Mapping intermediaries in contemporary art according to pragmatic sociology

Introduction

A new trend appeared during the 1990s in French sociology, named ‘pragmatic sociology’. It refers both to the American ‘pragmatism’ in philosophy and to ‘pragmatic’ linguistics (Heinich, 2009a). Besides a number of differences according to its various authors (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Hennion, 2007; Latour, 2002), it mainly stands on empirical surveys grounded in close observation of actions in their actual context, thus representing not only ‘a growing strand of cultural theory’ (Silber, 2003: 427) but also an important renewal. As it purports to be mostly descriptive and analytical rather than critical, it breaks with Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘sociology of domination’ (Heinich, 1998b, 2009b); and as it considers that the relativity of human actions according to their contexts is now but a commonsensical issue, which no longer needs to be demonstrated but only used as a starting point for analysis, it tends to overlook Anglo-American ‘cultural studies’ and ‘social constructivism’ (Heinich, 2010, 2011).

In the field of the sociology of arts, this ‘pragmatic’ perspective cannot be reduced to Howard Becker’s (1992) demonstration of the collective nature of artistic activities, since it does not pretend to demonstrate anything, or to dismiss the commonsensical belief in the individual nature of artistic experience: rather, the pragmatic sociological approach to arts aims at describing the close intertwining of situated human actions and objects in order to understand the whole set of frames (including symbolic frames such as representations and values) which constrain and organize actual relationships to art.

Let me give here one example of how the pragmatic perspective can help describe and understand what is at stake in such a situation related to the arts. When commenting on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, scholars often state that he would have declared ‘This is art’, but such a statement is absolutely untrue, as demonstrated by a close account of what actually happened. Duchamp did not say anything: he did something (buy a urinal, paint a signature and a date on it, bring it to the hall where the Salon des Indépendants in New York received the artworks, place it in a reverse position), then, after the urinal was left in a lobby (but not ‘refused’, since there was no jury), he let other people act. First, he let his friend Alfred Stieglitz publish a photography of Fountain and a comment on it in his journal The Blind Man, then he just waited. Nearly 40 years later, once he had become a leading figure in modern art, he decided to make a small number of replicas of the original urinal (which had been lost) and sell them to private galleries and public museums. This means that he allowed cultural intermediaries to do their work: treating and framing the thing as a work of art, insuring, describing, selling or exhibiting, lighting and commenting on it (Camfield, 1989; Heinich, 1998a). Thus Duchamp did with his actions what a ‘pragmatic’ sociologist would have done with words: that is, provide evidence of how important intermediaries are in the field of art.

Indeed, focusing on cultural intermediaries is not a novelty in sociology. This issue has been mostly addressed either regarding minor cultural productions, such as the culture industries, advertising, fashion or graphic design (Cronin, 2004; Nixon and Du Gay, 2002), or regarding the side aspects of artistic activities, such as the art market (Joy and Sherry, 2004). Considering the role of cultural intermediaries in major artistic activities such as the visual arts remains somehow a marginal issue in sociology (Greenberg et al., 1996; Heinich, 2007; Michaud, 1989). This article intends to frame the various ways to address it within the specific domain of contemporary visual arts.

A contemporary example

The scene takes place in September 2008, during the press opening of a major exhibition at the last floor of the Pompidou Centre’s Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. In the second room, in front of a huge canvas, a tiny old man in an elegant grey suit is facing a dozen photographers, with some embarrassment in his shy smile. Obviously, he is the artist to whom this big retrospective – the first one in his whole career – is dedicated in this prestigious place. His name is Jacques de la Villeglé. Some 60 years ago, he began to carefully pull out publicity posters stuck on the city walls, bring them into his studio, stick them on a support, sign them and eventually exhibit and sell them as his own works.

An art historian would tell us how these ‘torn’ posters (‘affiches lacérées’, as the artist says) entered art history, took place in a new trend together with the works of a few other artists, and may be influenced by previous ones or influence others to come. An art economist would describe how these works progressively entered the ‘first market’ of galleries, then the ‘second market’ of auctions or even of museums, and how their price went up and up. An historian of culture, or an old style art sociologist, would explain how this work may be read as a visual testimony of the urban French landscape in the postwar decades, with its specific publicity practices and graphic fashions. A social philosopher would comment on consumption society and the deconstruction of the ‘société du spectacle’ through its images. A critical sociologist would denounce how long it took for society to recognise an innovative artist, or how unfair it is to legitimize a pseudo-artwork made for dominants who manipulate culture in order to serve their distinction strategies (Bourdieu and Haacke, 1994).

A professional art sociologist would have to choose between an analysis of the artist’s production (the space of competition in which the artist took place, his social origins, the collective movements in which he was involved, his position in the contemporary art world), an analysis of his reception (statistics measuring his presence in the specialist or general press, analysis of the arguments used by critics to qualify and evaluate his work, surveys of the exhibition’s visitors), and an analysis of the various mediations that occurred between the first poster brought back to his studio and this final retrospective in a prestigious museum. There, the sociologist will meet a number of heterogeneous beings: humans and objects, words and numbers, walls and institutions: that is, a whole set of ‘mediations’, according to Antoine Hennion’s (1993) definition of this term; in other words, the series of operations which enable an artwork to be perceived and appropriated by others than its creator. In this very case, it means the various operations according to which the work has been turned from the underground of nightly removal in the streets of Paris onto the blinding flashes of the cameras in the museum room, where what once used to be garbage posters are going to be exhibited to crowds of visitors under carefully calculated lighting.

