Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation

Author(s): Adrian M. S. Piper

Source: Noûs , Mar., 1985, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1985 A. P. A. Western Division Meetings (Mar.,
1985), pp. 29-40
Published by: Wiley

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2215115

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation
ADRIAN M.S. PIPER

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

I want to make some observations about contemporary art and the

workings of the art world, in the attempt to demythologize certain
aspects of both. I shall be speaking from the experience of an artist,
but with the tools and perspective of a philosopher. Hence counter-
examples to my claims must be fairly numerous, in order to
demonstrate the need for revision of my many, admittedly empirical
generalizations.
Let's begin by supposing that, at some relatively early stage
of development, one exhibits some talent or interest in art-making,
and that this is expressed in some spontaneous, untutored, creative
product: drawing, say, or needlework, or mechanical inventions.
We can expect that if this creative impulse is encouraged at all,
its products will reflect the aesthetic values and conventions of one's
immediate community, and be informed and determined by one's
ethnic, economic, and political environment: Artists almost always
treat issues in their work that are, in a broad sense, of personal
concern to them.
Now let's speculate on who is most likely to make a career com-
mitment to art, either as an artist, a critic, dealer, or collector. Art
institutions in their present incarnations seem to offer the oppor-
tunity to achieve the highest standards of one's freely chosen craft,
and the valued peer recognition and approval that accompanies it.
On the other hand, posthumous or belated "discoveries" of
unrecognized artists, as well as successful publicity campaigns for
pre-packaged enfants terrible de la minute, demonstrate the lack of c
relation of merit and professional success. Similarly, aspiring dealers
and critics may learn all too quickly the economic dangers of stak-
ing their professional credibility on a single "movement" or in-
dividual. Hence one must be economically prepared to ensure one's
material well-being in some other way, in case one's gamble on

29

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 30 NOUS

an art career is unsuccessful. A commitment to a career as an art

practitioner requires that one is financially independent, or that one's
family is, or that one possesses other economically remunerative
skills, or that a permanently spartan lifestyle can be regarded as
a novelty or a virtue, rather than as proof of social failure.
This precondition to professional commitment functions as a
mechanism of selection among creatively inclined individuals. For
it discourages those individuals for whom economic hardship has
been, up to that point, a central reality. Art institutions in their
present incarnations will tend to attract individuals for whom
economic and social instability are not sources of anxiety, for they
have correspondingly less reason to sacrifice the vicissitudes and
satisfactions of self-expression to the necessities of social and economic
pressure.
One immediate effect of this social and economic preselection
is to create a shared presumption in favor of certain artistic values,
i.e. a concern with beauty, form, abstraction, innovations in media,
and politically neutral subject matter. Let us roughly characterize
these as formalist values. Since economically advantaged individuals
often import such values from an economically advantaged, Euro-
pean background environment, and since existing art institutions
favor the selection of such individuals, it follows that these institu-
tions will be popularized primarily by individuals who share these
values.
This means that there is a broad consensus, within the interlock-
ing system of art institutions, on the goals viewed as worth achiev-
ing. Artists, for example, will strive to realize broadly formalist values
in their work; critics will strive to discern and articulate the achieve-
ment of such values; dealers will strive to discover and promote
artists whose work successfully reflects these standards; and collec-
tors will strive to acquire and exchange such work.
Individuals whose work or aesthetic interests fail to conform
to formalist criteria are unlikely to pursue a career successfully within
the constraints of existing art institutions. For the commitment of
most art practitioners to the standards and values expressed in this
consensus is a deep and central one, rooted, as it often is, in the
prior socioeconomic balance of resources that engendered and con-
tinually reconfirms it. For such individuals, these values are a direct
expression and idealization of their lifestyles. And their lifestyles,
in turn, are justified and validated by the values such art expresses.
Thus it is natural that such individuals tend to be less than recep-
tive to critical scrutiny of those values, and to alternative conven-
tions of art-making that violate them. For in questioning their univer-
sal legitimacy, such critiques implicitly question the socioeconomic

