Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
private foundation support, because [it does] not involve the consequential judgment
of taste that is backed up by real money, by money that circulates, tends to
enforce an image of the arts as irrelevant and socially insignificant.” 24 Actually it
is in part the incompleteness of art’s absorption into the spheres of commercial
entertainment and advertising that makes possible its continuing social significance,
which depends on the preservation of something of its earlier aura of
transcendence. Even under today’s conditions, arts philanthropy preserves a
basic aspect of its original social function.
The postwar rise to near-official status of American modernism made this
nation’s first avant-garde the world’s last. A bohemia that sues for state financing
(as Karen Finley and others did in vain attempts to regain NEA grants cancelled
under Congressional pressure) is a contradiction in terms. 25 As Alvin Toffler
observed more than 35 years ago,
If links between business and art proliferate, it is going to be harder for
the artist to remain alienated. Despite its pluralism, our society remains
a business society . . . It is easy to be opposed to the central institution
of one’s society when one is locked outside the system by neglect, indifference,
or active hostility on the part of the men who make it run. It is
much harder when one is invited within the gates and permitted to
share its fruits. 26
Contemporary art nevertheless remains flavored by the sentiment of distance
from the culture of business, a distance central to the identity of art in its
modern sense. The work of Gerhard Richter, for instance, combines allegiance
to the painterly seriousness of high modernism with explicitly political critique of
modernity; there are artists whose work directly addresses the commercial operation
of galleries, museums, and art fairs, like Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel
Orozco, and Rikrit Teravanija, and others, like Mike Kelley, Liz Craft, and
Rachel Harrison, who make childish, opaque, or crudely constructed work that
seems to set the world of big money and expensive artworks on its ear. But
anyone sufficiently recognizable to serve as an example has found his or her
approach to contemporary culture an avenue to success. Inevitably, scorn for
24 Sidney Tillim, Remarks at NEA Symposium, Los Angeles, October 1–2, 1982.
25 Raymonde Moulin, in a penetrating analysis of the market structure of contemporary art,
observes that “art oriented toward the museum” and supported by institutional funds—conceptual,
minimal, performance, video, installation art—as opposed to “art objectively oriented
toward the market,” has “the sociological characteristics of avant-garde art”: “intellectual and
hermetic,” it contests “at once art and the market” (“The museum and the marketplace: the
constitution of value in contemporary art,” International Journal of Political Economy 25:2 (1995),
p. 50). But this is—sociologically—clearly not the avant-garde of the past, for which market success
paved the road to the museum.
26 A. Toffler, The Culture Consumers: Art and Affluence in America (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), p. 120.
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