What, then, has happened here? First, time: more than two generations. An artist’s longevity is a primary condition to be recognised while still living, at least in modern times, when innovation as a requisite in art prevents short-term recognition by laypeople, as the Van Gogh case clearly demonstrates (Heinich, 1996[1991]). Then, there were people: other artists who happened to form a group at the beginning of the 1960s; an art critic, Pierre Restany, who baptised it; gallery owners who decided to show some of these works; art collectors who bought them; other art critics who wrote about them; auctioneers who sold them in public auctions; experts who authenticated or priced them; museum curators who persuaded their peers to buy them (in 1971, about 25 years after the first poster removal); art historians who began to study the artist’s whole work; students who dedicated their PhD to it; as well as framers, transporters, insurers, restorers, printers, electricians, exhibition architects, attendants, lecturers and, eventually, photographers. Without all these people, there would have been no ‘artworks’, only old posters stored in a studio.

A number of objects were involved: frames, picture rails, spots, gloves, thermometers, hydrometers, labels, art magazines, books, photographs, catalogues, archives, contracts – without forgetting the most important: the walls of galleries and museums. Words had their part too: the signature of the artist on each work, the name of a new group (Nouveaux Réalistes), the name of a new genre (lacéré-anonyme), the names of galleries and museums, comments on the work, biographical data collected by specialists, the legal contracts between a gallery and the artist, and between a museum and the private collectors who own a work (the Spanish art historian Juan-Antonio Ramirez (1995[1994]) accurately speaks of ‘human operators’, ‘narrative operators’ and ‘icono-verbal operators’). Let us not forget numbers: the dates on the works and on the labels, lists of prices in galleries, the cost of insurance.

All these mediations are exactly the same as those required by any museum exhibition of a painting. What differs here is simply that passing from the studio to the museum is more difficult in the case of a contemporary artwork, since its very nature is to challenge art boundaries as they are traditionally conceived: in the case of classic and modern art, it means framed paintings or sculptures standing on a socle, created by the artist’s hand, long-lasting, easily transportable and supposed to convey either an aesthetical aim or, at least, an expression of the creator’s interiority (Heinich 1998a, 1999). Hence, another kind of mediation has to be added to the list: mental representations proper to the various categories of actors. However, contrary to people, objects, words and numbers, these representations cannot be directly observed: they may be perceived only through the comments on the works expressed in actual situations (or sometimes even through gestures, as in the case of vandalism; Gamboni, 1997). These cognitive frames, mental boundaries or ‘symbolic boundaries’ (Lamont, 1992) appear as generic classifications (DiMaggio, 1987), axiological criteria, biographical models (Wittkower and Wittkower, 1963); they are more or less incorporated in visual or corporal abilities. They all constitute art mediations, commanding both the introduction of a work into a category and its positioning on a value scale.

Thus the implicit artistic criteria more or less shared by people in a certain context are fundamental mediations, although they are not very perceivable unless specifically investigated. As soon as some of the criteria necessary to consider an artwork as such are missing (which is the case for most of them in the affichistes’ works), the mediations necessary to its artistic accreditation are more weighty, and thus take longer to obtain. Hence the emotion of someone who, by chance, observes this brief moment when the artist is being ‘recognised’ – in all the meanings of the term, since the image of his face and works will soon be reproduced in the public space, owing to the work of the photographers holding up cameras in front of him, shooting and shooting.

A historical perspective on cultural intermediaries

While the visual arts were craftsmanship (at the time of guilds) or a profession (at the time of academies), their commodification mainly relied on personal transactions via a shop or commissions (Heinich, 1993). However, since they pertained to the vocational regime of art, as this term has come to be understood in modern times (roughly from the second half of the 19th century), the art market became what it means for us nowadays: specialized intermediaries dealing with the circulation of artworks (art dealers) and their evaluation (art critics). The American sociologists Harrison White and Cynthia White (1965) have evidenced accurately the development of the French art market in the second half of the 19th century, or rather, since an art market had always existed but in less specialized forms, of the modern art market: what they call the ‘merchants–critics system’, as opposed to the classical academic and neo-academic system (Heinich, 2005).

These were the premises of what became a significant trend in contemporary art since the second half of the 20th century: the growing importance of art intermediaries, together with the ‘autonomisation’ of art (Bourdieu, 1992). The reason is simple: the closer art comes to artists’ and specialists’ favourite issues (and above these, the originality and place of the work in art history), the further it goes from mere amateurs and the general public; hence the necessity of specific mediation between the production of the work and its reception. The thickness of mediation, which means the number and importance of cultural intermediaries, grows together with the autonomy of the field, in Bourdieu’s terms.