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 AESTHETIC ACULTURATION 31

balance that generated them. And for individuals who have a very
deep personal investment in that balance, such critiques may seem
to question the legitimacy of these very individuals themselves.
The long-range effect of this tightly defended consensus is that
the art practitioners who share it determine-through their shared
values and practices, and the economic and social factors that deter-
mine them-the criteria of critical evaluation for all art that aspires
to entry into existing art institutions. I shall describe this as a state
of critical hegemony. That is, the socioeconomically determined aesthetic
interests of these individuals define not only what counts as "good"
and "bad" art, but what counts as art, period. Through art educa-
tion, criticism, exhibitions, and other practices and institutions
devoted to preserving and disseminating what I shall refer to as
Euroethnic art, the socioeconomic resources of this community of in-
dividuals enable its art practitioners to promulgate its fascinating
but ethnocentric cultural artifacts as High Culture on a universal
scale. According to these shared criteria, then, those creative pro-
ducts dominated by a concern with political and social injustice,
or economic deprivation, or that use traditional, or "ethnic", or
"folk" media of expression, are often not only not "good" art;
they are not art at all. They are, rather, "craft", "folk art", or
"popular culture"; and individuals for whom these concerns are
dominant are correspondingly excluded from the art context.'
The consequent invisibility of much nonformalist, ethnically
diverse art of high quality may explain the remark, made in good
faith by a well-established critic, that if such work didn't generate
sufficient energy to "bring itself to one's attention," then it prob-
ably did not exist. It would be wrong to attribute this claim to ar-
rogance or disingenuousness. It is not easy to recognize one's com-
plicity in preserving a state of critical hegemony, for that one's
aesthetic interests should be guided by conscious and deliberate reflec-
tion, rather than by one's socioculturally determined biases, is a
great deal to ask. But by refusing to test consciously those biases
against work that challenges rather than reinforces them, a critic
insures that the only art that is ontologically accessible to her is art
that narrows her vision even further. And then it is not difficult
to understand the impulse to ascribe to such work the magical power
to "generate its own energy", introduce itself to one, garner its
own audience and market value, and so on. For nearly all objects
of consideration can be experienced as animately and aggressively
intrusive if one's intellectual range is sufficiently solipsistic.
Suppose one decides to make a career commitment to becom-
ing a professional artist under these conditions. The critical hegemony
of formalistic art, and particularly its pretension to transcend its

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 32 NOUS

ethnicity, can have a demoralizing effect on art students from dif-

ferent ethnic backgrounds. For in presuming to furnish and inculcate
universal criteria of fine arts production, it implicitly subordinates
and devalues the creative products of other ethnic groups. It thereby
encourages the belief that such products are aesthetically or culturally
inferior to those of the Euroethnic art tradition. Thus it encourages
art students from other ethnic groups to reject their own culturally
spontaneous modes of artistic expression, in order to emulate this
one. I shall call this process one-of aesthetic acculturation. Through
the process, the pretension of formalistic art to universality chokes
off its only sources of cross-cultural enrichment. In this hothouse
atmosphere, it is little wonder that observers of current trends in
art conclude that there is nowhere for art to evolve but retrogressively.
Some have attempted to justify this pretension by appeal to pur-
portedly universal and ethnically neutral criteria-claiming, for ex-
ample, that formalist art is "high" art because it serves only aesthetic
and nonpragmatic ends. But this line of defense is difficult to sus-
tain, in the absence of further argument demonstrating that the
alteration or expansion of one's perception of reality, the profes-
sional success of the artist, the communication of some idea, ex-
perience, or insight, receiving a profitable return on one 's in-
vestments, and so on, are purely aesthetic and nonpragmatic ends.
And even if this could be shown (which is unlikely), it would in
any case remain a mystery why art that satisfies these criteria should
be thought culturally superior to art that does not. For these meta-
aesthetic criteria are no less ethnocentric than the aesthetic criteria
they are invoked to justify.
A second, major disadvantage of art education qua aesthetic
acculturation is its specialized division of labor. The intensive training
in the skills and history of one's craft as an artist is purchased at
the price of other skills needed to be a fully autonomous and respon-
sible practitioner in the art community, and in society at large. The
conceptual articulation and evaluation of an artist's aims and
achievements, for example, is a task often relegated to the art critic,
who researches the artist's past, interviews him, and fits his activity
into the familiar conceptual framework of formalist art discourse.
This validation, yielded by the critic's interpretation, is usually a
major precondition for the work's validation by the art community
at large. Even a negative review, in this regard, is better than no
review at all; and the grossest critical 'misunderstanding is preferable
to the most pellucid and self-critical appraisal by the artist.
Usually the interpretative function is one that the critic is
eminently well-suited to perform. For the critic has usually received

