Gatekeepers and the Legitimization of Culture

Elizabeth Currid, “The Economics of a Good Party: Social Mechanisms and the Legitimization of Art/Culture”, Journal of Economics and Finance, vol.31, no.2, Fall 2007, pp.386-394.

Elizabeth Currid is assistant professor at University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development. She studies the sociology of celebrity and pop culture. Her book, The Warhol Economy, published in 2007 by Princeton University Press analyzed the ways that fashion, art and music drive the economy of New York City. This article is taken from the official journal of the Academy of Economics and Finance, in it she analyses the ways in which social mechanisms, i.e. good parties, help to validate art and culture.

Currid uses a sociological approach and emphasizes that casual interactions that may seem peripheral to the serious business of the art/cultural world are in fact crucial to the assignment of cultural currency and the facilitation of cultural distribution. Differentiating between the symbolic value and the economic value of cultural practices, Currid asserts that people she terms ‘gatekeepers’ (.1) are instrumental in assigning symbolic value and helping to transfer this into the economic value of markets through their positions as buyers, curators and dealers etc.

All though she seeks to put special emphasis on Art she collapses distinctions between different cultural fields such as Art, fashion and music, showing that in the cities that she analyses, New York and Los Angeles, the same forces are at work in legitimizing these fields. She points out that;

“Consumers and evaluators of art/culture are not limited to one sector…The social milieu offers the context where these different activities happen at the same time, and those from different realms are able to cross-fertilize in two important ways. First, cultural producers in one realm often act as gatekeepers in another. Successful artists are often looked to as purveyors of good taste in music, while musicians are often sought after to wear designers’ clothes…Second, the increasing commodification of culture means that the skills for one realm of art/culture are useful to other sectors…The ability for art/culture producers to apply their skills to a variety of different sectors allows them to have flexible and longer career trajectories…In other words, art/culture producers have options if they meet opportunity.”

This sociological analysis of the way that art and other cultural fields are differentiated from one another (primarily through distribution) sits in stark contrast to the more lofty idea of the sublime, which is presented by Lyotard(.2). Anyone who examines cultural activities from a sociological point of view can not help but find that the key difference between art and other cultural fields appears to be more a matter of the institutions and businesses which legitimize and distribute art/culture than in any core difference as to the nature of the cultural product being distributed. There seems to be a kind of danger to this analysis that no room is left for an objective standard of quality in art, but there is also a danger in trying to assert any objective standard to a field which Currid emphasizes is “taste-driven and thus needs an intense, subjective evaluation system”(.3).

We can see these ideas put forward by Currid illustrated to some degree in the work of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (important to note here also is that although he is a Thai artist it is his residency/participation in the New York and Berlin art scenes which gives Tiravanija international currency).

“In his first exhibitions, for instance, he place the furniture and equipment from the gallery office in the exhibition room, where he also installed a temporary kitchen. Thai dishes were served, and over the meal Tiravanija chatted with visitors, as a pre-planned interaction between artist and viewer.”

(Also important to note here is that, at the openings to these shows those viewers included people whom Currid refers to as ‘gatekeepers’.)

“Tiravanija designs rooms for communication and interaction…Tiravanija thus expounds his thesis – the origin of which may be traced to his cultural connection with Thailand and Buddhism – that “it is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people”.”(.4)

(.1) pp.388

(.2) Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp.81

(.3) pp.389

(.4) From an excerpt on Rirkrit Tiravanija in “Art at the Turn of the Millennium”, ed. Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick, Taschen, 1999, pp.506

The Sublime / Emotion and Reason / Regret and Assay

Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp.71-82

Jean-Francois Lyotard was a french philosopher who died in 1998. In this book, originally published in 1979, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir he famously summed up the defining feature of the postmodern as an “incredulity towards meta-narratives”(.1). He saw this incredulity as a latent aspect of human thought and thus viewed postmodernism not as a narrowly defined historical movement but an ever-present feature of cognition.

European philosophers of the eighteen century such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke were among the first to distinquish between the beautiful and the sublime (.2). Kant asserted that the beautiful has boundaries because it is connected with the form of an object but the sublime is defined by a boundlessness which is beyond the abilities of human cognition. It was asserted by Kant that this resulted in a specific combination of fear and pleasure which was a sublime effect. Lyotard picked up on this concept of the sublime and used it to try and give a unified goal for the varied experimentations that come under the banner of modernism. By undermining the forms and “rules of the game”(.3) passed down to them by older generations, artists strive to more closely define that ethereal thing which is sensed by the viewer as the defining feature of art.

According to Kant, the sublime is a feature of reason but the main way that it is recognized is through an emotional response, which is a combination of fear and pleasure. The sense of a thing outside of our logical cognitive abilities causes an emotional response, which it is suggested compels people to activities such as Art. The connection here between emotion and reason is something quite interesting to me.

