks of a large contingent of ‘failed’ artists. While the world of art can be characterized as an economy in reverse (Bourdieu, 1993), where interests are hidden under the appearance of disinterestedness, the perverse effects of this deceptive economy that condemns the vast majority of artists to poverty have never been as widespread as today, when the hope of a posthumous recognition that would redeem them is no longer plausible.

Significantly, Sholette counts both amateurs and ‘failed’ artists within the ranks of the shadowy world that is conceptualized as artistic dark matter, redefining what Howard Becker (1982) could still approach as innovative outsiders or ‘mavericks’ (similarly conceived as being mostly destined to anonymity and oblivion) in terms of waste. Indeed, the difference between the ‘naïve artist’ or amateur and the professionally trained artist fades in the undifferentiated world of dark matter, that incessantly growing monster. The art world that puts a premium on the saleability of a few hugely successful artists also generates a vast lumpen proletariat of sorts, a rejected population that exists beyond the possibility of ever being assimilated into it. And, after the failure of the historical avant-garde and the generalized acceptance of a cosy familiarity between art and business, it might only be amongst this amorphous mass that a space of critical autonomy can still be found. As Sholette also points out, the unfulfilled potential of this missing mass lies not in the possibility of its absorption and colonization (which sealed the fate of the historical avant-garde), but rather in the embracing of a self-conscious politics of invisibility and marginalization. Needless to say, such a politics is in itself not sufficient to guarantee the survival of art, which must also aesthetically respond to new objective difficulties that derive from the position of art in society and from the development of its own technical productive forces. Theodor Adorno’s mature reflections on this subject led him to conclude that ‘Perhaps only that music is still possible which measures itself against this greatest extreme, its own falling silent’ (Adorno, 2002: 660).

From their seclusion in the apparently timeless space of attics and cellars, ignored works mirror the excess of commodities that inundate our homes. Already devoid of their immediate connection with a life’s work, they have slowly but inexorably entered the category of waste. In a recently reissued classic, Michael Thompson argued that waste’s invisibility and covertness is what allows the apparently impossible conversion of transient objects, which decrease in value over time and have finite life-spans, into durable objects, which increase in value over time and can have infinite time-spans (Thompson, 2017: 24–5). That which has no value can suddenly become invaluable. It is because it is apparently worthless that rubbish is disregarded and escapes social control, thus becoming a key factor of social change. Thompson’s theory of rubbish, which seeks to account for the connection between rubbish, value and the capacity to define the changing boundaries between them of different social groups, can thus be read as a shadowy reverse of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural distinction. In the context of increasing threats to the very autonomy that turned art into such a valuable commodity in the first place, the realm of waste – that ghostly province that now offers the only refuge for the useless – has become a wealthy reservoir that might very well be the only remaining space where uncertain promises can still flourish.

It might be worthwhile to return at this point to the illuminating example of Wall-E, which actualizes the Benjaminian figures of the ragpicker and the collector in a world dominated by waste.⁴ Wall-E is a post-human ragpicker, whose task is to work through the accumulated mountains of waste by compressing it into rectangular blocks and making with them tower-like buildings. But he is also a discerning collector of refuse, who has put together an unusual collection of objets trouvés, carefully arranged in his unlikely home. The collector builds on the ragpicker’s familiarity with rubbish. However, whereas the latter is guided by utilitarian concerns, the former is sensitive to singular objects that he finds amidst the rubbish serving no particular purpose. And only the collector is able to discover and appreciate, in its apparent uselessness, the treasure that will make it possible for humans to return to planet earth, even when he no longer remembers what it is.

Forgotten

Relegated to the realm of waste, ignored works are buried memories. They belong to what Paul Ricoeur (2004) has described in terms of profound and inexorable forgetting, which erases the traces of what we have learnt, the remnants of our lived experience. There is no memory without forgetting, something which the new technologies that seem to amplify memory towards the infinite would want us to remain oblivious of. Yet, just as the memory that is gigantically enlarged by technological means may easily disappear and get lost (due to corruption or destruction of the hard disks where it is ultimately stored), the vast invisible realm of suppressed memories tenaciously resists obliteration.