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 AESTHETIC ACULTURATION 33

the training in verbal and intellectual skills that the artist has not,
and often has thereby purchased the ability to interpret conceptually
the artist's products at the price of the full development of the critic's
own artistic impulses. Thus the phenomenon of the critic as closet
artist: many art critics (as well as dealers and curators) whose views
and pronouncements are highly influential in determining standards
for the evaluation of art products are themselves artists-whose own
artwork, however, is often completely independent of or even in
conflict with the views on which their own critical reputations rest.
To describe their attitudes towards their own artistic products as
self-effacing is an understatement. The process of aesthetic accultura-
tion tends to divest the artist of control over the interpretation and
cultural meaning of the work by relegating that role to the critic.
But in accepting it, the critic assumes responsibility for disseminating
critical standards from which she herself may be alienated.
Then there is the related phenomenon of the conflict of interest.
Many art practitioners who have achieved recognition within the
art community for their critical writings are justifiably reluctant to
promote their own artwork, for both self-interested and ethical
reasons. To utilize their own, highly developed critical and political
resources to promote their artwork would open them to the charge
of opportunism. But many such art practitioners also anticipate that
their artwork would be found unsophisticated or unintelligent by
comparison with their critical output in any case, by an audience
accustomed to expect only a certain kind of output from those in-
dividuals. Indeed, such an art practitioner may be led to adopt a
pseudonym under which to exhibit his work, merely to get an un-
biased hearing for it. But even here the temptation may be great
to utilize his political clout in its support. The phenomena of closet
artist and conflict of interest dovetail in the recognition that as things
now stand, the role of cultural interpreter and evaluator of work
of art is a source of art-political power that is largely incompatible
with the role of creating works of art.
One reason this division of labor is suspect is because-to butcher
Kant's observation-words without artworks are empty, artworks
without words are dumb. To relegate the creation and interpreta-
tion of art objects to different subjects is to bifurcate the experience
of both. Artists are divested of control over the cultural meanings
of their own creative impulses, while critics are denied access to
theirs, in exchange for authority and control over artists'.
This highly specialized division of labor between artists and critics
exacerbates the problem of critical hegemony. That art critics and
not artists determine the cultural interpretation of an art product

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 34 NOUS

implies that there is no necessary connection between the set of con-

textualized experiences, associations, beliefs and intentions an artist
brings to the production of a work, and its resulting cultural inter-
pretation. These factors may, of course, enter into this interpreta-
tion, but only at the critic's discretion, and only in so far as it serves
the critic's own theory of the work. This is particularly evident when
the theory falls within the constraints of formalism as I have
characterized it. Formalism encourages us to abstract from the per-
sonal subject-matter of the work, and consider its "universal" (ac-
tually its Euroethnic art-historical) significance. It also encourages
us to evaluate the work in terms of such purely formal properties
as shape, line, color, etc., independently of its subject-matter.
In some respects the formalist stance can be extraordinarily
enriching, for it frees us to view all objects as containing the prom-
ise of beauty and meaning, without regard to function or context.
On the other hand, it reinforces the alienation of the artwork from
that particular meaning intended for it by its creator. If the art-
contextually legitimated meaning of the work is both independent
of its function and context, and also-therefore- "universally" ac-
cessible (i.e. to anyone schooled in the canons of formalism), then
its creator's intended meaning is obviously irrelevant. And indeed,
many young artists who seek recognition within existing art institu-
tions quickly learn to discuss their work in the impersonal and decon-
textualized manner that formalism requires.
Through its very impersonality, formalism can confer the illu-
sion of understanding and accessibility to otherwise unfamiliar and
ethnically diverse artifacts (witness, for example, the art commu-
nity's appropriation of African tribal imagery as a consequence of
Picasso's Cubist investigations, and its more recent attempts to
assimilate hip-hop culture divested of its original context of
significance). Here recognition and a genuine appreciation of
otherness is sacrificed in order to preserve the appearance of authority
and control. But formalism can only achieve this in collaboration
with the division of labor earlier described. For of course the purely
formal significance of such artifacts can be maintained only if any
dissenting interpretation its creator might offer can be safely
disregarded. And this, in turn, requires the belief that the artist's
own, preacculturated contribution to critical discourse is irrelevant;
or at best, of subsidiary importance. Thus formalism itself implies
a certain critical hegemony, in subordinating all objects to criteria
of evaluation that are independent of their original content, func-
tion and subject-matter.
Similarly, there is little room within existing artists' education
programs for a course on the management of the economic and