The image of a chain of mediation or intermediaries is used sometimes to describe this process, but such an image might be deceptive. A more relevant image should be the one used by the art historian Alan Bowness (1989) when trying to explain how the modern artist rises to fame. He evidences the existence of four ‘circles of recognition’: first, peers; second, critics and curators (often bound to public institutions); third, merchants and collectors (pertaining to the private market); fourth, the general public. One after the other, each of these circles is increasingly populated, from a few peers to crowds of museum audiences, later from short-term recognition by peers to posthumous fame, and then less competent. This model allows three dimensions to be crossed:

This model also evidences an important difference between modern and contemporary art: in contemporary art, what used to be the second circle in modern art (merchants and collectors) tends to become the third one, since the institutional circle of curators and art critics gets closer to artists and more immediately involved in their recognition (Heinich, 2005).

Any mediation is ambivalent: like a screen, it is considered either to be what creates or what blurs visibility, so that it may be perceived either positively, bringing the spectator closer to the artwork, or negatively, separating him from it. This is why people often dismiss the excessive role played by curators, who used to be criticized in that they would pretend to be genuine ‘authors’ of the exhibitions that they organize, competing with the artists that they exhibit (Heinich, 1995; Heinich and Pollak, 1996[1989]; Michaud, 1989).

Cultural intermediaries in the French contemporary context

The case of France is particularly interesting regarding the issue of cultural intermediaries. In this country their role became increasingly important for contemporary art. A new professional group arose in the 1970s and developed in the 1980s, after the Left came to power in 1981, fostering an active policy conceived both to help creators and to democratize culture. Within the visual arts, the number of state-salaried civil servants has multiplied at the same time as they have been given much wider duties than those carried out by the traditional corps of museum officials: exhibition curators and/or art critics, directors of regional funds for contemporary art (Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain), art advisers in regional cultural directorates (Directions Régionales des Affaires Culturelles) or for the Ministry of Culture (inspecteurs à la creation), project managers in the regional authorities. They are active in an ever-growing sector, with increasingly specialised academic educational pathways.

These circumstances are relatively unknown, although they have major consequences, some of them deemed damaging and others deemed good: the modernisation of museums, a growing number of public art exhibitions, the establishment of specific departments in major museums in order to promote democratisation of the audience, the creation of artotheques (institutions for lending works of art, mostly graphic art), artists’ housing and a number of other supportive measures (help in putting on first exhibitions, allocation of studios, grants for journeys abroad, etc.).

This reality is often undervalued or even ignored. Little is known about this professional group, its morphological profile (size, age distribution and social origins, degrees, salary conditions, etc.), the way that people are selected, peer appraisal, determination of competence, etc. Forthcoming surveys should focus particularly on the strong mutual interdependence which marks this new professional group, as many of its members know each other personally. All of this leads to a fairly high degree of conformity, unswerving loyalty when the group is questioned by outsiders and a worldwide method of corporatist defence in the name of art and culture. However, it also leads to considerable rivalry, particularly in the competition to discover new, unknown talent: that is, artists who are either very young or foreigners. This partly explains why confirmed French artists so seldom attract attention inside France, and why so many young artists appear, even before having completed their training, and having proved their worth on the market or showed a personal development potential other than simply demonstrating their understanding of the rules of the game.

Mapping cultural intermediaries in contemporary art

Far beyond the French context, contemporary art possesses special properties which directly influence its relationship to intermediaries. The difference between modern and contemporary art is not chronological, but generic: the ‘genre’ of contemporary art fundamentally differs from the ‘genre’ of modern art, since the former relies mainly on transgression of the boundaries of art such as they are commonly conceived, whereas the latter is supposed to express the interiority of the artist, by transgressing the rules of academic figuration – rules that classic art is expected to enact (Heinich, 1998a, 1999).

This peculiar relationship to common sense expectations opens up a gap between contemporary artworks and the general public’s capacity to accept or understand them. This is the major reason why cultural intermediaries are a fundamental component of the field of contemporary art: without specialized curators, critics, lecturers, merchants, auctioneers, no installation, performance or contemporary painting could move successfully from the artist’s studio (or mind) to a public place, let alone to any private home. Thus contemporary art provides a privileged ground for the sociological study of mediation, particularly of cultural intermediaries – as evidenced in the case of Jacques de la Villeglé.

We spontaneously figure out the aesthetic relation as binary, between a work and a receiver. In fact, it is actually a triadic relation between works, the public and a number of mediation processes – publication, dissemination, organisation, production, commentaries, material and mental frameworks. These processes are operated by individuals who act as intermediaries in the art world; much more than artworks and artists, and as well as spectators, they are a perfect scope for sociological investigation. As the art historian Juan-Antonio Ramirez accurately wrote, ‘one has to stop believing that genuine creation directly passes from the artist’s studio to the spectator’s eye’ (1995[1994]: 20). This new perspective opens up the way for a number of surveys using the methods of pragmatic sociology and ethnology in order to describe and understand the very actions of all these cultural intermediaries.