Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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was reminiscent of the old competitive spirit: to succeed, it had to be different. But the bureau-
cratization and new corporate marketing techniques (involving art criticism, the trade journals,
galleries and museums, art schools and all) changed that, so today we see the idea of “international
high culture” demanding a uniformity dominated by New York art. To create a successful
(that is, privileged) art, I must now affirm and perpetuate at least one of the dominant styles.
It is hard for me to be blind to the fact that what has happened to recent art closely parallels
the entrenchment of the giant multinational corporations. But, I want to restate, this has been
achieved primarily on tacit agreements and not on the typically overt bureaucratic techniques—proving
once more how little surveillance a system like this requires once the principles
have been internalized and everyone has “like-minded” interests. This allows imperialism
to operate in its most despicable state—where the specific character and subjectivity of any
one place is disregarded and the “universality” of New York corporate uniformity is proclaimed.
In my mind, one depressing result of “incorporating” modern art has been the proportionately
greater increase in the numbers of drab “non-production workers” (middle-people)
compared with the increase in (sometimes equally drab) “production workers.” This is just
part of the marketing structure’s expansion. But the consequences are pervasive: by bureaucratizing,
the market has developed a bureaucratic or corporate “taste,” essentially rendering personal
or individual taste impossible. I can best illustrate this by pointing to the network of
modern art museums which have sprung up like automobile sales-rooms throughout the Western
world, all spouting the same rhetoric of “freely developing, democratic, cultural, educational
enterprises.” This has lost all relation to me as an artist. The museums, run by the new
culturecrats, have become overlording institutions utilizing all the packaging techniques of the
greatest consumer society in order to sell “culture” (at a price); they openly serve as showcases
propagandizing the global ambitions of our selling “successes.” The old “gunboat diplomacy”
has been replaced by the new “modern art diplomacy” (for example, the Museum of Modern
Art’s International Program).
In case it appears I am overstating the role of United States capitalism in all this, let me
emphasize the obvious, that the history of modern art from its beginnings was nurtured within
a number of industrialized societies, not just America. Looking closer at that history, with its
unrelenting emphasis on an “art-for-art’s-sake” ideology, we become conscious of the everincreasing
role played by a neutered formalism—at the expense of our possibility of content.
The stress on exclusively formal innovation had the aftermath of content in its last gasp being
reduced to such vacua as “color,” “edge,” “process,” “ideas,” “image,” etc. plus a lot of fatuous
jargon about qualities symbolized through these (c.f. especially Greenberg’s account of mod-