Perceptive accounts of the social significance of memory have insisted on the need to approach memory and forgetting as inextricably related and not merely as opposites. Ricoeur points out that ‘on the whole, forgetting is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory. An attack, a weakness, a lacuna. In this regard memory defines itself, at least in the first instance, as a struggle against forgetting’ (2004: 413). However, this thought is soon confronted with the monstrous idea of a memory that would not forget anything. Ricoeur refers to two different forms of profound forgetting: forgetting as the erasing of traces, a definitive forgetting, but also to a sort of reversible forgetting, to forgetting as a reserve and as a resource, to the forgetting associated with ‘the small pleasures of the sometimes unexpected return of memories we had thought lost forever’ (2004: 440–1). The essential ambivalence between these two forms or approaches to forgetting – a destructive forgetting and a founding forgetting which makes memory possible – is finally characterized as undecidable (2004: 443).

Huyssen (1995, 2003) has pointed to the apparent contradiction that our amnesic age is obsessed with memory. The emergence of memory as a key cultural and political concern in the last decades of the 20th century is a key sign of the crisis of high modernity, firmly turned towards the future, not the past. There is, according to Huyssen, a hypertrophy of memory in our culture, where ‘total recall seems to be the goal’ (2003: 15). But, at the same time, the processes that characterize a society of consumption and obsolescence have turned amnesia – destructive forgetting – into the terminal condition of capitalism, a condition that threatens to consume memory itself. Thus, the current obsession with memory is a response to the transformations that are taking place as a result of processes of acceleration, as well as the increasing dissolution of territorial and spatial coordinates under contemporary globalization. For Huyssen, memory represents

the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fast-speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload. (1995: 7)

It is usually an overarching preoccupation with remembering that leads one to reflect on forgetting as an important component of the very memories that are enabled by it. Here, on the contrary, I take the lead from ignored works to proceed in the opposite direction, allowing forgetting to direct us to remembrance. Ignored works are buried memories, memories that may be inaccessible and overlooked, but that can still emerge from their silent dwellings and come to meet us. And, contrary to what we may initially think, this category of surviving but unreachable memory objects to which ignored works belong is not a marginal one but actually the norm that defines how we relegate the present to the past. In fact, most and often particularly the most meaningful contents of our lived experience live on in an uncertain state and are not immediately available to us. As Ricoeur points out, ‘many memories, perhaps among the most precious, childhood memories, have not been definitively erased but simply rendered inaccessible, unavailable, which makes us say that one forgets less than one thinks or fears’ (2004: 416).

But if we forget less than we think, or fear, we also need to actively find the means to render these surviving memory traces accessible. Marcel Proust undertook the most systematic attempt to articulate with them an account that could recover past experience, where time would be no longer lost but regained. This truly monumental task of rescue refers especially to the experience of childhood, that most significant and also most distant aspect of our self. And it is not a systematic memory, the reconstructive memory of our intellect – what Proust calls voluntary memory – that is the key to this search, but instead an involuntary memory the starting point of which is, precisely, forgetting. We cannot command involuntary memory at our will. For Proust, our past is hidden in an unsuspected material object that we may never find, and all our conscious attempts to evoke it are doomed to failure. Like ignored, forgotten works, involuntary memory appears suddenly out of nowhere. And only in this way can we hope to recover a past that is otherwise dead, and of which the pictures that the voluntary memory shows us preserve nothing (Proust, 1992: 59).

Marc Augé (2004) has examined return as a form of oblivion. The main purpose of return is to recover a lost past by forgetting the present, whether it is in African rites of possession or in revisiting a faraway place that we have previously inhabited. Like Proust’s account, on which it is partially based, Augé’s notion of return as a figure of forgetting emphasizes the potency of smell or taste rather than sight, and the poignancy of an experience that connects a person to her unknown depths in unanticipated, uncontrollable ways, obliterating her immediate surroundings. And, contrary to what might initially seem to be the case, the figure of return reveals why we need the gift of oblivion even more clearly: whereas Proust’s narrator can recover his long abandoned memories through arduous work with the materials of forgetting, Dumas’ Count of Montecristo’s attempt to return ends in failure because of his inability to forget (Augé, 2004).

