Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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Buchloh sees the political limitations of Warhol’s personality as ultimately setting limits to the “aesthetic and subversive ‘intensity’” of his art. 55 What Buchloh says about Warhol’s earliest work with art-cultural pretensions sets the pattern for his analysis of the production of the 1960s as a whole: that the “task” Warhol set for himself was the destruction of the “metaphysical residue” that, clinging to painting, limited its utility as a “device” of negation. This 55 Buchloh, “Andy Warhol line,” p. 64. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL Figure 9.2 James Rosenquist, Marilyn II, 1962, © James Rosenquist/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2003. Image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. 149
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL he accomplished by the “contamination” of the modernist artwork “with the vulgarity of the most trivial of commonplaces” (Buchloh here has in mind the matchbook-cover paintings of 1962). The adoption of the silkscreen technique emphasized the photographic image and substituted a mechanical mark for Abstract Expressionist gesture. 56 In this Buchloh follows in Crone’s footsteps; all that is missing is a quotation from Benjamin (the other major source of the analytic framework employed here is, of course, Benjamin’s fellow Frankfurter, Theodor Adorno). Corresponding on the iconographic plane to the use of mechanical reproduction, according to Buchloh, is “the abolition of the hierarchy of subjects worthwhile representing.” As Buchloh sees it, the lasting fascination of the paintings of Marilyn, Liz, and Elvis “does not originate in the myth of these figures, but in the fact that Warhol constructed their images from the perspective of the tragic condition of those who consume the stars’ images.” 57 Because he made the point of view of these consumers that of his art Warhol was unable to pass beyond the demolition of art’s pretensions to an active resistance to the “state of general semiotic anomie” represented by “the advanced forms of the culture industry.” 58 Just as the conventional emphasis on the mechanical aspect of serigraphy misses, I have argued, the actual effect of paint handling produced in the printing process, so Buchloh’s idea that Warhol’s images reveal glamour to be only the reflex of “collective scopic fixation” reduces the consumers of mass culture to manipulated victims, erasing them as subjects. 59 This is—to repeat an argument I have already made, in a different form, with respect to Crow—to ignore the ways in which mass culture, like art culture, serves as a means for the active construction of subjectivity. Buchloh speaks of “semiotic anomie” because he does not care about the semiotics of the movies, advertising, fashion, and the news. But Warhol did care about such things. For him, as for most people, the myths mattered. It was this actual involvement in “vulgarity” that led Warhol to the insight that Marilyn, Jackie, and Mao share an identity as media constructions, along with the victims of car accidents and civil rights marchers attacked by police dogs. This identity is artificial, but it provides materials that people work with, just as leftish art writers can find in Warhol’s paintings a critique of consumer culture. In criticizing the writings on Warhol by Danto, Crone, Crow, and Buchloh, I have not meant to assert an incompatibility between close observation of works of art and the employment of theory, philosophical or otherwise, in their interpretation. What I have meant to challenge is the insistence on certain theoretical constructs in the face of artistic phenomena—meaning both artworks and their 56 Buchloh, “One-dimensional,” p. 48; see p. 50. 57 Ibid., p. 53. 58 Buchloh, “One dimensional,” pp. 65, 66; see also p. 68. 59 Buchloh, “One-dimensional,” p. 57. 150
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ART IN ITS TIME Art writing normall
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First published 2003 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of illustrations ix P
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PREFACE In writing this book I have
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1 INTRODUCTION The ten chapters tha
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INTRODUCTION ideology, as I am atte
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INTRODUCTION process as practically
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INTRODUCTION articulation of nonver
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2 SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM The days
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM which it di
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM chaotic mov
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the faces o
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.2
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.3
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM private str
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the artist
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ART AND MONEY action taken to turn
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ART AND MONEY Diderot’s version o
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ART AND MONEY Luxury and corruption
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ART AND MONEY financed not only by
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ART AND MONEY of Plato with whom th
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ART AND MONEY When a handful of spe
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ART AND MONEY might confuse the hon
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ART AND MONEY complaint about the r
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ART AND MONEY comparison with Kant
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ART AND MONEY experience of the bea
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ART AND MONEY worthy inheritors of
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME It is, we mus
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME strength. Cri
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In Rousseau
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME two centuries
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME exemplified b
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME Figure 4.1 Jo
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME “beautiful
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME and political
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME The paintings
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In this pictu
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world will be long in freeing itsel
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69 Figure 4.2 Eugène Delacroix, De
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME always has a
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the sublime and the beautiful—cal
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART “Spiri
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART als, wit
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART The dist
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART members
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART image, e
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART which de
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6 MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION IN THE AG
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION Almost none
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION models were
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION But we are
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION They repres
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION have alread
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Page 128 and 129: PORK AND PORCELAIN ment censorship
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Page 132 and 133: 8 THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
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Page 148 and 149: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL Warho
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Page 188 and 189: CLASSLESS TASTE home or being aroun
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Page 192 and 193: CLASSLESS TASTE It would be pervers
Page 194 and 195: CLASSLESS TASTE ing, as the boundar
Page 196 and 197: Adams, Abigail 48 Adorno, Theodor 5
Page 198: play 41ff Pocock, J. G. A. 28 n. 16
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Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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