Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

familiar with how “high art” has been rhetorically infected with the need to innovate and
personally aware of being made to feel the pressure to innovate, on pain of extinction.
So where does that leave me? Like a lot of others, I am revolted by the torpidity of the
status quo on the one hand—and on the other, by any desperate reactions to escape that status
being celebrated as part of the “innovative logic” of the system! Meanwhile we are vulgarly
lionized by institutions created in the belief that capitalism is divine and should not be tampered
with and which are part of a market now so powerful that even the most iconoclastic
work can be comfortably celebrated. With these conditions, wouldn’t it be sheer lunacy for me
to maintain that my market relations are just incidental? 5
WE HAVE BEEN CAPITALIZED AND MARKETED
There are a number of things I can no longer ignore. The emergence of the international art
market along its present lines has been incontestably an arm of a necessary expansion of the
United States capitalist system and consolidation of marketing areas after the Second World
War. As pointed out above, the impersonal nature of the market forces it to expand without
reference to the consumers or producers. Furthermore, considering some of the sources of the
capital backing it, it is perhaps hardly surprising that American art achieved its “internationalism”
6 at a time when it also functioned as a weapon to fight the “menace of communism”
(that is, the main threat to American domination of major marketing areas of the world). 7 This
was a period when various ideals were perverted into an aesthetic ideology to sustain the emerging
social and economic order. All was recent enough for most of us to be able to reconstruct
how this internationalism created a “common interest” of selling to foreign investors, and how
mutual advantage burgeoned into corporate interest. This common interest demanded more
efficient production and organization—the outcome being, in the United States, that the consolidation
of the business of art intuitively followed the lines of the model of bureaucratic
corporate industry. This doesn’t mean we have a concretized bureaucracy; it means the people
running the various parts of the business of art, indeed ourselves, have internalized the bureaucratic
method so that it now seems “natural” to separate functions, roles, relationships from the
people who perform (etc.) them. So we intuitively achieve the corporate spirit of bureaucratic
organization without any of its overt structures; by such means, our “high culture” has reified
itself in a remote and dehumanizing tradition.
Looking at my situation today, I am obviously faced with functionally different circumstances
from those of the early 1950s. In that period, in order to create a privileged art, it was
necessary to produce something markedly different from what Europe was producing—this
ian burn the art market 325