In an interview on the DVD “Artists in Focus #2” which was produced for the Biennale of Sydney 2004, American artist Jimmie Durham says, “There is an old, crazy idea that comes from the enlightenment, especially from Descartes that trys to separate reason from emotion and anyone with a little bit of reason can see, these cannot be separated. They’re inseparable. That is so important for the arts, for theatre, for poetry, for the visual arts. It’s so completely important. We’ve taken away the poetry of art in very many circumstances through our constant reasonable critique, as though art could be translated. It’s emotion and logic mixed.”(.4)

This idea that an overemphasis on reasonable critique causes something to be lost in art resonates with another interesting passage from Lyotard’s text where he points out a tension between melancholia and regret on one hand and novatio and assay on the other(.5) On the side of regret he points first of all to the German expressionists and on the side of assay, people such as Picasso and Duchamp. This describes a tension in the experiments of Modernism and Post-modernism between striving for something new on one hand (assay) and the desire to rediscover something that seems to have been regretfully lost (which the german expressions sought in the influence of African art).

(.1) Jean-Francois Lyotard on wikipedia.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyotard

(.2) Sublime (philosophy) on wikipedia.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)

(.3)&(.5) Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp.80

(.4) “Art as Intellect: Interview with Jimmie Durham”, Artists in focus #2, dir. James Marshall, Craig Judd, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Bienalle of Sydney Limited and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2004.

On Received Notions of Criticality

Meg Cranston interviewed by Nico Israel, "Running On Light Feet", from Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World: Works 1987-2007, ARTSPACE & Clouds, Auckland, 2008, pp.6-21

This interview with Meg Cranston is taken from a book published by ARTSPACE and the New Zealand publishing company Clouds when ARTSPACE hosted a survey exhibition of her work entitled Meg Cranston: The Pleasure of Obvious Problems (4 August – 15 September 2007). The show was curated by Brian Butler and included works from various stages of Cranstons art career between 1987 and 2007. I unfortunately missed this show at Artspace but heard a lot about it from friends and have looked into Meg Cranstons work since.

In this interview Cranston mentions a group of LA artists who she admires, or feels a connection with, the are “Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, and Liz Larner.” I too have had a long standing admiration and a strong sense of connection with the first three of these artists (I had never heard of Liz Larner). I saw Jim Shaw speak at the Sydney Bienalle, I have long been a fan of Raymond Pettibon’s illustrations starting with his illustrations for punk record covers for bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth, and I was exposed to Mike Kelley’s band Destroy All Monsters through our tutor Simon Cummings in 2007. I enjoy the way that these people have managed to have active careers as artists by working through a range of cultural fields and by mixing up distinctions between high and low culture (a distinction which my time studying anthropology led me to be extremely cynical towards, especially after being raised in a semi-rural environment which seemed to me to be a complete vacuum of first hand encounters with 'high' culture). She says of the appeal that these artists have for her (pp.15), “I don’t think they’re anti-intellectual or against formal approaches, but they’re against a certain received notion of criticality.” This quote particularly resonated with me and my own approach to making work. Particularly interesting is what she calls “a certain received notion of criticality”. I think what she is talking about is gestures/tropes/aesthetics which become recognizable signs of critical/intellectual/high art thinking. Writing on the difficulty defining what makes Conceptual Art conceptual Seth Price says “Let’s put aside the question of what makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resignation, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old historical movement”(.1). The ‘received notion of criticality’ which Cranston mentions refers to attempts artists and critics make to link work to this historical movement through recognizable gestures. Raymond Pettibon paints with India ink on paper and Jim Shaw uses found paintings from thrift stores. The resulting works have various connotations such as; traditional, unskilled, bad, low (comic book/amateur). I think what Craston finds appealing about these artists is that they do not present a recognizable aesthetic of ‘conceptual art’ but at the same time we can not help but recognize that they are not anti-intellectual or against formal approaches. Their work is not necessarily less conceptual than Conceptual Art but they perhaps they do not feel the need to spell out their criticality in a simple way using obvious tropes.

An interesting comment on the way that people recognize the conceptual nature of work can be found in an interview with Jim Shaw on artist Tony Ourslers website;

TO: A few years ago you developed a major exhibition of hundreds of art works by artists outside the main stream who produced what you call ‘thrift store paintings’. This amazing exhibition toured the US and Europe and was accompanied by a lavish book. Conceptually the project had a great impact on the art public and the high/low dialogue. The issues surrounding this exhibition are important to our generation politically and artistically, and seem to echo around studios today.

JS: Well it wasn’t exactly conceptual, it was taken as conceptual because I went to Cal Arts...(.2)

What this amusing comment brings to attention is the way that a conceptual analysis can be brought by the viewer to any artwork, or cultural activity whether a conceptual critical analysis was intented by the maker or not. This is perhaps why many artists who want to position themselves as conceptual employ and play into ‘received notions of criticality’ which encourage the viewer to bring the kinds of readings associated with the Conceptual Art movement to the work.

(.1) Seth Price, "Dispersion" (2001-2002) a catalogue of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art 2003. available from http://distributedhistory.com

(.2) Jim Shaw interviewed by Tony Oursler (Not dated, accessed from www.tonyoursler.com)

http://www.tonyoursler.com/tonyourslerv2/words/interviewsTO/jimshaw.pdf