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
AESTHETIC ACULTURATION 35

legal aspects of art production. The criteria by which a work is priced

may seem a mysterious matter indeed. And it is often claimed that
only a practical and thorough familiarity with the vicissitudes of
the art market, plus a "good business sense", enables one to do
so. Legal control over the distribution, exhibition, or exchange of
the work is similarly dependent, in mysterious and mystifying ways,
on the trustworthiness and good character of the dealer. Thus the
dealer, rather than the artist, becomes the custodian of the market-
and so aesthetic-value of the art product, and of its material fate
as well. To suggest that such control should be assumed by the artist
then becomes an insult to the relationship of trust and good will
that exists between them-and may, indeed, lead the dealer to take
the initiative in dissolving that relationship. Similar considerations
apply to the role of the critic. Thus the artist relegates interpretative,
social, and financial control of the product to the dealer and critic,
whose informed judgment and taste are accountable for its fate.
This is an overwhelming responsibility for anyone, even the most
highly cultivated and well-informed dealer or critic to shoulder. And
so it is not surprising that dealers may collaborate with critics and
collectors, in a sort of "gentlemen's agreement", in order to en-
sure the critical and financial attention the dealer feels the artwork,
and he, deserves.
A third feature that is usually absent in the training of artists
is attention to the skills and information necessary to analyze and
critique the social and economic preconditions for producing art;
this is rather the provenance of the historian of contemporary art.
Nor do artists usually learn how to scrutinize and dissect their own
ideological, socially determined presuppositions; this is the proven-
ance of the social theorist, who is able to view the entire interlocking
network of art institutions as an historically specific, sociocultural
phenomenon that engenders its own ideological justifications. But
this, too, is often thought to be of no pressing concern to artists.
I shall return to this question later.
Thus the end result of this process of specialization in aesthetic
acculturation is a severely lopsided division of labor. The artist's
function is the bare production of the work alone. She is neither
expected nor encouraged to exert any control over the meaning,
price, value, social and political impact, or material fate of the ob-
ject; these are instead the provenance of the critic, dealer, and col-
lector, respectively. Nor is she expected or encouraged to develop
broader views about any of these things; these are rather to be
relegated to the art historian or social theorist.
The result of this division of labor is, then, the essential infan-
tilization of the artist as bare producer of art. Having divested himself

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 36 NOUS

of power and control over the work, he can then hardly be expected
to participate in the interpretive, economic, and social processes by
which the art product is assimilated into the art context-nor,
therefore, into the political and cultural life of society at large. The
artist "just makes the stuff", and therefore is not to be held account-
able for its aesthetic, social, or political consequences beyond its
bare production.
The result of this lopsided division of labor, inherent in the pro-
cess of aesthetic acculturation within existing art institutions, is a
pervasive alienation of the artist, both from her own creative pro-
cesses and products, and also from the background sociocultural
environment that engendered them. For by abdicating control over
the meaning, value, price, function, and material fate of the art-
work after it leaves her studio, the artist thereby abdicates her claim
to have a special relation to that product which is significant and
valuable in its own right. The art product is appropriated by the
art institutions which legitimate it, and is thereafter governed by
its cultural and economic laws, rather than the artist's intentions
and wishes. This means that ultimately neither the creative process
nor the final product is determined by the artist's own aesthetic
imperatives.
One manifestation of the alienation that results from this divi-
sion of labor is the phenomenon of overproduction. For example, a
newly discovered artist may contract with a gallery to show new
work, say, every two years. For some artists, the rate of production
necessary to fulfill the contract may correspond perfectly with their
natural rhythm of art production. For others, this rate of produc-
tion may be far too high, producing stereotyped and superficial work
that the artist has been pressured, by the terms of his contract, into
producing. Now one might think the obvious solution would be to
contract to exhibit less frequently, say, once every four or five years
rather than once every two. But this is improbable. For the dealer's
interest in contracting with the artist at a certain time is predicated
primarily on her belief that the work will be financially marketable
at that time, not on her faith in the enduring aesthetic value of the
work; that is a conviction on which few experienced dealers would
do business. And so if an artist desires gallery affiliation, and the
prestige and recognition it brings, he must be prepared to adapt
his rate of art production to the demands of the economic, not the
creative process. Similar conclusions apply to the nonaffiliated artist
whose work is currently in vogue. That the admittedly grueling rate
of production necessary to sustain one's visibility, by participating
in all the invited exhibitions, performances, lectures, residencies,