The concepts of involuntary memory and of return reveal that buried memories are not obliterated and lost forever, but neither do they simply belong to us nor can they be controlled and mobilized at will. Our amnesic but memory-obsessed age suffers, in fact, from the monstrous predominance of voluntary memory over involuntary memory, which dangerously negates the benefits of forgetting. Involuntary memory does not just allow us to relive our past but, as Benjamin maintained, it is linked to the possibility of articulating meaningful experience itself, as well as to the preservation of an aura that surrounds certain objects, referring both to their uniqueness as well as to the imprint of time they carry within them (Benjamin, 2006: 202). The invention of photography marked the beginning of a trend towards the exponential extension of voluntary memory, made possible by modern techniques of mechanical reproduction that would lead not only to a crisis in art but also to a crisis in perception itself (Benjamin, 2006: 203). Nearly two centuries later, thanks to a technology that remembers everything, we can easily be watched, targeted and even held accountable for minor indiscretions or transgressions, no matter how distant and irrelevant to the present they might be. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has argued, ‘because of digital technology, society’s ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory’ (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009: 4). Technology remembers what we no longer can. This new and ever-growing form of destructive memory, which Proust and Baudelaire already confronted, appears today as damaging, if not more so, as destructive forgetting.

We need to be willing to rely on an uncertain memory that does not belong to us because it is founded upon forgetting. Proust affirmed that it is a matter of chance whether we will find the mysterious object that can lead us to recover our past before we die. In this respect, the collector’s approach proves once more to be revealing. In his essay on book collecting, mentioned above, Benjamin states: ‘the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books’ (2007: 61–2). The collector’s excess represents the antithesis of destructive memory, the flat, instantaneous memory of technological means, yet it is similarly all-encompassing. Everything can here find a place; no objects are deemed superfluous because they are intricately linked with the materials of our experience, with our lived past. Benjamin describes true collectors as ‘physiognomists of the world of objects’ to refer to their particular sensitivity towards objects, no matter how humble, and any connections they have to everything remembered and thought. Benjamin also sees ownership as ‘the most intimate relationship one can have to objects’, as objects become the building stones of the edifice in which the collector can dwell (2007: 69).

The memory of electronic means is presently doing away with this intimate relationship to objects, that we can control but no longer own, as we become mere users of our collections (of books, of music, even of the photographs that we have taken ourselves). Not only are we not able to bequeath these collections to our heirs (their license of use is limited to our lifespan), but electronic memory, because it cannot make space for oblivion, risks losing our most valued memories the moment we forget about them.⁵ By contrast, ignored works, and all the remnants of lived experience contained in them, are not inexorably lost. They can still suddenly emerge from the shadows, calling for our attention. Instead of rushing past our memories we may seek to give ourselves the time to find them and look at them anew.

Authentic

Like manuscripts willingly abandoned to ‘the gnawing criticism of the mice’ (Marx, 1971), ignored works are what remains of the authentic in the age of authenticity. Writing not for publication but for self-clarification becomes something that we find, in our context, increasingly difficult to grasp, but it connects with what ignored works can still reveal to us if we care enough to interrogate them. This refers to an idea of the authentic based on the singularity of individual pursuits that does not succumb to external demands and that also speaks of our ability to connect with our past, expressed in the Benjaminian notion of aura and in Proust’s concept of involuntary memory. In the case of ignored works, the passing of time pulverizes the worldly pursuits that once seemed so pressing; it turns artistic trajectories, competition and position-taking into rubble. Inexorable forgetting appears here as a figure of redemptive destruction, a founding destruction that, unlike Banksy’s programmed self-destruction of his canvas Girl with Balloon after being sold at auction, does not depend on the creator’s will. Failure becomes failed artists’ posthumous wealth, a wealth which threatens to become incomprehensible. Once more, the image of the collector as millionaire needs to be evoked in this context. There is also a likeness between failed artists and children, in the unrestrained freedom that characterizes their inconsequential but productive play. It is precisely this freedom that allows the preservation of creative impulses that may never find an echo in a world where instrumental reason prevails. Because, as Antonio Aguilera argues, invoking the figure of one of Kafka’s creatures, ‘those who wanted to be forgotten in all seriousness in order to distance themselves from the countless crowd of the heroes and enter into the agitated redemption of forgetting, like Josefine, resist obliteration’ (Aguilera, 1999: 237). Kafka’s Josefine constitutes perhaps the most poignant reflection on the fate of a type of avant-garde art that consciously rejects the deceptive character of success, embracing instead the silence of ignored works. Today, its significance has become more pronounced, even if we forget that such an alternative of self-withdrawal still exists.

Our amnesic age is not just obsessed with memory but also with authenticity. In the artistic world, authenticity has become inextricably linked with the legitimacy of the division between high and low, as well as with the celebrity status of the most successful artists and the exorbitant price of their productions. As Hans Abbing has pointed out,

because of authenticity people look up to art and artists. What else can explain that in 1998 the Dutch government was prepared to pay 36 million Euro [appr. $32 million] for an unfinished painting by Mondrian…? After all, it’s just a piece of linen on a wooden frame with some dots of paint on it. (Abbing, 2002: 25)

An authentic work may be the product of the artist’s unique expressive powers and creativity, which leave their own distinguishable imprint in it. However, authenticity is easily reduced to attribution and authentication, which can end up covering all marks of individuality in works. The development of a culture of authenticity since the late 18th century has gone hand-in-hand with the emergence of the expert, who assumes the specialized task of attribution of works circulating in the market. Attribution links the authorship of a given work to a prestigious artist, and ‘attributing and authenticating are such commonplace operations within the art world that the processes involved end up being no longer questioned’ (Lahire, 2019: 212). In his recent book This is Not Just a Painting, Bernard Lahire has examined authentication and attribution as part of the process of the creation of artistic belief. He describes how at the end of the 18th century the power of attribution went from the hands of artists and/or aristocratic owners to those of connoisseurs and experts (art historians, art dealers, museum curators) while, at the end of the 19th century, the specialist’s eye became in turn replaced by the use of new scientific approaches and techniques (such as X-rays and chemical tests). Thus, the historical development of a culture of authenticity has brought with it the paradoxical disappearance of aesthetic, expressive, and individual elements in art, first through the reduction of artistic works to originals that need to be distinguished from fakes, second through the elimination of the expert’s eye made possible by impersonal laboratory techniques.

Lahire’s perceptive account of the significance of authentication and attribution in art is not oblivious of the perverse effects that they bring with them. As he points out,

the strict logic of attributionism, which favours known and recognized values (Raphael is therefore a great painter universally recognized) can distract attention from the real aesthetic value of the work independently from the reality of this attribution. The desire for authenticity at any price (the painting is or is not by Raphael) has come to be in contradiction with purely aesthetic values. (Lahire, 2019: 231, emphasis in the original)

However, he remains himself locked within this perverse logic that is primarily based on extra-artistic considerations in his account of the cultural and economic effects of art as a form of modern magic.⁶

Neither simply ordinary objects nor participating in the social magic that is strictly reserved for works that have become the object of artistic recognition, ignored works are immune to the tyranny of authenticity. They survive in their obscure materiality, pointing to an unlikely chance for redemption. Lahire’s sociological perspective led him to add a twist to Magritte’s well-known artistic joke (‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’) in the title of his book in order to foreground the social dynamics on which artistic appreciation is based. This essay has maintained the need to attend not just to the power of art worlds to determine what becomes invaluable and what is devoid of value, but also to remain perceptive of art’s intrinsic social promise, however implausible, which unprecedented commodification is leading us to forget. Pausing and looking at one of the works that inspired the writing of this essay, now hanging on my staircase, I can finally state: this is, indeed, a painting.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work has received financial support from ICREA, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.

Notes

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