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 AESTHETIC ACULTURATION 37

or conferences, may be so extreme as to endanger the artist's physical

or psychological well-being, is irrelevant for most artists. For they
understand the economic and political workings of existing art in-
stitutions well enough to know that their professional success depends
upon satisfying the extra-aesthetic demands that are made on them.
That they are thereby manipulated by these demands, and alienated
from their own creative processes, may seem a small price to pay
for the recognition and support to which every serious artist aspires.
A related manifestation of this alienation is what I shall call
the phenomenon of deformation. Faced with the pressures of over-
production, the artist has a few alternatives, besides that of simply
refusing to meet all of these demands. She may produce shoddy
work; or she may modify the product in ways that make it easier
to produce; or she may employ others to make the work for her.
She may thereby delegate to others an increasingly large propor-
tion of the creative decisions that need to be made in the process
of execution. If all concur in regarding the final product as a col-
laborative effort, well and good. If the artist does not, her col-
laborators' responses, as they confront an artwork attributed to the
artist but that primarily manifests their creative decisions, may be
mixed indeed. Each of these alternatives represent ways in which
the form and content of the final art product can be modified to
accommodate the extra-aesthetic demands of the economic process,
to which the creative process is subordinate.
Similar deformations of the art product are often required by
the artist's own desire to achieve and maintain a certain level of
visibility and critical approval, even when the pressures of over-
production are absent. Critical and social recognition from within
the art community is naturally and centrally important to anyone
who aspires to professional success as an artist. But if the commu-
nity's standards of aesthetic excellence are not independent of
economic pressures, then the critical approval and economic rein-
forcement an artist receives for doing economically and critically
viable work encourages that artist to produce more economically
and critically viable work, even if it conflicts with his natural creative
dispositions to do so. Thus we have the phenomenon of the artist
who produces one kind of work for her gallery and another for herself;
and of the artist who is reluctant to risk unfashionable departures
from a successful and well-established formula, after having been
reprimanded by silence or negative reviews for attempting such
departures in the past. The obverse phenomenon is the artist whose
output has been so completely cannonized for the annals of art history
that anything he produces, no matter how unskilled and superficial,

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 38 NOUS

automatically acquires aesthetic value and critical approval-in direct

proportion to the price it can be expected to command at the next
international auction. These are further ways in which the artist's
alienation from his product may be manifested by deforming his
product in response to extra-aesthetic imperatives.
Art products may also be deformed in response to imperatives
from dealers for art that is sellable. Art that requires too great an
effort at comprehension, or that too obtrusively violates traditional
criteria of art, or that seems too difficult to commoditize, may be
the target of a concerted attempt to make it just plain disappear
from the annals of art history, through comprehensive survey ex-
hibitions that ignore it or critical writing that marginalizes it. This
conveys to artists a less than subtle message that to continue pro-
ducing such economically nonviable work is to court obscurity. Those
who take the hint often reform their art production accordingly.2
Finally, the artist may deform her product in response to the
demand for innovation. In order to preserve the profitable func-
tioning of many existing art institutions, a continuous demand for
new art must be created. And this can be done only by creating
a desire for new art. This, in turn, requires the allegiance of the
art community to innovation as an intrinsic value; i.e. the recogni-
tion of an artwork as good precisely and only because it does what
has never been done before, advances some aesthetic a step fur-
ther, or offers us a new and exciting experience, or forces us to
revise our view of the world. And so artists often compete with one
another in their quest for visibility and professional standing, by
presenting increasingly bizarre and shocking work to an audience
whose polite applause is predicated upon their inability to have con-
ceived or predicted its advent.
In response to this fundamentally economic imperative of pro-
duct innovation, artists may deform not only their work, but
themselves to the point of suicide, by hanging, shooting, burning,
starving, castrating, or maiming themselves, all in the name of High
Culture. Just like the town in Florida whose inhabitants are known
to amputate or maim their own limbs in order to collect the in-
surance, these artists gradually truncate themselves and their creativ-
ity in order to survive economically as artists. That a recent work
of an artist proficient in this genre consisted in broadcasting an ex-
tended plea to his radio audience to send him money is a natural
extension of this "aesthetic" stance.
Thus the comforting and often self-sustaining vision of the artist's
studio as a self-contained realm of personal power and creative con-
trol, to which the artist can retreat from a chaotic and unmanageable

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
AESTHETIC ACULTURATION 39

external world, is a myth. For even her creative activity within that
realm is largely determined by external socioeconomic imperatives
which are, within the scheme of existing art institutions, beyond
the artist's ability to withstand. The notion of the successful profes-
sional artist as the one who has been freed, by her gallery affilia-
tion, and critical and financial successes, to devote all her time to
creation, is, then, an ideological fiction. It is ideological because it ser
the interests of those who prefer to preserve rather than improve
existing art institutions. And it is a fiction because it is false that
this brand of success promotes genuine freedom or creative
expression.

That this expropriation of power, responsibility, and freedom

in exchange for professional success need not be the norm is evi-
denced by comparing the condition of the artist to those of other
creative producers in higher education. Take, for example, the
historian. Like the artist, the historian draws on available informa-
tion, personal experience, and insight, and an internalized set of
standards-intellectual and academic ones, in this case -to synthesize
an original creative product, i.e. a book or article. The standards
by which the product is evaluated are themselves created and promul-
gated, through teaching, by that historian and his academic peers.
And those peers, all equally practicing historians, subject the pro-
duct to the critical scrutiny of those standards. That an article or
book on history should be evaluated by others who do not themselves
participate in the creative process is unthinkable. And that the criteria
relative to which the product is evaluated should be articulated,
amplified, and imposed by equally distanced others is equally un-
thinkable. Historians create, control, and survey critically their own
creative products. They do not recruit others to perform the hard
task of intellectual self-evaluation for them. For that is the surest
way to abdicate control over the self, and over the expressions of
the self, that one can imagine.
Similarly, the pricing and public distribution of the historian's
creative products are controlled by the community of historians.
Articles and books submitted for publication are refereed by other
historians, who thereby control the vehicles by which such products
are brought to the public. An historian does not abdicate economic
and legal control over the dissemination of an article or book to
a journal editor or publisher, merely for the privilege of having the
work disseminated at all. Rather, the product is protected by strict
copyright laws, the producer is reimbursed, in part, by royalties,
and the audience to the work is determined by the producer's con-
scious, strategic decision as to whom the work shall be addressed

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 40 NOUS

(other historians, students, the general public), and to what kind

of publisher it should therefore be submitted.
Now one might be tempted to think that such a system could
never work for artists, because, unlike books, art products are uni-
que objects or events that can never be replicated. I have argued
elsewhere3 that this conviction is false, and that the assumption of
uniqueness is, similarly, an ideological fiction, determined largely
by economic interests, that serves to legitimate the economic and
market criteria for pricing art products by equating those criteria
with aesthetic criteria for evaluating them. If art products are not
unique, like precious jewels, there is no reason why they should
cost so much. If they cost less, artists would be unable to support
themselves solely by producing them. They might then be more
inclined to seek out supplementary jobs as critics, teachers, dealers,
or curators of art, in order to ensure their livelihood, and thereby
encourage critics, teachers, dealers, and curators to experience the
artist's role first hand. This mutual exchange of roles and skills might
engender both more artists who are critically adept and socially
responsible, and more critics, dealers, and curators whose manage-
ment of artists reflected personal sympathy, rather than professional
self-interest alone. The possibilities for dialogue, cooperation, and
collective action among such individuals who would be both informed
and experienced in a multiplicty of roles, seem potentially unlimited.
Although artists would then have less time to produce art, the art
they produced would be more fully their own. For they would col-
lectively determine its meaning, value, price, public dissemination,
and material fate.

NOTES

This paper is abridged from a much longer discussion, "Power Relations Within Ex-
isting Art Institutions", in Dale Jamieson and Douglas Stalk, Eds., Recent Art. Philosophical
Problems and Artistic Promise (forthcoming).
'Richard Goldstein makes essentially this point in "Art Beat: Race and the State of
the Arts," The Village Voice, August 23, 1983. 31; and in "Art Beat: 'Darky' Chic," The
Village Voice, March 31, 1980. 34. Also see Robert Pear, "Reagan's Arts Chairman Brings
Subtle Changes to the Endowment," The New York Times, April 10, 1983.
2See Michael Brenson, "Artists Grapple With New Realities," The New York Times,
May 15, 1983.
3' 'Performance and the Fetishism of the Art Object," Vanguard 10, 10 (December
1981-January 1982), 16-19; also see, "A Proposal for Pricing Works of Art," The Fox 1,
2 (1975).

This content downloaded from

139.135.222.122 on Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:59:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms