Art/Commerce: The Convergence of Art and Marketing in Contemporary Culture [1. Aufl.] 9783839426197

Table of contents :
Contents
Art/Commerce: Blurring the Line
Art Spaces/Commercial Spaces
A Short Stroll through History: Museums and Department Stores,
Galleries and Boutiques
An Excursion to Texas: Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa
Prada Marfa: A Site-Specific Installation
Discursive Site Specificity I: Prada Marfa and the White Cube
Moving around in Space: Minimalism
Discursive Site Specificity II: Prada Marfa and Minimalism
Discursive Site Specificity III: From the Gallery to the Boutique—White Cube Retail Spaces
Moving around in the White Cube Boutique: Aesthetic Perspectives on Commercial Spaces
Discursive Site Specificity IV: Other Art-Related Retail Spaces
Art Objects/Brand Products
What It’s Worth: Economic Value and Aesthetic Value
Art into Life: Aesthetic Experience
The Dematerialization of Art: Conceptual Art
Recovering Experience: Shifting Perception in Land Art and Performance Art
Branding: From Object to Experience
Transitions: Aesthetic Experience/Brand Experience
Artist/Entrepreneur
Modernism and Beyond: From Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art
A New Art, a New Artist: Pop Art
From Studio to Factory: Redefining the Artist’s Work
Where’s the Artist? From Auctorial Artist to Entrepreneurial Artist
Here’s the Artist: The Creative Industries and the Creative Economy
Lead Actor in the Creative Economy: The Artist/Entrepreneur
Art/Commerce: The Question of Autonomy
Bibliography

Citation preview

Maria A. Slowinska Art/Commerce

Cultural and Media Studies

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I am grateful to Winfried Fluck, for guidance through freedom in many years of equally supportive and challenging mentorship Laura Bieger, for an always caring balance of friendly criticism and critical friendship My father, for encouraging fearlessness and inquisitiveness, and for cherishing the beauty of rational thought My mother, for being my shining example of courage, dedication, and tenacity

Maria Aleksandra Slowinska studied at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and Freie Universität Berlin, where she received her doctorate. She is now a Strategy and Innovation Consultant working at the confluence of academic research and industrial development.

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Maria A. Slowinska

Art/Commerce The Convergence of Art and Marketing in Contemporary Culture

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This book is the result of research undertaken as part of the doctoral program at the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Work on this project was generously funded by the German Excellence Initiative and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2014 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: theRACE / photocase.com Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2619-3 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2619-7

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Contents Art/Commerce: Blurring the Line  | 7 Art Spaces/Commercial Spaces  | 19 A Short Stroll through History: Museums and Department Stores, Galleries and Boutiques | 19 An Excursion to Texas: Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa | 29 Prada Marfa: A Site-Specific Installation | 34 Discursive Site Specificity I: Prada Marfa and the White Cube | 40 Moving around in Space: Minimalism | 48 Discursive Site Specificity II: Prada Marfa and Minimalism | 62 Discursive Site Specificity III: From the Gallery to the Boutique— White Cube Retail Spaces | 72 Moving around in the White Cube Boutique: Aesthetic Perspectives on Commercial Spaces | 87 Discursive Site Specificity IV: Other Art-Related Retail Spaces | 95

Art Objects/Brand Products | 109 What It’s Worth: Economic Value and Aesthetic Value | 111 Art into Life: Aesthetic Experience | 123 The Dematerialization of Art: Conceptual Art | 137 Recovering Experience: Shifting Perception in Land Art and Performance Art | 153 Branding: From Object to Experience | 161 Transitions: Aesthetic Experience/Brand Experience | 170 Artist/Entrepreneur | 187 Modernism and Beyond: From Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art | 188 A New Art, a New Artist: Pop Art | 202 From Studio to Factory: Redefining the Artist’s Work | 217 Where’s the Artist? From Auctorial Artist to Entrepreneurial Artist | 226 Here’s the Artist: The Creative Industries and the Creative Economy | 238 Lead Actor in the Creative Economy: The Artist/Entrepreneur | 250

Art/Commerce: The Question of Autonomy | 261 Bibliography | 271

Art/Commerce: Blurring the Line “Ours is a moment, at least (and perhaps only) in art, of deep pluralism and total tolerance. Nothing is ruled out.” A rthur Danto

This is the time of aesthetic openness in art. Not only is it difficult to find an answer to the question “What is art?” It often seems pointless even to ask. Attempting to define art is a Sisyphean task, and it has been so for more than a century. From the historical moment in the 18th century when the ­modern understanding of art emerged as a significant philosophical concept in its own right, the forms and boundaries of ‘this thing called art’ have been much contested. Efforts to define art became a constant uphill struggle with the ­onset of modern culture and new technologies of reproduction in the late 19th century. It is during this time that art began to question its own categories. While a work of fine art had once had a more or less defined form (a painted ­can­­vas or a bronze sculpture), content (the human figure or nature), context of presentation (churches, museums, galleries), and producer (the artist persona as it developed since the Renaissance), these categories became subject to scrutiny and subversion over the next half-century. Beginning with European Impressionism and Expressionism and then erupting with the historical avantgardes of the early 20th century, art’s questioning of its own means became a recurring cutting-edge strategy. A ­s Arthur Danto suggests, “with modernism, the conditions of representation themselves become central, so that art in a way becomes its own subject.”1 In dynamic interaction with practice, theory both followed and shaped these ­artistic developments. Today, we have at our disposal a multitude of theoretical approaches that try to grasp and define art by means of aesthetic theories that are, for example, representational, expressionist, formalist, communicational, institutional, or reception-based, to name the more influential ones. And 1 | Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7.

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yet, any attempt to conclusively define art by means of these theories is bound to fail. If there is one thing to be said about the strategies of art in the 20th century, it is that a significant number have sought not to establish and confirm existing categories, but rather to subvert them, thereby questioning the boundaries of art. The constant subversion of these boundaries is a central aspect of the history of modern art. Three particularly strong examples of the subversion and ensuing extension of the boundaries of art can be observed in three major art historical move­ments of postwar American Art—Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop Art—all of which would not have been possible without the trailblazing role of Abstract E ­ xpressionism. With the influx of European refugees and émigrés around ­World War II, New York became what Paris had been: the center of the Western art world. With Abstract Expressionism, American culture not only produced an original art movement to be taken seriously on the international scale; it was during these years that the United States (particularly New York and California) also gained relevance as the new international hub of the art world. The emerging American art market achieved worldwide importance, and the American art world became a motor of Western art for decades to come. Minimalism, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art reached critical importance in the United States at this time and have in common their particular and pro­nounced subversion of the categories of art. This led to an opening of art, both voluntary and involuntary, towards what had formerly been its supposed other: the commercial market. The convergence of art and commerce that results from this subversion is the subject of this book. My study starts out from an emphatic notion of art, established primarily on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, which postulates that fine art (schöne Kunst), as opposed to agreeable art (angenehme Kunst), is autonomous from all other spheres of life and has no purpose aside from itself.2 In their 2 | This should not, however, be interpreted as a total and absolute autonomy of art. For Kant, art’s autonomy is to be understood in terms of art’s being non-instrume­n tal for other instrumental purposes. This still leaves art with the power to develop the ­h uman capacity for reflection. “Schöne Kunst dagegen ist eine Vorstellungsart, die für sich selbst zweckmäßig ist, und obgleich ohne Zweck, dennoch die Kultur der Gemütskräfte zur geselligen Mitteilung befördert … und so ist ästhetische Kunst, als schöne Kunst, eine solche, die die reflektierende Urteilskraft und nicht tdie Sinnenempfindung zum Richtmaße hat.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, [1781] 1974), §44, 240. “Fine art, on the other hand, is a mode of representation which is intrinsically purposive, and which, although devoid of an end, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interest of social communication … Hence aesthetic art, as art which is beautiful, is one having for its standard the reflective judgment and not bodily sensation.” ———, Critique of

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famous critique of the culture industry, Adorno and Horkheimer take up this emphatic notion of an autonomous art that has no purpose but itself yet still holds the c­ apacity to further human powers of philosophical s­ elf-reflection.3 Adorno further d ­eveloped this view in his aesthetic theory.4 Adorno and ­Horkheimer critize that this autonomous art is destroyed by the culture indus­ try. Their particular analysis results from their experience of a politically bat­ tered e­ arly 20th century; it is a harsh reckoning with the historical consequences of ­Enlightenment philosophy. They argue that reason, the fundamental principle of Enlightenment, has been narrowed down to instrumental reason and in this ­goal-orientedness has been fundamentally abused—not least for the barbaric purposes of Nazi and fascist politics. In their view, the culture industry is an expression of the fact that the Enlightenment project has failed. All the more, Adorno and Horkheimer hold up the emphatic notion of an auto­­nomous art as the last refuge from instrumental reason. For them, art should both propose and embody an avantgardist ideal of negativity, fragmentation, and dissonance (Adorno offers Beckett, Kafka, and Schönberg as exam­ples). When Adorno and Horkheimer criticize the culture industry as an instrument of mass deception, their critique is directed primarily against the instrumentalization of art for goals outside of art itself. In their view, this instru­mentalization can be observed particularly in modern American culture, with the culture industry’s primary goal of commercial profit. In light of the authors’ historical experience, their critique has generally been explained with refer­ence to an underlying fear of political instrumentalization. Yet, their critique is also fundamentally a critique of the overall dominance of instrumental reason in capitalist culture—for which the market is the quintessential play­ ground. Adorno and Horkheimer considered avantgarde art to be a potential force outside of these workings of instrumental reason. My discussion in the three chapters that follow suggests otherwise. Analyzing the three main American art movements of the postwar second avantgarde, I will argue that avantgard­ist art strategies have undermined the aesthetic and institutional categories which had helped to determine the boundaries of art, and that avantgarde art thus opened the realm of art to instrumental reason and market thinking. In a number of paradoxical moves, these avantgardist strategies have led to a separation of art and aesthetics and to a blurring of the line between art and instrumen­J udgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), §44, 135. 3 | Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug,” in Die Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, [1944] 2001). 4 | Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 15th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970).

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tal reason. Both this separation and this blurring take form in con­temporary commercial culture, a culture that, in turn, has become increasingly aestheticized. This aestheticization can be understood as a consequence of the capitalist necessity to constantly increase consumer demand for goods. Aesthetics and instrumental reason have thus become intertwined. As a result of these two converging dynamics, much contemporary avantgarde art can no longer be located in a realm outside of commercial culture or the workings of instrumental reason. The growing intrusion of instrumental reason into different spheres of life can also be observed in the traditional institutions of art. Winfried Fluck notes that today art is often used “as a bargaining chip for securing the future of the institution.”5 Yet, this very intrusion of instrumental reason into art has rendered the institutions of art problematic themselves. This development has been pushed forward by the curatorial practice of various museums of m ­ odern art since the late 1990s, which brought luxury consumer products into the art museum and thus challenged the credibility and normative power of the ­museum as an art institution. Examples include the Armani exhibition (2000) or the BMW Art of the Motorcycle exhibition (1998), both at the Guggenheim, as well as such exhibitions as Takashi Murakami’s, in which handbags designed by Murakami for Louis Vuitton were both exhibited and sold at the MOCA and the Brooklyn Museum. At the same time, the art market has become a fundamental force in the art world. Since the 1980s, there have been several art market booms, with prices for art rising steeply. Art has become a preferred object of financial i­ nvestment. Accordingly, the art market has gained an increasing importance for the definition of art. This is not to claim that artists, gallerists, or art dealers ­suddenly started to define their work only or primarily by means of market criteria. ­However, as Olav Velthuis shows in his study of pricing in the art market, art prices are not just economic indicators of current or projected financial value. Prices have also acquired significant symbolic meanings, indicating artistic value, the status of the artist in the art world, and sometimes even the artist’s self-esteem.6 Moreover, contrary to some expectations, the art market has not lost its ­importance after the 2007 recession in the United States. Although the ­A merican art market was still contracting slightly in 2010, on an ­international scale art sales were increasing again, with the sales of contemporary art works 5 | Winfried Fluck, “The Search for an ‘Artless Art’: Aesthetics and American Culture,” in The Power and Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture, ed. Klaus Benesch and Ulla Haselstein (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007). 6 | Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for ­C­o n­t emporary Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8f.

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tripling between 2001 and 2011.7 Considering the radical openness of contemporary art both in terms of aesthetics and value systems, it is only a small step from Velthuis’s account of the symbolic importance of prices to the claim that visibility and success in the art market are no longer ancillary to art. At this point, it seems there is one minimal definition we can give to art: art is what sells as art (in the form of ticket sales or artwork sales to institutions or col­ lectors)—a definition that is based on the logic of the art market and at the same time reinforces it. How can we explain these developments? One way would be to follow a ­directional, formalist narrative of art, such as the one presented by seminal critic Clement Greenberg and since taken up by various contemporary ­t hinkers. Here, modern art is determined by its growing self-reflexivity and by the continuous reduction of its forms until every art form reaches its ­essence—for ­example, the condition of flatness in the case of painting.8 In order to understand contemporary art developments in the vein of such a directional narrative à la Hegel, one does not even need to be a straight formalist of the ­Greenbergian type. Another example of this view is the approach Arthur D ­ anto takes, ­depicting the development of modern art as a continuous reflection on its own means and conditions. In Danto’s view, this development is fueled by epistemological and, in contrast to Greenberg, not just formal concerns. H ­ owever, in his narrative, too, art reaches a final point at which it is no longer definable by any aesthetic trait but only by philosophical thought. For Danto art now lies in “creating art explicitly for the purpose of knowing philosophically what art is.”9 The Hegelian narrative reaches its end point and realization when the definition of art becomes a question not of art, but of philosophy.10 When we observe the relation between the emphatic notion of art in the tradition of Enlightenment philosophy on the one hand, and contemporary manifestations of art on the other, a particularly odd twist is revealed. Although such self-reflexive strategies in art are meant to fuel the development of an emphatically autonomous art, they ultimately appear to lead not to an increasing autonomy from instrumental reason, but rather to the opposite result. This process is not to be understood as a linear development guided by an inner logic; after all, we are dealing with a multitude of actors and interests and not with ‘art’ as a unified entity or directional force. Yet, it does appear that several generations of artists and theorists have dealt with very similar concerns. The avantgardist 7 | Abigail R. Esman, “The World’s Strongest Economy? The Global Art Market,” Forbes, 29 February 2012. 8 | Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Art and Literature, no. 4 (Spring 1965). 9 | Danto, After the End of Art, 31. 10 | This self-reflexive turn of art can be thought in parallel with the earlier turn of philo­ sophy towards its own conditions as it took place in Kant’s work.

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motivation of overcoming the boundaries between art and life has time and again propelled the questioning and undermining of established categories of art. The contemporary consequence of this development seems to be not an increase in the autonomy of art but rather an undermining of its autonomy and its subjection to the forces of instrumental reason. Where art strategies work to undermine the categories and concepts that attempt to define and evaluate art on its own terms, the one crucial yardstick that remains is external instrumentality.11 Contemporary developments in the art world indicate that Adorno and Horkheimer’s fears of the subjection of art to instrumental reason in the form of market rationality have not been unfounded. However, the argument put forward here proposes an alternative to their pessimistic Hegelianism. Even though art might no longer be understood in terms of a negative dialectics that situates it outside of instrumental reason and thus outside of mainstream society, this does not mean that art has lost its cultural function or importance. Arthur Danto’s view is a possible alternative to the Frankfurt School’s pessimistic view of art in consumer culture. Danto proposes that the relation between art and aesthetics was only a passing historical phase. He concedes that art is still being made today, but suggests there is no longer a master narrative with which it can be fully grasped—no generational style, no developmental ­direction, no unifying aesthetic theory: “… if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense experience to thought … to philosophy.”12 Danto’s observations seem quite accurate in view of the pluralism and de-aestheticization of art today, when art can take any shape the artist wants it to have (even none), and when aesthetic traits are no longer a defining factor of art. However, as I have already suggested, the teleological orientation of this theory, which ends with the overcoming of art through its realization in philosophy, makes it yet another take on the discourse about the end of art that Hegel initiated in his 1817-1829 Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Since then, it seems that art has almost continuously been reaching its end. And yet, somehow it never quite got there. Even the approach that Danto chooses—less pessimistic than Adorno and Horkheimer, yet still fundamentally Hegelian—therefore remains unsatisfactory. Danto’s central claim about the end of grand narratives in art remains in tension with the core narrative of his thinking, namely the grand narrative of the end of art in philosophy. 11 | Wolfgang Ullrich summarizes, “Da sich die Kunst den Bedingungen des Marktes angepasst hat, braucht nicht zu verwundern, dass dieser auch konstitutiv für sie geworden ist.” (“Since art has adapted to the conditions of the market, it is not surprising that the market has also become constitutive of art.”) Wolfgang Ullrich, Gesucht: Kunst! Phantombild eines Jokers (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2007), 275. 12 | Danto, After the End of Art, 13.

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The question of whether art has now finally reached its end is not at the core of my discussions in this book, and neither do I want to determine ­philosophically what is art. The question I will be engaging with in the fol­ lowing chapters cannot and will not be “What is art?” or “Is there (still) art?” or even “Is this art?” Rather than trying to draw clear lines between an inside and an outside of art, I will proceed in a slightly more cautious manner and ask the following: What different strategies, forms, and tensions can we observe when we look at aesthetic phenomena today? How do these phenomena relate to the practice and discourse of art as it can be reconstructed from the history of artistic practice and theoretical discourse? The truism is that whether something is art or not depends on whether we decide to apply the idea of art to it. In spite of my cautionary remarks about not trying to define art, I will be using specific concepts of art in my discussion. However, this will be primarily for heuristic and practical reasons. In particular, these concepts will be based on philosophical, institutional, or aesthetic theories and practices. The motor that drives my discussions will not be the question of whether we identify certain aesthetic phenomena as art. Rather, the crucial question is how we can think about these phenomena in light of the historical stretching of the categories and boundaries of art. How do strategies that emerge from the broad institutional and discursive realm of art deal with the radical openness of art’s boundaries? How did we get to this moment of precarious openness? And what does this mean for the commercial instrumentalization of aesthetics? It may be pointless to define what art is or to determine art’s boundaries. It is not pointless, however, to analyze various contemporary phenomena situated on the unstable verges of art’s conceptualization. Such an analysis will not answer the question of what art is, but it will help us to openly and critically evaluate phenomena that navigate the blurry line between ‘art’ and ‘commerce.’ In the three main thematic chapters of this book, I will look at such con­ temporary phenomena from three different perspectives: a spatial one, one that focuses on the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience, and one that d ­ eals with the artist persona. These three perspectives are not to be understood ­strictly in chronological terms or as parts of a directional narrative. Rather, they are reflections of three principal ways of understanding art: in terms of the institutional and aesthetic context in which it is presented, in terms of the form and content that is presented and experienced, and in terms of the culturally legitimizing function of the creative artist. The three perspectives also show that the form, function, and theoretical conceptualization of art are subject to cultural and historical conditions, as well as to an internal dynamic of interaction between these three fundamental ways of conceptualizing art. When an art object can look like anything and aesthetic experience is conceived not as the exclusive domain of art but on a continuum between everyday life and the sphere of art, then the institutional (conceptual) and spatial (aesthetic)

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f­ ramings of this object and experience gain importance. If, in turn, the institutional and spatial framings are undermined because artists move their work outside of these contexts or because the institutions undermine themselves, then we may need to orient our attention towards the artists themselves. And if these artists undermine their own cultural position by epitomizing market values traditionally considered alien to the sphere of art, then our search for a framing concept for art might come full circle and back to institutional or ­aesthetic concepts. A major consequence of these various destabilizations of art is the growing influence of a commercial logic, which today extends well into the core of how art is culturally defined and legitimized. If we were to go in search of a foundational moment of these major destabilizations, it would likely be Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the found ­object. This crucial art historical moment most famously manifested itself in Duchamp’s decision to place a urinal in an art exhibition.13 Ultimately, we can trace all three developments that will be discussed in this book back to this moment: the dwindling importance of an aesthetic definition of art and the de-definition of the art object that ensued,14 the fundamental questioning of the art institution, and the undermining of the myth of the artist as inspired maker. Duchamp’s pervasive influence on different avantgarde movements in art can hardly be overestimated. My particular interest, however, lies not in revisiting the importance of this historical moment in modern art for the theory and practice of contemporary art. Instead, I will look at the postwar artistic movements of the neo-avantgarde. These movements are unquestio­­­n­ ably connected with Duchamp’s work. However, contrary to readings such as Peter Bürger’s,15 they should not be understood merely as feeble repetitions that confirm the first avantgarde’s failures. Rather, the American art movements of the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s introduced an avantgardist dynamic that has undermined the categories of art in unique ways. They effectively opened up the concept and institutional framework of art (in its emphatic meaning) to the commercial logic of the capitalist culture in which it is embedded today. Against this background, I will elaborate on my argument that the convergence of ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ should be understood not as a simple instru­ mentalization of a formerly autonomous aesthetic sphere, but rather as a devel­ opment that is closely linked with the strategies of avantgarde art itself.­I will combine thematic discussions of contemporary aesthetic phenomena with art historical perspectives on the major movements of the postwar North ­A merican avantgardes. This historical horizon is necessary to understand contemporary 13 | See Image 4, page 56. 14 | Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (New York: Horizon Press, 1972). 15 | Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008).

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developments properly. The first analysis, Art Spaces/Commercial Spaces, will focus on the spatial and institutional framing of art and will be coupled with a discussion of the spatial strategies of Minimalism and the white cube as the paradigmatic exhibition format. Admittedly, Minimalism questioned not just the conditions of reception but also such crucial categories as the status of the art object, the theoretical and art historical discourse it was part of, and the role of the artist as creator. However, my discussion of Minimalism will focus specifically on the spatial conditions of perception and reception that it suggested, and which it so emphatically and lastingly put on the agenda of art practice and theory. In its engagement with the conditions of reception, Minimalism’s fundamental tensions—what Hal Foster has termed “the crux of Minimalism”—come to bear most strongly: its simultaneous realization and overcoming of modernism.16 Minimalism ­strayed from the emphatic and autonomous, or in one word, modern, notion of art as it had been famously championed by Clement Greenberg. It did so particularly in terms of the conditions of reception, turning towards the here and now of the viewer and thus effectively proposing a phenomenological opening of art. ­However, this phenomenological opening was counterbalanced by a ­self-reflexive closing off of the theoretical discourse of art, seeking to empha­ size the autonomy of the sphere of art. It is in terms of the spatial conditions of reception that Foster’s “crux” is most apparent. Where Minimalism scrutinized the modes and conditions of perception in space, conflicted between a modernist notion of an autonomous art object and an avantgardist impetus towards a phenomenological opening up of art, the white cube as a paradigmatic exhibition format carries a comparable tension. The white cube is the physical manifestation of a modernist discourse on the autonomy of art, a space that presents itself as a neutral and neutralizing backdrop for the experience of the autonomous art object. It stabilizes the modernist discourse of art as a separate sphere in both spatial and institutional terms. In this function it has remained the paradigm of art exhibition until the present. Theoretical and practical critiques that started developing in the 1970s aim at demasking this normative, stabilizing function and the purported neutrality of the white cube. As a consequence of these critical strategies, which emanate from the sphere of art itself, the paradigm has become destabilized. Thus, the white cube can no longer claim to be a modernist countermodel to capitalist consumer society. When commercial spaces imitate or reinterpret the white cube exhibition concept, they tap right into a tension—I will call this the present absence of the commercial—which the white cube and its critiques have

16 | Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century ­(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996).

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already established in the realm of art. The white cube has entered a distinct tension between a commercial and a non-commercial spatial identity. The second perspective I will take, Art Objects/Brand Products, will focus on the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience as key concepts in art. I will link the theoretical discussion of these concepts with an analysis of the core strategies of Conceptual Art. Notably, Conceptual Art did not only question and undermine the categories of art on the level of the aesthetic object and ­aesthetic experience. It also proposed a significantly new idea of the creative artist, ­namely as conceptual developer and intellectual thinker. Conceptual Art renegotiated the function of the artist by trying to leave out subjective intention, while strengthening the artist’s discursive position instead. This established a complex tension between the de-subjectification and the (self-)empowerment of the artist. Furthermore, Conceptual Art also problematized institutional ­notions of art by radically declaring that art may be just an idea (and an unspoken one at that). This undermining of conventional notions of how art was sup­ posed to be produced, bought, collected, and exhibited instigated what could be understood as a radical democratization of art. The most consequential concern of many Conceptualists, however, was with the dematerialization, de-objectification, and de-aestheticization of their work. Art was redefined as not needing any specific materiality, and even as needing no materiality at all. At the same time, Conceptual Art fundamentally questioned the traditional notion of aesthetic experience as a dual experience of body and mind, a notion that had been proposed in variations since Kant put it forward. Many Conceptualist works undermined this notion of duality by decisively focusing on the intellectual side of the experience, all but taking the phenomenal, sensual experience out of the equation. While the dematerialization and de-aestheticization of art aimed at increasing its autonomy from market forces, a closer analysis of these strategies will show how ambivalent they proved to be. Effectively, the destabilization of core categories of art that the Conceptualists proposed finds a contemporary reverberation in the ­de-objectification of brand marketing and the commodification of (aesthetic) experience. These commercial strategies should not simply be understood as a late appropriation of Conceptual Art. They must also be viewed in relation to Conceptual Art’s own undermining of aesthetic and discursive definitions of art. Finally, my third discussion, Artist/Entrepreneur, will analyze the c­ hanging role of the artist in contemporary culture, suggesting that the artist p ­ er­sona in contemporary culture is increasingly converging with the persona of the entrepreneur. I will anchor my observations about the artist/entrepreneur by revisiting the strategies employed by Pop Art, and most prominently by Andy Warhol, which brought the artist out of the Bohemian corner and positioned him or her at the very center of consumer culture. In what has today come to be

Ar t/Commerce: Blurring the Line

known as the creative economy, we can even claim that the artist/entrepreneur is positioned as an economic role model. Of course, strategies employed by Pop artists were also pivotal in questioning the status of the art object in relation to the consumer product.17 While the fundamental change in the public idea and image of the artist was therefore by no means the only influential avantgarde strategy of Pop Art, I consider it to be the most consequential approach to under­mining traditional notions of art at the time. This strategy appears to have come to full fruition in contemporary consumer culture. In the case of the cultural image and role of the artist, the convergence of art and commerce reaches yet another level. What is taking place is not just an opening of art to the logic of the market and the increasing, even pivotal, valuation of the aesthetic in the realm of the commercial. More than that, it appears that we can observe a reversal of roles between the artist and entrepreneur. It is no longer anathema to art or to the cultural role of the artist to present himself or herself as an entrepreneur. In fact, the market success of artists like Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Olafur Eliasson seems to prove that it is precisely this entrepreneurial approach that is an expression of and a factor in the cultural and social legitimation of art. The new persona of the artist/ entrepreneur is another case in point that underscores the difficulty of separating contemporary forms and functions of art from commercial considerations. The convergence between contemporary art and contemporary commercial strategies can be observed on many levels; in this book, I have chosen three major ones. Using these three perspectives, I will read contemporary manifestations of art/commerce phenomena against their cultural and art historical backgrounds. The question this discussion will ultimately have to face is the question of the autonomy of art. Can we still think the concept of autonomy in art in light of these processes of delimitation both in art and in commerce— and if so, how? This is the broader horizon of my analysis, and the discussion will come back to it in the final chapter of this book. The question of the autonomy of art will frame a critical summary of my arguments while also opening up a wider perspective on the convergence of art and marketing in contemporary culture.

17 | For an overview of these discussions, see Christin J. Mamiya, Pop Art and ­C on­s umer Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).

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Art Spaces/Commercial Spaces “All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” A ndy Warhol

A S hort S troll through H istory : M useums and D epartment S tores , G alleries and B outiques When thinking about similarities and differences between art and commerce, space is a key dimension. In this chapter I am interested in a powerful ­contemporary practice of organizing space—what we could call a current manifestation of the “cultures of display”1 —which is widely used for the purpose of presenting art and consumer goods: the white cube space. I will take the Prada Marfa installation by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset as a starting point for analyzing the workings of the white cube exhibition space and its implications for the experience of both art and consumer objects. Organizing the chapter around a close reading of this example will help us to make some inroads into the complex discursive constellation of art spaces and commercial spaces. Moreover, the installation is a highly suggestive art/commerce hybrid that condenses some of the core questions this book will continue to explore in the following chapters. The second theoretical pillar of this chapter will be a discussion of the spatial strategies of Minimalism and the aesthetic effect of Minimalist objects. These two theoretical perspectives will help us to establish a discursive horizon against which we can read the contemporary convergence of art spaces and commercial spaces. Before we turn to Prada Marfa, it is worth looking more generally at how we can conceive of the relationship between spaces of art and spaces of commerce. Despite their obvious difference in function, there are several ­crucial similari1 | Emma Barker, ed., Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

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ties between spaces in which goods are sold and spaces in which art is exhibi­­ ted. These similarities extend both to their history and to their contemporary material appearance. To start off, we should make a fundamental ­distinction between large spaces and small spaces—between museums and d ­ epartment stores (later shopping malls) on the one hand, and galleries and boutiques on the other. Both the large and the small spaces reveal a ­dynamic rela­tionship between art and commerce throughout history and until the ­present. Although museums and department stores initially had quite different primary objectives—edification and/or aesthetic experience on the one hand, as opposed to consumption on the other—we can observe many parallels between them. Neil Harris, among others, has observed that “many commentators, both friendly and hostile to the metropolitan museum, have noted the relationship between the store and the great museum …”2 This close relationship is anchored in a shared historical moment. Both presentational spaces developed in the late 19th century and reached their apex around the turn of the century.3 Both were modern capitalist institutions created for visual pleasure. Department stores as well as museums and galleries displayed items for aesthetic, educational, and commercial effects, even if with different emphases. Historically, it has been a goal of both kinds of spaces to democratize taste and luxury—we may leave open for discussion whether the democratization was actual or imaginary.4 Whether they wanted to experience consumer products or 2 | Neal Harris, “Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for ­I nflu­e nce,” in Cultural Excursions (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 3 | William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New A­ merican Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993). See also: Peter Temin, “An Economic H ­ istory of American Art Museums,” in The Economics of Art Museums, ed. Martin Feldstein ­(Chi­c ago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). As Mary Anne Staniszewski succinctly summarizes in her highly interesting book on the history of exhibition design at the MoMA, “Both the museum and the department store arose in the nineteenth century. Both are institutions of modernity and modern capitalism. And both the museum and department store are created for visual delectation and display—one, traditionally, for an original, timeless, aesthetic experience, the other for mass-produced, common­ place, commercial exchange.” Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Ex­h ibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 174. The question that will be posed throughout this chapter is how far apart ­these ex­p eriences really are when we look at contemporary examples, in particular ­t hose of the white cube gallery and boutique. 4 | For a discussion of how architectural elements can work to imaginarily include and/ or exclude patrons, see Maria A. Slowinska, “Consuming Illusion, Illusions of Consumability: American Movie Palaces of the 1920s,” American Studies 50, no.4 (2005): 575-601.

Ar t Spaces/Commercial Spaces

artworks, people entered these contained, regulated spaces for aesthetic enjoyment and edification just as well as for consumption, if on markedly different terms. While consumption might happen in visual terms in a museum, in the department store it is actual, or at least it has the potential of becoming so. The goal of a department store is not just to draw customers in, but also to sell them something. In contrast, what we conceive of as the modern museum of art— the institution that developed in late 19th century American culture—is a space ideally devoted to the disinterested, non-commercial, aesthetic appreciation of works of art.5 And yet, particularly in the early stages of their development, the difference between department stores and museums was not as firm as we might think. The influence goes both ways. The closeness of museums and department stores manifested itself strongly in the late 19th and early 20th century United States, where, as William Leach pointed out, significant museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Newark Museum cooperated closely with department stores. Such cooperation was driven both by the motivation “of spreading the idea of ‘beauty’ to the masses” and by the conviction that if museums wanted influence, they had to take the commercial route.6 As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman provocatively put it, it is “… one of the dirty secrets of American cultural history … that these two great offspring of the late 19th century have been linked from the beginning, dancing a kind of highculture-low-culture pas de deux. They came from similar roots, had related goals and worked in tandem more times than anyone can remember. The story of their association goes to the very core of American cultural identity.”7

The democratic goal of bringing art to the people obviously paired up with the stores’ interest in growing their cultural capital and their reputation, which was ultimately a commercial interest. Thus, democratic goals were linked with capitalist endeavors—two fundamental concerns of American culture, indeed. And while Kimmelman might provocatively be understating the actual differences between the museum and the department store, we should still take his point that these two institutions did, contrary to what one might think, significantly 5 | The sacralization of art that took place as a consequence of the separation in highbrow and lowbrow culture in the second half of the 19th century has been discussed in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in ­A merica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 6 | Leach, Land of Desire, 173. 7 | Michael Kimmelman, “Art in Aisle 3, by Lingerie, And Feel Free to Browse,” The New York Times, 19 March 1995.

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interact with and influence each other. Just as much as art was exhibited in department stores, consumer objects were showcased in the art museum.8 Of all places, it was the Museum of Modern Art in New York that most strongly developed this relationship, bringing it to a highpoint with their ­popular and well-received Good Design exhibition series (1950 to 1955). These exhibitions, organized by the MoMA in cooperation with a wholesale merchandising center called the Chicago Merchandise Mart, displayed household items that had been chosen by MoMA’s curatorial staff for their modernist aesthetic. The exhibitions were supported and advertised by retail stores, which in turn used the Good Design label to advertise their products. The Good Design exhibitions were not the first ones of their kind; they were in fact successors to the earlier Useful Objects exhibition, which had focused on lower priced objects. The Good Design shows, however, “were the climax of MoMA’s incorporation of American commerce and industry within its galleries.” They were mounted at the MoMA as well as in department stores all over the country and epitomized the initially close interaction between modern art and commerce in the United States.9 8 | Essentially following Leach’s earlier analysis, Kimmelman further points out several aspects in which these two institutions closely interacted, namely in regard to their educational goals and to the collection and exhibition of art. The cooperation between department stores and museums went so far as to include the joint collection and exhibition of art. Many an art exhibition was organized in department stores or traveled there. Among such exhibitions were the Cubist show at Gimbels in Pittsburgh in 1913, as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art show of 1934 and its show of International Style, which travelled to Midwestern departments stores. It was at the same time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that department stores changed their display policies to allow patrons to browse through merchandise on their own, without having to buy anything. This effectively enabled experiences of an aesthetic and potentially edifying kind, as well as fostering the patrons’ desire to possess the objects they touched. In 2008 a psychological study at the Universities of Ohio and Illinois showed that the time of haptic contact with an object significantly increases the probability that it will be bougth by the patrom. We can assume that although this has only recently been analyzed scientifically, it was already common-sense knowledge of salespeople at the time. See James R. Wolf, Hal R. Arkes, and Waleed A. Muhanna, “The Power of Touch: An Examination of the Effect of Duration of Physical Contact on the Valuation of Objects,” Judgment and Decision Making 3, no. 6 (2008): 476-482. 9 | This interaction had, of course, been influenced by such European movements as Bauhaus and DeStijl. The closeness of art and design in European modernism can be e­ xplained with the historical avantgardes’ understanding of the socially utopian ­f unction of art, whose fulfillment lay in the overcoming of the separation of art and life. In con­t rast, in the United States, the notion of modern art that became institutionali-

Ar t Spaces/Commercial Spaces

Yet, if such historical closeness of art and commerce had been character­ istic of the forming years of modern American culture, why would the relationship between museums and consumer spaces become a topic of discussion in contemporary criticism? Michael Kimmelman suggests that following the ­earlier period of joint endeavors, there was a historical break from the cooperative approach between museums and department stores, which changed the rules of the game. According to Kimmelman, this historical break is a consequence of two processes: the malling and suburbanization of America on the one hand, and on the other, the development of what he calls an increasing “snobbism” of museums, which “came to see themselves as temples too lofty to associate with quotidian stores.”10 I would like to rephrase Kimmelman’s point to suggest that the relation between museums and department stores, which had been strikingly close during the coming of age of American consumer culture, ­la­­ter­­­cooled off, firstly with the boom of consumer capitalism in the 1950s, and secondly, with the contemporaneous institutionalization of modern art in the United States. The MoMA is a strong case in point here: what Kimmelman calls “snobbism” found expression in the ending of what Staniszewski refers to as the “laboratory phase” and Alan Wallach calls the “utopian moment” of the ­ ­MoMA.11 Initially, the MoMA had been planned as an ever-modern museum of contemporary art that would give over its artworks to institutions more concerned with classical art (like the Metropolitan Museum of Art) when they had lost their cutting-edge modern status (which was estimated at around 50 years after acquisition).12 However, in 1953 the MoMA introduced a fundamental po­­licy change, deciding to establish a permanent collection of artworks; the first permanent exhibition opened in 1958. The concurrence between these policy changes within the museum and its changing relation to institutions of consumer capitalism suggests that the institutional collaboration between museums and department stores that had been established during the rise of consumer capitalism ended with the institutionalization of modern art—its

zed in the 1950s can be traced back less to the ideas of the European pre-war avantgardes than to the modernist idea that art had to be autonomous and removed from other s­ pheres of life in order to fulfill its critical function. When autonomy became the dominant characteristic of modern art, social utopianism was supplanted by aesthetic utopianism, leading to a highly formalist notion of modern art. 10 | Department stores, in turn, “more and more became bottom line businesses.” Kimmelman, “Art in Aisle 3, by Lingerie, And Feel Free to Browse.” 11 | Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art: The Past’s Future,” Journal of Design History 5, no. 3 (1992): 207-15. 12 | Ibid., 210.

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institutionalization as the museum, in the museum, and as the idea of a sphere removed and autonomous from commercial considerations.13 After decades in which this cultural and ideological separation dominated the discourse of art, in recent years museums have again moved visibly closer to the commercial realm, particularly through institutional interaction with established brands and companies. The Guggenheim museum under its former director Thomas Krens spearheaded this development. Still, the intense discussion and criticism that accompanied such Guggenheim exhibitions as the Art of the Motorcycle (1998) or Armani (2000) show that the convergence of art and commerce in museums remains highly controversial today. The idea of modern art and the modern art museum as a sphere removed from the realm of commerce remains dominant today. Let us go back to the decades before the historical break of museums from department stores to look at their respective cultures of display and to analyze the striking parallels in their cultural history and function. These similarities are most pronounced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and again ­today. Firstly, up until the first decades of the 20th century, the architecture of many museums and department stores made strong references to temples and ­palaces, showing that both institutions aspired to present themselves as s­ pecial and even sacred spaces, removed from everyday life, and striving to ele­vate and educate the visitor/customer. Their effectiveness in creating such an atmosphere varied only in degree: “If the atmosphere [in the stores] was less ­sacred and hushed than in the museums, it was still special and s­elf-contained.”14 ­Secondly, the strategies of display in museums and stores show a similar historical pattern, which develops in two directions: into an exuberant, excessive style, and into a reduced, minimalistic style. As Christoph Grunenberg o ­ bserves, “by the 1920s, these two extremes of presentation were well established, and over the past century shop displays have oscillated between these two ­polar opposites. The presentation of art in galleries and museums has simulta­neously fed off and inspired commercial displays.”15 In the 19th century, dense accumulation and vertical stacking to the point of visual chaos characterized practices of display in both museums and stores. 13 | Notably, even earlier than that, the MoMA instituted the white cube model of exhibition design when it moved into its new building on 53rd Street in 1939, proposing a mode of display that would gain hold and spread along with the institutionalization of this conception of modern art—exactly because it was so well-geared towards its crucial credo of autonomy, as we will shortly see. 14 | Harris, “Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste,” 66. 15 | Christoph Grunenberg, “Wonderland: Spectacles of Display from the Bon ­M arché to Prada,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph ­G runenberg and Hans Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 31f.

Ar t Spaces/Commercial Spaces

Paintings and goods piled up high, and it seemed less important to present an individual work than to create an overall impression of overflowing abundance. In the early decades of the 20th century, this display strategy of spectacular abundance evolved into a type of space that was highly spectacular, sensual, exuberant and excessive. Increasingly, these spaces were also organized thematically. We can observe this spectacular mode of display, for example, in ­t urn-of-the-century temples of consumption such as Wannamaker’s, whose tradition is kept alive today by stores like Macy’s (which bought W ­ annamaker’s), Bloomingdale’s, or Saks’, particularly in their Easter and Christmas displays, as well as in the exuberant display practices of many shopping malls.16 In recent decades, this spectacular mode experienced a further radicalization when it developed into immersive spaces of experience like themed malls or Las ­Vegas ­casinos.17 This excessive style of display has already been discussed widely ­under such labels as Disneyization, malling, and immersive environments.18 In contrast to this exuberant, excessive mode, a second exhibition design developed that was reduced, unadorned, and horizontally oriented. In the context of museums, particularly the Museum of Modern Art and its first ­director Alfred Barr furthered this mode of display, which would later develop into the omnipresent white cube. Starting in the 1930s, this reduced style gained increas­ing importance in both museums and galleries. With a significant tem­ poral lag, this display strategy has now also arrived in commercial spaces; it has become the style of choice for many fashion and luxury boutiques, particularly since the 1990s. This reduced style constitutes a major second line of historical development and applies particularly to the smaller spaces of the gallery and the boutique. It is this second development that will be of central importance in the present chapter, because it is with the white cube that the cultures of display of art and of commerce come together in a particularly striking way. In the case of the gallery and the boutique, close institutional interactions such as those between museums and department stores cannot be observed. In part, this is due to the fact there is little historical research on these small enterprises; it may also be explained in part by smaller audiences and budgets, which have prevented both institutions from furthering their educational or commercial goals as effectively as their larger counterparts. However, a look at 16 | This fantastic style of window dressing has also been employed by some luxury boutiques such as Louis Vuitton, whose annual Christmas displays have been elabo­ rately staged by the likes of Robert Wilson and Takashi Murakami. 17 | See Laura Bieger, Ästhetik der Immersion: Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). 18 | See, for example, Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: Sage, 2004) and William Severini Kowinski, The Malling of America: Travels in the United States of Shopping (New York: William Morrow, 1985).

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this smaller exhibition format is crucial for our discussion, not only because it has been analyzed little so far, but mainly because it is in these smaller spaces that we can today observe a particularly interesting convergence between art and commerce and their respective cultures of display. As Olav Velthuis details, art galleries emerged in 19th century Paris, deve­l­ oping out of shops (print and art supplies shops) as well as out of traditional art dealership, and thus from a commercial background.19 While today their commercial function as places to sell art remains important, several developments show the increasing blurring of boundaries between the gallery’s commercial purpose and its function as a space for the pure contemplation of art. This blurring can already be found in the very meaning of the word ‘gallery,’ which connotes both a commercial enterprise and, more generally, a room in which art is displayed; such a room can be part of a private mansion or of a museum. The distinction between commercial and non-commercial function became even more blurred in the 20th century. After World War II, with artists and dealers immigrating to the United States and Abstract Expressionism developing, New York became the center of the international art market and the world capital of the art gallery. Between the beginning of the War and 1946, the number of galleries in New York grew from 40 to 150.20 Today, there are well over 500.21 Many of these galleries, and particularly the most famous ones, such as the Gagosian or David Zwirner, are primarily exhibition spaces rather than sales spaces. The art gallery has become a central institution of the art world, not just as a place to sell art but also as an increasingly important public or semi-public space for the exhibition and experience of art. This has led to an erosion of the boundaries between the functions of the museum and the gallery. A symbolic instance of the convergence of these two spaces and cultures of exhibition was the Contemplating the Void exhibition at the Guggenheim New York in 2010. The fact that museums sell some of their works in auctions to raise additional funds is not a new development. ­Howev­er,­­ ­t he decisive change here is that this Guggenheim exhibition was mounted with the explicit intention of selling the works on display, incidentally also increasing the value of the works along the way. While this is a big step towards the commercialization of museums, the Guggenheim seems to be merely one of the fast movers in a more general tendency of eroding differences between the

19 | Velthuis, Talking Prices, 11. 20 | Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract ­E xpres­s ionism, F­ reedom, and the Cold War (Chicago; London: Chicago University Press, 1983), 91. 21 | CitiDex New York City: Directory and Guide to New York City, http://www.citidex. com/2504.htm.

Ar t Spaces/Commercial Spaces

traditionally non-commercial museum and the traditionally commercial gallery.22 The history of the boutique, in turn, can be traced back to two commercial forms: the 19th century arcade, which was made up of a multitude of small shops; and the small, stand-alone specialist shop, in particular the lower-priced outlet for haute couture that developed in the early 20th century. Walter ­Benjamin discussed the phenomenon of the arcade in the notes to his ­Passagen-Werk, pointing out its central cultural importance in the emerging consumer society of the 19th century, its aestheticization and fetishization of the many products that invited the consumer to become a flaneur (and vice versa), and its double-facedness that proposed and upheld the dialectical tension between liberation and oppression that is at the very heart of consumer culture.23 When the arcade lost ground as a cultural phenomenon in the first half of the 20th century, its small shops had to find new contexts and moved to boulevards and shopping malls. With the development of mass consumer culture until the mid-20th century, the small shop was temporarily overtaken by big department stores and then by malls, which implemented the concept of the flaneur on a larger scale. The small shop was only rediscovered in the ­mid-1960s, once the more basic consumer desires had been met and the market for more individualized and luxury items re-emerged. This is when the boutique reappeared, only this time addressing a broader market than in its early stage as a small, specialist shop. At the same time, the boutique emphasized uniqueness and individuality more strongly than department stores and shopping malls had: “In the mid-1960s, the boutique made its reappearance as a manifestation and in the service of a re-­emergent individualism.”24 First used as one-of-a-kind designer outlets in England in the 1960s, boutiques were soon discovered as market placement tools by bigger companies that wanted to address a wider market while retaining an air of exclusiveness. Today, boutiques are often stores, in particular the strategically ­important flagship stores,25 operated by large conglomerates such as LVMH 22 | Fred A. Berstein, “On the Guggenheim’s Walls, and Now on Yours,” The New York Times, 17 March 2010. 23 | Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, [1927-1940] 1983). 24 | Mark Pimlott, “The Boutique and the Mass Market,” in Boutiques and Other Retail Spaces: The Architecture of Seduction, ed. David Vernet and Leontine de Wit ­(Abdingdon; New York: Routledge, 2007), 3. 25 | “Of nautical origin, the term ‘flagship’ refers to a ship which is the largest, fastest, newest, most heavily armed, most well known, or the lead ship in a fleet. When applied to a particular retail store, the designation of ‘flagship’ is given to a retailer’s primary location, a store in a prominent location, a chain’s largest store, the store that holds

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(Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy)—which since the 1990s holds, among o ­ thers, leading ­Champagne brands such as Moët & Chandon and Veuve ­Clicquot, fashion brands Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Kenzo, Marc Jacobs, Emilio Pucci, D ­ onna Karan, shares of Fendi, and cosmetics by Christian Dior and ­Guerlain—or ­Prada, which between the 1990s and the early 2000s held shares of Fendi, Gucci, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, and Azzedine Alaïa. Although in fact being outlets for large corporations and conglomerates, these retail outlets are designed to express exclusivity, specificity, and individualism. Even more strongly than depart ment stores, boutiques became manifestations of the crucial tensions of Western consumer culture—the tensions between democracy and individualism, between mass market appeal and individualized consumption.26 The spatial design is a chief instrument in achieving this effect, and the use of exhibition strategies established in the art context is particularly popular here. The similarity of art spaces (galleries in museums and stand-alone galleries) and commercial spaces (boutiques as part of shopping centers or stand-alone boutiques) today goes so far as to blur the boundaries between the two, fundamentally questioning and even changing their respective cultural functions. Boutiques act as art spaces and art spaces act as boutiques. Very often, the style of choice of these emerging gallery/boutique hybrids is the white cube/Minimalist space.

or sells the highest volume of merchandise, a retailer’s most well-known location, a chain’s first retail outlet, or the store location in a chain which carries the most highpriced merchandise catering to the most upscale customers.” Barbara Farfan, ­“ Flagship Store Definition” About.com: Retail Industry, 2010, http://retailindustry.about.com/ od/glossary/g/flagshipstorede.htm. 26 | As Pimlott writes: “It is in the nature of publicity of luxury goods that the consumer is intended to identify with the uniqueness and exclusivity of the object of desire: it mirrors and represents the individuated consumer, who is obliged to suffer the paradox of feeling uniquely attracted to a mass-produced artefact subject to mass publicity.” Pimlott, “The Boutique and the Mass Market,” 9. Elsewhere I have demonstrated how Wiliam Leach’s concept of the democracy of consumption brings precisely this paradox to the fore: “The tension inherent in this democracy of consumption lies in the fact that the desire to consume is built on both the illusion that the act of consumption can be achieved and performed by everyone, and at the same time on the impression that this very act will distinguish the consumer from others. Thus, we can see how the two fundamental forces in American culture—the drives toward democratization and toward individualization—come to interact in the culture of consumption and in the corresponding conception of democracy.” Slowinska, “Consuming Illusion, Illusions of Consumability,” 586.

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A n E xcursion to Te x as : E lmgreen and D r agse t ’s P rada M arfa Our investigation of gallery/boutique hybrids will begin with a detailed analy­sis of the Prada Marfa installation by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Starting out from this concrete example, we will be able to trace the discursive field 27 that surrounds the contemporary situation, in which we can hardly tell what we are looking at—a commercial space or a space devoted primarily to disinterested aesthetic experience. Prada Marfa is a little pavilion on Highway 90 in West Texas, about 40 miles from Marfa, Texas. Image 1: Prada Marfa on Highway 90

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. Photography © Marchingusa, 2012.

The pavilion appears to be a Prada boutique. It was produced by the local nonprofit art organization Ballroom Marfa and by the New York-based Art ­Production Fund. Inaugurated with a reception on October 1, 2005, the small building looks just like a typical Prada store, including a display of the 2005 season’s handbags and high heels. The major difference is that this boutique is never actually open and that the collection on view will forever be the one of 2005. This fact is stated on a small sign next to the pavilion, which is the

27 | This definition includes the historical and linguistic as well as the visual and expe­ riential levels of discourse.

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only indication that Prada Marfa is, in fact, not a store.28 In order to realize that this is not a space where commerce did or ever will take place, one needs to stop, take a closer look, and read this sign, or research the pavilion afterwards. ­Various commentaries and videos online document people’s surprise when driving by this “Prada store” in the middle of nowhere, and even their disappointment in finding out that they would not be able to buy any merchandise here.29 The work itself does not reveal its non-commercial aesthetic status. This unclear status in between art space and commercial space is at the core of the 28 | The sign reads: “PRADA MARFA / Established: October 1, 2005 / Artists: E­ lm­­g reen­ & Dragset / Commissioners/Producers: Art Production Fund; Ballroom Marfa / Architects: Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello; Joerg Boettger / Construction: The Maxwell Company / Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa present PRADA MARFA, a site specific, permanent land art projects by artists Elmgreen & Dragset. Modeled after a Prada boutique, the structure includes luxury goods from the fall 2005 collection. However, the sculpture will never function as a place of commerce, the door cannot be opened. / Art Production fund is a non profit organizatiotn dedicated to realizing ambitious projects by contemporary artists. / Founders: Yvonne Force V­ illareal­and Doreen Remen / Project Coordinator: Casey Fremont / This project is made pos­s ible through the support of the local communities. The family of the late Walter Alton ‘Slim’ Brown (Trucker, Rancher, Roper, Friend) has generously contributed to the project by lending their land. Many thanks to Fondazione Prada for their support and in-kind product contribution. Boyd Elder, artist, has overseen the project as our Project Site Representative, with additional support from his family Shauly Elder and Flaunn ­E lder Jamison. Use of the Prada logo is made courtesy of Prada, Milano. / Art Production Fund (logo) / Ballroom Marfa (logo).” Source: Photograph, 22 June 2006. http://www.­ chr is t ian-t hiemann.de/cr os singus/index .php?viewmode=ex panded& s t ate=t x. 29 | Various comments online express exhilaration about the store, disappointment about the “cruel mirage,” and even relief about hearing that it is, in fact, art. See, for example, the search results for Prada Marfa on www.youtube.com, or these comments on http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasArt/Prada-Marfa.htm: “Dear TE, I recently went on a family vacation to Fort Davis, Texas. My kids and I could not believe our eyes when we saw the Prada Marfa store! It so surprised us that I slammed the brakes and turned around and took a picture. I am happy to find out it was art. - Graciela Tercero, August 23, 2007.” “… Boy was I surprised! It almost makes you think you might be on Candid Camera. I think [someone] should film the people that stop to see it... - Tammie Riley, Van Horn, Texas, September 08, 2006.” “As me and my mom were on our way to Eagle Pass we passed the shoestore and we were not sure if it was what we had seen. We wanted to make a U-turn and see if it was really there. Well, on our way back it was there. We stopped and took pictures of it. To us it was a store in the middle of nowhere, but [we] enjoyed it as well. I told my brother about it and he doesn’t belive [sic] it’s really there. - Marisa Flores, May 11, 2006.”

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work’s effect. While the artwork might never satisfy any potential customer craving, looters did take advantage and stole all of the products/objects just a few days after the pavilion’s inauguration. They left graffiti comments on the pavilion, stating “dumb” and “dum dum” on its outside walls. It remains open to discussion whether these graffiti are to be understood as a critique of the aesthetic concept of the artwork, or just as a comment on the decision to leave expensive products unprotected in the middle of nowhere. Image 2: Prada Marfa, interior detail

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. Photography © James Thurman, 2008.

The reaction to the incident, however, was clear. Although the president and co-founder of the Art Production Fund had stated in the New York Times that it was part of the idea of the work that it would never be maintained,30 the building was restored. The graffiti was cleaned up, alarm equipment installed, a security guard hired, and the merchandise replaced. Only this time, the objects were made worthless as consumer products: the bottoms of the bags were cut 30 | “We loved the idea of the piece being born on Oct. 1 and that it will never again be maintained. If someone spray-paints graffiti or a cowboy decides to use it as target practice or maybe a mouse or a muskrat makes a home in it, 50 years from now it will be a ruin that is a reflection of the time it was made.” Quoted in: Eric Wilson, “Little Prada in the Desert,” The New York Times, 29 September 2005.

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out. Prada Marfa obviously generates considerable confusion as to whether it is a commercial or a non-commercial enterprise. In the West Texan desert, the store that is not a store has to be secured like one in order to protect its nonstore status.31 This ambiguous status of the installation between commerce and art reached what may be its last chapter in September 2013, when the Texas Department of Transportation classified it as an “illegal outdoor advertising sign.”32 The controversy was sparked by a work that artist Richard Phillips erected close by in June 2013 for Playboy Enterprises. Playboy Marfa was a commissioned work paid for by Playboy Enterprises and apparently tried to make use of the attention Prada Marfa had generated. After the Department of Transportation declared Playboy Marfa an illegal outdoor advertisement, the same question was raised for Prada Marfa. Was the installation art or was it illegal outdoor advertising because no permit had been obtained for the outdoor use of a trademarked logo? Even though Prada Marfa was neither a commissioned work nor paid for by Prada, legally it was treated in equal terms as Playboy Marfa. In contrast, Michael Elmgreen maintained that “There’s a difference between being commissioned by a company to do something for them and using their logo, and using their logo on your own.”33 This debate and the possible ­consequences for Prada Marfa indicate on yet another level the complicated status of the work between the discourse of commerce and the discourse of art. At the time of writing, a decision has not been made as to whether the Prada Marfa instal­ lation will have to be dismantled. Although Prada Marfa is neither a marketing stunt nor a commissioned artwork, the brand is central to the work’s controversial concept and success. The installation clearly generates positive publicity for the Prada brand. On the individual level, people who happen to pass by the installation interact with the brand—immediately by experiencing the uncommon sight, and later by poten­ tially trying to find out what Prada is doing in this remote place. The result of both is that people interact with the artwork and the brand simultaneously. In addition, Prada Marfa also generated a vivid response among major newspapers, art magazines, and on the grassroots level. A google.com search of the name returns some 2,000,000 results (as of February 2014), many of these from personal blogs. This is a win-win situation for the brand, which might be 31 | While the sculpture seemed to have been left empty to dilapidate in 2008, merchandise was returned or replaced in 2009. While the installation has been repeat­ edly vandalized over the years, t remains stocked and in place as of June 2014. 32 | Francesca Mari, “Maybe This Is Why Warhol Stuck to Soup Cans,” The New York Times, 14 September 2013. See also Tracy Zwick, “Desert Showdown: Artists’ Texas Projects in Peril,” Art in America, 30 September 2015. 33 | Ibid.

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one explanation for Miuccia Prada’s support of the work: “Ms. Villareal [of the Art Production Fund] said that Miuccia Prada had given the artists the permission to use her trademark for the work. She also picked out the shoes.”34 It has been speculated but remains unclear whether Prada “silently sponsored” the project, too.35 Whether this is true or not, the suspicion alone lends important insight into this work: although it is a non-commercial artwork, the installation effectively functions as a marketing tool for the Prada brand. Just as much, however, does the brand function as a vehicle for fostering interest in the installation. The Prada Marfa installation combines artistic and commercial interest. The art experience and the brand experience are inextricably intertwined. How exactly does Prada Marfa generate this huge amount of attention? The commercial impression Prada Marfa makes is produced primarily through its use of the Prada name and logo. Yet it is not simply the Prada brand by itself that calls attention. Prada Marfa does not intend to completely dissimulate that it is an art installation and to impress merely with the famous brand name. If this were the case, the artists would not have put a sign next to the pavilion (whether people read it or not is a different question). And even more importantly, had the goal been dissimulation, Elmgreen and Dragset would ­probably have put the pavilion closer to its ‘natural’ environment, perhaps in a city center or shopping mall. So rather than simply the brand name, what catches attention and sparks interest in the pavilion is the contrast between the famous brand and the location in which we find it. This combination generates what we could call a cognitive dissonance: the Prada boutique appears inconsistent with the environment in which it is situated. Since the opening of the pavilion, this environment has been the setting of such stark movies as No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) and There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). It is also a stretch of land commonly passed through by il­legal immigrants coming from Mexico. The “fashion boutique” draws the power to surprise from its unlikely setting in the middle of nowhere and from its marked contrast to the surrounding, endlessly stretched-out Texas flatland. Yet when we take a closer look, it turns out that Prada Marfa could just as well be considered to be situated not “in the middle of nowhere” but rather in a very specific place, namely close to the town of Marfa. This small Texan town has in recent years become a booming little art community. Although the pavilion is situated only two miles from the ranch town of Valentine, Texas, it carries Prada Marfa on its marquee and is known under this name, which establishes a clear link with Marfa, about 40 miles further down highway 90. 34 | Quoted in Wilson, “Little Prada in the Desert.” 35 | “Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset: The Welfare Show, Serpentine Gallery, London, January-February 2006,” Circa, Irish magazine for contemporary visual arts, 2006. http://www.recirca.com/reviews/2006/elmgreendragset/ed.shtml.

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Having been the home of Donald Judd from the mid-seventies until his death in 1994, today Marfa is the location of two art foundations, the Donald Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation, and has lately become something of a cultural enclave. Artists and galleries have moved there, and along with them, art tourists have found an interest in the otherwise unremarkable town of less than 2000 inhabitants.36 While the Judd Foundation maintains the late artist’s studios, living quarters, a ranch, architecture offices, and libraries, it is the Chinati Foundation’s objective “to preserve and present to the public permanent large-scale installations by a limited number of artists.”37 For those who know about the role that art has come to play in Marfa, this stretch of Highway 90 appears to be quite the opposite of the middle of nowhere, namely a rather probable location both for a fashion boutique and for a “public permanent largescale installation.”

P rada M arfa : A S ite -S pecific I nstall ation Whether the spectator experiences Prada Marfa as an actual boutique or as an artwork, the cognitive dissonance that it generates is a consequence of its specific physical location. We can therefore consider the work a site-specific installation. In her analysis of the transformations of site-specific art since the 1960s,38 Miwon Kwon presents a three-fold model that considers the different practices of site specificity both as distinct historical stages and as competing contemporary paradigms. Kwon details how site-specific approaches in art ­initially set out with a literal understanding of the site as location, emphasizing presence and interaction. Pursued prominently by Minimalist artists in the 1960s,­this approach aimed at expanding the boundaries of traditional art ­media, at shifting the emphasis from the art object to the art experience, and at rejecting the capitalist logic of circulation and exchange of (art) objects.39 In reaction to this phenomenological model of site specificity in M ­ inimalism, the second wave of site-specific practice in the 1970s shifted the meaning of ‘site’ from the physical location of the artwork to its social and institutional setting and definition. Works in this tradition challenge the earlier idealist and 36 | Josh Noel, “Marfa makes an art out of quirky,” Chicago Tribune, 8 March 2009. 37 | Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati. “Chinati: Mission & History,” http:// www.chinati.org/visit/missionhistory.php. 38 | Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85-110, and Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003). 39 | Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 86.

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universal conceptualizations of space and the viewing subject. They point to the definatory power of the institution in which the art is presented, as well as the race, class, gender, and sexuality of the perceiving subject.40 With the meaning of ‘site’ thus shifted, the viewer is now required to critically (not just physically) experience the work and to reflect on the ideological matrix in which it is embedded. This critical attitude is emphasized even more in a third approach to site specificity, which has developed from the 1980s onwards. Here, the context of reference expands further, moving beyond questions of the production and reception of art, and beyond a primary focus on aesthetics, towards a more general engagement with and critique of culture, “blurring the division ­be­­­­t­ween art and non-art, in fact.”41 This expansion takes place both in spatial and in discursive terms: more and more public and non-public places can become places of art, and the works refer to more and more discourses, among them those of advertising and fashion.42 For Kwon, the defining feature of these contemporary site-specific works is that the two earlier meanings of site—as location and as institutional frame—are present but subordinate to the discursive determination of the site. When we revisit Prada Marfa with this three-fold meaning of site specificity in mind, we find that all three modes coexist in the installation. However, the third, discursive dimension clearly dominates, not only because it appears to be richer in its referential system, but also because it simultaneously develops and undermines the first two modes—the site’s physical and institutional site specificity. First, let us look at the physical or phenomenological approach to site specificity. Prada Marfa is site-specific in regard to its physical location: it pretends to be a high-fashion boutique that is situated on a desolate stretch of land surrounded by virtually nothing. In line with Kwon’s model, Prada Marfa does, indeed, expand the boundaries of traditional art media by venturing into locational, installational, and architectural work. It does shift the emphasis ­towards the art experience because the art object becomes utterly unstable: What is it that is being exhibited here? What is being sold? It is the experience of cognitive 40 | Cp. Ibid., 88. 41 | Ibid., 91. 42 | Reading James Meyer’s discussion of Robert Morris with this lens, establishing a connection between site-specific extension and Minimalist reduction is close at hand. The growing influence of a work’s contextual situation can be understood as a logical ­c onsequence of a formal reduction that reached its apex in Minimalist sculpture: “When formal incident within the work was so reduced, the work’s contextual relations became perspicuous.” James Sampson Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 160. Site-specific art, in this regard, is a child of Minimalism.

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dissonance itself that counts. Moreover, the installation does renounce the capi­ talist logic of circulation and exchange by remaining in one place, by remaining closed—emphatically so, when we think of the security measures—and by ­always keeping the same items from the 2005 collection on display. The installation’s physical site thus includes not only its geographic location but also its temporal situation. Although Prada Marfa seems to be situated in the middle of nowhere, it effectively anchors the global, free-floating imaginary discourse of brand marketing to a locally and temporally determined environment, arresting it right there, in West Texas in 2005. This geo-temporal situatedness is further emphasized by the early p ­ romise that the installation would not be maintained and “50 years from now … will be a ruin that is a reflection of the time it was made.“43 In this context, it b ­ ecomes clear why the decision to restore and maintain the installation after its initial vandalization was not incidental, but rather highly problematic on the conceptual level. While the restoration permitted more people to perceive the installation in its ­‘original’ state, repairing the structure and replacing the items was done at the risk of dissimulating the passing of time and thus giving up this tem­­poral anchor. Moreover, judging from various photographs online, for unknown reasons the pavilion was cleared of merchandise in 2008 and subsequently re-equip­ped with the same products. These interventions contradict the idea of letting the installation dilapidate over time; apparently, the process of ageing started to take effect faster than had been desired by the initiators of the artwork. However, overall the artistic concept of geo-temporal site specificity has been successfully upheld. While the building is still standing and exhibiting the Prada merchandise, it has obviously been marked by time. On the level that can be perceived immediately, the building is slightly dirty, there is graffiti on the outside wall, and people have left business cards, letters, and old shoes on the building and nearby fences. Moreover, on a level that can be perceived mainly by those who partake in the fashion world, the shoes and bags are ‘so 2005.’ While the process of destruction and dilapidation has been ­artificially slowed down, it is visibly taking place, thus emphasizing the cognitive dis­sonance between the glamorous brand name and the physical appearance of the site. However, another artistic intervention has clearly undermined Prada ­Marfa’s geo-temporal site specificity and strengthened the discursive aspects of site specificity instead. In 2005, in support of the Prada Marfa art project, ­Elmgreen & Dragset developed a fine art edition of a sign that says “Prada Marfa­/ ­1837 MI,” marking the distance from New York, the American capital of art (and the American art of capital), to Marfa. 43 | Yvonne Force Villareal from the sponsoring Art Production Fund quoted in the New York Times. Wilson, “Little Prada in the Desert.”

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Image 3: Prada Marfa Prop Art

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa sign, 2005. Courtesy of the Art Production Fund.

The signs were 4 by 6 feet (approximately 122 by 183 centimeters), made of powder-coated aluminum, raised on 4 foot legs, and sold as “unique pieces” with a certificate signed by the artists. In 2008, the sign was also used as the model for a prop on the set design for the TV series Gossip Girl, on which is has stayed and reappeared ever since. In 2009, a Prop Art edition was added, based on the Gossip Girl sign. These signs are 30 by 40 inches (approximately 76 by 102 centimeters) printed, stretched canvases with a rubber stamp print of the artists’ signatures on the back. They can be bought for $300 in the online shop operated by the Art Production Fund, the non-profit organization that sponsored Prada Marfa.44 It is the website’s stated goal to bring art to a broader audience as well as to generate additional funds for supporting art projects.45 44 | “Works on Whatever,” Art Production Fund, http://worksonwhatever.com. http:// www.artproductionfund.org/shop/prada-marfa-sign-by-elmgreen-and-dragset. 45 | “APF invites artists to experiment with the latest commercial materials and techniques to bring art off the walls and into homes as everyday objects. WOW introduces contemporary art to a larger community with revenues from sales supporting our non-profit mission. WOW works conceptually with APF’s program of expanding art audiences and helps fund additional major civic artworks.” http://www.artproductionfund. org/shop.

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The Marfa sign is not the only Prop Art edition prepared for Gossip Girl and sold on the website. Various prints are even marketed with the line “As seen on Gossip Girl!” The artists and the Art Production Fund thus developed a highly circulable, and after 2008, even more highly sellable work that appeared in a TV-series and was sold on the Internet. How much more hyperspatial can an artwork get? As we have seen, Prada Marfa as a physically site-specific installation follows the logic of site-specific art, upholding a certain resistance to the system of market exchange. However, the Prada Marfa sign enters this capitalist logic of exchange with a vengeance. Firstly, the Prada Marfa sign is an actual indexical sign that marks the distance to a real, specific location. The sign’s signified is situated 1837 miles away in Texas, arrested there in time and space and thus utterly uncirculable. However, this resistant signified is pointed to by an endlessly reproducible and sellable signifier—the print. Moreover, the sign not only refers to the installation, it is also another physical manifestation of the Prada brand itself. The print is thus a signifier that simultaneously refers to the artwork and the commercial brand. We can imagine that the print would only be half as interesting if it said, for example, “Donald Judd Foundation 1837 MI” instead of “Prada Marfa 1837 MI” in the brand’s typical typography. While the artwork exists materially, notwithstanding its complicated ontological status, the Prada brand invoked by the print is just another sign, with a signifier whose signified is an endless reproduction—a bag, a shoe, a scarf. Such reproductions pretend to be originals, but their most important characteristic is the s­ ignifier (the brand) rather than the signified (the actual product). We can conclude that just as much as the site-specific work anchors and arrests the capitalist discourse of consumer brands, so does the Prada Marfa sign free the work of its physical site specificity. Through its simulacral quality and the resulting perpetual deferral of meaning, the sign endlessly (re)produces desire. Let us now look at the second dimension of site specificity: Prada Marfa is also site specific in regard to its social and institutional location. Situated 25 miles from the Mexican border and close only to a farm community called ­Valentine a few miles away, the Prada shoes and bags clash starkly with the ­reality of local farmers and even more so with that of illegal Mexican immigrants, many of whom cross the US border in this area, mostly on foot, probably with a bag, and most likely exhausted. In regard to its social site, Prada Marfa is not situated in the confined traditional spaces of the museum or gallery. It engages with the outside world by appearing to be a place full of luxury goods in a h ­ ighly unlikely location—or, in an alternative interpretation, by being in just the right place to serve as proof of gentrification processes close by. In both cases, the installation engages the social environment in which it is set. Both farmers and illegal immigrants are unlikely customers for the luxury brand, which brings to the fore a socio-critical dimension of the work. This is also the

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case if we under­stand the pavilion as a reference to gentrification processes, leaving open the question of whether it is a shop or an art installation. Here, questions of race/ethnicity and class are being addressed, as well as questions of gender and gendered consumption, if more in passing—all exhibited shoes and bags are from Prada’s women’s collection. Moreover, the fact that people have left marks, messages, and personal items like shoes on or next to the building shows that the installation does, indeed, seem to have a socially engaging nature. It remains open to discussion, however, to what extent the installation can really be understood as a social intervention in a community, in the sense that social site specificity often tries to bring out. Just as much as the instal­lation pivots b ­ ­e­­­­t­ween a commercial and an artistic enterprise, so does it oscillate between presenting a critical, thus socially engaged, and a cynical, thus socially aloof, commentary on contemporary processes in art, consumption, and ­gentrification. I would like to suggest that another aspect of Prada Marfa’s site specifi­c­ ity is more pronounced than the social one, namely the critical perspective it opens up in regard to its institutional location. As an installation outside of the conventional environment of a museum or gallery, Prada Marfa implicitly questions the power of art institutions to determine what is art. Yet this move, too, is immediately subverted. Prada Marfa does not only look like a boutique; it also resembles an art space by means of the very same spatial strategy: the aesthetic of the white cube. Prada Marfa engages with and upholds the institutional critique often presented by site-specific art; at the same time, it produces yet another reiteration of the definatory power of these institutions. The pavilion opens up a field of references that renders its main location discursive—in relation to these different visual and art historical ­discourses— rather than just physical and institutional. The following discussion will show that Prada Marfa intensely engages with the artistic practices of site speci­ficity and Minimalism, as well as with the paradigmatic art exhibition practice of the white cube. Although Prada Marfa’s site-specific positioning does have a strong physical, or as I have called it, geo-temporal component, this is not the work’s most consequential aspect. As Miwon Kwon rightly observes, the move of site-specific practices towards the discursive does not mean that the para­meters of a particular place or institution no longer matter, ­because ­site-oriented art ­today still cannot be thought or executed without the c­ ontin­­gencies of lo­cational and institutional circumstances. But the primary site a­ddressed by current manifestations of site specificity is not necessarily bound to or determined by these contingencies in the long run.46 Although the physical site and the social/ institutional site of the installation remain relevant, they are immediately and

46 | Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, 29.

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consequentially subverted. The discursive site thus dominates over the physical and the institutional ones. Crucially, the art historical and conceptual turn towards the discursive meaning of site can in similar ways be observed in other fields of art and art experience, as I will later discuss in relation to Minimalism and the white cube. As Kwon observes, “the site of action or intervention (physical) and the site of effects/reception (discursive) are … pulled apart.”47 This process of separating the physical and the discursive is one manifestation of what I understand to be a broader tendency, namely the separation of the phenomenal and aesthetic, on the one hand, from the conceptual and discursive, on the other. This separation shapes the conceptualization and experience of the art/commerce phenomena discussed in this book. The following analysis of Prada Marfa in relation to its discursive location will uncover an outstanding example of how contemporary art negotiates this delimitation of art in aesthetic and institutional terms. Prada Marfa takes up strategies of subversion that have been used by Minimalist art and ­site-specific practices to question and push the categories of art aesthetically. Moreover, the pavilion also strongly engages with the visual and critical discourse of the white cube. Yet, while taking part in strategies that subvert the categories of art, P ­ rada Marfa simultaneously positions itself squarely within this discursive realm.

D iscursive S ite S pecificit y I: P rada M arfa and the W hite C ube Prada Marfa is site-specific particularly in terms of its discursive location: the in­stal­lation is an example of the expansion of site-specific works to i­n­­clude all kinds of locations and discourses. In particular, the installation in­vokes the historical and theoretical discourse of art. Through its closeness to ­Marfa, but s­i­gni­­fi­cantly also through a rich array of art historical references, the ­installation is situated in an art historical and art critical discourse that finds a moment of temporal and spatial coalescence in Marfa. Prada Marfa also ­refers to the discourse of consumer capitalism, and more specifically to luxury consumer goods and fashion, as well as their “cultures of display.” While we see that all three dimensions of site specificity—locational, s­ocial/institu­tional, and discursive—are taken up in the work, it is the discursive dimension that is most elaborate. This becomes most obvious when we take a closer look at the art historical references of Prada Marfa. For one, as we have seen, the work is deeply engaged in the discourse on site specificity. According to Miwon Kwon, this self-referential interrogation of site specificity can also function as a dis47 | Ibid., 29.

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cursive site.48 Secondly, Prada Marfa employs the standard format of art presentation, the white cube. And thirdly, Prada Marfa is highly reminiscent of Minimalism, and in particular of Donald Judd’s works, a number of which are exhibited nearby. Prada Marfa’s use of symmetry plays with the idea of cuboid forms, which is also a recurring theme in Judd’s works. The front wall is divided into two surfaces: the upper half is made of adobe painted white, while the lower one is a window front, itself divided in two by the glass entry door. As a result, the building can be visually partitioned into four cuboids. Each section bears the Prada logo: on the bottom of the two upper cuboids it is subtitled with ­Marfa; on each of the two marquees that stretch down into the lower cuboids of the shop windows, Prada stands alone. Here, again, we find that the tension ­between art and commerce is upheld even in the details of the installation— each cuboid form corresponds to one Prada logo. The significance of cuboid forms goes even further, for the white adobe structure in itself is a white cube, which in turn houses two small, literal white cubes that function as exhibition furniture, with one box on each side of the space. These elements, too, are ­highly reminiscent of Minimalist sculpture and of Minimalism’s appropriation in furniture design, as I will discuss later on.49 With its emphasis on cuboid forms, Prada Marfa visually relates to the presentation formats that have become standard in both art and commerce. Whether in the institutional realm of art or in the realm of commerce, these forms are meant to channel a more intense focus on the exhibited objects and a more immediate perception of their phenomenal qualities. The standardization of this format of presentation in both art and commerce has reached a level at which it is difficult to decide whether museums have become commercialized or shops have become musealized. In other words, some of the confusion that Prada Marfa provokes stems from the fact that the white cube is the primary exhibition format for art, but has also become widespread in some commercial segments. Prada Marfa looks like a gallery and a boutique at the same time not least because galleries and boutiques have come to look alike. The cuboid forms of the pavilion, as well as its white walls and sparse exhi­ bits are reminiscent of the interiors of the standard modern museum as well as of many contemporary museums and galleries. Interestingly, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (located, as we already know, at about 1837 miles from Marfa) is generally credited with internationally establishing the practice of displaying art in the so-called white cube.50 Alfred Barr, the museum’s first 48 | Ibid., 28. 49 | See Images 1, 3, and 5, pages 29, 37, and 63. 50 | Christoph Grunenberg, “The Modern Art Museum,” in Contemporary Cultures of Display, ed. Emma Barker (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1999), 26.

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director and likely the most influential individual in the history of the reception of modern art in the US, together with Philip Johnson, his friend and later the first head of the MoMA’s architecture department, pioneered this development. Both had experienced avantgarde exhibition design during their travels in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Impressed particularly by German Surrealism, Dada, and Bauhaus practices, Barr and Johnson selected elements of these exhibition techniques to initiate a radical departure from earlier exhibition practices in the US (as exemplified by the famous 1913 Armory Show). Adopting contemporary avantgarde methods, the new exhibition design eliminated skying (the vertical hanging of paintings), and placed the paintings at eye level, further apart from each other, and on neutral (chiefly white, off white, or light grey) surfaces. The paintings were also no longer arranged symmetrically or by size, but rather chronologically or thematically. After an initial phase of experimentation in which different exhibition designs were tried out, the MoMA institutionalized this type of innovative exhibition design, a process that was mostly complete by the 1960s.51 This exhibition practice has since ­remained standard in most museums and galleries. In his famous 1976 essays, Brian O’Doherty coined the term “white cube” for this type of exhibition design. At the time, O’Doherty was writing against the background of his own and other artists’ negotiations in post-Minimal and Conceptual Art, which were carried out particularly in the mode of institutional critique. O’Doherty suggested that this “white, ideal space ... more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth century art.”52 Indeed, the first and most persistent image that comes to mind when we think of modern and contemporary art is still the white, airy, well-lit, spacious white cube. As Charlotte Klonk summarizes her detailed discussion of the history of art gallery interiors in the last 200 years: “Where do such developments leave modern art galleries at the turn of the twentieth century? The most striking aspect is that modern art galleries are now remarkably similar on the inside.”53 They are all, to a lesser or greater degree, white cubes.54 51 | A major change in MoMA’s exhibition practice, which until the 1950s included more experimental exhibition designs, occurred in 1953, when the transition from constatly changing collections to a permanent collection was made. This policy change ­m anifested itself in the opening of the first permanent MoMA exhibition in 1958. 52 | Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space ­(Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 14. 53 | Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven; New York: Yale University Press, 2009), 195. 54 | I am grateful to Jasmin Jouhar, whose thesis provided valuable insights for my discussion of the white cube: Jasmin Jouhar, Eine Architektur der Reinheit: Der White Cube und die Strategien seiner künstlerischen Analyse (Berlin: Grin, 2005).

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Why did this particular exhibition design become the international standard for decades to come? The reason might be that with this kind of presentational style, the museum (or gallery) presented itself as the “other” of mass consumer capitalism, while at the same time also being an expression of the liberal market ideology at the very core of this system. We can better understand this ambivalent character of the white cube by looking at the fundamental change it effects on both the artwork and the spectator. For the individual artwork, the white cube, with its white walls, artificial and equal lighting, and ample exhibition space, provides an architecturally “neutral” space in which the work has space to breathe. The white cube effectively puts the individual works at a distance both from each other and from the outside world; they become important in their own right as singular, autonomous aesthetic creations. In his critical discussion, O’Doherty maintains that this spatial and temporal removal of the exhibited objects from real life is the ultimate goal of the white cube. It makes sure that “art exists in a kind of eternity of display.”55 The white cube frees the artworks from their social and temporal context and thus plays a crucial role in positioning artworks in the supposedly autonomous, separate, timeless sphere of modern art. Modern art, with its emphatic notion of autonomous art, is therefore fundamentally linked to this type of exhibition space. The white cube is the material equivalent of the idea that art is an auto­nomous aesthetic sphere; it is the physical manifestation of this discursive space. This physical and discursive separation from other spheres of life may be understood as providing a neutral space and the critical distance necessary for experiencing the modern work of art. However, O’Doherty and critics in his wake have pointed out that by isolating the work from society, this supposedly neutral space in fact reinforces dominant power structures: “The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values.”56 The artwork ­enters a realm of art that appears self-contained, disinterested, and removed from social realities. The mechanisms of social production and reproduction, the social and historical circumstance under which the works were created,57 and the mechanisms of social exclusion and accumulated cultural capital are not addressed. Yet all of these factors influence which works get to be presen­ ted, which audience gets to see these works, and how the works are perceived. 55 | O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15. 56 | Ibid., 14. 57 | This view is voiced in particular by Marxist critics. For example: Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as late capitalist ritual: An iconographic ­a nalysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1, no. 4, (Winter 1978): 28-51.

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According to O’Doherty and later critics, the white cube is an institutional space that preserves social power structures and conventions by appealing to supposedly transcendental values, not unlike the church or the courtroom.58 The white cube separates artworks from their social context—what Philip ­Fisher later terms “effacement”59 —and thus reinforces the decontextualizing tendencies of museums in general and of modern art in particular. At the same time, the white cube presents itself not as a new space, but as a non-place, a neutral space. It not only appears to be universal and transcendental, it also dissimulates the act of decontextualization that is its crucial characteristic: the white cube actualizes and at the same time naturalizes the modernist discourse of aesthetic autonomy. While it allows the work of art to appear as an autonomous, singular creation, it simultaneously pretends to be nothing more than a neutral environment in which the work’s supposedly ­inherent quality can come to fruition. To a significant degree, the prominence of the white cube hinges on this double act of effacement.60 By effacing the social context of the works as well as the very work of this effacement, the white cube phenomenally and discursively separates itself from the everyday world outside. I would like to argue that it is, in fact, specifically the commercial world that the white cube effaces. In this sense, the white cube is a “heterotopic” space. According to Michel Foucault, heterotopias are spaces that “are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.”61 Like utopias, heterotopias are linked to other spaces of society yet contradict them: they “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set

58 | In his introduction to the 1986 (and 1999) edition of O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube, Thomas McEvilley explains: “The white cube’s ultimate meaning is this ­life-erasing transcendental ambition, disguised and converted to specific social purposes. O ­ ’Doherty’s essays in this book are defenses of the real life of the world against the sterilized operating room of the white cube—defenses of time and change against the myth of the eternality and transcendence of pure form.” O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 12. 59 | Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of ­M useums (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1997). 60 | “The white cubes owes its success to this strategy of effacement and simultaneous self-negation: highlighting the inherent (that is, formal) qualities of a work of art though the neutralization of its ortiginal context and content while, at the same time, remaining itself virtually invisible and thus obscuring the process of effacement.” G ­ runenberg, “The Modern Art Museum,” 31. 61 | Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27, 24.

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of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”62 In contrast to utopias, however, heterotopias are real places with an actual geographic location, such as the museum—and, I argue, the white cube exhibition format in particular. Following Foucault’s logic, the autonomous white cube space and the commercial space are one another’s “other.” What is crucial about the white cube therefore is not only that it is the physical manifestation of a modernist discourse on the autonomy of art. Even more, we can understand the success of the white cube to be a consequence of its function as a paradigmatic counter-model to mass consumer culture, a culture that has come to permeate most other spheres of society. Foucault suggests that there are several modes in which a heterotopia oper­ ates in relation to its “other”: as representation, as contestation, as inversion, as suspicion, and as neutralization. He does not strongly differentiate between these modes, yet I would suggest that for the white cube, the particular function does make a difference. Of the modes listed above, the modernist white cube employs two in particular. Firstly, the white cube appears to be the neutralization of its commercial other. At the same time, however, it is but a mere inversion. Art has never been completely independent from commercial considerations because most of it is meant to be sold, collected, exhibited, or in any other way circulated on some sort of market. However, the critique of the white cube’s modernist ideology understands art as not incidentally but quintessentially commercial. The white cube and its critique thus engage the difficult question of the autonomy of art from commercial objectives, which is one of the core issues of this book. Much in line with Brian O’Doherty’s earlier critique, Douglas Crimp points out that “[t]he real material condition of modern art, masked by its pretense to universality, is that of the specialized luxury commodity.”63 In this reading, ­rather than being a neutralization, the white cube is a heterotopic inversion of commodity culture. As we will see, it has over time even become its re­pre­ sentation. In yet another inverse gesture, the white cube and the com­mercial boutique become less opposites than counterparts, one built in the ­other’s ­image, one adapting the other’s mode of functioning. The immense success of the white cube concept in the design of fashion boutiques, which I will later discuss in more detail, can be attributed to this particular tension between the commercial and its other which the white cube creates and ­upholds. In short, the special status of the white cube as “heterotopia” is unthinkable without the looming presence of what it pretends not to be: a commercial endea­vor. In

62 | Ibid. 63 | Douglas Crimp and Louise Lawler, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, [1993] 2000), 155.

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claiming the absence of its “other,” the white cube simultaneously evokes its presence. This ideological power of the white cube does not manifest itself simply in space; it can also be conceived of as exerting a particular subjectivizing function on the spectator. Here, we find a strong opposition between the modernist perspective on and the postmodernist revisionist re-evaluation of the white cube. The white cube can, on the one hand, be understood as the perfect envi­ron­ment for a concentrated experience of modern art, which can function in a positively individualizing and empowering way. This very experience of an auto­nomous art in an autonomous sphere can, on the other hand, also be understood as a process of conditioning executed by a subjectivizing ideological apparatus, generating a particular kind of viewing subject. Mary Anne Staniszewski considers the white cube exhibition format as closely linked to the notion of the subject as an independent and autonomous individual as it is prevalent in a modern, North American, liberal democracy: “This aestheticized, autonomous, seemingly ‘neutral’ exhibition method created an ­e ­­­xtremely accommodating ideological apparatus for the reception of modernism in the United States, where the liberal democratic ideal of the autonomous, independent indi­v idual born to natural rights and free will is the foundation of the mythology of the American dream.”64

Understanding the white cube as an experience space that is conducive to the creation of a certain type of individual in line with a liberal democratic and capitalist culture does not necessarily have to be considered in negative terms. In the perspective of institutional criticism, however, the framing and isolation of the individual work of art mirrors the isolation and ideological conditioning of the individual spectator through modern art. The white cube thus functions as a decontextualizing space on the cultural, the social, and the individual level. The crucial point of critique put forth by O’Doherty and others from the 1970s onwards is therefore not simply aimed against the commercial character of art—as object, as space, as sphere. Neither is this criticism simply based on the fact that art is part of capitalist consumer culture. Rather, the critique specifically addresses how the white cube turns a blind eye towards its own ideological and commercial function. This critique thus implicitly asks for a higher degree of critical self-reflexivity. Emergent postmodernist practices in the 1970s self-reflexively put these phenomenal and discursive dimensions of the white cube on the table. Its hetero­topic and self-effacing function becomes subject to negotiation; the gal-

64 | Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 70.

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lery space “joins the picture plane as a unit of discourse.”65 The white cube is no longer neutral; it becomes part of the artwork. It moves into the viewer’s field of vision and at the same time becomes part of the discursive dimension of the work. The self-effacement of the white cube is put into question particularly by installation art, interactive art practices, and site-specific works. Artists like ­Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler and Vito Acconci (who are commonly grouped together as practitioners of institutional critique) have brought into view the phenomenal and discursive presence and function of the exhibition space, thus undermining its self-effacing pretense of neutrality. All of these approaches make clear that the white cube, like any other form of presentation, is not neutral but influences how works are presented and perceived. In effect, this puts the relation between art and commerce right on the ­table. As O’Doherty puts it: “With postmodernism, the gallery space is no longer ‘neutral.’ The wall becomes a membrane through which esthetic and commercial values osmotically exchange. As this molec­u lar shudder of the white walls becomes perceptible, there is a further inversion of context. The walls assimilate; the art discharges. How much can the art do without?”66

What remains art, and what art remains, we might ask, once the white cube has been ­demasked, and once the heterotopia has been lost? This is one of the fundamental questions that Prada Marfa poses. The pavilion is both an exhibition and an exhibit that stands outside of the traditional museum and gallery contexts. Simultaneously, the pavilion itself creates the paradigmatic exhibition context of the white cube in order to present Prada shoes and bags. As O’Doherty observes in regard to the modernist white cube, “So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status. Conversely, things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them. …”67

For O’Doherty, the modernist white cube is what turns works into artworks. Prada Marfa uses this ideological function of the white cube. However, this use of the white cube in the Prada Marfa pavilion turns out to be complex and ambiguous: it stands between the self-reflexive subversion of the white cube’s ideological function from within the discourse of art, on the one hand, and the

65 | O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 39. 66 | Ibid., 79. 67 | Ibid., 14f.

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appropriation of the white cube aesthetic in the commercial context of fashion boutiques, on the other. From the perspective of a stable modernist aesthetics, in which the white cube’s framing power is still untouched, the consumer objects in Prada Marfa are not displayed instead of art; they are art. As O’Doherty suggested, the emergence of postmodernist practice has changed the situation by demasking the ideological force of the white cube. However, in spite of the undermining of the white cube by postmodernist artists, its allure remains largely untrammeled, as most museums and galleries show. Even more interestingly, the aesthetic of the white cube has also entered the commercial realm. The pavilion we see on the side of the road therefore looks just like a boutique not in spite of, but exactly because of its strong references to the white cube. The commercial realm has fully entered the art space. Or is it the art sphere that has entered the commercial sphere? The inversion of contexts that O’Doherty talks about has become an endless loop, the inside and the outside of the white cube are in constant “osmosis,” and it becomes increasingly dif­ ficult to tell which is which. The walls have assimilated. It is therefore difficult to consider Prada Marfa and its play with the white cube only in phenomenal or formal terms. We cannot tell by the looks of the installation whether it is a gallery or a boutique, a heterotopic art space or a commercial space, an artwork or a retail store. This indecision is a consequence of the white cube’s loss of ideological power in the sphere of art; its spatial and institutional framing does not function anymore. When the artificially excluded commercial context enters the white cube, this effects a change in the theory and practice of art. It opens art towards what it has formerly pretended to exclude.

M oving around in S pace : M inimalism The problematic tension between aesthetic autonomy and commercial function that is present in the white cube can also be found in Minimalism, whose canonization coincided with the international success of the white cube. The emphasis of this three-dimensional art on new modes of perception seemed to demand large white spaces rather than the formats of exhibition that had been common before.68 While there is as yet little analysis of historical ties between the two practices, there is a strong case to made for the argument that Minimalism and the white cube were closely related in terms of aes­t hetics and perception. As we will shortly see in more detail, this art movement is also P ­ rada 68 | See, for example, an interview with Robert Smithson, quoted in Meyer, M ­ inimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 18.

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­ arfa’s second reference to the discourse of art and art history. ­Before anaM lyzing the exhibition’s references to Minimalism, I will sketch out the ­major aspects of this art practice and its importance for the argument presented in this book. In the early 1960s, Minimalism—which was then also called Primary ­Structures, Specific Objects, or ABC art—was part of a highly varied set of experimental art practices that also included Pop Art. Labels had not yet been given and boundaries were difficult to draw. As painter Larry Poons recalled, “for a few moments, everything existed on the same walls, and it was fine.”69 In the course of the 1960s, the label “Minimalism” developed and came to include diverse practical and theoretical approaches to the making of art.70 They ranged from works such as Frank Stella’s and Ad Reinhardt’s painterly abstraction, to Robert Morris’s and Donald Judd’s sculpture/objects; from Anne Truitt’s expres­sionist sculpture to Carl Andre’s serial works; and finally, to conceptual work like Sol LeWitt’s and Dan Flavin’s installations with fluorescent light. Minimalism was far from being a unified answer to its art historical forerunner, Abstract Expressionism. Yet Minimalist works did have in common their move away from Action Painting’s gestural expressionism and towards simple geometric abstraction, as well as their departure from Abstract Expressionism’s emphasis on painting in favor of three-dimensionality.71 Donald Judd expressed the complex relation of Minimalist practice to Abstract Expres­ sionism, insisting on calling his and his colleagues’ works “neither painting nor sculpture” but “specific objects” or “three-dimensional work.”72 Judd thus refused to be integrated into either the pictorial or the sculptural tradition, choosing instead to concentrate on the actual materiality of the objects, on what came to be called their literalness. While concrete manifestations varied with each artist, we can generalize that most Minimalist work stood in a specific dialectical tension with the values of Abstract Expressionist art. The fundamental change of values in art becomes particularly vivid in Irving Sandler’s account of the early 1960s art scene. He recalls the massive 69 | Quoted in Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 45. 70 | The most important exhibitions in this development were New Work: Part I at Green Gallery in 1963, which showed works by Judd, Morris, Flavin, and other artists; solo shows by Robert Morris (1963), Donald Judd (1963), Anne Truitt (1964), Dan Flavin (1964), and Sol LeWitt (1965); Black, White, and Grey in 1964, and Primary Structures in 1966. 71 | Anne Truitt can be considered an exception here, standing against the decisive ­a nti-subjective notion of Minimalist practice with an individualist, expressionist position in her work. 72 | Donald Judd, “Specific Objects.” in Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 181.

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opposition of the Abstract Expressionist “coterie” to the emerging avantgarde, exemplified here in the work of Frank Stella. For those who upheld Abstract Expressionist values in art—in particular the values of Action Painting, or as Sandler calls it, gestural painting, which had been championed by Harold Rosenberg—Stella’s geometric abstractions appeared devoid of aesthetic value, for they were “something other than expressive, authentic, significant, and contemporary.”73 Clearly, this critique was aimed against the turn of Minimalist work away from artistic subjectivity and individual expression, and from what Barbara Rose called “the self-indulgence of an unbridled subjectivity,” towards a more impersonal approach.74 In stark opposition to Abstract Expressionism, most strongly to Action Painting but also to the Color Field painters’ transcendental brushwork, Mini­ malism’s huge, mostly monochrome geometric objects and canvases manifested personal detachment and a lack of affect. They bore no traces of the artist’s struggle or the process of creation; their clean edges and materials disclaimed any intervention of the artist’s hand. Minimalist objects were actually often prefabricated units. Rosenberg therefore called the Minimalist approach a “deliberately dehumanized” and “fundamentalist aesthetics.”75 In line with Rosenberg’s view, Sandler labeled Minimalism—together with Pop art and in opposition to the earlier “romanticism” in art—the “cool-art.”76 The role of the individual artist changed from inspired creator to conceptual developer. When discussing Minimalism in his “Recentness of Sculpture,” Clement Greenberg acknowledged that Minimalism followed a formalist, avantgardist logic, superseding the probing of art’s boundaries in painting by moving into the third dimension.77 The formalist reduction we can observe in Minima­list art, could, in fact, be read as an extreme intensification of the ­Greenbergian narrative of formalist abstraction. Minimalism’s focus on monochrome geometric shapes and objects did away with almost everything that might be 73 | Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 2. 74 | Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 280. 75 | Harold Rosenberg, “Defining Art,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 303f. 76 | Irving Sandler, “The New Cool-Art,” Art in America 53, no. 1 (1965): 96-101. 77 | “Given that the initial look of non-art was no longer available to painting, since even an unpainted canvas now stated itself as a picture, the borderline between art and non-art had to be sought in the three-dimensional, where sculpture was, and where every­t hing material that was not art also was. Painting had lost the lead because it was so ineluctably art, and it now devolved on sculpture or something like it to head art’s ad­­vance.” Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical ­A nthology­, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 182.

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considered inessential in art. Minimalist objects were clear and simple, ­utterly non-illusionist, reduced to their “presence” in space (as, for example, ­Greenberg ascribed to Truitt’s work).78 If Greenberg proposed formalist reduction as an intrin­ sic principle of the historical development of art, Minimalist artists appar­ently took this up and pushed it to the extreme. However, Greenberg’s formalism necessarily also included a strong notion of the individual and his or her personal artistic experience and authenticity, which precluded the critic’s support for Minimalism. Accordingly, Greenberg considered the Minimalist avantgarde to be too thought out and not authentically experienced enough. For this reason, he dismissed Minimalism’s conceptual, intellectual approach, which was engendered by artists who had mostly had academic training, and who published criticism on behalf of their own and their colleague’s art rather than depending on the authority of the art critic.79 According to Greenberg, although Minimalism appeared to be avantgardist, it was too conceptual and too conscious, which undermined the authenticity of its avantgardism.80 Greenberg’s critique of this alleged over-intellectualism of the Minima­ list approach was closely linked to his observation that a shift from aesthetic experience to phenomenal experience was taking place in Minimalism, and, moreover, a shift towards commodification and commercialization. Aesthetic experience for Greenberg was an integrated visual experience in which present surprise and former experience closely interacted. Aesthetic experience had to be unconfined temporally: “aesthetic surprise hangs on forever.”81 Greenberg therefore criticized Minimalism, arguing that it offered a short-lived “pheno­ menal” experience with only a momentary effect that failed to involve the spectator more effectively. Shallow as this experience appeared to him, it relegated Minimalism to the realm of “Good Design” and brought it on the verge of commercial commodity status. In summary, both major art critics of the time, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, criticized the new developments they observed and which, according to Rosenberg, had been “spoken of disdainfully as a matter of course” 78 | The following discussion of Greenberg’s critique of Minimalism is based on his ­e ssay, ibid. 79 | Likely the most important essays in this regard were Judd’s “Specific Objects” (1965) and Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” (1966). See Donald Judd, “Specific ­O bjects” and Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. ­G regory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1966] 1995). 80 | “The geometrical and modular simplicity may announce and signify the artistically furthest-out, but the fact that the signals are understood for what they want to mean betrays them artistically.” Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 183f. 81 | Ibid., 184.

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only a few years earlier.82 In their view, Minimalism propelled the professionalization and the commercialization of the artist and approximated this art to design and commerce. From the perspective of our discussion, what Greenberg and Rosenberg were criticizing can be read as an instance of the ambiguous nature of avantgardist endeavors in postwar American art. In the course of avantgardist efforts to question and push the values and categories of art, Mini­ malist art effectively opened itself to the commercial sphere, even without the explicit intention of undermining the autonomy of art. Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s criticism suggest that Minimalism marked a radical shift in values from the Abstract Expressionist paradigm that preceded it. If the “old” Abstract Expressionist values did not hold anymore, what were the new values? In his Greenbergian formalist critique of Minimalism, Michael Fried succinctly summarized some core aspects of Minimalist aesthetics. His famous essay “Art and Objecthood” relabeled Minimalism as “lit­ e­r­alism,” which was to say that the paintings or objects were “experienced as nothing more than objects.” In Fried’s view, this was exactly what literalist art aspired to, as opposed to modernist painting, which found it “imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood.” Minimalist objects presented “wholeness,” “singleness,” and “indivisibility,” (or “the holistic,” “non-relational,” and “unitary”). Literalist art was not a compositional pictorial technique; instead, shape belonged to the object, defined it, and even was the object itself.83 This phenomenal existence of the object was the central characteristic of Minima­ list aesthetics and theory. While Fried’s discussion of Minimalism’s aesthetic approach captures many of its major aspects, for him these aesthetic values ultimately were not values at all. Rather, they primarily presented the “absence of anything beyond itself” in Minimalism.84 A cube was a cube was a cube. And for Fried, this was not enough. Fried’s formalist critique pinpointed the fundamental change in orientation that Minimalism was introducing. Where Greenberg had located Minimalism’s questionable aspiration to avantgardism in its closeness to non-art objects, Fried took the critique a step further. The crux of literal art, for Fried, lay not just in its avowed objecthood, but in the theatrical effect of its literalness: “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art.”85 For Fried, theatricality meant the kind of experience constituted by not only the ­object 82 | Harold Rosenberg, “Action Painting: Crisis and Distortion,” in The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), 40. 83 | Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. ­G regory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 119f; 129. 84 | Ibid., 143. 85 | Ibid., 125.

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but also the whole “situation” and the actions of the spectator. Minimalist art needed the spectator; “inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him.”86 Minimalist artists themselves supported this view. Robert Morris in particular brought attention to the context in which objects were perceived: “One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context.”87 Both Greenberg and Fried utterly rejected this emphasis on the performative process that took place in space and time between every single spectator and the object in question. In their opposition to this type of experience, Greenberg and Fried were in effect defending a modernist notion of art, based on the autonomous artwork and its producer, against an emerging phenomenological aesthetics of reception. With Minimalism, phenomenal experience became integral to the very constitution of art—a significant step that extended the borders of art. The new art was not characterized by the expression of an individual’s inner state (Rosenberg’s modernist view), or by a progressive development in formalist abstraction (Greenberg’s modernist view). Now, every single viewer’s experience brought the artwork into being—or not. With Minimalism’s emphasis on the spectator’s subjective experience, the normative function of the critic, as Greenberg and Rosenberg had exerted it, was decisively weakened. Minimalism shifted the emphasis of experience from the artist and the critic to the individual spectator. The artist stepped, so to speak, out of the picture; instead, the viewer became a constitutive part of the work. Contemporary critics like Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Sandler rightly identified the fundamental overturn in aesthetic values that Minimalism instigated. Yet their evaluation of its aesthetic principles and of their relation to commercial culture remains one-dimensional. Minimalism should not only be seen as a paradigm of consumer capitalist logic, an argument that ­Greenberg developed in his “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” essay (and which a few years later was elaborated more thoroughly in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry). Rather, Minimalism’s reductive aesthetic approach offers two modes of relation to commercial culture. Although these modes might appear paradoxical and even mutually exclusive, it is precisely the ongoing tension between them that renders Minimalism important to both the history of art and the history of Western consumer culture. On the one hand, the clean surfaces of Minimalism, purged of illusionism, representation, and even human gesture, could be understood as “a negative art of denial and renunciation,” an abstract art situated at the furthest possible 86 | Ibid., 140 (Fried’s italics). 87 | Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Part II, 232.

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point from assimilation into consumer culture.88 When comparing Minima­ lism to its contemporary, Pop Art, commodification indeed appeared to be at a minimum. On the other hand, the picture presents itself differently when we read Minimalism against the background of the utterly subjectivist painting of Abstract Expressionism. From this view it is clear that not only Pop Art but also Minimalism played a significant role in bringing the relationship between art and commerce to a new peak during the 1960s. With the Minimalist use of industrial materials, as well as readymade and factory-made objects, artistic craft in the traditional sense lost importance. Many Minimalists employed industrial materials such as bricks, plywood, aluminum, plexiglas, styrofoam, light bulbs, and fluorescent lights. Some of the artists had their works fabricated for them by carpenters (Truitt) or factories (Judd). Writing in The New Yorker in 1966, Robert Coates described the contemporary artist as a “designer,” whose work was fabricated by “the lathe and milling machine operators.”89 The clean, impersonal look of many Minimalist works was achieved by methods borrowed from industrial production. This connection allowed Minimalists to distance their work from Abstract Expressionism as well as to produce objects of specific sizes and surfaces. Simultaneously, it put Minimalism into proximity with design: the rise of Minimalist art closely interacted and can even be considered as coextensive with its appropriation in popular culture as the “Minimalist” label and “the minimal look,” particularly in the realms of fashion, product and furniture design, and magazines. This closeness of Minimalism to its commercial appropriation is ap­parent in Donald Judd’s and Robert Morris’s works that were designated as design and furniture products. Judd’s furniture pieces, for example, were later used to furnish the Calvin Klein flagship store that opened in New York in 1995. This change in aesthetic values brought to the fore the dialectical tension that defines Minimalism’s crucial position in art and cultural history. It is this 88 | “But, if Pop Art is the reflection of our environment, perhaps the art I have been describing is its antidote, even if it is a hard one to swallow. In its oversized, awkward, uncompromising, sometimes brutal directness, and in its refusal to participate, either as entertainment or as whimsical, ingratiating commodity (being simply too big or too graceless or too empty or too boring to appeal), this new art is surely hard to assimilate with ease. And it is almost as hard to talk about as it is to have around, because of the art that is being made now, it is clearly the most ambivalent and the most elu­s ive.” Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock ­(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 296f. Also: “Minimalist surfaces seem to offer a renewed vision, innocent of commodification.” David Joselit, American Art since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 112. 89 | “The Art Galleries,” The New Yorker, 21 May 1966. Quoted in Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 22.

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same tension that will also help us to grasp the complex contemporary relation between spaces of art and spaces of commerce. In his book The Return of the Real, Hal Foster proposes the idea of “the crux of minimalism,” which he understands to be the simultaneous completion and overcoming of the forma­ list modernist endeavor. I want to extend this crux to include Minimalism’s ambivalent turn towards both the phenomenal experience and the conceptual definition of art. In artistic practice as in writing, Minimalism pushed to the extremes the Greenbergian idea of formal abstraction. With its simple geometric shapes and monochrome surfaces, as well as with the development of the creative artist into a conceptual developer, Minimalism proposed an art that was strongly reductive and self-reflexively engaged in the formalist discourse of art. Simultaneously, Minimalism realized the formalist project of simplification to the extent that its status as art was questioned. In their simplicity, Minimalist objects possessed an artlessness that put them close to “the world of things.”90 In fact, Minimalism was often accused of not being art, or “not-art-enough,”91 both in terms of production and in terms of perception. Yet, although Minimalist art stood on the verge of non-art, it was still squarely and deliberately part of the discourse of art. This becomes obvious when we clarify the idea of non-art, which should not be mistaken simply for everything that is not art. Art and non-art should be understood as mutually and historically contingent: they relate to each other in inverse, but not complementary, terms. Non-art is not a residual category, but rather a specific term dependent on the values of art at the time. We can therefore understand non-art as those products and practices that latch onto the discourse of art, but do not sufficiently comply with the values characteristic of art at that point in time. One of the most famous instances of such non-art was Duchamp’s placement of a urinal as an object entitled Fountain in the 1917 Society of ­Independent Artists exhibition in New York. By signing it (with a pseudonym) and positioning it in the context of an art exhibition, Duchamp’s object entered the discourse of art. However, the object’s characteristics did not correspond with the dominant values of art at the time and were therefore insufficient for the o ­ bject to join the ranks of art objects. Only retroactively, validated by increasingly more practices that referred to his discursive intervention, did Duchamp’s ready­mades b ­ e­come part of the realm of art. In the course of this inclusion of non-art into art, the boundaries of art were redefined.92

90 | Rose, “ABC Art,” 292. 91 | Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 3. 92 | This specific interaction between Duchamp and the 1960s avantgarde, which ­r elied on each other in order for their art-historical significance to come to full fruition, is crucial to Hal Foster’s vindication of the neo-avantgardes, which he considers as

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Image 4: Undermining the discourse of art

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica 1964. Porcelain, 360 x 480 x 610 mm (unconfirmed) © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002.

Similarly, Minimalist art followed the rules of a formalist modernist d ­ is­­course while at the same time pushing these rules to their extremes. Minimalism developed in a dialectical tension with Abstract Expressionism and thus latched onto the contemporary discourse of art. However, it also (re)introduced a notion of objectness that strongly undermined this discourse’s governing values. By emphasizing the objectness of objects and producing works using industrial processes of production, Minimalism thus undermined the paradigms of both reception and production. The critiques against Minimalist art were comprehensible reactions against this unsettling of established values. Minimalism simultaneously hypostatized and undermined the modernist idea of autonomous art. Minimalism incorporated a set of interrelated dialectical tensions, which brought attention to several contesting values in art. For one, as we have seen, the aesthetic value of non-art, of objecthood, stands in contrast to the formalist values of reduction as composition. Foster calls this the tension between the transgressive and the formalist avantgarde, and we find influences of both in more than merely a postmod­e rnist repetition or reminiscence. Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.

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Minimalism. Second, this tension between art and non-art is closely related to the tension between the autonomy and the commercialization of art. While Minimalism extrapolated a modernist formalism whose ideal was a total auto­ nomy of art, it also closely approximated commercial forms of production. Moreover, the extension of Minimalism into commercial culture was not simply smooth (this had already been the case for Abstract Expressionism of the late 1950s). Minimalism’s process of becoming visible in American culture was virtually coextensive with its commercial appropriation. Third, and most impor­tantly, the art and discourse of Minimalism brought together an emphasis on phenomenal experience with a discursive conceptualization of art. This tension between the move towards phenomenal experience and the discursive conceptualization of art becomes particularly clear in Susan ­Sontag’s discussions of 1960s art. Probably the most influential proponent of the type of literalist formalism that Michael Fried criticized, Susan Sontag strongly discarded traditional semantic interpretations of art. In her famous essay “Against Interpretation” (1964), she endorsed phenomenal experience instead, focusing on the performative quality of the work rather than on its meaning. Sontag called this quality “transparence,” which she found to be “the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today.”93 In Sontag’s view, interpretation as part of a semantic or formal canon was losing importance. Instead, imme­diate sensual perception—the experience of an aesthetic object in its quality of transparence, which we could also call presence, literalness, objectness, or matter-of-factness—was becoming crucial. This emphasis on experience rather than on the production of meaning was, in effect, a critique of modernist values such as enlightened rationality and instrumental reason, which according to Sontag had led to “massive sensory anesthesia.”94 Against the modernist model of art’s progression towards perfection in form or expression, Sontag posited an aesthetics of immediate, sensory, corporeal experience that could bridge all kinds of traditional distinctions in value: high and low, serious art and kitsch, art and non-art. Sontag thus posited phenomenal experience as an antidote to the dominance of instrumental reason. It was also an alternative to the major Hegelian notions of art as moving through a linear progression of formalist reduction and towards a historical moment of overcoming its aesthetic determination. One year after publishing “Against Interpretation,” Sontag further exten­ ded these ideas in “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” which developed 93 | “Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing itself, of things being what they are.” Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 13. 94 | Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 302.

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a more detailed picture of the form and function of contemporary art. In this ­later essay, it becomes obvious that the move towards phenomenal experience is more ambivalent than it might have seemed at first. Although her emphasis on immediate experience carried the potential for an expansive, strongly pluralistic notion of art, we should not overlook Sontag’s discursive framing of this expe­r ience. For her, perceiving objects in this mode of experience was something that had to be learned, and which demanded “an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering.”95 For Sontag, the new sensibility was not simply there; it was an educational goal to which artists were to aspire with their work, self-consciously referring to art history and becoming art critics themselves. Minimalist artists met this educational imperative on art largely through their writing. Accordingly, the mutually defining relation between discourse and practice reached a new level here.96 Although the “new sensibility” searched for a way out of the constraints of rationality, this process fundamentally depended on a sound understanding of the discursive background of art. The tension between the phenomenal and the discursive culminates in the conceptualization of contemporary art that Sontag presented in her 1967 ­essay “The Aesthetics of Silence.”97 Sontag calls “silence” the new standard of contemporary art: art’s means and effects are incrementally reduced in a progressive development towards silence, leading to a rupture in dialogue with the audience. Sontag understands this search for silence as an artistic attempt to break out of the constraints of historical consciousness, as a “mythic project of total liberation.” This gesture aspires to an ideal of freedom through the total renunciation of communication between the artist/artwork and the audience. Art could thus reach a state of opaque, impenetrable “plenitude,” which would constitute the total autonomy of art. In contrast to the implications of 95 | Ibid., 295. 96 | This is exactly what Harold Rosenberg criticized when he complained that “the rule applied is: The less there is to see, the more there is to say … No mode in art has ever had more labels affixed to it by eager literary collaborators … No art has ever been more dependent on words than these works pledged to silent materiality.” Harold Rosenberg, “Defining Art,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: ­U niversity of California Press, 1995), 306. 97 | Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Aspen, no. 5+6 (1967). http://www. ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#sontag. All of these essays are about contemporary art—Minimalism as much as Pop Art—as well as contemporary literature, film, and dance. I will discuss them in the context of Minimalism, and return to them again in regard to Pop Art, because they shed a particularly clear light on the “crux of Minimalism.”

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“Against Interpretation” and to Sontag’s earlier suggestion that “transparence” was the highest value of contemporary art, this later approach seems to follow a ­Hegelian trajectory of art towards a point at which art comes to its end, self-contained in its philosophical fulfillment. I would like to suggest that this paradox between “transparence” a­nd ­“silence” ex­presses a general tension between the ideal of a discursive auto­­ nomy of art and the act of perception that constitutes art. Sontag’s work thus sheds light on a defining tension in Minimalism, which on the one hand moves the constitution of art decisively towards the side of the recipient, while on the other hand engaging with a notion of autonomy that is based on a discursive closing off of art from the recipient. We have seen that formalist narratives of Minimalism, whether critical or supportive, emphasized the reductive tendencies of Minimalist objects and paintings. These formalist approaches relied heavily on the construction of an art discourse, which provided a conceptual background for the contemporary art form in question. On the other hand, we have encountered narratives of Minimalism that could be called phenome­ nological. In these accounts, the main importance of Minimalism lies in its emphasis on immediate, subjective, corporeal experience. Of course, these two narratives are related. Yet, when either of them is pushed to the extreme, we enter a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, through a conceptual history of formalist reduction, art reaches a state of utmost independence from perception: “impenetrability, opaqueness,” and “plenitude.” On the other hand, this art propels a mode of perception based on immediate sensual experience and “transparence.” It therefore depends on an interactive relation with a perceiving subject in order to come into existence (even if the subject, phenomenologically speaking, disappears in this very act of perception). We can see how art deve­ lops into two opposite directions simultaneously: discursive closing off and phenomenal expansion. What in Abstract Expressionism had been the formal (Greenberg) vs. the expressive/individual (Rosenberg) side of art now turns into the poles of conceptual vs. phenomenal. Both of these latter poles put a stronger emphasis on the spectator than on the creator or the object. Minimalism’s particular strategy of pushing the boundaries of art ­be­comes obvious here, and also the effect of precariousness it has on the form and concept of art, effectively blurring the boundaries between contemporary mani­ festations of art and of commerce. The shift in emphasis from the creator and/ or artwork to the spectator’s act of perception results in an aesthetic object that Harold Rosenberg called “the anxious object.” In general, it can no longer be decided whether an object is an art object or not. The discursive background of the artwork in question thus becomes increasingly important, which leads to a professionalization and even an elitization of art. Only someone who under­ stands the discursive history and background can grasp the aesthetic object in its appropriate art context. For others, the aesthetic experience may appear

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­ evoid of meaning, incomprehensible, isolated, or even as a different experid ence altogether. That the concept of aesthetic experience becomes significantly more open in this case depends more on the viewer more than on the object itself.98 Opinions on this development vary. What is democratic openness to some (like Susan Sontag) is “limitless expansion” to others (like Rosenberg). What is praised as aesthetic autonomy on the one hand is criticized as elitist impenetra­ bility on the other. But to all of these critics, it is clear that the importance of Minimalism lies not in its treatment of the object but rather “in its redefinition of art as a relationship between viewers, places, and things.”99 Minimalism’s artis­tic strategies and theoretical interpretations redefine art as being dependent on its conditions of perception. Among these conditions, the function of space as an intermediary between object and viewer is particularly important. This is why the white cube paradigm is crucial for understanding the specific ways in which Minimalism negotiates and pushes the boundaries of art. Since the 1960s, art criticism and theory have been struggling to evaluate the nature of the relationship between the opening and closing of art’s boundaries as it is negotiated in Minimalism. Two strands of interpretation have ­arisen, which are roughly in line with the positions of Sontag and Greenberg/ Fried as sketched out above. One strand consists of the notion of ­Minimalism as an opening towards and inclusion of the spectator, as bringing subject and object together, and as collapsing this modernist difference through a phenomenological approach. In this interpretation, Minimalism’s strategies of pushing the boundaries of art by emphasizing subjective perception have a democratizing effect, extending the experience of art to more people. The other strand understands Minimalism as a late formalist endeavor that presents itself as unified and autonomous, following a Greenbergian formalism of modernist autonomy. This effectively excludes the viewer. Revisionist accounts such as those of Anna Chave or Rosalind Krauss criticize Minimalism as having a normativizing function that is in line with a consumerist and primarily male ideology.100 This critical interpretation of Minimalism points to the ideological function of the modernist notion of autonomy. According to this argument, the

98 | This development warrants a reference to John Dewey’s democratic aesthetics, in which the question of aesthetic experience depends on the attitude of the beholder rather than on specific aesthetic properties of the object. John Dewey, Art as ­E xperi­e nce (New York: Penguin, [1934] 2005). I will elaborate on this view in the next chapter. 99 | Joselit, American Art since 1945, 113. 100 | Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64 (­January 1990): 44-63. Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3-17.

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Minimalist aesthetic presents itself as objective and neutral while effacing its actual ideological function. I have discussed a similar type of criticism of the neutralizing and ­self-effacing function of a modernist aesthetic in my elaborations on the white cube earlier in this chapter. This ambivalence links Minimalism and the white cube on a theoretical as well as a phenomenal, aesthetic level. As Alan Moore points out, the Minimalist aesthetic today is intertwined with the general aesthetic of museums to the degree that the two seem almost identical: “Conceived of as an anti-institutional avant-garde style, Minimalism today is the very mantle of museumicity.”101 While Minimalism thus set out to undermine established categories of art, it has over time become such a category itself, fundamentally shaping the conditions of the reception of art and becoming that which turns a space into a space of art. If the observant reader notices a slight conflation of minimalistic o ­ bjects (as opposed to Minimalist objects, that is, objects closely related to Mini­mal Art rather than just reductive in style) with spaces of exhibition here, let me point out that this is an intended slippage. In fact, Alan Moore addresses this conflation head-on, arguing that “... this art, esthetic and its site of being seen are closely linked. The social space of the art exhibit is conditioned by a particular set of self-reflexive relations between behold/ perceiver, object of art and the space that contains it, relations which were most comprehensively formulated by the Minimalists. This ‘minimalism’ has bled deeply into the nature of the exhibiting space and the habits of attention we pay to art.”102

Functionally and aesthetically, Minimalism is closely related with the white cube paradigm of exhibition: firstly, in regard to the space it engages with; ­secondly, in regard to its closeness to non-art, achieved through objects that later become furnishings (pedestals or seats) for both art spaces and commercial spaces. Conceptually, the two opposing interpretations of Minimalism, either as autonomizing or else as effacing an ideological function, strikingly resemble the criticism of the white cube exhibition design with which it is ­closely inter­ twined. Rather than trying to resolve their dichotomy, however, we should conceive of these tensions as a way to understand the artistic strategies of ­Mini­malism: how they are both transgressive and formalist, both autonomizing and commercializing, and contribute simultaneously to a phenomenal opening and a discursive closing of art. Minimalism pushes the boundaries of 101 | Alan Moore, “The Twilight of Minimalism,” Artnet, 11 August 1997. http://www. artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/moore/moore8-11-97.asp. 102 | Ibid.

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art and under­mines established categories by moving reception and its conditions to the center of attention, by weakening the role of artist and critic, and by establishing a closeness of art objects to industrial methods of production. Thus, Minimalism’s transgressive avantgardism destabilizes the boundaries of art. At the same time, the formalist aspect of Minimalism’s artistic strategies consolidates into new categories of what and how art can be, particularly in terms of the aesthetics and pragmatics of space. This side of Minimalism also supplies a formal repertoire that is easily appropriated by the commercial realm. With these crucial tensions, Minimalism remains pu zzling for interpretations, both in regard to its manifestations in art and its use and citation in the commercial realm. It appears that Minimalism both destabilizes and restabilizes the boundaries of art without ever resolving its internal tensions. These tensions are at the dynamic crux of Minimalism. In upholding rather than resolving these internal dichotomies, Minimalism marks a paradigmatic shift ­towards the postmodern dilemma of art that is still at work today.

D iscursive S ite S pecificit y II: P rada M arfa and M inimalism Prada Marfa refers to Minimalism on the levels of formal, material, and spatial order. Particularly striking is the work’s clear reference to Donald Judd’s work. Among the pieces maintained by the Chinati foundation in Marfa are 15 outdoor works by Judd which consist of concrete blocks with one or two openings, reminiscent of small containers, sheds, or garages. This is a shape we also find in the Prada Marfa building. Although it is approximately four times bigger than Judd’s blocks, it is also a block, made not of concrete but of very similar looking adobe.103 While Prada Marfa is not open like Judd’s blocks, it does make such a visual impression by means of one transparent and one translucent wall. 103 | Adobe is a low-cost building material used primarily by low-income populations in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Southern Europe. Its choice for the construction of Prada Marfa can therefore also be interpreted in terms of its social site specificity on the Mexican-American border. If we consider the possibility that an illegal immigrant might pass by the adobe structure, this certainly opens up an interpretation that gets at the consumerist view from a critical angle and can thoroughly unmask the self-centeredness of this consumerism. However, as I have outlined above, I find that the social dimension of Prada Marfa is at least as cynical as it might be critical, and I therefore choose to focus less on its potential social implications than on its perceptual qualities in relation to the assumed North American consumers who drive by in their cars.

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Image 5: Cuboid forms in Donald Judd’s work in Marfa

Donald Judd, 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980-1984, detail. 2.5 x 2.5 x 5 meters. Permanent collection, the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Photography by Douglas Tuck, 2009. Courtesy of the Chinati Foundation. Art © Judd Foundation/licenced by VAGA, New York, NY.

Image 6: Prada Marfa, lit against sunset

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. Photography © Noel Kerns, 2008.

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A major part of the Prada Marfa pavilion’s front is constituted by a glass shop window. In addition, the rear wall is filled by a backlit showcase. When lit, this showcase dematerializes the back wall of the pavilion and thus references Judd’s open blocks. These formal and structural analogies are not the only refe­rence to Minimalism. Similarly, light and reflec­tion are impor­tant aspects of both Prada ­Marfa and Minimalist art. Dragset and Elmgreen’s storefront and display are not only reminiscent of Judd’s concrete blocks; their interest in reflecting surfaces also brings to mind Judd’s numerous metal boxes, and particularly some of his ­objects exhibited close by, as well as much of Robert Morris’s work. Image 7: Series of Judd’s reflecting aluminum boxes

Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986. 41 x 51 x 72­ inches. Permanent collection, the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Photography by Douglas Tuck, 2009. Courtesy of the Chinati Foundation. Art © Judd Foundation/licenced by VAGA, New York, NY.

Many of Judd’s and Morris’s boxes were made of aluminum, and one of their most inter­esting character­istics is the way they reflect light and their sur­­­rou­nd­ings. A series of Judd’s boxes, 100 untitled works in mill a­ luminum, is part of the Chinati Foundation’s permanent exhibition. Judd worked on dif­­­ferent qualities of reflection by equipping the boxes with internal divid­ ers and by using various reflecting materials and coatings; each method ­­ caused the light to break differently. He thus created what could be ­called re­­ ­­ p­ e­­­ ti­ tion with a difference, but such differences can only be perceived through close interaction with the work.­

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Similarly, reflection is a prominent element of Prada Marfa. The glass window and door of the storefront are transparent; depending on the light and angle of viewing, they reflect their surroundings and the spectator who stands in front of the pavilion. In addition, there are mirrors in the back corners of the space, to either side of the backlit showcase. The reflections produced by the surfaces of the pavilion integrate both the environment in which Prada Marfa is located and the spectator into the work: looking at the installation, the spectator inevitably also looks at the Texas landscape and at him- or herself. In a gesture typical of Minimalism, the spectator and the environment become intrinsic elements of the work—yet another manifestation of what Fried deplored as the theatricality of Minimalism. Image 8: Seriality and reflection in Prada Marfa

Elmgreen & Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005. Photography © Margaret B. Adie, 2010.

The reflecting surfaces of Prada Marfa reference both the emphasis on phe­no­ menal experience and the importance of seriality in Minimalism. The serial manner in which Elmgreen and Dragset arranged the Prada objects on the two cubes and the backlit showcase amounts to a literal repetition with a difference, reminiscent of Judd’s cubes. Single shoes stand side by side on the showcase, and three bags are assembled on each of the two cubes/pedestals. The shoes and bags are of a similar and even identical form, but the products are made of different materials and colors. In these series of repetitions with a difference, the units are not bricks, boxes, or blocks, as in Minimalism, but consumer products: shoes and bags. How does this approach relate to the use of seriality in Minimalism? Mel Bochner opened his seminal 1967 essay by declaring: “Serial order is a m ­ ethod,

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not a style.”104 Seriality had been around well before Minimalism: it had been employed notably in earlier modernist work (starting with works by ­Monet, and then particularly in De Stijl and Bauhaus), as well as in the works of ­Kenneth Noland, Elsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Jasper Johns. However, Minimalist practice, and in particular Donald Judd’s cubes, “suggested a radical new mean­ing for seriality,” as Meyer points out.105 As opposed to many of the earlier approaches, Minimalist seriality was synchronic rather than dia­chronic: its series are part of one artwork, for example of an installation of 4, or 100, cubes that can only be presented together. In contrast, seriality in earlier works often meant the creation of several variations of a theme or object, which did not necessarily have to be exhibited together.106 Image 9: Minimalist seriality in Robert Morris’s work

Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), 1965. Mirrors on wood, 21 x 21 x 21 inches. © Robert Morris/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2013. Courtesy of Sprueth Magers Berlin London/Sonnabend Gallery, New York.

104 | Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1999), 22. Originally published in Artforum 6 (December 1967): 28-33. 105 | Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 172. 106 | This is the difference Bochner suggests between works “in series” and “serial works.” Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” 22f.

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Minimalism’s synchronic approach to seriality went along with its use of industrially produced materials and objects and its movement into three-­dimensional space. Morris’s Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) are a strong example of this use of ­seriality and industrial production. Significantly, this type of seriality was no ­longer based on the artist’s intuition or compositional deliberations, but on mathe­matical order and formulas. The crucial characteristic of Minimalist ­­seriality is thus the elimination of artistic subjectivity—which again amounts to a clear rejection of Abstract Expressionist aesthetic values. Originality and uniqueness were replaced by industrially produced repetition: only with Minimalism did serial industrial production become part of seriality in art. Of the different modes of seriality employed in Minimalism,107 modular repetition is the one that applies most clearly to Prada Marfa. This mode was most often employed by Donald Judd and is the most basic form of seriality, in which “the order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.”108 The critical question in regard to seriality is in what relation it stands to consumer culture. Minimalism’s use of seriality and of industrial materials clearly puts it into conversation with consumer capitalism’s rationalized modes of production. However, critiques of Minimalism that infer from this a simply affirmative stance towards the hegemonic capitalist system account neither for “the specific formal complexities of the work itself,” as Meyer rightly argues,109 nor for what makes this seriality aesthetically interesting to us. For at the core of this serial approach, I would like to suggest, we can again spot the unresolved crux of Minimalism and the specific tension between the phenomenal and the conceptual/discursive. The phenomenal side of Minimalist seriality is emphasized by the insistence on the material, immediate qualities of the work, on its literalness and the attendant refusal to signify beyond itself, and on its synchronic mode presentation, such that a series must be presented in its wholeness and no one item can function metonymically. Serial production and the mode of exhibition influence both the material quality of the objects and the ways in which they are perceived. By presenting the items, for example, Judd’s boxes, in a series, the work is prompting us to experience the material qualities of each single elementand also their synchronic, spatial relation to each other. Seriality in Minimalism thus orients us towards the here and now. And yet, seriality displays an obvious closeness to industrial capitalism. ­A fter all, even if they remain original and mostly singular, these serial works put the very concepts of originality and singularity into question. They are objects that are produced industrially and/or made of industrial materials. ­A 107 | Ibid. 108 | Judd, “Specific Objects,” 184. 109 | Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 184.

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scheme or plan is made in order to design the object and then set up a series of identical or similar ones. The plan is the artistic process. The production of the work is then partly or completely relegated to machines and other people. Minimalist series thus position the artwork in an uneasy closeness to the serial production of consumer products. Here again, there are two interpretations of the Minimalist tension. We can either follow a revisionist view, which understands the formal aspects of a Minimalist work primarily as manifestations of the ideology of consumer capitalism. Rosalind Krauss follows this approach when she points to the paradox between Minimalism’s phenomenological ambitions and its participation in the culture of commodity production. This ideological aspect, according to her, is at work in both the materials and the forms of Mini­ malism, as well as in its use of seriality: “Most crucially, the Minimalist resistance to traditional composition which meant the adoption of a repetitive, additive aggregation of form—Donald Judd’s “one thing after another”—partakes very deeply of that formal condition that can be seen to structure consumer capitalism: the condition that is, of seriality. For the serial condition seals the object away from any condition that could possibly be thought of as original and consigns it to a world of simulacra, of multiples without originals, just as the serial form also structures the object within a system in which it makes sense only in relation to other objects, objects which are themselves structured by relations of artificially produced difference. Indeed, in the world of commodities, it is this difference that is consumed.”110

Krauss notes here the complicated and contradictory relation of Minimalism to consumer capitalism, which is marked by a complex tension between resistance and affirmation that is most apparent in this art’s seriality. Yet, I would suggest that her revisionist view of Minimalism still does not fully conceive of the crucial paradox inherent in Minimalist works. James Sampson Meyer follows an alternative approach, arguing that even though Minimalist seriality and industrial production are not fully in critical resistance to the rationalized modes of capitalist production, neither are they simply affirmative. Rather, for him, every artwork is a negotiation of this tension between affirmation and resistance to capitalist consumer culture, a tension that he describes as a dialectical tension in the very sense of Adorno’s negative dialectics. The Minimalist artwork refuses to be anything but its phenomenal self, contained in its own material reality in time and space. Yet, in this very materiality, it reflexively points back to its character as an industrial product and thus brings the capitalist logic of production into the art world through its serially produced and serially arranged items. To use Meyer’s ­Adornian words, 110 | Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 10.

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“The negative artwork inscribes within its form a social logic that it at once affirms and resists.”111 Judd’s serial boxes refer back to their industrial, serial production and thus give visibility to this type of production. Still, as we have seen earlier, they also make a strong point of refusing to be something beyond their material reality. These two interpretations of Minimalist seriality—as affirmative of or resis­ tant and negative to consumer culture—again bring to the fore the complex tension between the phenomenal and the conceptual approaches to art. Should we experience the work on a phenomenal level, putting our bodies and senses in interaction with its materiality and thus potentially experiencing the work as subjectively empowering? Or should we understand the work primarily in its position relative to and inside of different discourses, and more specifically, the discourse of capitalist production, thus conceiving of it primarily as a form of ideological critique that is at best problematic, and maybe just plain affirmative? Both ways of grasping the work are possible. The real question here is what this ongoing tension between the pheno­ menal and the discursive, between a rather positive and a rather negative ideological evaluation of such works suggests. Rather than resolving this tension, I would like to suggest that it is the element that makes Minimalist seriality and Minimalism in general both aesthetically and cognitively interesting and challenging to us. This tension also marks Minimalism’s special position in cultu­ral history: this position lies in what I have discussed as the crux of Mini­ malism, namely its transitional position between the negative aesthetic of a modernist art (and art theory), and the contemporary situation—we could cautiously call it postmodern—in which the tensions that artistic strategies deal with lie not outside of the sphere of artistic production but in its very core. Minimalism is both the realization and the overcoming of modernism, linger­ ing uneasily between these two historical moments. We can think of it as a modernist aesthetic of negativity, but also as a historical manifestation of an art that is basically coextensive with its commercial instrumentalization. There is a third way in which we can conceive of this crux of Minimalism, this shifting character between the modernist and the postmodernist “state of the art.” It is to think of Minimalism by way of the aesthetic experience it seems to suggest. As we have seen, Minimalism moves the focus away from the artist and the critic towards the spectator. In a similar vein, literary theorist Wolfgang Iser proposes to understand aesthetic experience as an act that is centered in the reader (or spectator, in our case). For him, it is crucial that this e­ xperience generates a constant movement between different ­perspectives, ­between ­ever-unstable positions and counterpositions. If we read Iser’s ­approach through the work of Winfried Fluck, it becomes an alternative 111 | Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 187.

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to the either/or of the Frankfurt School, which either allocates art’s last utopian impulse exclusively in modern, autonomous art, or later radically rejects any negating potential of literature and art in general. Fluck’s alternative approach results in an understanding of aes­ t hetic ­experience that is fundamentally different, namely as a state of constant ­­­in­­betweenness, rather than as an ultimate decision for one position or a stable synthesis of different positions.112 Fluck argues that instead of settling for a static negation of one position in favor of another, Iser’s approach suggests a more fundamental form of negativity in the form of a constant, unstable re­ negotiation that is the function and goal of aesthetic experience. This dynamic state offers a third way, which assumes that an artwork carries both the affirmation and the negation of the discourses in which it is embedded. We can conceive of Iser’s theory of aesthetic experience, which is characterized by continuously changing perspectives and positions, as operating in a highly spatial mode: “As a ‘negating’ structure, suspended in connectivity and, hence, characterized by inde­ terminacy, the literary text can be meaningfully processed only by a movement back and forth between figure and ground that compels the reader to look at the text from constantly reversed angles. These constant perspectival shifts generate ‘distance’ in a far more persistent and systematic way than modernist strategies of negation could.”113

This understanding of the reader’s aesthetic operation on the text, informed by Iser’s reception aesthetics, bears a strong structural similarity to the modes of perception that Minimalist objects seem to propose. Minimalism and ­seria­l­ity thus suggest an approach to aesthetic experience that assumes an ongoing nego­tiation, tension, and struggle between the present and the absent, between singularity and contextuality, between the phenomenal and the discursive. ­Iser’s relatively contemporary analysis turns out to be quite useful for grasping the tensions that Minimalism engenders. It opens up a third option between affirmation and resistance, locating the potential for distance not in a clear oppo­sition or even duality of art and society, but in the negotiation that occurs in the act of reception. In these unresolved tensions lies the very attractiveness of Minimalism, but also its difficulty and complexity, which we will soon revisit in our discussion of the use of Minimalism in commercial spaces. How does this framework help us to understand seriality in Prada Marfa? The shoes and bags that are serially arranged in the pavilion are not P ­ rimary 112 | For the relevance and development of Iser’s reception theory, see Winfried Fluck, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory,”New Literary History 31, no. 1 (2000): 175-210. 113 | Ibid., 188.

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Structures114 —they are not geometrical objects like cubes or beams. Also, their material—different types and hues of leather—is highly processed and not as straightforwardly perceptible as, say, polished aluminum. And yet, all the ­objects presented here are shoes or bags with similar forms, and all are made of one basic material: leather. The serial arrangement of the shoes and bags ­invites us to perceive the objects both in their individuality and in their difference to each other. Is this shoe similar or different from the next one and the one before? How exactly is it different? We are invited to enhance our perception of these objects and also to reflect on the ways in which we perceive objects in general. Moreover, the setup of the shoes yields a question about the underlying principle of the series. There are 7, 6, and again 7 shoes in a row; there are pumps, slingbacks, slingback sandals, and one boot. What is the system underlying this series? Is it a shoe, a shoe, a shoe, one after another—­modular repetition? The seriality of the shoes and bags in the Prada Marfa ­pavilion empha­sizes our phenomenal perception of the Prada consumer objects, both individually and contextually. The shoes can be perceived phenomenally, as objects with a specific form and materiality. In this sense, they are freed of their consumerist meaning and become similar to art objects. At the same time, however, this very perception of the products also brings to the fore the fact that what we consume in the world of commodities is “artificially produced difference,” to recall Krauss’ words. We see a shoe, and a shoe, and another shoe—in the end, what exactly is their difference? The shoes are serially produced consumer products, and we consume—perceive—merely minor differences in color, form, style, and material. The serial presentation of shoes and bags in Prada Marfa thus echoes the dialectical tensions present in Minimal Art. The twist here is that the exhi­ bited objects are, in fact, serially produced commodities rather than serially produced art. Prada Marfa takes up the tension of opposition and affirmation inherent in Minimalism, and then turns the screw yet a bit further. Elmgreen and Dragset’s work achieves a tension and an ongoing negotiation between the different modes of perception and evaluation of its objects by referencing Mini­ malism and its inherent perceptual and conceptual tensions. However, as it features a famous commercial brand, the work moves a decisive step further into the realm of the commercial, and effectively onto utterly unstable terrain. Although the pavilion can both aesthetically and conceptually be anchored in an art historical discourse that would identify it as a disinterested, autonomous work of art, we have seen that it also functions all too well in the realm of the 114 | The term refers to the title of the first significant exhibition of Minimal Art at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 1966. See, for example, Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 13-30.

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commercial. The work’s aesthetic and instrumental functions are in constant struggle. Interestingly, this struggle should not be understood as a completely new symptom of postmodern art. Rather, as my discussion of Minimalism has shown, Prada Marfa takes up and brings to a contemporary manifestation a set of strategies and resulting tensions that can already be observed in Minimalism. These strategies renegotiated the modes and conditions of perception in art, ultimately risking and effecting an opening of art to the sphere of the commercial and the workings of instrumental reason.

D iscursive S ite S pecificit y III: F rom the G allery to the B outique — W hite C ube R e tail S paces With its use of visual references to Minimalism and the white cube, Prada ­Marfa performs yet another operation; it puts into motion an ambiguous ­dynamic of decontextualization and recontextualization of the artwork and what it exhibits. Decontextualization, Fluck suggests, is one of the modes through which the in-betweenness of aesthetic experience can be triggered. We can add that decontextualization is the fundamental function of art exhibition, particularly in its most common form: the white cube. In this form, decontextualization has also become an important operation of consumer retail spaces. John Pawson’s 1995 design for the Calvin Klein flagship store in New York is an early exponent and an excellent example of a boutique that looks strikingly similar to a white cube art space. The four-level structure on Madison A ­ venue is clearly a white cube with the calm precision of white walls and ceilings, even lighting, and light-colored sandstone floors.115 Beyond the smaller unit of one room/gallery, the larger connection of the retail/exhibition spaces with cor­r idors and open vertical connections between the floors bears interesting visual parallels to Yoshio Taniguchi’s later design for the interior renovation of the Museum of Modern Art, albeit on a smaller scale; MoMA’s renovation and expansion was finished in 2004. Pawson’s design can be understood not just as an adaptation but rather as an evocation of art spaces—that is, of spaces that allow for focused attention and individual experience, while at the same time suggesting a connection with other such spaces. In addition to this emphatically white-cube-like interior, there is a strong Minimalist influence in the space: the furniture used in the store consists of pieces designed by Donald Judd. One of the primary questions that comes up here is whether these furniture objects inside the boutique are art or design 115 | John Pawson, “Calvin Klein Collections Store,” http://www.johnpawson.com/ works/calvin-klein-collections-store/. Images of the store can be found on the webpage.

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­ bjects. At first sight, this question might seem easy to answer. The furniture o has a use-value—tables to display clothes on, chairs to sit on—and should therefore be considered as design objects rather than as art objects with a primarily aesthetic function. Indeed, Donald Judd himself discussed the status of the furniture he designed, arguing that “The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. … The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair. … The art in art is partly the assertion of someone’s interest regardless of other considerations. A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.”116

Judd argues in both formal and functional terms here, setting apart the dimen­ sion and shape of design objects, which have to follow function, from the idiosyncratic dimension and form of art objects that follow only their own logic or the subjective decisions of the creator (depending on whether the approach is more conceptual or more expressionist). In passing, we can note the interesting contradiction between the objectivist air of Minimalist works and Judd’s ­account of his works as strongly determined by his interest as subjective ­creator. What is more at issue here, however, is Judd’s decisive distinction between design and art. He even stated that in order to avoid confusion, he tried to keep his design objects out of art galleries.117 Something in this seemingly straightforward view provokes further questioning, namely the fact that although Judd argued strongly in terms that connect form and function of the object, he still factored in the third dimension of institutional definition by context (the art gallery). This points us towards the problem inherent in his formalist argument. Judd implicitly recognized that in spite of their formal characteristics, in a different environment his design works could become artworks, by virtue of contextual reframing. The works’ insecure status is not only based on the fact that they are functional objects designed by the artist Donald Judd. Rather, it points to the very crux of Mini­­malism, namely to its precarious state between fulfilling and overcoming modern­ist formalism, between a strong discursive embeddedness in the formalist discourse of art and a strong emphasis on the phenomenal qualities that refuse to signify beyond the object itself.

116 | Donald Judd, “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” in Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles, in the Documents of Contemporary Art Series (London; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 50. 117 | Ibid., 54.

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The difficulty of this tension becomes clear when we consider that although Judd himself argued in a clearly formalist vein and reputedly never quite understood why Clement Greenberg did not like his art, for Greenberg himself the point was not even to distinguish between Judd’s design and his art. ­Rather, Greenberg did not tire of emphasizing that Minimalist art itself was just d ­ esign, displaying a “more or less conventional sensibility” that positioned the works, ultimately, “in the realm of Good Design”—the very industrial con­sumer aesthetic the MoMA exhibited in its 1950 to 1955 shows.118 Put more provocatively, Greenberg’s view was that Judd should not have put his artworks into a gallery in the first place because in any case they were design rather than art. In Minimalism the boundary line between commercial design and art became blurred and subject to negotiation. More importantly, Minimalism emphatically put forward the question of what constitutes art and design, or art and non-art. We can repeatedly see this same question come up in the artists’ use of materials and methods to produce their objects, in Judd’s own thought, and also in the critical evaluation of Minimalist works. If Minimalist art itself posed this problem of lingering in a sphere between art and design, between autonomous aesthetics and aesthetic functionality, then how important is the assumed difference between design and art for our present argument about the character of the Calvin Klein boutique? In his 2004 discussion of several Minimalist exhibitions at the time, Yve-Alain Bois points out that, in fact, one of the core themes of contemporary negotiations of Minimalism is whether it “has become merely good design.”119 As we have seen, we might even ask whether it had ever been anything other than that. Bois answers with a qualified yes, arguing that Minimalism should still be considered art rather than design. His arguments are, firstly, that while the 118 | Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture.” Notably, Greenberg refers to the MoMA Good Design exhibitions; he points out the influence of consumer culture on art rather than the other way round. It is crucial that we take into account the historical moment of Greenberg’s position here. For Greenberg and his contemporaries, the art historical function of the works of Judd, Morris, and other artists working with simple ­g eome­t ­r i­­c al forms, industrial materials and methods, and the ideas of formal reduction and im­m e­ di­a te experience, was not yet clear. Greenberg’s critique can thus be understood as ac­­tively opposing the inclusion of Minimalism into his formalist narrative of high art. Looking back at the art historical narrative created around Minimalism, the question is less whether Minimalism is too much influenced by consumer culture to be art (although this question does come up again in the revisionist readings of Minimalism by Rosalind Krauss, among others), but whether Minimalism has diffused so much into consumer culture and design that it has lost its character and significance as art. 119 | Yve-Alain Bois, “Specific Objections: Three Exhibitions,” Artforum (Summer 2004).

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commercial co-optation of modern art is not a new phenomenon, it has become an inevitable reality of modern art today. Secondly, the fact that Judd created both artworks and furniture does not mean that both practices are the same, as Judd himself pointed out. Thirdly, while the commercial appropriation of Mini­ malism might be debatable, Bois by no means considers it aesthetically lamentable. And finally, for Bois the “marrying of architectural and sculptural space” that Minimalist artists, and particularly Donald Judd, performed remains an outstanding accomplishment.120 To summarize these arguments, Bois agrees with the notion that Minima­ list art has been appropriated for the design of use objects and thus for commercial goals. However, he does not consider this to be a problem. First of all, as we have seen, the question of design and art had already been posed and worked through by Minimalist artists themselves. Bois mentions Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, who were not only conscious of the commercial potential and impact of their art but also furthered its dissemination in the media and the commercial sphere. Second, Bois considers the co-optation of Minimalism by commerce as a positive, interesting development, particularly in terms of its aesthetically advantageous effects on commercial spaces. We can conceive of these positive aesthetic effects in two ways. One possi­ bility would be to follow an argument that rests on the notion of cultural highto-low appropriation, cultural framing, and the creation and transfer of cultural and symbolic capital. In this vein, we could suggest that the phenomenon of these art-inspired spaces is a consequence of the confluence of art and design. In the logic of this argument, design has become (or attempts to be recognized as) an art form by virtue of being exhibited in art spaces. Such a cultural elevation of the design product is exactly what commercial display strategies attempt to achieve. The function of art-inspired spaces, then, is to signify that the design objects shown inside are artworks rather than mass-produced consumer products. Another possible argument, however, would be to suggest that the white cube/Minimalist space in retail is not just important because of its design and ‘look,’ but rather because of the specific aesthetic function it has. The consequences of choosing the white cube and Minimalist elements for commercial display, I argue, go decisively beyond a mere stylistic appropriation, beyond the question of chicness and a sleek, elegant look, and also beyond the question of

120 | Again, this is an argument that emphasizes the strong impulse of Minimalism to ­e xtend into the whole space surrounding its objects. This argument, as I have pointed out earlier in regard to Alan Moore’s observations, lies at the basis of my bringing together an analysis of Minimalism with the white cube in particular, and with spatial organiza­t ion as a set of categories that shape the perception of art and its categorization as such in general.

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a high-to-low appropriation and the transfer of cultural capital. They touch the fundamental mode of operation of these spaces. The use of Minimalist elements in aesthetically reduced spaces such as the Calvin Klein boutique taps deep into the function of the white cube as an expres­sive medium in itself,121 as well as that of Minimalism as an art in space. In order to analyze the influence of the white cube and Minimalist art on ­retail spaces, it is therefore not sufficient to discuss these decisions simply as questions of look and design. Of course, the Calvin Klein boutique is a functional space that was designed as such. However, by employing specific spatial strategies that are used for presenting and creating art, this space also takes over functions and tensions engendered in these strategies, whether they are consciously or unconsciously copied, adapted, or referenced. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the white cube is marked by the presence of what it pretends to keep out, namely commerce; and it was in particular Minimalism that posed the question of how close art and commercial design really were. If the white cube and Minimalist art continuously negotiate and negate the presence of the commercial, then the inverse is also true for commercial spaces that take over the spatial strategies of art. Such commercial spaces deal with and continuously negotiate the absence of the commercial and the presence of the non-commercial and the aesthetically autonomous. What does this mean for our analysis of Pawson’s Calvin Klein boutique? First of all, it means that the use of the white cube can be understood not just as a quotation of and reference to art, but also as the effective creation of a specific experiential space in itself. Just like the white cube art gallery, the white cube boutique spatially and temporally removes itself and its objects from the surrounding world. It creates “a kind of eternity of display”122 for the objects/ products, positioning them in a separate, virtually timeless sphere. This format of exhibition aestheticizes the Calvin Klein products, putting their look, feel, and touch above considerations of usefulness (“Do I need another sweater?” “Will this sweater keep me warm?”) and also above considerations of price. In this space, just as in the white cube, financial value appears secondary to aesthetic value. Simultaneously, however, this space suggests an eternalization the a­ esthetic and financial value of what it displays—“This special object will never lose its value.” Minimalism had scrutinized the modes and conditions of perception in space and thus renegotiated the modernist notion of the autonomous art object. The institutional critique of the white cube that followed drew attention to the 121 | I am grateful to Kristina Wilson for this line of thought. See Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925-1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 122 | O‘Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15.

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self-effacing and neutralizing function of the white cube in regard to these very conditions of perception. And yet, despite the various practical and theoretical attempts to undermine the aestheticizing ideological power of this paradigm of art exhibition from inside the context of art, the white cube is not only alive and kicking in the art world; it is also highly functional in the world of commerce, and in very similar ways. To what extent is the white cube the same in the commercial realm? Importantly, one function the white cube can no longer perform in this context is its own neutralization, the self-effacing gesture that I have posed as one reason for the sustained international success of the white cube as an art exhibition strategy. The white cube refers to the context of art exhibition, and this connection will be actively or subconsciously clear to most of the patrons of a white cube boutique. However, this form of display is not self-effacing, insofar as it sets itself apart from the abundant, excessive, or theme park strategies of display used in many shops in the lower price segment as well as by some luxury brands. By virtue of being related to the visual discourse of art, the white cube boutique differs from other common forms of commercial display. The white cube boutique is therefore self-reflexive rather than self-effacing; it has an element of ‘look at me’ rather than an element of ‘you cannot see me.’ It creates a special, separate experience, but it inevitably refers back to this experience at the same time. The second important aspect in Pawson’s design is how it combines the white cube exhibition format with works by Donald Judd.123 Notably, the pieces used here are furniture pieces, which again highlightes the complicated and unstable boundaries between art and commerce. The furniture pieces are formally simple; some sideboards are just longitudinal boxes. However, since these objects are ­functional, it is unlikely that they will be perceived as artworks proper. Rather than fully becoming art objects, Judd’s works merely (but ­clearly) gesture towards Mini­malism in terms of they way they can be perceived in space by the spectator. While they should be understood as only a gesture towards Minimalism, they do emphasize the overall atmosphere of the space, adding to its reduced, concentrated, and ­removed feel. The space evokes not only the white cube and Minimalism, it also engages in the negotiation of the art/commerce divide that these artistic paradigms put forward. Pawson’s boutique is an important exponent of the white cube/Mini­malist retail space, and an important step in a direction taken up by other brands.

123 | See James Kaplan, “The Triumph of Calvinism,” New York Magazine, 18 ­S eptember 1995.

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Image 10: Helmut Lang store with black cuboids and Jenny Holzer installation

Richard Gluckman/Gluckman Mayner Architects, Helmut Lang. © Paul Warchol Photography. Jenny Holzer, Arno, 1997. LED sign with yellow and green diodes ©VG-Bildkunst, Bonn, 2014.

­ nother noteworthy example is the New York flagship store of fashion ­designer A Helmut Lang, opened at 80 Greene Street in SoHo in 1998.124 Richard ­Gluckman designed it as a white cube with white walls and ceiling, even lighting, and wooden floors. Artist Jenny Holzer, generally considered post-­ Minimalist, contributed an installation of one of her signature LED electronic display signboards. By including this artwork, the Helmut Lang store took the merging or art space and boutique space one step further than Pawson’s design for Calvin Klein. The boutique was a white cube with an installation by Jenny Holzer. ­A lready when seen from the street, the space communicated indecision as to its ­function: “the merchandising area has been placed toward the rear of the store, making the front space an ambiguous area visible from the street.”125 124 | After Lang sold all his shares to Prada (51 percent in 1999, the rest in early 2005) and left the brand in 2005, all Helmut Lang stores were closed; the store discussed here is therefore no longer in existence. 125  |  “Helmut Lang, New York, NY, 1997,” Gluckman Mayner Architects (Projects/Retail/ Helmut Lang), http://www.gluckmanmayner.com.

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Image 11: Black cuboids/display cabinets in Helmut Lang store

Richard Gluckman/Gluckman Mayner Architects, Helmut Lang.© Paul Warchol Photography.

Image 12: Display cabinets/black cuboids in Helmut Lang store

Richard Gluckman/Gluckman Mayner Architects, Helmut Lang. © Paul Warchol Photography.

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Inside of this white cube stood six large, black cuboid forms. One was Jenny H ­ olzer’s column, on which an LED display showed vertically moving fragments of sentences.126 The second cuboid form was a long, black block with a white top. This was, in fact, the sales counter, which did not immediately betray itself as such because the cash register was hidden from the customer’s view in a carved-out space in the block. The ­remaining elements in the space were four huge, monolithic, black boxes, ­arranged serially and again bearing a striking similarity to Minimalist works, particularly those by Tony Smith, whom Gluckman mentions as an inspira­tion.127 Only when seen from their back side did the black boxes turn out to be cabinets for designer clothes. Even then, however, the milky glass doors offered only a blurred glimpse of the clothes, and only when the display cabinets were lit from inside. The various objects arranged in the Helmut Lang white cube boutique strongly obscured the commercial nature of the space. Even more strongly Minimalist in style was the Helmut Lang perfume store that opened in the same vicinity in 2000. It was also designed by Gluckman in cooperation with Jenny Holzer. The space was kept simple, even austere, and featured only a work by Holzer as well as a few large block-like elements which were, again, inspired by Minimalist art such as Richard Serra’s and Dan Flavin’s. Since the merchandise in this Helmut Lang perfume boutique needed even less exhibition space than the clothes in the flagship store, the simplicity of the space and the emphasis on art-inspired objects was even more ­pronounced. The architecture and the design of both stores show that for Helmut Lang and Richard Gluckman, Minimalist art was a strong and avowed influence. The identity of these spaces as commercial was kept vague and only revealed itself fully through the visitor’s interaction with the space. In terms of their spatial setup, the Helmut Lang stores could have hardly focused less on the actual merchandise. The stores achieved their strong effect fully and exclusively through the minimalistic elements and their interaction with the surrounding space. As Gluckman pointed out in regard to the flagship ­store on Greene Street, “There is a deliberate ambiguity to what the space is ... one ­review commented that you couldn’t tell whether it was an art gallery or a s­ tore … that’s exactly what we were trying to do.”128 The Helmut Lang boutiques were very much in accord with the identity of the Helmut Lang fashion brand, which

126 | The text was from Holzer’s 1996 text “Arno,” which she had also used for other installations, most notably at the Florence Biennale in 1996. ­ oyal Academy 127 | Interview with Richard Gluckman, “Gluckman’s Art of Display,” R of the Arts, http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/architecture/architecture-resources/ interviews/gluckmans-art-of-display,210,AR.html. 128 | “Gluckman’s Art of Display.”

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was, after all, best known for its minimalistic style; Helmut Lang was even stereotyped as the “King of Fashion Minimalism.”129 Image 13: Helmut Lang parfume store, interior

Richard Gluckman, Helmut Lang Parfumerie, 2000. Photography © Lydia Gould Bessler.

These boutiques push the analogy between minimalistic fashion and Mini­ malist art to the point of dissimulating the commerciality of the space. While Minimalism quickly developed from an art form into various spheres of design, its three-dimensional forms and spatial strategies still signal a closeness to the sphere of art and can succeed in creating an experience related to the experience of art more closely than to that of commerce. By tapping into the aesthetic of Mini­malism, the Helmut Lang stores create an experience that decisively moves away from the commercial and towards the aesthetic. 129 | See Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 330. The concordance between brand and space was still upheld when Lang sold most of his shares to the Prada company in 1999, not only because the Helmut Lang brand identity remained intact, but also because the closeness of art and business is an important aspect of the Prada brand, too. In this regard, the decision to sell his shares (and later the whole company) to Prada was conceptually solid.

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There are many examples of similar spaces built since the late 1990s that could be mentioned here. Among them is much of Gluckman’s work Gianni Versace (Madison Avenue, New York, 1998) and Yves Saint Laurent (88 Wooster Street, New York, 1998),130 or Rei Kawabuko’s and Future Systems’ Comme des Garcons store in Chelsea (520 West 22nd Street, New York). Contrary to what one might assume, this approach of bringing boutique and art spaces together was not restricted to the 1990’s booming economy. The trend did not end with the slowing of the economy in 2001 or even with the recession in 2007. Image 14: Missoni boutique in Beverly Hills, exterior

Kinmonth and Monfreda. Missoni Boutique, 2010. © Kinmonth and Monfreda.

130 | “‘We wanted something that would not look too much like a clothes shop,’ ex­ plains [YSL chairman] Berge. ‘And as it is SoHo we decided to create a sort of half-way house between an art gallery and a boutique. At Saint Laurent, we have never separated art and fashion. We know very well that fashion is not art, but we believe that there is a very strong link between art, contemporary artist and the creation of fashion.’” “The new store contains many parallels to his art projects. The design is spare, the walls white and the interior of the boutique not visible from the street. Gluckman has placed smoked-glass screens in the store front and instead of window displays he plans simply for images to be projected onto the glass. There are more screens in the main part of the store. They run from floor to ceiling, are lit around the edges by fluorescent light and were inspired by a Bill Viola installation. Between each are the cantilevered racks for the clothes. Both sides of the store are lined with 30ft-long brushed-aluminium cabinets. For the dressing room walls, he has chosen an ‘ambiguous’ material—glass backed with

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Cases in point are the Chanel boutique on Robertson Boulevard in Los A ­ ngeles (2008), the A|X Armani Exchange store in Los Angeles (March 2010), and particularly the Missoni boutique by designers Kinmonth and Monfreda in Beverly Hills (February 2010), which assertively presents itself as an über-white cube, both in its external architecture and in the structure of its internal galleries. While all of these spaces employ the visual language of the white cube and mini­malistic elements to display their merchandise, they do not all succeed equally well in fostering modes of experience that approximate those of the white cube and Minimalist art. It seems that in order to achieve the effects of spatial and temporal separation and aesthetic concentration, the spaces need not only be designed in a specific way, but must also remain reduced in the number of objects they display, whether products, decoration, or furniture elements. The fuller the space, the less its particular aesthetic effect. Image 15: Missoni boutique in Beverly Hills, interior

Kinmonth and Monfreda. Missoni Boutique, 2010. © Kinmonth and Monfreda.

The balance between a minimalistic aesthetic of space and the display of merchandise is a fine one. Depending on the practice of exhibition dominant in the space, the reduced visual language of the space may well be combined with a tendency towards an abundant display of objects. These particular apprometal—but has draped the inside of them in the Saint Laurent fabric par excellence— grain de poudre.” Ian Phillips, “Yves Saint Laurent: Where Art and Fashion Collide,” The Independent, 12 December 1998.

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priations of display strategies from the art world may end up focusing on an art-related look more than on the actual aesthetic effect, emphasizing the abundance of goods over simplicity and concentratione. The Versace and Chanel boutiques, for example, are at risk of having such an effect, as is the Missoni boutique when fully stocked with merchandise. This suggests that in order to evaluate these spaces, we need to take into account all three aspects: their architectural characteristics, the decisions made in terms of interior design and decoration, and the day-to-day practice of display. Only when all of these elements come together are the functions of the white cube/Minimalist space of perception evoked successfully. Image 16: Chanel boutique, interior

Peter Marino, Chanel Boutique, Los Angeles, 2008. © Paul Warchol Photography. Courtesy of Peter Marino Architects.

The closeness of art spaces and retail spaces finds expression not just in their design, but also in the fact that most of the architects commissioned were previously known for their designs for art museums and galleries. Before he ­designed for Helmut Lang, Armani, and Yves Saint Laurent, Richard ­Gluckman

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had been well known for his 1987 design of the SoHo Dia Art Foundation. He has since designed numerous art galleries and museums, among them the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Georgia O‘Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.131 Similarly, John Pawson had designed several galleries before he worked for Calvin Klein. Architects well known for their art spaces created commercial spaces in the spirit of art spaces. Image 17: The Crystals, Los Angeles, exterior

Daniel Libeskind, The Crystals, Los Angeles, 2009. Photography © Jason Mrachina.

We can observe the approximation of art spaces and retail spaces not only in these small- to medium-scale examples, but also on the large scale. Let me mention one case in point here. After the Guggenheim had opened and closed a museum branch in Las Vegas (2001-2008), a complementary strategy was presented to the public in late 2009. The Crystals Shopping Center in Las Vegas by Daniel Libeskind (architecture) and the Rockwell Group (interior design) is a shopping mall built in the spirit of a museum. In its highly complex shape, it follows the deconstructionist approach that marks many of Libeskind’s works. The Crystals is typical of what Charles Jencks termed “the iconic building.”132 131 | Other examples are Frank Gehry’s interior design for Issey Miyake in Tribeca, which was preceded by his iconic art spaces, such as the Guggenheim museum in ­B ilbao (1997) and Disney Hall. Daniel Libeskind, before creating the Crystals Shopping Mall, designed several museums, most notably the Jewish Museum in Berlin (1999), as well as the extension of the Denver Art Museum (2006) and the Royal Ontario Art ­M useum (2007). Besides the Prada boutique that will be discussed later in this chapter, Rem Koolhaas also designed, for example, the Guggenheim Hermitage in Las Vegas. 132 | See Charles Jencks, The Iconic Building (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2005), 23.

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The building functions as an expressive landmark with meta­ phorical power. It effectively functions as a brand in itself, and as such joins the ranks of such buildings as the New Guggenheim ­Museum B ­ ilbao (Frank Gehry, 199397), Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (Frank ­Gehry, 1988-2003) the Jewish Museum in Berlin (Daniel Libeskind, 1989-2001), and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1954-59). Notwithstanding Wright’s specificaly organic approach, the Guggenheim New York has a similarly impressive iconicity as its late cousin, the Guggenheim Bilbao. In an interesting inversion, the Crystals becomes the newest exemplar of such iconic architecture. It is crucial to note that many of these iconic buildings are cultural insti­ tutions and art museums. Jencks explains this with the self-proclaimed function of culture in postmodernity, in which art takes over the role of religion—“art as religion, museum as cathedral, the buyer as priest”— and in which the function of an icon has moved from its initially religious ­meaning as “an object of religious veneration to now become an object of shopping.”133 The Crystals goes one step further in the logic of this develop­ ment, taking over the museum’s functions of representation, identification and creation of meaning. In an interview, Libeskind explicitly stated that the idea was to build a shopping mall that would be like a spectacular museum. “Meine Idee war es, die Trennung zwischen Kommerz, Kultur und Entertainment auszuradieren. … Ich wollte einen kühnen architektonischen Raum schaffen, der diese Regeln sprengt. ‘Crystals’ ist wie ein spektakuläres Museum, in dem Sie eine ­G ucci-Tasche kaufen können.”134

The Crystals participates in the fight for attention, “the war of the hot labels,” and the brand-building trend of the contemporary economy.135 It shows that iconic buildings have reached a moment of popularization in which n ­ ewer ­examplars are employing the cultural capital of earlier exponents. We can ­observe the convergence of art spaces and retail spaces not only in galleries and boutiques, but also on the grand scale of the museum and the shopping mall. 133 | Ibid., 8. 134 |  “My idea was to erase the division between commerce, culture, and entertainment. I wanted to create a bold architectural space that would shatter these rules. ­‘Crystals’ is like a spectacular museum in which you can buy a Gucci bag.” (My ­t ­­r anslation) Daniel Libeskind, interview by Marc Pitzke, “Libeskinds Las-Vegas-­P runkbau:­ ‘Man muss wohl ein bisschen verrückt sein.’” Spiegel online 12 December 2009. Interestingly, at the © Murakami exhibition, which took place at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007-2008, visitors could indeed buy Louis Vuitton designer bags. 135 | Ibid., 7.

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M oving around in the W hite C ube B outique : A esthe tic P erspectives on C ommercial S paces While the ideological neutrality of the white cube has been fundamentally questioned in art, its framing power is being used quite efficiently in c­ ommercial contexts. The reduced mode of display, related to both the white cube and Minimalist art practice, has become widespread in the design of luxury f­ ashion boutiques and other luxury retail spaces. As we have seen, there are many instances in which we can observe the use of white cube exhibition ­design in commercial environments. It is often combined with Minimalist or M ­ inimalism-inspired objects that may or may not function as furniture. The white cube has become a staple in up-market commercial environments, to the extent that the seemingly provocative suggestion that “the white cube is just ­another form of showroom” warrants closer scrutiny.136 The question is whether the white cube has come to function as a showroom, thus commercializing its aesthetic function, or whether the showroom has come to function as a white cube, thus aestheticizing its commercial function. Does the paradigmatic art space become a commercial space, or does the commercial space become an art space? The answer to this question follows from my introductory observations about the covergence of the commercialization of the aesthetic and the aestheticization of commerce, as well as from my discussion of the white cube as the paradigmatic art space: ultimately, the dynamic goes both ways. As we have seen, the relation of the white cube boutique to the visual discourse of art r­enders it self-reflexive rather than self-effacing. It does not conceal the aestheti­cization of the commercial; quite on the contrary, it points to it. This aestheti­cized commercial format refers to the white cube art space both for cultural elevation and for the aesthetic function of the art space. However, the white cube that is being referred to can no longer be conceived of as the auto­ nomous, non-commercial space it once projected to be. As O’Doherty in particular and the institutional critique of the white cube in general have suggested, the commercial logic has entered the white cube art space. Although the formerly concealed and arguably ideological function of aesthetic autonomy is lost, the aesthetic form remains important in the contexts of both art and commerce. The crucial point we should note here is that the loss of the white cube’s framing function as an autonomous space for autonomous art cannot be understood simply as an encroachment upon or an appropriation of art through commerce. The fact that commercial showrooms now often look like white cubes is not so straightforwardly explained by the commercial appropriation of the white cube. When art theory and practice unmasked an underlying capitalist logic in the white cube art space, it was branded (in the double 136 | Alex Coles, Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles, 11.

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meaning of the word) as commercial. This process can be observed ­firstly in Minimalism, when space becomes a significant category in itself; then subsequently, when space becomes a category that must be deconstructed in postmodern art practice; and finally, in the actual, proactive commercialization of art spaces. The strategies that put the autonomy of the art space up for grabs emerged from inside the art world itself. The ideological power of the white cube as an aesthetically autonomous space has been undermined by critical art practice as well as by the commercialization of museums.137 In regard to museums, we should mention here the repositioning of museum shops from the periphery of exhibitions to the very core of the museum experience. A particularly striking example of this is the Louis Vuitton boutique at Takashi Murakami’s show at the MoCA. Here, a fully functional boutique was integrated into the art exhibition. Concurrently, up-market retail has moved much closer to the “purely” aesthetic in its adoption of the white cube exhibition format from the art world, beginning in the mid-1990s. The white cube is particularly common in the luxury and design sector, most of all in fashion. It is, however, not exclusive to the fashion sector and can also be found in other design, technology, and up-market retail environments, with the technology brand Apple standing out as an exemplary case in the non-fashion field. While art spaces are becoming more like retail spaces, retail spaces are looking more like art spaces. One of the first arguments that comes to mind when we consider the convergence of art spaces and commercial spaces, as well as processes of commer­ cialization and aestheticization more generally, is the Frankfurt School’s ana­ lysis of the mass culture industry. In its many iterations, this line of argument essentially claims that instrumental reason and capitalist consumer culture are taking over increasingly more areas of culture, including “high” modernist art and its potentially resistant forms of expression and experience. As I have sketched out in the beginning of my discussion, I take issue with this argument, primarily because it suggests a one-directional narrative for art that does not account for the possibility of meaningful and complex artistic production outside of a modernist aesthetic of negativity. In this logic, art only has the potential to be critical of the workings of instrumental reason that govern socie­ ty if it emerges from a sphere outside of and emphatically autonomous from mainstream society. This argument, I find, does not fully grasp the contemporary complexity and cultural relevance of the processes discussed in this book. It only takes into account the debasing effect that the appropriation of art by commerce has, rather than analyzing these processes in more detail and thinking about the sources, complexities, and consequences of these developments. 137 | See, for example, Robin Rauzi, “The Line Between High Art and Commerce: Blurry and Getting Blurrier,” Los Angeles Times, 24 December 2000.

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These are more multifaceted than a mere destruction of resistant, modernist high culture. In particular, in decrying the debasing and totalizing influence of capitalism on culture, neither Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry thesis, nor Greenberg’s similar critique of kitsch and design, help us to better understand the converging contemporary processes of aestheticization and commercialization. In the hopes of developing a more encompassing, contemporary approach to current cultural processes, I would like to suggest two theoretical perspectives. The first is an art historical tracing of the processes of aestheticization and commercialization, which I have started in this chapter and will continue to develop in the chapters that follow. This perspective seeks to anchor contemporary commercial developments in earlier developments in art. I understand the processes I address not as one-directional attacks on art, but rather as devel­opments that are closely related to strategies in the art world itself. These strategies are not to be understood as a pragmatic or opportunistic opening up of art to commercial considerations and necessities, but as stemming from an avantgardist logic of art itself. With my focus on the second avantgarde and developments in postwar American art, I am analyzing a specific inflection of the subversion of art and its categories, namely one that results in an opening up of art to capitalist market logic. This process may be understood in two ways. One is to conceive of it as a teleological development. If we follow this Hegelian narrative as it finds expression in Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic evaluation, as well as in C ­ lement Greenberg’s formalism and Arthur Danto’s narrative of the end of art, this ­development leads to a definite endpoint. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this (negative) endpoint is art’s complete co-optation by instrumental reason and its concomitant loss of cultural importance. For Greenberg, this (positive) endpoint is reached when art finds its ultimate form by reducing itself to its essential characteristic. For Danto, the most strictly Hegelian of this group, the endpoint is the transposition of art into philosophy—an evaluation that is n ­ either negative nor positive but rather an observation of the contemporary state of things. Whether we conceive of this dynamic in art as one related to the positive, self-reflexive development of reason and art, or whether we understand it as the negative effect of Enlightenment gone wrong, these narratives suggest a clear trajectory. Although I agree that the dynamics of commercialization suggested by the Frankfurt School, and the dynamics of self-reflexivity and pluralization of styles suggested by Danto, can be observed in the phenomena of contemporary art at issue here, I would like to suggest a view that is slightly different from these Hegelian perspectives. Thus, the second way to understand these strategies and their complex, ambi­guous consequences is to conceive of them as constant, non-directional practices with which art-makers negotiate art’s form and function. I do not

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think that these strategies will reach an endpoint that can be neatly conceptualized, because what underlies these strategies is not an impersonal, abstract logic that is somehow inherent in art. This would be a rather abstract and agentless way of thinking about art.138 Rather, the underlying motor of art—what I call its avantgardist logic—is art-makers’ motivation to find, express, externalize, and legitimize their creations and positions within a social and discursive environment. I think we can expect this motivation to remain a constant motor in the search for possibilities of artistic intervention. And in a culture that is so strongly shaped by commercial objectives, the commercial world is a very likely if ambiguous point of reference for such intervention. Instead of considering such artistic intervention in terms of either a negative aesthetic outside of instrumental reason, or else as an expression of a complete state of co-optation that art has purportedly reached, we need to look closely at its particular manifestations and the questions and tensions that these bring out. In view of the particular convergence of aestheticization and commercialization, this analysis can no longer focus only on the realm of art. The very point is that this realm has in many cases become highly difficult to grasp, not just at its fringes but even in what used to be its core categories. So far, our discussion has analyzed the changing spatial conditions of aesthetic reception and anchored these within the discourse of art history. I would now like to add a second approach, which can help us understand the broader cultural processes at issue here. This second approach comes from Gernot Böhme’s aesthetics of atmospheres, which tries to take a more nuanced look at the contemporary aestheticization of our everyday world. Böhme rightly points out that we if we want to understand and critically evaluate these processes, we need to take them seriously beyond the culture industry argument.139 In his book Atmosphäre, Böhme proposes to base a new aesthetic theory on the concept of atmospheres, which would enable us to better analyze contemporary processes of aestheticization. This concept takes into account both the creation and the reception of atmospheres. For Böhme, atmospheres are spaces that are touched by the presence of things, people, or environmental constellations: they are “Sphären der Anwesenheit von etwas,”140 and “was zuerst und unmittelbar wahrgenommen wird”141 when we enter a room. Atmo138 | I should note here that despite my frequent use of the idea of self-subversive processes emerging in the art world, these should not be mistaken for such an abstract, self-serving force. Rather, I understand them as driven by aesthetic and market interests of acting individuals in the field. 139 | Cp. Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: ­S uhrkamp, 1995), 41. 140 | “... spheres of the presence of something ...” (My translation) Ibid., 33 141 | “... that which is perceived first and immediately ...” (My translation) Ibid., 48

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spheres ­belong wholly neither to subject nor object, but rather extend in the space between the two. Their creation is one of the most important and elaborate, and yet least analyzed techniques of contemporary processes of aestheticization. Böhme sees the critical promise of his aesthetics in its possibility to shed light on the creation and function of atmospheres. Knowledge about how atmospheres can be evoked, used, and experienced, both in the realm of art and well beyond, would ideally lead to a “Kritik der ästhetischen Ökonomie.”142 Following our analysis of the function of the white cube as an aesthetic space, and our discussion of Minimalist art as an experience between an ­object and spectator in space, we can now understand that both forms of spatial work create atmospheres. I have argued that spaces built in the tradition of the white cube and Minimalism can evoke a special type of experience. These e­ xperiences revolve around spatiality, temporality, and subjective experience, and are conducive to modes of perception that clearly favor the aesthetic over the functional or commercial. My argument closely relates to Böhme’s in terms of recognizing the crucial importance of space as an aesthetic category. In line with Böhme’s argument, I believe that rather than stopping at the point of critically noting the appropriation of art by commerce, we need to develop an analysis that sees beyond the line of demarcation between the two. Rather than trying to secure this line of separation, we have to closely analyze the spe­cific similarities and differences between the commercialization of art and the aestheticization of commerce. In extending my analysis of the white cube and Minimalist art into the commercial sphere, I aim to shed light on the function of commercialized and commercial spaces in a way that takes seriously their spatial strategies as fundamentally aesthetic processes closely related to art, while still keeping in mind the transposition of these strategies into a new, more commercial environment. I have earlier discussed the white cube and its critique by O’Doherty and others. Let me now reconsider what specific aesthetic operations the white cube and Minimalism perform on the objects and space of the white cube boutique. Firstly, the white cube/Minimalist exhibition format primarily strengthens the phenomenal presence of the objects in the here and now of the time and space in which they are shown. The spectator becomes engaged in a perceptual and aesthetic act. The white cube/Minimalist space thus performs the very ­aesthetic operation that Michael Fried, among others, strongly criticized as “theatrical”; extending between subjects and objects in space and time, this operation is atmospheric in Böhme’s sense. Both formally and functionally, this mode of presentation turns consumer items into fundamentally aesthetic objects, and spaces of consumption into spaces of aesthetic experience.

142 | Ibid., 45

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Clearly, these processes auraticize and fetishize the products. Simultaneously present and removed, the products are rendered quasi-sacred by their ­mise-en-scène. This operation has been performed on consumer objects since the inception of the department store “cathedrals,” which Neil Harris and ­William Leach, as well as Walter Benjamin, have discussed in detail.143 In fact, we could argue that this auratization and fetishization is attempted by almost every kind of presentational space, be it the turn-of-the-century museum or department store, or the late 20th century white cube. However, this more contemporary exhibition mode fundamentally differs from earlier strategies. Specifically, the white cube reduces environmental distraction and channels subjective attention towards the individual product. This creates a mode of inter­action akin to the ideals of modern art, rather than to those of the late 19th century culture of abundance. A core concept of this modernism is auto­ nomy—of the object, subject, and of art in general—as well as the ensuing tension between the idea of autonomy and the vital engagement of the spectator. This mode of aestheticizing has a marked impact on the object in space, whether it is a Mini­­malist artwork or a consumer object.144 However, the space itself also has an aesthetic function. It cannot simply be conceived of as a framing device, but must be considered as an expressive medium that performs an aesthetic operation in its own right. The use of the white cube and of Minimalism-inspired elements in commercial environments is a case in point for the argument that recent sociological studies of consumption and consumerism have made—namely, that apart from the traditional analyses of modes of consumption in space, we must increasingly take into account the consumption of space itself.145 Rather than asking only what the space does to the objects, we therefore have to ask how the space itself functions in relation to the spectator/ consumer. I would like to propose that one of the most important functions of this space—we could say, of its atmosphere—is temporal. Let us briefly turn back to O’Doherty’s argument about the special temporality of the white cube and apply it to the present discussion. As O’Doherty suggested, the white cube effects a decontextualization from the outside world in both spatial and temporal terms. 143 | Harris, “Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste”; Leach, Land of Desire; Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk. 144 | Given the scarce amount of products exhibited in these spaces, the elements can function both as Minimalist works on their own, and as minimalistic furniture—that is, as pedestals for the products. ­ onsums: 145  |  Kai-Uwe Hellmann, “Räume des Konsums: Zur Einführung,” in Räume des K Über den Funktionswandel von Räumlichkeit im Zeitalter des K ­ onsumismus, ed. KaiUwe Hellmann and Guido Zurstiege (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für S ­ ozialwissenschaften, 2008).

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In particular, O’Doherty declared the white cube to be a socially normati­v izing and ideologically stabilizing space, similar to the church or the courtroom, ­because it eternalizes the objects displayed, along with the norms and values they project. This same eternalizing function can also be claimed for the white cube in the commercial realm, especially given that the economic sectors in which it is primarily used—luxury, fashion, and technology/­entertainment— are subject to a particularly high speed of change and moderni­zation. It is quite understandable that items which we can expect to be out of fashion very soon are put into an environment that bestows upon them the semblance of eternity. The white cube separates the space and time inside of an exhibition/retail space from the space and time outside of it. The serene experience inside is cut off from the stress and fast pace outside. Being in the white cube space can thus set the spectator/consumer at ease, slow down the experience, and maybe even extend the spectator/consumer’s duration of stay. These effects not only transform the experience into a more conscious and aesthetic one; they may also increase the likelihood of buying. Moreover, this stretching of time prolongs what I would like to call the moment before consummation—the excitement of discovering, desiring, and trying out an item (imaginarily or actually) without yet possessing it. We can conceptualize this moment through a differentiation employed by various studies of consumer behavior, namely the one between “buying” and “shopping.” While the first activity is oriented towards the goal of acquisition and consumption, the second focuses on the pleasurable experience of browsing and trying on/out. As Hellmann rightly notes, shopping enables people to create and try out alternative identities before owning an object.146 Understood this way, shopping can be conceived as a fundamentally performative and imaginary activity. It is in this vein that I propose to read Charlotte Klonk’s suggestion that there is a relationship between the experience of art in its institutional setting (as I have been arguing in regard to the white cube gallery in particular) and the experience of shopping. This view implies an understanding of the processes of aestheticization and commercialization that goes beyond the one-directional narrative of an appropriation of art by commerce: “One might be inclined to think that the identification of the gallery experience and shopping is merely an idea received from the kind of cultural criticism fashionable in the

146 | Similar differentiations are made between “shopping with a goal” and “shopping as a goal,” between “shopping for” and “shopping around,” between “doing the ­s hopping” and “going shopping,” and between “necessity shopping” and “pleasurable shopping.” See Ibid., 36f.

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The aestheticization of commercial space goes hand in hand with the commercialization of art space. Significantly, the latter took place as a critique and strategy from inside the art world, and not just as a hostile takeover aimed at the subordination of a logic of autonomy to a logic of instrumental reason. However, a crucial inversion takes place between the white cube gallery and the white cube boutique. While the white cube gallery draws its appeal (as well as the basis of its critique) from its supposed neutrality, in its ideal form the white cube boutique actively draws attention to itself as a special environ­ ment. The theatricality that Michael Fried criticized in Minimalism—its focus on the interaction between spectator and object in time and space, as opposed to the contingency and autonomy at the basis of Fried’s conception of art— comes back in an even more pronounced form in the white cube boutique. It is a staged interaction whose crucial importance lies in this very process of interaction, rather than in the detachment and autonomy of the object and the spectator. We can thus understand the white cube boutique as a postmodern continuation of a paradigmatic change in the concept of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience has moved towards interactions marked by a specific temporality, (in our present case, the simultaneous extension and condensation of time), as well as by a specific spatiality (the spatial arrangement proposed by the white cube and Minimalist art leads to an atmosphere simultaneously removed from and connected with the “outside” of consumer capitalism). Although the white cube boutique stems from an ideal of autonomous modernist art that found spatial expression in this specific exhibition design, and although it clearly picks up some crucial modes of functioning of this space, it also brings to full fruition the paradoxical tension at the crux of Minimalism, which encompassed the realization and overcoming of the modernist endeavor. The white cube boutique taps right into the tension between a modern, formalist, autonomous concept of art versus a postmodern, phenomenal, and interactive one. It draws on moder­nist modes of presentation while fully developing the postmodern logic of an utterly open art experience. The heterotopic space of the modernist white cube gallery receives a new quality in its postmodern manifestation as the white cube boutique. Even after the loss of heterotopia brought about by the ideological critique of the white cube, spaces that could potentially function heterotopically are still being built. While white cube spaces are not as exuberant as the fantasy worlds of themed malls and Las Vegas casinos, they still present a variant of heterotopia, 147 | Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 208.

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as s­ paces that are separate and different from other social places. We may now ask whether these commercial spaces are just pretending to be heterotopic even though they are not, aspiring to recreate a modernist ideological closure that has already been undermined. Or maybe these spaces are, in fact, our contemporary heterotopias, prompting us to rethink the concept of heterotopia today? At the present stages of consumer culture, postindustrial Western capitalism, and postmodern art, might retail spaces be the paradigm of heterotopic ­spaces? Moreover, might it be possible that today only retail spaces can in fact be hetero­ topic? After all, while many art spaces still seem to cling to the modernist version of a neutralizing and self-effacing white cube space that supposedly fades out the increasingly crucial aspect of the gallery’s and museum’s commercia­ lity, retail spaces acknowledge the intrinsic tension they carry between commercial goals and aesthetic modes. Rather than being a space that is separate from consumption—which is true for neither the boutique nor the art space—the white cube heterotopia separates us from the spaces of production. It effaces the processes of industrial mass production (and their human price) as well as the manual labor and indi­ vidual creativity of the artist. Instead, it puts viewers in the position of active creators of aesthetic experience. By fostering the active role of the consumer spectator, the modes of reception of Minimalism and the white cube effectively focus on reception as the crucial act of meaning construction, rather than on production or the art object itself. The consumer/spectator becomes the site of aesthetic experience and thus takes over the producer’s active role. Ironically, although developing from the background of modernist aesthetics, the white cube in its postmodern continuation as the white cube boutique thus seems to suggest that it is the consumer rather than the producer who creates cultural meaning. Whether we should understand this as an instrument of ideology that hides the reality of an all-encompassing capitalism under a veneer of freedom of choice, or whether this is simply one postmodern form of individual expression and self-fashioning shall be left open to the reader’s evaluation.

D iscursive S ite S pecificit y IV: O ther A rt-R el ated R e tail S paces Although white cube and Minimalist strategies of exhibiting art are most effec­­­ t­­ive in aestheticizating retail spaces, they are not the only manifestations of a convergence between art spaces and commercial spaces. An alternative possi­ bility of integrating art space and commercial space is exemplified in Rem Kolhaas’s design for the Prada flagship store in New York. While this space is neither a white cube nor Minimalist, it achieves a number of effects that are comparable to those discussed above, even though some of these are arguably

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unintended. Rather than undermining what I have argued above, however, the example of Prada New York shows the wider importance of the principles discussed. What the ideal white cube/Minimalist boutique achieves as a para­ digm, other spaces take up in different variations. Prada New York will also bring us full circle to Prada Marfa, the anchor point of this chapter. In a 2007 interview, Michael Elmgreen stated that Prada Marfa was an extension of an earlier Elmgreen & Dragset work, their Opening Soon/Powerless Structures, Fig. 242 at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea, New York, an exhibit which took place between 20 October and 24 November 2001. This work consisted of a large sign that covered the window and entrance door of the gallery and stated “Opening Soon: Prada” in the typical Prada typography. Image 18: Signboard in the window of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Elmgreen & Dragset, Opening Soon/Powerless Structures, Fig. 242, 2001. Paper, vinyl lettering on window. Photography by Mark Lutrelle. Courtesy of Elmgreen & Dragset.

Already in this work, Elmgreen & Dragset played with the inversion of art and commerce. In this case, the work was not a three-dimensional installation but a two-dimensional sign. It suggested that what was hidden behind it was no longer an art space—the Bonakdar Gallery—but a space that was in transition

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towards becoming commercial. By covering up the gallery’s front window and door and blocking the view of the gallery’s interior, the sign exerted a signifying power over the space that extended behind it, changing it from an art space into a commercial space. At the same time, the sign also protruded into the city space around it, engaging with its urban environment. According to Elmgreen, the reaction to the sign was confusion about the status of the work, comparable to the effect of Prada Marfa: “Everybody believed that the gallery had run out of business and that Prada would move into the space. The work was about gentrification. Not really popular by our former gallerist there since she didn‘t have any visitors for the duration of our show.”148

This reaction to the sign might seem surprising at first because at the time, Chelsea was the up-and-coming New York art district. Gentrification was taking place, but primarily in the form of a steep incline in the number of art galleries. As a consequence of soaring prices in SoHo in the late 1990s, many art galleries were moving to or opening up in Chelsea. According to ­David Halle and Elisabeth Tisso, the number of galleries in Chelsea steadily rose from 71 to at least 268 between 1998 and 2008, while the number of gal­leries in SoHo fell from its 1990 peak of 262 to 44 in 2008. Important reasons for this movement of galleries from SoHo to Chelsea were increasing rents and the influx of highpriced fashion boutiques to SoHo.149 Another crucial factor, however, was the intention of some agents in the art world to reinstall the distance between art and commerce by spatially moving away from a commercialized environment. 148 | Michael Elmgreen, interview by Tiffany Tondut, Supersweet, 2007. http://super sweet.org /main.aspx?at ype=1&aname=Ar t _Michael_Elmgreen&con=1&sc1=0& ­­s c2=0. 149 | David Halle and Elisabeth Tiso, “Chelsea still center of art world, but L.E.S. beckons,” The Villager 77, no. 30 (2007). Similarly, the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s press release stated: “Opening Soon/Powerless Structures, Fig 242 is a commentary on the mediating role that art galleries have played in reshaping and transforming the urban landscape of the city. Throughout the last decade, galleries have been moving into many of the city’s lowest rent neighborhoods, and effectively contributing to the gentri­f ication of these areas. Of course, the cycle subsequently comes around, so that the galleries find it necessary to leave these same neighborhoods due to increasingly high rents or other economic concerns. Fashion shops or chain stores then take over and push the real estate values even higher. In New York’s SoHo we saw such changes.” “Elmgreen/ Dragset, 20 October 2001 - 24 November 2001,” Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. http://tanya bonakdargallery.com/press_release.php?exhibit_id=63.

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Ar t/Commerce: The Convergence of Ar t and Marketing in Contemporar y Culture “With this migration the regard of art is returned to something like a state of purity, uncontaminated by vagrant desires for objects of similar price—like designer clothes—and related usages, like furniture and the decorative and ethnographic arts.”150

Similarly, artist Sylvia Kolbowski wrote in the catalogue to her Closed Circuit exhibition in 1997, in which she dealt with the move of artists and galleries from SoHo to Chelsea: “This move to Chelsea among a small group of dealers is to articulate a hierarchy of ­‘seriousness’ in art appreciation, to demarcate a sense of exclusivity once again in relation to contemporary art—I think the move to Chelsea in many ways allows for the repression of the commerce part of art’s trade.”151

When commerce moves in, art tries to move elsewhere. The distance between art spaces and commercial spaces does not simply collapse. It is, however, constantly questioned and negotiated through proces­ ses of spatial signification as well as spatial appropriation and re-appropriation. Elmgreen and Dragset’s works in Chelsea and in Marfa can therefore be understood as comments on actual processes in the art world. Even though they are misplaced in a strictly geographical sense, they are site-specific in terms of discourse and temporality, pointing to former and probable future developments of the sites. Given the fear of recession after September 11, 2001, as well as the soaring rents in SoHo, it is not surprising that passers-by might have taken for real the announcement of Prada moving into a former gallery space. Moreover, the sign stands in close relation to the actual transformation of a former art space into a Prada store that was occurring in SoHo at the time. In December 2001, Prada opened its new flagship store in what had since 1992 been the SoHo branch of the Guggenheim, on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. Rem Koolhaas redesigned the space to become Prada’s New York “epicenter,” the term Prada uses for their flagship stores. The main Prada ­epicenter stores are in New York (2001) and Los Angeles (2002), both designed by Koolhaas, and in Tokyo, designed by Herzog & de Meuron (2003). In addition, Koolhaas’s partnership, OMA, developed the project for an architectural expansion of the Fondazione Prada, which was presented to the public in 2008. The expansion is meant to broaden the space and scope of the art foundation that Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli founded in Milan in 1995 in order to collect and present contemporary art.152 Prada New York is therefore 150 | Moore, “The Twilight of Minimalism.” 151 | Closed Circuit catalogue, 10. Quoted ibid. 152 | Fondazione Prada was a reorganization of Prada Milano Arte, established in 1993 for the presentation of contemporary art. See www.fondazioneprada.org.

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the first, architectural attempt in Prada’s series of ongoing efforts to (re)present the brand and to (in)fuse it with culture and art. One way to think about this merging of art and commerce is as processes of cultural distinction, which we can understand by referring to classical cultural theorists like Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu.153 As Miuccia Prada and her brand are strongly engaged in the art world, wearing Prada clothes could be read as an expression of the wearer’s cultural capital or ambition to gain such. Furthermore, in the American context, the European roots of the brand’s identity play a part in this process of cultural distinction. Yet with the Prada brand this plays out in a particularly interesting way. Routinely, the staff at famous auction houses such as Christie’s are dressed in Prada attire. Therefore, Prada may not be the wisest sartorial choice for those wishing to position themselves on a higher social level; these customers would likely prefer to stand out as collectors and not be mistaken for staff. We should therefore note that processes of social distinction function in ways more intricate than a straightforward transposition of cultural capital, though the general argument regarding cultural distinction and cultural capital certainly stands. However, what is particularly interesting about this merging between art and fashion is not how it might or might not be instrumental in achieving goals of social distinction. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the question of how this approximation of art and commerce works out spatially. How does the Prada New York store actualize the close relation of art space and retail space? Apart from the store’s obvious relation to art, situated as it is on the site of a former museum, Prada New York also shows elements of interior design that evoke practices of art exhibition. The interior of the long, ­two-story boutique housed in a formerly industrial brick building features a stylistic mixture. On the one hand, one wall on the ground floor is completely covered with exu­berant, colorful wallpaper, and part of the floor in the basement is made of black and white marble tiles that are reminiscent of the first Prada boutique in Milan. These elements refer to the excessive, luxurious style of store design and decoration, one of the two dominant strands of the early capitalist aesthetics of display. On the other hand, however, most of the surfaces in the boutique are simple and clear: there are wooden floors, the fixtures are polished white, the walls and ceilings are made of glass or mirrors, and aluminum and steel ­elements are present, most notably in cage-like display boxes installed throughout the room and suspended from the ceiling.154 153 | Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford; New York: Oxford ­U niversity Press, [1899] 2007); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London; New York: Routledge, 1984). 154 | See Image 21, page 101.

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Image 19: Prada Epicenter, mix of stylistic elements

OMA, Prada Epicenter in New York, 2001. © OMA.

Image 20: Prada Epicenter, product display on lower level

OMA, Prada Epicenter in New York, 2001. © OMA.

The store’s dominating design element is an immense zebrawood wave, which governs the space and creates a transition from the ground floor to the lower level of the store.155 The wave takes up about half of the floor space and ­partly functions as a presentational space for mannequins and shoes. The main ­impression it creates is that of an abundant use of space with little function.

155 | See Image 24, page 104.

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Koolhaas’s architecture works less in functional terms than it does aesthe­ tically, thus approaching the condition of art itself. Image 21: Prada Epicenter, display cages and zebrawood wave

OMA, Prada Epicenter in New York, 2001. © OMA.

Overall, the interior design of the store is dominated by a mixture of indus­ trial and minimalistic elements, with lots of glass and sleek surfaces. For Mini­ malism, such use of clear, simple forms inside industrial spaces has been a typical display alternative to the white cube, employed for example on Judd’s premises in Marfa, but also in many New York art galleries. The Prada boutique engages with the original industrial architecture of the building in a way that is similar to these spaces. With the original brick walls of the building still visible in parts of the space, and with the narrow, cast-iron Corinthian-­ Victorian columns in a turn-of-the century industrial style, the Prada boutique still displays abundant traces of the original industrial space that preceded the Guggenheim. Built in 1882 by Thomas Stent, the building had been a branch of the Rogers, Peet & Co. clothing factory. All phases of the space’s existence are still discernible in its architecture and design. Prada New York is an industrial space turned ­museum turned retail space.

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Prada New York shows elements of interior design that put it into rela­tion with Minimalist art practices, yet the boutique cannot rightly be called a Mini­ malist or a white cube art space. It does, however, relate to another proto­t ypical art space that has become popular since the 1990s, namely the industrial style art space. This stylistic development was furthered strongly by ­R ichard Gluckman, one of whose major projects was the conversion of a former Chelsea warehouse into gallery spaces for the Dia Center for the Arts in 1987. Gluckman has since renovated numerous galleries in Chelsea.156 This industrial type of exhibition space became a popular alternative for art exhibition spaces in the 1990s. While, in detail, it might function differ­ently from the white cube, the industrial style has now been used so e­ xtensively that it can be considered a typical art space along with the para­digmatic white cube. By mixing found references to the original building with minimalistic aes­t hetics, Prada New York is an exemplar of a stylistically mixed yet strongly art-related space. Having taken over the location of the former Guggenheim, Prada New York is over-determined as an art space. Yet, these two connections to art spaces are not even the most striking ones. An even more significant factor is the store’s peculiar temporal quality. The space displays elements of different building epochs, as well as references to a 19th century European aesthetic of luxury shopping. It conserves all of these different time periods. This conservational character, along with references to the museum space that it used to be, ­likens the retail space to a space of art exhibition, in which not just the o ­ bjects, but the architecture itself “exists in a kind of eternity of display.”157 One distinct element of the boutique might seem in contrast to the timelessness of the retail space: much of the attention that Prada New York generated upon its opening in 2001 was due to its extensive use of technology. Firstly, the ground level is dominated by an oversized, fully glazed, round elevator, which cost about $1 million to construct. It goes from the ground floor to the basement and back. Secondly, instead of price tags, items carry RFID chips. In order to retrieve infor­mation about the product’s availability or price, sales assistants need to pick up one of the remote controls from a shelf and hold it against the piece. The information is then shown on one of the displays installed throughout the store. We should note that keeping this information out of the customer’s direct reach is not just a means of showcasing up-to-date technological equipment; it is also a mode of distancing the aesthetic from the commercial experience.158

156  |  Rhea Anastas, “Auf nach Chelsea! Eine Genealogie des New Yorker K­ unst­b etriebs,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 44 (December 2001). 157 | O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15. 158 | The fact that the commercial part of the experience only takes place at the cash register also emphasizes the process of distinction, for it suggests that Prada custo-

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Image 22: Prada Epicenter, glass elevator

OMA, Prada Epicenter in New York, 2001. © OMA.

Image 23: Prada Epicenter, use of technology

OMA, Prada Epicenter in New York, 2001. © OMA. mers do not need to consider the profane financial side of their shopping and can focus only on its aesthetic aspect.

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Thirdly, the changing room doors downstairs have transparent walls covered with a special material that turns opaque with the push of a button. And finally, cameras inside the dressing rooms film the customer in real time while he or she turns around—what the customer then sees is a delayed image of herself, making it possible to see herself from all angles. Rather than conserving time in space, this extensive use of technological elements emphasizes innovation, change, and eventfulness. Image 24: Prada Epicenter, zebrawood wave and convertible stage

OMA, Prada Epicenter in New York, 2001. © OMA.

This potential for eventfulness and change is further emphasized by the mobi­ lity of several elements in the store. The display cages, which are suspended from the ceiling on the ground level of the space, are fully mechanized and can be moved through the whole length of the space. More importantly, the wooden wave that connects the two levels of the boutique was planned so that it can be easily opened and converted into a stage by night. The idea was to host cultural events and concerts on the stage. However, all of these elements of change, potentiality, innovation, and motion seem to be used little or not at all. Moreover, years of usage and a fire in 2006 temporarily impaired a good deal of the technical functions. Thus, while the flagship store impresses through its many possibilities for change and entertainment, it does not necessarily make good

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on them. The store seems like a bubble in which technological innovation from 2001 has been imperfectly conserved. In a strange way, this formerly up-to-date technology constitutes yet another type of time capsule for the store, keeping it in an eternal state of potentiality and thus registering the passing of time around it. In this impression, the store is interestingly close to Prada Marfa and to the function of the white cube in general. Even more than this temporal limbo that Prada New York creates, what likens the boutique to an art exhibition space is its spaciousness. As architecture critic Herbert Muschamp observed, “space itself is the ultimate luxury at Prada; space, and the dedication of so little room to stuff you can buy.”159 By displaying few products and concentrating the retail space in the basement, the interior focuses on its own spatial characteristics, puting its architecture at the center of the experience and creating an impression of spatial abundance and luxury. Even a 2003 episode of the TV series Sex and the City refers to this specific quality of the store. When the main character Carrie enters the boutique with her then-boyfriend, he exclaims: “Holy shit! You know, on my planet, the clothing stores have clothes.”160 The focus is on the qualities of the space rather than on the merchandise. And what place would lend itself more to the expression of the luxurious quality of abundant space than Manhattan, where space is one of the scarcest resources? At the same time, the few objects that are on display are singled out. By strengthening the impression of luxury, this non-commercial type of presentation ironically enhances the material value of the product. The specific ­mise-en-scène simultaneously channels attention and evokes the object’s aura­ tic qualities, charging it with excessive meaning and value that is not inherent in its material or use function. Consumer products seem to become art objects before our very eyes; they are transformed into objects whose main function is aesthetic pleasure rather than instrumentality. Muschamp instructs us to “think of this as a museum show on indefinite display,”161 thus expressing the immediate closeness between art and commerce in this space that lingers ­between retail and exhibition. The fact that the products are presented in series does not undermine this aesthetic focus of the presentation. As we have seen, Minimalism took up techniques and materials of industrial production, thus bringing industrial serial­ity into art where it has remained an important method ever since. In particular, the specific presentation of merchandise on shelves in Prada New York strongly 159 | Herbert Muschamp, “Forget the Shoes, Prada’s New Store Stocks Ideas,” The New York Times, 16 December 2001. 160 | Sex and the City, Season Six, Episode Five, “Lights, Camera, Relationships,” first scene. 161 | Muschamp, “Forget the Shoes, Prada’s New Store Stocks Ideas.”

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approximates the Minimalist seriality of objects. This results in a display so strikingly aesthetic that Andreas Gursky made similar shelves the subject of his photographs Prada I (1996), Prada II (1997), and Prada III (1998).162 The transformation of consumer products into art objects has also been furthered by several product exhibitions that took place at the store, in which skirts or suitcases, for example, where arranged in installations. Waist Down: Skirts by Miuccia Prada (2006) was an exhibition that traveled from Tokyo and Shanghai to New York and opened shortly after the New York epicenter was reopened in 2006. The exhibition was designed by Koolhaas’s AMO, the sister company of OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture), which had designed the store. A number of methods were used make the exhibition resemble a museum show.163 As if the architecture and design of the Prada flagship had not made it clear already, this exhibition on the occasion of the store’s reopening em­pha­ sized once more the idea of the store-as-museum. As New York Times’ Alex ­Kuczynski ­summarized: “It’s as if Mr. Koolhaas and Ms. Prada decided to thumb their noses at the enterprise of shopping, creating a showroom for clothes that hardly has room to show clothes, a place where the grandiosity of the architecture takes a premium over the merchandise. At its heart this store seems almost ashamed of the fact that it is a store, veiling its commercial intentions beneath an apologetic veneer of art.”164

Prada New York obviously attempts to be gallery or a museum rather than a store. Paradoxically, the ultimate logic behind this move cannot but be thought of as commercial: the goal of any company decision should ultimately be an increase in the value of the product, brand, or company. The flagship store in New York was opened at a time when the company was in economic distress.165 Even considering Miuccia Prada’s known engagement in the arts, it seems safe

162 | Unfortunately, the use of Gursky’s photographs was not permitted in this publi­ cation as black-and-white reproduction would distort the composition of the works. 163 | The skirts were installed hanging from the ceiling or the walls and were animated using windshield wipers and motors. In addition, each of the exhibited skirts was discussed in short essays similar to the type of description one can find in a museum. “These disquisitions, in a crude blend of English and artspeak, resemble in miniature the essays one might find in a museum, but succeed in illustrating the commerce at the heart of Prada.” Alex Kuczynski, “At Prada, a Grand Premise Comes Unhemmed,” The New York Times, 27 April 2006. 164 | Ibid. 165 | Richard Heller, “The House of Prada,” Forbes, 15 September 2003.

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to say that an investment of $20 to $40 million in the architecture and design of a store at such a time was guided significantly by the logic of making profit. Yet the attempt to be a non-commercial space by means of architecture and interior design goes so far as to risk plain failure in marketing terms. An article in a retail real estate magazine, evaluating the shop’s retail design according to marketing aspects and quoting several experts’ opinions, points out that the space’s separation of artistic impression from the fundamental function of sel­ ling goods was too extreme. It goes on to criticize the concentration of retail activities on the lower level as disadvantageous and ill-planned, stating that the store’s architecture was wrongly prioritized over its brand identity, leaving its message incohesive and ephemeral. The article notes that some of the shop’s innovations have influenced mass market retail architecture, in particular its use of materials and video screens, as well as the sequential set-up of the space as an architectural promenade. Interestingly, particularly this last feature has a close kinship with the spatial and exhibition design in museums and g ­ alleries. Yet, the retailers’ overall evaluation remains: “Prada’s SoHo store is clearly about sizzle, not the bottom line.”166 This judgment of the space as a failure in commercial terms does not automatically mean that it functions convincingly as an art space. Yet the many aspects of the store that bring it strikingly close to an art space, as well as the store’s negative commercial evaluation, show how far Prada is willing to go to distance the brand and the space from commerce, and to approximate its strategies of presentation to the aesthetics of art spaces. This is supported by Koolhaas’s statement in an interview, in which he suggests that instead of following regular branding strategies, Prada’s and his intention in the shop were to stretch the brand identity: “what we have been trying to do with Prada, for instance, is instead of trying to reduce it to its essence, we try to stretch it, so that more becomes possible instead of less.”167 Koolhaas’s New York Prada shop thus exemplifies an approach to brand marketing that opens the meaning of the brand towards the consumer/spectator; this makes possible an intense experience of space, as well as an experience of the brand that is primarily aesthetic. This experience is significantly more open-ended than a one-dimensional insistence on efficient business instruments might a­ llow for. This open-endedness likens the brand experience to 166 | David Sokol, “SCW Case Study: The Prada Effect,” retailtrafficmag.com, 2003. 167 | Chee Pearlman, “Yesterday, Prada; Tomorrow, the World [Interview with Rem Koolhaas],” The New York Times, 23 May 2002. In a similar vein, in the project description on his own website, Koolhaas describes his work for Prada as follows. “New York’s Prada Epicenter—an exclusive boutique, a public space, a gallery, a performance space, a laboratory—is part of OMA/AMO’s ongoing research into shopping, arguably the last remaining form of public activity, and a strategy to counteract and destabilize any received notion of what Prada is, does, or will become.”

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the experience of semantic polyvalidity in art, that is, the potential of art to have multiple meanings. By breaking established rules of marketing to achieve aesthetic e­ ffects, this strand of brand marketing shows remarkable similarities with art stra­tegies. Particularly in luxury branding, this aesthetic approach increas­ingly seems a strategy of choice.168 If we now change the focus back to art and look at its role from a marketing perspective, we can understand in a new light the recurring attempts to question and undermine its categories in search for new modes of standing out.169 These strategies, however, run a high risk of undermining the boundaries and ultimately the very core of art. In marketing terms, this core would be called the brand identity of art. The overstretching of this identity leads to a destabilization of the cultural form and function of art because it opens up the sphere of art to the logic of instrumental reason and commercial gain. If we put this insight in relation to the use of aesthetic strategies in the commercial realm, we can see that these strategies can, in fact, also lead to an overstretching of the respective commercial brand. This may result in adverse effects, such as negative commercial results. However, both of these risks seem to be willingly taken in the hopes of making the product—whether in the realm of art or commerce—stand out. In its stretching of commercial space far in the direction of the aesthetic and potentially even at the cost of commercial success, Prada New York shows one possible variation on the aesthetic function of retail spaces. Koolhaas’s boutique shows us that the aesthetic principles I have discussed in regard to the “ideal” white cube boutique find reflection in other boutique spaces, as well. This supports my argument that the aestheticization of commercial envi­ ronments, just like the commercialization of spheres formerly conceived of in terms of an aesthetic of autonomy, have to be closely scrutinized case after case. Only if we take upon ourselves such a detailed analysis of the modes of functioning of these spaces will we be able to better grasp the specific ways in which commercialization and aestheticization interact and converge in spatial and temporal terms.

168 | Jean-Noel Kapferer and Vincent Bastien, The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands (London; Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2008). 169 | Winfried Fluck has discussed the motivation and strategies of the artist to posi­ tion his or her work at the cutting edge in his essay: Winfried Fluck, “Radical Aesthetics,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, no. 10, Aesthetics and Contemporary Discourse (1994): 31-47.

Art Objects/Brand Products “In the stores of tomorrow, ‘buying’ will be outmoded as a sterile activity and in its place will stand ‘the art of shopping’ which is less about purchasing and more about experiencing the brand.” M arc G obé and S ergio Z yman

Art spaces and retail spaces show striking parallels in their strategies of displaying objects and in their ways of transporting the spectator/consumer into a different dimension. Similarly striking parallels between strategies of art and commerce are revealed in the very objects in question—the art object and the brand product. While, of course, these objects cannot be analyzed irrespective of their contexts of presentation, the following chapter will take a different perspective and focus on their object-character, or rather on how it has been increasingly put into question by post-war art and contemporary culture. This development puts the experience rather than the object center stage in both art and consumer culture. Accordingly, the concept of value related to art objects and consumer objects can today also be grasped in a novel way. As the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture points out, the cultural and the economic are different modes of valuation. However, this duality is not to be understood as strictly oppositional or incommensurate.1 As the importance of the object has been decreasing in many areas of art, we can observe a corollary phenomenon in commerce: the importance of the consumer/spectator experience is increasing, which significantly changes the character of both the art object and the consumer object/ commodity.2 This brings about yet another convergence of the spheres of art 1  |  David Throsby, “Introduction and Overview”; Michael Hutter and Richard ­S husterman, “Value and the Valuation of Art in Economic and Aesthetic Theory,” in Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Victor A. Ginsburgh and David Throsby (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006). 2 | These processes are taking place in temporally deferred yet parallel ways. For the question of mutual temporal relationality, see Hal Foster’s notion of parallax, which I

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and commerce. The process and strategies of value creation in art and in marketing—what generates value in an artwork and what generates value in a prod­ uct of consumer culture—have become strikingly similar. The question here is essentially one of aesthetics. A central aspect of the value of objects we consume—whether with our senses only or by also taking them into our possession—is their form and appearance. Yet current research does not sufficiently take into account the importance of the relation between the aesthetic and the commercial. In his introduction to a comprehensive volume on commodity aesthetics3, Heinz Drügh observes that there is still a lot of basic research to be done in order to improve on explanations of commodity aesthetics put forward by Marx, the Frankfurt School, and, more recently, by Wolfgang Fritz Haug.4 Drügh deems these explanations insufficient for the present moment and sees two main areas for further research. One is the notion that commodities are always also bearers of cultural meaning and cultural practices, which is closely related to the question of how this influences the formation of contemporary subjective identities. The second area includes further analysis of the aesthetic part of the term commodity aesthetic. This entails analysis not only of the aesthetic form of commodities, but also of the ways in which commodities influence other aesthetic realms, such as literature and the visual arts. Significantly, Drügh also ask the question of how the aesthetic can in turn catalyze thinking about consumption.5 It is particularly in this second area that

will elaborate on in more detail later in my discussion. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism in Parallax,” October 63 (Winter 1993): 3-20. and ———, The Return of the Real: The Avant-­ Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996). 3 | Heinz Drügh, Christian Metz, and Björn Weyand, eds., Warenästhetik. Neue ­­­P er ­s pek ­t iven­ auf Konsum, Kultur und Kunst (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2011). 4 | Haug introduced the term commodity aesthetics into the discussion surrounding Marx’s proposition that in capitalism, exchange value has come to dominate over use value. Marx’s argument was continued by Adorno and Horkheimer, who added to it a specific perspective on culture, holding that the commodification of art and the aestheticization of the commodity lead to a loss of the autonomy of art, and to the total domination of culture and manipulation of the consumer through capitalist interests. In contrast, writers like Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin have approached the phenomenon in slightly more nuanced ways, allowing for an analysis that also acknowledges the cultural importance of aestheticized commodities. Georg Simmel, “Das Geld in der modernen Kultur,” in Georg Simmel: Schriften zur Soziologie, ed. Heinz-Jürgen Dahme and Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, [1896] 1983). Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, [1927-1940] 1983). 5 | Drügh, Metz, and Weyand, eds., Warenästhetik. Neue Perspektiven auf Konsum, Kultur und Kunst, 15.

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I situate my own analysis, asking how the aesthetic (and its ‘hometurf,’ art) influences the commercial, and vice versa. This chapter begins by addressing the issue of how value is generated in works of art and in consumer objects. A new perspective on this issue will be developed that turns our attention slightly away from the aesthetics of the object itself and towards the category of experience. Of course, no object or situ­ ation can be stripped of its aesthetic dimension. However, my contention here is that the character of the aesthetic is itself fundamentally changing, moving the spectator/consumer away from the perception of the object and towards a more inclusive, holistic experience. Marketing strategies today increasingly move towards a comprehensive experience for which the object is, at best, an enabler. Throughout the chapter, I will argue that this development in the economic sphere was prefigured by the dematerialization of the art object, which was initiated as an avantgardist art strategy by Conceptual Art in the late 1960s. It will become clear that although we may still be dealing with objects today in both art and the commercial realm, the crucial value in both the artistic and the economic spheres lies ever less in the materiality or formal traits of objects, and more in qualities that are external and even unrelated to the object. These values are often created through special experiences. The argument presented here will show how a process derived from the art world is now applied as a commercial instrument in the realm of brand marketing. What in the arts had been intended as a renunciation of the marketplace—a turn away from material, circulable, sellable art products—has ­effectively desta­ bilized the boundaries of autonomous art. It has simul­taneously increased the importance of experience over object. And if current marketing research is not mistaken, this strategy of moving away from the object is a promising marketing approach for the future.

W hat I t ’s W orth : E conomic V alue and A esthe tic V alue In order to understand the changing functions of the art object and the con­ sumer object, we need to grasp what is important about these objects and how their value is constituted. To begin with, it should be noted that the question of value is complicated and widely discussed and cannot be covered comprehensively in the scope of this book. However, we can look at the discourse on value more generally and establish some fundamentals of its mode of oper­ation. First of all, we can make a very basic distinction between extrinsic or instrumental value, of which economic or commercial value are subcategories, and intrinsic value, of which aesthetic value is a subcategory (as are emotional or ethical

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value).6 This distinction is essentially another take on the duality b ­ e­t ween instrumental reason and commerce, on the one hand, and the emphatic notion of autonomous art, on the other. Accordingly, the discourse on value is split along these lines into an economic and an aesthetic one. This results in what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has termed the double discourse paradigm. “On the one hand there is the discourse of economic theory: money, commerce, technology, industry, production and consumption, workers and consumers; on the other hand, there is the discourse of aesthetic axiology: culture, art genius, creation and appreciation, artists and connoisseurs. In the first discourse, events are explained in terms of calculation, preferences, benefits, profits, prices, and utility. In the second events are explained or, rather (and this distinction/opposition is as crucial as any of the other), ‘justified’ – in terms of inspiration, discrimination, taste (good taste, bad taste, no taste), the test of time, intrinsic value, and transcendent value.”7

We can trace this double discourse paradigm back to Marx’s influential work on the nature of value in capitalist societies. Marx elaborated on the economic value of goods, positing that in capitalism this value lies not in the use but in the exchange of an object. While use value is inherent in the object, exchange value is external to it and comes into being through the act of exchange. The object’s value is thus established in relation to other objects. Marx deplored this new importance of exchange value over use value because it signified an ­estrangement of the producer from the product and the creation of value, as well as an estrangement of the consumer from the conditions of production. This eventually led to the general alienation of human beings in capitalist society, Marx maintained. Many discussions on the value of both consumer goods and artworks have built on Marx’s argument. These include arguments proposed by Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland B ­ arthes, and Jean Baudrillard.8 In broad terms, we can distinguish two basic positions on the relation between aesthetic value and economic or consumer value. 6 | See, for example, Antoon van den Braembussche, “The Value of Art,” in The Value of Culture, ed. Arjo Klamer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). Suzan ­B oztepe, “User Value: Competing Theories and Models,” International Journal of Design 1, no. 2 (2007). Morris Holbrook, Introduction to Consumer Value: Consumer Value–­ ­A Framework for Analysis and Research (London: Routledge, 1999). 7 | Barbara Hernstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for ­C ritical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 127. 8 | Simmel, “Das Geld in der modernen Kultur”; Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Adorno and Horkheimer, “Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug”; ­R aymond ­W illiams, “Advertising: The Magic System” in Problems in Materialism and Culture

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Arguments indebted to the Enlightenment idea(l) of an autonomous art, in particular that of the Frankfurt School, emphasize that (true) art is and has to be a self-valuating realm that is external to and independent from an instru­ mental, capitalist market logic. In contrast, more sociological approaches, such as those put forth by Simmel, Veblen, Barthes, and Bourdieu, as well as by Baudrillard in his later works, emphasize that art, too, has a very real value to those who consume it, primarily in symbolic or social terms.9 These arguments follow the proposition that commodities are valuable to the consumer, not merely because of their exchange value or because of their artificially ­cre­ated fetish character, as Marx assumed, but because they carry important social and symbolic functions. Such functions may be understood in terms of establishing instrumental and economic value for consumers by helping them build and exhibit social standing and cultural capital. However, these sociological ­approa­ches focus on bringing together instrumental or use value with aes­­thetic value in more general, and not strictly economic, terms. They accordingly represent early attempts at bridging the fundamental divisions between use and exchange value, external and intrinsic value, and economic and aesthetic value. It is only recently that economic and aesthetic theory have started to engage in comprehensive discussions that focus specifically on the aesthetic and the economic modes of valuation, attempting to work out their similarities rather than dwelling on their still widely assumed fundamental differences.10 A good way to dive deeper into the crucial aspects of this value discussion is to take a closer look at the argument for an autonomous art presented by Horkheimer and Adorno. In their 1944 commentary on the culture industry, they voice strong criticism of the total fusion of culture with the instrumental

(­ London: Verso, [1961] 1980); Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: ­Verso, 1991); Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: New Press, 1995); Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, [1957] 1972); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of ­M ichigan Press, [1981] 1994), as well as The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage Publications, 1998) and “The Ecstasy of Communication” in The Anti-­ Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 2002). 9 | In his earlier works, Baudrillard reconceptualized the idea of value in art, proposing “a renewed emphasis on use-value and a belief that art, the ‘pure signifier,’ is untainted by the spread of commodification to the cultural world.” Michael Hutter, Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, Murphy Institute studies in political economy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5. His later theories of symbolic value arguably add a consumer perspective to this formerly autonomous valuation of art. 10 | See, for example, ibid., 128.

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logic of capitalist markets that they observe.11 It seems to them that this process will lead to a total dissolution of art into consumer society, the “Transposition der Kunst in die Konsumsphäre.”12 In their view, the artwork should follow a different logic than the sphere of consumption; it should be autonomous from a social system that is dominated by economic rationality and instrumental reason. They strongly criticize that art is becoming just another cultural product among many to be standardized, marketed, and sold.13 Horkheimer and ­Adorno locate the use value of art in the very fact that it has none, at least not in the logic of the dominant market ideology. In other words, the core ­ele­­­ment of the autonomy of art lies in the independence of its value from ­other modes of value production in society. While art should have no use value and no v­alue e­ xternal to itself, Horkheimer and Adorno observe that exchange ­value is becom­ing the defining feature of art in society. This exchange value is based on social prestige.14 The value of art, in their view, is thus transformed from intrinsic to extrinsic. Art becomes fetishized as a marker of social status and recognition15 —an observation that is close to what Veblen will later call 11 | Adorno and Horkheimer, “Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug.” 12 | “The transposition of art into the sphere of consumption.” (My translation) Ibid., 143. 13 | We should not mistake this critique of the commercialization of art for a nega­ tion of the fundamental relation that exists between art and the market. Quite on the con­t rary, Horkheimer and Adorno recognize that the economic autonomy of art has always been a claim rather than an economic reality, and that autonomous art and artworks have always, at the same time, been commodities. “Die reinen Kunstwerke, die den ­Warencharakter der Gesellschaft allein dadurch schon verneinen, dass sie ihrem ­e i­g enen Gesetz folgen, waren immer zugleich auch Waren….” “The pure works of art, which deny the commodified nature of society by following their own law, have always also been commodities.” (My translation) Ibid., 166. In this sense, capitalist art per se is no less autonomous than bourgeois art, only the relations of economic depen­d ency have m ­ oved from personal to anonymous. “Die Zwecklosigkeit des großen n­ eueren ­K unstwerks lebt von der Anonymität des Marktes.” “The purposelessness of the big new work of art lives off the anonymity of the market.” (My translation) Ibid., 166. Georg Simmel had also made this observation in his essay “Das Geld in der modernen Kultur.” 14 | “Was man den Gebrauchswert in der Rezeption der Kulturgüter nennen ­k önnte, w ird durch den Tauschwert ersetzt, anstelle des Genusses tritt Dabeisein ­ ­ u nd­ ­B e­­­scheid­­wissen­, Prestigegewinn anstelle der Kennerschaft.” “What one could call ­t he use value of the reception of cultural goods is replaced by exchange value; pleasure is sub­­stituted by being there and being in the know, gaining prestige takes the place of con­n oisseurship.” (My translation) Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 167. 15 | “Der Gebrauchswert der Kunst, ihr Sein, gilt ihnen als Fetisch, und der Fetisch, ihre gesellschaftliche Schätzung, die sie als Rang der Kunstwerke verkennen, wird zu ihrem

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“­ conspicuous consumption” and to what Bourdieu calls “cultural capital.” All of these concepts share an emphasis on the intrusion or presence of a market logic in the ideally self-valuating, autonomous realm of art. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the art object becomes a fetish. With this fetishization, what they call the paradoxical commodity character of art is at once fully realized and destroyed. When art follows the logic of the culture industry and becomes yet another product, it ceases to deal with its inherent contradiction between autonomy and commerce. This contradiction is at the very heart of Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of art, which must continuously deal with this internal tension in order to uphold its claim of occupying a separate sphere. When art moves towards commerce, it gives up its claim to autonomy, and along with it the utopian potential inherent in this claim.16 Art then becomes truly and intrinsically useless, unable to provide the only pleasure it offers according to critical theory: the pleasure of freedom. Art ceases to be autonomous from the dominant instrumental logic of society.17 How does this development of art relate to the cultural role of marketing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view? Their chapter on culture industry does not refer to marketing in general or to brand marketing in particular, as both were non-existent as disciplines at the time of writing. It does, however discuss the related function of advertising at length.18 Horkheimer and Adorno claim that einzigen Gebrauchswert, der einzigen Qualität, die sie genießen.” “The use value of art, its existence, serves as their fetish; and the fetish, their social esteem, which they mistake for the status of the art works, becomes their only use value, the only quality they enjoy.” (My translation) Ibid., 167. 16 | “Mit der Billigkeit der Serienprodukte de luxe aber, und ihrem Komplement, dem universalen Schwindel, bahnt eine Veränderung im Warencharakter der Kunst selber sich an. Nicht er ist das Neue: nur dass er heute geflissentlich sich einbekennt, und dass Kunst ihrer eigenen Autonomie abschwört, sich stolz unter die Konsumgüter einreiht, macht den Reiz der Neuheit aus.” “However, in the cheapness of serial products de luxe and their complement, universal fraud, looms a change in the commodity character of art itself. This commodity character is not new. Only the fact that it deliberatly reveals itself today and that art renounces its own autonomy, proudly joining ranks with com­ modity products, constitutes the allure of novelty.” (My translation) Ibid., 166. 17 | “So zerfällt der Warencharakter der Kunst, indem er sich vollends realisiert.” “The commodity character of art thus disintegrates in the very instant that it fully material­ izes.” (My translation) Ibid., 167. 18 | In the following, I will often use marketing as an umbrella term, even where specific texts only mention advertising. This is because, firstly, marketing is the overall business strategy of how to organize the company’s presence in the market, and there­f ore ­in­c ludes advertising among other sub-categories. Secondly, marketing has developed as a practice and a field of study in the last fifty-odd years; it was only in its early

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in the culture industry, advertising takes the place of art, to the degree that the dominant taste now derives from former rather than from latter.19 Moreover, in their view, a general merging of culture and advertising is taking place. The culture industry, its products, and advertising all collapse into one another, leaving a culture at the core of which the aestheticized, eternal promise of fulfillment endlessly defers gratification.20 Horkheimer and Adorno are thus in essence criticizing the very phenomenon we are discussing here, namely the blurring of art and marketing. For them, while art is becoming a commodity ­fetish, advertising is becoming something like art. Even more generally, culture becomes a commodity and commodities turn into culture. If Horkheimer and Adorno seem to have had a good grasp of these developments, why are we bothering to discuss these phenomena again? Did these two brilliant observers of culture not already make good arguments about the convergence of the economic and aesthetic spheres more than half a century ago? Indeed, they did. Many of the points they made back then are still convincing. Just as Adorno and Horkheimer observed, art has become a commodity; e­ qually, an important aspect of advertising today is its character as an art for art’s sake. Moreover, Roger Behrens observes that critical theory is ultimately less about what happens to art than about what happens to the com­modity character of cultural products, and how this changes the function of culture.21 ­Accordingly, if we look at the fundamental importance the commodity has gained, and at the way the production, framing, and consumption of the commodity is shaping contemporary culture, it is hard to disagree with the ­Frankfurt School’s view that the contemporary culture of many societies in Europe, the United States, and beyond, is a capitalist consumer culture in which aestheticization and commercialization are fundamentally related. stages at the time of Horkheimer and Adorno’s writing. If marketing (and especially brand market­i ng, which aims to create a consistent brand image and brand identity for a company or product) had been a more developed discipline at the time, cultural critics would have considered this more encompassing practice rather than advertising only. 19 | Ibid., 165. 20 | “Immerwährend betrügt die Kulturindustrie ihre Konsumenten um das, was sie immerwährend verspricht.” “The culture industry constantly defrauds the consumer of that which it constantly promises.” (My translation) Ibid., 148. 21 | “Für die Kritische Theorie ist das Entscheidende nicht der Ausverkauf der Kunst, sondern die Art und Weise, wie sich Kunst und Kultur als warenförmige Produkte verändern und wie sich dadurch auch die Umgangsweisen mit Kultur verändern.” “What is crucial for critical theory is not the selling out of art, but the way in which art and culture change as commodity products, thus changing the way we interact with culture.” (My translation) Roger Behrens, Kritische Theorie (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002), 66.

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There are two reasons, however, for fundamentally rethinking Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument. Firstly, Adorno and Horkheimer’s evaluation of what turned out to be only the early stages of a more encompassing process is not only highly critical, but also strongly teleological.22 In contrast, I propose to look at this convergence from a more open, less Hegelian standpoint. This alternative perspective allows us to take into account that new modes of cultural production and consumption generate not only new means of constriction, but always also new spaces of cultural freedom. It will also acknowledge that while strategies in art might deal with the recurring question of the autonomy of art, this ongoing negotiation is not necessarily a one-directional narrative that leads to the end of art. I maintain that careful aesthetic and theoretical analysis of each individual phenomenon, rather than teleological narratives, will best equip us to understand contemporary culture and art’s function within it. Secondly, a fresh look might prove enlightening not because the Frankfurt School’s critique was completely inappropriate, but on the contrary because the logic Horkheimer and Adorno observed in the early and mid-20th century might be taking a particularly sharp turn today. Not only is the market value of art no longer hidden as it used to be; in many cases, it has even become outright fundamental to the very definition of art.23 As a consequence, the question of 22 | Many critics of postmodern culture follow an equally negative evaluation of this development. One example is David Harvey, who asserts that “postmodernism signals nothing but a logical extension of the power of the market over the whole range of cultural production.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 6. For a broader view on this discussion, see ­W infried Fluck, “American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale,” REAL: Yearbook of ­R esearch in English and American Literature, no. 19 (2003): 65-80. 23 | “An der Diagnose der Kulturindustrie ist richtig und gilt heute immer noch, dass sie auch die Kunst in Ware verwandelt. Dennoch geht das, was gegenwärtig passiert, was sich in den vier Jahrzehnten nach Adornos Tod entwickelt hat und sich freilich bereits zu seinen Lebzeiten abzeichnete, über die Kulturindustrie weit hinaus: Dass auch die Kunst dem Prinzip der Verwertbarkeit folgt, ist überhaupt kein Geheimnis mehr, sondern fungiert als unabdingbare Grundlage ihrer Qualität. Die Idee des Wertes—eine ausschließlich ökonomische Kategorie, die mit dem liberalen Kapitalismus vollends zum allgemeinen Maßstab der Moderne wurde—hat sich mit der Ästhetik des Höheren, Überlegenen, Besseren verschränkt; das, was Adorno den Wahrheitsgehalt genannt hat, ist nur noch eine Akzidenz.” “The analysis of the culture industry is correct and still valid today insofar as it turns even art into a commodity. However, what is currently happening, and what developed in the course of four decades after Adorno’s death but was already becoming apparent in his lifetime, far exceeds the culture industry. The fact that art, too, follows the law of instrumentality is not at all a secret anymore, it has become a fundamental principle of its quality. The idea of value—an exclusively

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value can no longer be answered by pointing to art’s uselessness, as had been the case in the Enlightenment tradition. However, this does not mean only that art has come to be dominated by the logic of the market. Again, a closer look reveals that the development is a two-way street. If the aesthetic and the economic spheres are converging, they are affecting one another mutually, and this includes their modes of valuation. Therefore, thirdly and most importantly, Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of value has to be reviewed in light of current developments. The fundamental differentiation of value that underlies the Frankfurt School’s argument is the Marxian distinction between use value and exchange value. Exchange is the basis of capitalism because objects are produced not to create use value for the producer but to enter into an exchange with the consumer. The objects thus become commodities. Based on this Marxian distinction, Adorno and Horkheimer criticize the loss of ‘authentic’ value in an object—meaning its use value—in favor of an increasing dominance of ‘phony’ value—its exchange value. In the context of art, this means that art’s use value—which, ironically, is its instrumental uselessness—loses importance, while the exchange value of art becomes primary. Art comes to revolve only around the spectator being there and being in the know, and not around the actual experience of the work or object of art. The value of art then no longer lies in its own (useless) use value, but in its usefulness for something else. This something else is social appreciation. The appreciation that a renowned work of art receives supposedly mirrors the social standing of the person who appreciates it. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, use value and exchange value thus collapse into the sole purpose of showing that one is part of the in-crowd. In addition to Adorno and Horkheimer, numerous cultural and social theo­ rists throughout the 20th century have reinforced, criticized and added new perspectives to the distinction between use and exchange value. Thorstein V ­ eblen and Pierre Bourdieu have modified the concept by emphasizing the social function of commodities, pointing out that they are often ­conspicuously consumed and thus used to build and express cultural (as opposed to eco­nomic) capital.24 Jean Baudrillard has taken this socio-cultural dimension of commodities one economic category which through liberal capitalism has eventually become the general measure of modernity—has merged with the aesthetic of the greater, the superior, the better. What Adorno called truth content is now only accidental.” (My translation) Roger Behrens, “Kritik, Wahrheitsgehalt, Erkenntnischarakter. Anmerkungen zu Adorno und Kunst,” http://txt.rogerbehrens.net/adornokunst.pdf. 24 | Bourdieu’s approach, however, still distinguishes between the economic realm and the cultural realm, assigning objects primarily with instrumental value in the first, and with symbolic value only in the second realm. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. See also Hutter, Beyond Price, 4.

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step further by adding the category of sign value. According to ­Baudrillard, the crucial value of the commodity in capitalist consumer ­society lies in its sign value, which can be conceived of as a use value that r­ esults from the object’s exchange value.25 By emphasizing the semiotic quality of the commodity, Baudrillard moves the focus of value creation to the processes of communication for which an object is used.26 The value of the object can no longer be measured primarily in terms of the financial or cultural capital it expresses, but rather in the meaning that is assigned to it. While these approaches touch on the importance of the aesthetic dimension for value creation in contemporary capitalism, it is Gernot Böhme’s perspective that brings this aspect to full fruition.27 Böhme reviews the major theories that deal with the aestheticization of the commodity. In so doing, he attempts to recover the critical project of the Frankfurt School for our contemporary situation, which he calls the “aesthetic economy.” He traces the shifting target of cultural criticism, from the commodification of art, to commodity aesthetics ­itself, and then to the even more encompassing process of the aestheti­cization of all spheres of life. Böhme’s discussion starts out from the narrow under­standing of aesthetics as art that is reflected in Horkheimer and ­Adorno’s ­approach. He then points out that Walter Benjamin’s earlier work ­offers a more nuanced ­approach to the industrial production of art, as well as to the aesthetics of the commodity,28 which Adorno and Horkheimer mostly seem to have omitted. He moves on to Fritz Haug’s commodity aesthetics, which indeed went beyond the duality of art and industrially produced commodities.29 However, Haug still unequivocally considers the processes of aestheticization to be culturally r­ epressive. Böhme further argues that Baudrillard, too, engages with the impor­tance of the aesthetic dimension of commodities, and that this dimen­sion even gains some autonomy in Baudrillard’s concept of sign value. Yet, Böhme argues that not even Baudrillard gives full weight to the importance of the aesthetic for the value of a commodity. Böhme therefore suggests adding to the two Marxian dimensions of value a third one, namely that of aesthetic value.

25 | Cp. Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 143. 26 | Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage ­P ublications, 1998). 27 | Gernot Böhme, “Contribution to the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy,” Thesis ­E leven 73, no. 1 (2003): 71-82. 28 | Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen ­R eprodu­­­zier­­­­b arkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, [1936] 1977). Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk. 29 | Fritz Haug, Kritik der Warenästhetik, (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971).

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In these discussions, the differentiation between different categories and ­ imensions of value—use value, exchange value, and completely new categod ries of value—is complex and not always clear. What kinds of value are aspects of exchange value—something that is ascribed to the object—and what kinds of value are aspects of use value, and thus inherent in the object? When an o ­ bject acquires certain qualities through the specific use to which it is put, could these properties become part of its use value, even if they are not function­ally inherent in the object? Or would they more accurately be apprehended as ­ascribed qualities? And how far can we stretch the concept of exchange value? Does it primarily include the financial aspect of an object? Or does exchange value also refer to the social aspect of the object, and even to other aspects which are not an inherent part of the object, such as pleasure? In other words, how far does the Marxian distinction get us? The complexity of these questions is also brought to bear in Böhme’s argument. He suggests that aesthetic value is distinct from use value: “commodity aesthetics satisfies a need of the customers which is not aimed at use value.”30 At the same time, Böhme proposes that “these aesthetic qualities of the commodity then develop into an autonomous value, because they play a role for the customer not just in the context of exchange but also in that of use.”31 In other words, the aesthetic qualities of an object are not part of their use value, but they still have a use value and an exchange value for the customer. How can we clarify this complex thought? We can conceive of aesthetic value as a value that is important in the context of both use and exchange, but that is neither inherent in nor limited to either. Aesthetic value thus gains a crucial function, not as a subcategory of the classical Marxian duality, but as a category in its own right. Moreover, it holds particular importance because it influences, and maybe even increasingly determines, both use and exchange value. Böhme argues that the use value of a commodity promises the satisfaction of the consumer’s needs. It is therefore fundamental that we understand how he employs the concept of need here. Böhme bases his thoughts on the common observation that all of the primary needs of consumers were satisfied by European and North American consumer capitalism during the 1950s and 1960s. Capitalism subsequently entered a new phase, which was and still is characterized less by the satisfaction of primary needs than by the creation of desires, which are “intensified through their satisfaction.”32 He understands these desires, however, as a “different type of needs.”33 To clarify this conflation of need and desire, we must understand that Böhme does not see these desires 30 | Böhme, “Contribution to the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy,” 75. 31 | Ibid., 72. 32 | Ibid., 77. 33 | Ibid.

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as fake ones, produced by capitalism for the sole purpose of selling what we do not actually need, as Adorno and Horkheimer would have it. Rather, for Böhme these desires are “something more generally human, and therefore relate to a fundamental human need. This need, which is not a primary need (for it does not serve the preservation of life), is the wish for life’s intensification.”34 This need/desire for intensification can be fulfilled (if always only temporarily) by the aesthetic value of the commodity. It is this alternative take on the question of need and desire that explains Böhme’s proposition to understand aesthetic value not just as a subcategory of either use value or exchange value, but as a category of value in its own right. More specifically, Böhme conceives of this aesthetic value as “staging value” (“Inszenierungswert”).35 In the previous chapter, I discussed some important strategies of staging in the commercial realm, and how these relate to avantgarde art strategies of unmasking this kind of staging. Let us now focus on a different aspect of the convergence between aestheticization and commercialization: the relation of object and experience. I will add another perspective to Böhme’s discussion of the aesthetic value of commodities as their staging value by analyzing the shift from the object/commodity to the experience. By this I mean not just to the experience of objects—“their attractiveness, their aura, their atmo­sphere”36 —but the wider set of experiences that customers can have in the realm of what Böhme terms the aesthetic economy. While this wider view is still in line with Böhme’s theory of aesthetic value, it goes beyond his concept of staging value by emphasizing particularly the here and now of an experience, rather than something the consumer could take home as and with an aestheticized commodity. What Böhme calls the intensification of life has been taken up by brand marketing, and not only in the form of an increasing aestheticization of the commodity, or even of an aestheticization of our lives by means of the aesthetic value of a commodity. Brand marketing does not simply work by suggesting that we use an object to make our lives more beautiful, or more intense, as Böhme puts it. Rather, the creation of brand experiences has become a strategy 34 | Ibid. 35 | “In order to raise their exchange value, however, commodities are treated in a special way: they are given an appearance, they are aestheticized and staged in the sphere of exchange. These aesthetic qualities of the commodity then develop into an autonomous value, because they play a role for the customer not just in the context of exchange but also in that of use. They are certainly not classical use values, for they have nothing to do with utility and purposiveness, but they form, as it were, a new type of use value, which derives from their exchange value in so far as use is made of their attractiveness, their aura, their atmosphere. They serve to stage, costume and intensify life.” Ibid., 72. 36 | Ibid.

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of its own, and these experiences can be all but unrelated to the commodity itself. Where aesthetic value resides less with the object and more with the expe­r ience the consumer/spectator makes, it can be conceived of as removed, or autonomized, from the object, as well as from its use and exchange value. My take on Böhme’s approach is therefore that the central importance of aesthetic value lies less with the staging of the object or with the staging that we can enact by means of the object, but rather with the staged experience we can make, both with and increasingly even without the connection to a commodity object. While this development brings about a dematerialization of marketing, it is also coextensive with the commodification of experience. The crucial importance of aesthetic and experiential aspects of consumption in cultural theory finds its counterpart in similar developments in brand marketing. Looking at recent marketing practice and theory, we can observe a clear discursive shift to what we can call experience value. Brand consultant Anna Klingmann summarizes: “In the context of an economy that is centered on the experience of the consumer, the object is no longer valued for its actual use and exchange value, no longer solely for its representational value (sign exchange value) but in its ability to transform the sensation of the subject.”37

This concept of commodity value as experience value is taken even further by recent brand marketing, suggesting that the object is no longer necessarily needed to allow for such an experience. I will expand on this shift in marketing theory and practice later on in this chapter. For now, the crucial point is that the function of aesthetics in consumer culture moves away from the object and towards the world of experience more generally. As Holbrook puts it, “value resides not in the product purchased, not in the brand chosen, not in the object possessed, but rather in the consumption experience(s) derived therefrom.”38 The primary function of the object has been fundamentally transformed, from being the goal of a transaction to merely enabling a particular experience. More broadly, contemporary culture and economy seem to have moved from object to experience—and in many cases, this experience is branded. The transaction of excessive value that the object instigates, be it happiness, beauty, or cultural capital, is no longer postponed to the time of ownership; it no longer refers to a different time and place as in the concept of deferred grati37 | Anna Klingmann, “Eyes Which Do Not See: Liners, Automobiles, Airplanes,” Archi­t ectural Theory Review 9, no. 1 (2004), 4. http://www.klingmann.com/new/NEWS/by klingmann/012/012.pdf. 38 | Holbrook, Introduction to Consumer Value. Quoted in Boztepe, “User Value: Competing Theories and Models,” 8.

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fication. Whereas before, buying an object was principally a means of becom­ing its owner, or of getting to own the qualities related to the object, the object now functions at best as a trigger or a trace of this experience, and no longer as its principal goal. Thus, the crucial transaction in question is consummated at the very moment and in the very place that the experience occurs. A material trace may remain in the form of an object that is purchased, but arguably, the experience will be just as successful if it leaves only an imaginary trace by inscribing a memory of the brand. I would like to suggest that in terms of i­ntensity and meaningfulness, such an experience may be structurally related to, and will be particularly valuable if it succeeds in being, an aesthetic experience.

A rt into L ife : A esthe tic E xperience As we have seen, Gernot Böhme puts the concept of aesthetic value at the center of economic valuation, joining two modes of valuation that used to be con­sidered distinct and separate. This is yet another level on which the aesthet­icization of the commercial and the commercialization of the aesthetic converge. While Böhme’s concept is useful for grasping more general cultural developments, its weakness lies in its intentional expansion far beyond its point of origin: it leaves behind the role of art in these processes. In the previous chapter, I have discussed art in terms of the spatial and institutional conditions of its perception and reception. I would now like to turn our attention to a different framing concept, namely that of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic object. While art used to be the privileged domain of this concept, it has today become relevant well beyond this sphere. The aesthetic object and aesthetic experience have been primary concerns of aesthetic thought since the aesthetic became a realm of its own, that is, since the autonomization of art. This process took place on both a social and a philosophical level: with the development of bourgeois societies and the emergence of aesthetic theory. Since then, numerous theoretical approaches have strived to grasp what aesthetic experience is, whether and how it is different from other experiences, and how it is related to the aesthetic object and to the subject who perceives it. The most enduring and dominant assumption underlying these numerous approaches has been based on Kant’s notion of the disinterested, free play of the cognitive faculties (Erkenntniskräfte), which Kant variously catego­r izes as sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) or imagination (Einbildungskraft), on the one hand, and intellect (Verstand), on the other.39 While the concrete under­ standing of aesthetic experience varies in contemporary conceptualizations, 39 | Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. See particularly §9 and §51.

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most of them are implicitly based on these two Kantian principles of autonomy and duality of experience. What is the importance of aesthetic experience for our understanding of contemporary culture? With the development of the two cultural processes I am discussing here—the de-aestheticization of art and the aestheticization of commerce—it has become increasingly difficult to determine what constitutes an aesthetic object, as well as to define what aesthetic experience is and how it is different from other forms of experience. In his essay “The End of Aesthetic Experience,”40 Richard Shusterman attempts to clarify the idea and practice of aesthetic experience, and to recover it for contemporary philosophical aesthe­tics. His elaboration on the theory and practice of aesthetic experience is helpful, even though I disagree with one of his basic assumptions, namely that aesthetic experience is losing importance in contemporary culture. ­Shusterman holds that aesthetic experience is in decline, both as a practice and as a concept. He thinks this is due to two developments. Firstly, he observes a general develop­ment of our culture from an experiential to an informational one. Secondly, he points to the analytical confusion that has arisen around the concept of aesthetic experience. It is this analytical confusion that Shusterman tries to sort out in his essay. Shusterman’s observation of our turn to a culture based on information and knowledge more than on immediate experience captures important ­aspects of contemporary culture. The anaestheticization or de-aestheticization of contemporary culture that he observes also finds expression in a certain strand of contemporary avantgarde art, going hand in hand with art’s dematerial­ ization. Similarly, contemporary brand marketing dematerializes object and brand, as we will shortly see in more detail. However, this is only one side of the coin. Contrary to Shusterman’s observation, marketing and culture at large are also moving in the opposite direction, possibly in a balancing move: they often strongly emphasize aesthetic experience. Just as much as information and knowledge have become crucial, experience seems to have gained ground as a cultural category in and of itself. The obvious question here is whether and how such experiences in contemporary culture differ from the autonomous and disinterested kind posited by Kant and most aesthetic theorists after him. Before engaging with this question, it is useful to establish an overview of the relevant concepts. Part of Shusterman’s goal is to grasp the complex ­array of theoretical approaches to aesthetic experience, for which he proposes a three-dimensional model. Firstly, aesthetic experience can be conceptualized either as evaluative—referring to a realm of freedom, beauty, pleasure, and transcendence—or as descriptively neutral. Secondly, aesthetic experience can 40 | Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 1 (1997): 29-41.

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be understood as distinctly phenomenological—referring to a particular affective power or sensory intensity that differentiates it from other experiences—or it can be approached primarily from a semantic perspective. Thirdly, aesthetic experience can be understood either as a transformative concept, which has the power to expand the sphere of the aesthetic and affect all realms of life, or the concept can be used only in close relation to the realm of art, thus demarcating art’s boundaries. Shusterman’s three-dimensional model thus seeks to capture the multitude of contemporary conceptualizations of aesthetic experience. It also makes clear how wide the spectrum of approaches to aesthetic experience is, and that consequently, it is open to discussion how different aesthetic experience is from other types of experiences, and how strongly it defines art. The difficulty of grasping aesthetic experience is, above all, an indication that the concept is strongly determined by its cultural and historical situatedness, as well as by its theoretical use. With the expansion and pluralization of art forms in modernism, and with the general aestheticization of life in modernity, the concept of aesthetic experience also had to be re-evaluated. In order to think about how we can best grasp the importance of aesthetic experience and its relation to the aesthetic object in contemporary culture, I would like to start out from a discussion of Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience, which marks one pole of the conceptual spectrum we have just opened up with Shusterman’s help. Elaborated in his fragments for an Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno’s conception is based on an emphatic notion of autonomous art. For him, aesthetic expe­ rience is strictly related to (modernist) art, and it is brought about by a certain kind of object with a certain kind of effect. For Adorno, aesthetic experience is an experience that is induced by the structure of an artwork and suffered by the spectator, who has to relinquish him- or herself to the artwork, rather than the other way round; herein lies the autonomy and the value of the artwork. Aesthetic experience is therefore fundamental for the experience of art. Two interrelated aspects define aesthetic experience for Adorno. Firstly, aesthetic experience differs from everyday experience through its negativity to social reality.41 Secondly, the interaction between experience and second-degree reflection is crucial; aesthetic experience is only complete if reflection is an 41 | Christoph Menke summarizes Adorno’s point: “Aesthetic difference, the difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, is, in truth, aesthetic negativity. Only by conceiving of works of art in a negative relationship to everything that is not art can the autonomy of such works, the internal logic of their representation and of the way they are experienced, be adequately understood. … What art actually is, is contradiction, rejection, negation.” Menke goes on to show that Adorno has two contradictory conceptions of aesthetic negativity, one that aims to overcome the border between life and art, and one that upholds it. In the present discussion, Adorno’s more elaborated and widely discussed idea of aesthetic negativity shall be sufficient. For Menke’s argument, see

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integral part of it. Adorno demands that “genuine ästhetische Erfahrung muss Philosophie werden oder sie ist überhaupt nicht.”42 This transcendence into philosophy is necessary for art to reach the emancipatory function that ­Adorno envisions for it—its negativity. Following this Hegelian approach, Adorno burdens art with the responsibility to engage in the philosophical search for truth43 —a truth that can only lie in the negation of society. Just as vehemently as he opposes the commodification of art, Adorno therefore turns against an idea of aesthetic experience that is phenomenological and subjective, and in which the artwork would serve as a projection screen for the individual. In fact, for Adorno commodification and subjective projection are the two ways in which art ceases to be art.44 In short, critical theory’s understanding of art is closely related to the concept of aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience itself is tied to the particular structure of an artwork—the aesthetic object— that can induce an experience of negativity to which the (engaged and active) subject must surrender. In light of this conception of aesthetic experience, we can better understand the crushing critique of the culture industry that Horkheimer and ­Adorno formulated earlier. In our present context, their view of advertising could be particularly interesting. However, their interest here lies not with the effect of advertising on the consumer, but only with its effect on market competition. Advertising, for them, is a representation of the economic and therefore ­social power of a company; it works as an exclusionary instrument directed at

Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 3. 42 | “Unless genuine aesthetic experience becomes philosophy, it does not exist.” (My translation) Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 197. 43 | “Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Kunstwerke ist die objektive Auflösung des Rätsels eines jeden einzelnen. Indem es die Lösung verlangt, verweist es auf den Wahrheitsgehalt. Der ist allein durch philosophische Reflexion zu gewinnen. Das, nichts anderes rechtfertigt Ästhetik.” “The truth content of works of art is the objective resolution of their enigma. In demanding its resolution, the work of art points to its truth content, which can be unlocked exclusively through philosophical reflection. Only this, and nothing else, justifies aesthetics.” (My translation) Ibid., 193. 44 | “Als tabula rasa subjektiver Projektionen jedoch wird das Kunstwerk entqualifiziert. Die Pole seiner Entkunstung sind, dass es sowohl zum Ding unter Dingen wird wie zum Vehikel der Psychologie des Betrachters.” “The artwork disqualifies itself if it becomes the tabula rasa of subjective projections. The poles of its deartification are these: art turns into merely one thing among others, and art turns into a vehicle for the beholder’s psychology.” (My translation) Ibid., 33.

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competitors.45 We can understand their view of advertising when we think of Horkheimer and Adorno’s criticism of “conspicuous production” in the context of film production. The main point of advertisement for them is the demonstration of the company’s ability to afford the investment.46 Such ­products and adver­tisements not only advertise products, they also self-referentially point back to the socio-economic power of the company, which by these means ­aspires to monopolize the market. Horkheimer and Adorno worry that the resul­ting monopoly capitalism could find its most appropriate political form in a fascist dictatorship. Advertising thus stokes the authors’ deepest fear, namely that the total grip of the culture industry will ultimately result in political fascism.47 Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of advertising thus largely falls short of considering the consumer’s experience, and thus the aesthetic effects that advertising can have. For a helpful extension of their argument, we can turn to Heinz Steinert’s work, which uses Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s terms to analyze the contemporary aestheticization of advertising: “If (as I have just argued) advertising is a demonstration of domination, we can use the changes that advertising undergoes in order to find out more about the state of domination and the nature of competition within the ruling class. In this way, we can see that the recent ‘aestheticization of advertising’ is an indication that competition is now characterized by ‘taste’ and ‘luxury’ and that domination is working via ‘exclusive membership.’ It is not a matter of providing perks to attract and encourage consumption, nor a question of promoting the goods as being ‘good value for money’—it is about

45 | “Reklame ist heute ein negatives Prinzip, eine Sperrvorrichtung; alles, was nicht ihren Stempel an sich trägt, ist wirtschaftlich anrüchig.“ “Advertisment today is a negative concept, a blocking mechanism. Anything that does not carry its stamp is economically suspicious.“ (My translation) Adorno and Horkheimer, “Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug,” 171. 46 | “Der einheitliche Maßstab des Wertes besteht in der Dosierung der conspicuous production, der zur Schau gestellten Investition. Die budgetierten Wertdifferenzen der Kulturindustrie haben mit sachlichen, mit dem Sinn der Erzeugnisse überhaupt nichts zu tun.” “The common measure of value consists of the dosage of conspicuous production, the display of investment. The budgeted differences of value in the culture industry have nothing at all to do with actual ones, with the meaning of the products them­s elves.” (My translation) Ibid., 131f. 47 | “Reklame wird zur Kunst schlechthin, mit der Goebbels sie ahnungsvoll in eins setzte, l’art pour l’art, Reklame für sich selber, reine Darstellung der gesellschaft­ lichen Macht.” “Advertisement becomes art itself, with which Goebbels ominously had ­e quated it; l’art pour l’art, advertisement for itself, pure demonstration of social power.“ (My translation) Ibid., 172.

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Ar t/Commerce: The Convergence of Ar t and Marketing in Contemporar y Culture ‘communication’ between sophisticated yet approachable firms and us—their happy and individual clients.’”48

Steinert extends the concept of market competition and exclusion by changing the focus from production to consumption, that is, to social competition and exclusion. With this extension, he essentially points to the function of aestheti­ cized advertising as an instrument of social distinction. This socio-economic function of advertising is important for contemporary cultural analysis. It is also yet another way in which advertising relates to art, which has been used for the purpose of social distinction and exclusion for centuries, as Pierre ­Bourdieu has demonstrated. But even when we extend the culture industry argument to include consumption, one of our central questions remains unanswered: what happens to the cultural functions of art when marketing—specifically experiential brand marketing—appears to take on some of art’s core functions? Today, this ­includes not only social distinction, but also the function of aesthetic experience itself. In order to rephrase this thought from another perspective, we can draw on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of photography and art. Benjamin suggested that the important question is not whether photography is an art form, but r­ ather how the emergence of photography changed the character of art in general. Accordingly, our question is not whether phenomena of the convergence of art and marketing are (still) art, but rather how these change the form and function of art and aesthetic experience in contemporary culture. This perspective points to yet another reason for going beyond Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument. One of the major criticisms of the culture industry argument, voiced most prominently by members of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, targets its one-directional understanding of communication and of aesthetic experience. For Horkheimer and Adorno, radio advertising ­re­pre­­sented the dominant model of communication in the culture industry. With a sender who holds the power and a passive receiver, they felt that it carries a proto-dictatorial quality. This one-directional understanding of communication extends to any product of the culture industry, and the forms and effects of these products are considered to be always the same. Products are standardized and serialized, emphasizing singular effects at the cost of coherence. As a consequence, consumers are de-subjectivized and de-individualized. The aesthetic theory that follows from this view essentially disallows for different types of experience—for example, aesthetic or commercial, affirmative or resistant—with products of the culture industry. Horkheimer and A ­ dorno’s account of the culture industry suggests that the type of experience one can 48 | Heinz Steinert, Culture Industry, trans. Sally-Ann Spencer (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2003), 117.

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have with an object is determined by its form of production, which is a line of thinking that Adorno continued in his later theory of aesthetic experience. Horkheimer and Adorno’s fundamental fear also resides in this analysis: when the form of production determines the effect, and when the culture industry tries to aestheticize life and render it indistinguishable from its aesthetic products,49 then this industry aims to destroy individual experience and the thinking subject altogether. This is why the culture industry, in spite of the broadened participation in and increased consumption of culture it brings about, is deeply anti-individualistic and anti-democratic for Horkheimer and Adorno—a thought that Naomi Klein, among others, later continues in her critique of branding.50 Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of aesthetic experience in art thus ­strictly differentiates itself from the products and experiences of the culture industry. It is a concept of aesthetic experience that follows a modernist ideal of autonomous art and excludes the contemporary phenomena of delimitation that are of interest here. If we refer back to Shusterman’s model, this becomes even clearer. By using the three axes Shusterman proposes for analyzing concepts of aesthetic experience, we can see that Adorno’s concept is evaluative—it is inherently positive—even if the experience itself is one of negativity. Further, the aesthetic experience that Adorno posits is not phenomenologically direct, for only with a second degree of reflection does it become complete. Finally, the position of Adorno’s concept of aesthetic experience on the transformational/­ demarcational axis is ambiguous. In general, Shusterman notes that while aesthetic experience is distinct from social reality and dependent on the structure of the artwork, this structure itself results from the work’s socio-historical environment, and it is therefore not radically autonomous but rather subject to historical change.51 On the one hand, Adorno argues for the sovereignty of aesthetic experience, and thus for its transformational, utopian power which should reach outside of the sphere of art. On the other hand, he emphatically upholds its very autonomy. As Christoph Menke has shown in more depth, this conflicted view of the autonomy of art is at the center of Adorno’s aesthetic theory.52

49 | “Das Leben soll der Tendenz nach vom Tonfilm nicht mehr sich unterscheiden lassen.” “Life is supposed to become indistinguishable from talking pictures.” (My translation) Adorno and Horkheimer, “Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug,” 134. 50 | Naomi Klein, No Logo, (New York: Picador USA, [2000] 2002). 51 | “Since changes in the nonaesthetic world affect our very sensibilities and capacity for experience, aesthetic experience cannot be a fixed natural kind.” Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” 31. 52 | Menke, The Sovereignty of Art, 13.

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Shusterman’s model and Menke’s analysis help us to understand more clearly why from a contemporary point of view, Adorno’s conceptualization of aesthetic experience is limited—not only to an emphatic notion of art, but also to a certain kind of art—and is therefore insufficient for grasping the question at the heart of this book. Firstly, this concept excludes the possibility of aesthe­tic experience that does not fulfill a utopian—that is, a negative—function. S ­ econdly, it requires philosophical reflection on its negativity and thus ­excludes the possibility of a less critical and more pleasurable experience. Thirdly, a­ lthough Adorno’s category of aesthetic experience might be partly transformational and thus reach outside the sphere of art, aesthetic experience is for the most part strictly limited to art and the art object, and does not extend to everyday reality, and particularly not to consumer culture. To summarize: Adorno’s concept of aesthetic experience focuses strongly on the aesthetic object (the artwork ); it is evaluative and philosophical (more than simply semantic); it is semi-demarcational (referring only to a certain kind of modern art, and not to art in general or to phenomena other than art); and it is semi-­transformative (ideally transforming the individual and society at large, but nonetheless upholding the autonomy of art). As such, Adorno’s concept of aesthetic experience categorically excludes the contemporary cultural practices I am discus­sing here. In his 1934 Art as Experience, John Dewey develops an approach to aesthe­ tic experience that, in regard to the demarcational capacity of the concept, is situated at the other end of the spectrum. Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics have recently been taken up in order to recuperate the aesthetic as a core dimension of contemporary culture and cultural theory. As Winfried Fluck remarks, “one is struck to see in how many ways Dewey anticipated [recent] positions and devel­opments in literary and cultural studies” with his central thesis “that aesthetic experience is not tied to the encounter with a beautiful object but emerges from an intensified experience of qualities that characterize everyday objects, so that aesthetic experience is something we encounter as ever-present potential in our life-world.”53

As opposed to Adorno, Dewey does not consider aesthetic experience to be restric­ted to a specific aesthetic object and its structure; rather, it is dependent on the attitude of the beholder. Dewey’s approach gives the experience primacy over the object, frees it from its dependency on art, and integrates it with every­ day life.

53 | Winfried Fluck, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience,” REAL: Yearbook of ­R esearch in English and American Literature 15 (1999): 227-242, 228.

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Shusterman, too, refers to John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. It is with Dewey’s evaluative, phenomenological, and transformative approach that he hopes to recover the analytical strength of aesthetic experience. Shusterman criticizes conceptualizations of aesthetic experience that are neutrally descriptive instead of evaluative, semantic instead of phenomenologically immediate, and demarcational instead of transformative. In such approaches, the concept of aesthetic experience has lost all “power and interest.”54 Shusterman therefore suggests Dewey as an alternative, for Dewey sees aesthetic experience not as a description of something pre-existing, but rather as a concept that is “­ directional, reminding us of what is worth seeking in art and elsewhere in life.”55 Shusterman understands Dewey’s concept as more than a model for philosophical aesthetics; it also has a performative, or at least educational power over what kind of experiences we create and value. In this pragmatist tradition, S ­ husterman wants to redeem aesthetic experience in theory and practice. There are, indeed, several interesting perspectives that John Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience opens up.56 Among these, I think the most signi­ ficant one lies on the third axis of Shusterman’s model, in the transformative power of aesthetic experience. Dewey breaks open the traditionally close correlation between art and aesthetic experience, and shifts the attention from the aesthetic object towards the aesthetic attitude, and thus towards the perceiving subject. He redefines traditional aesthetics, moving away from a substantialist model to an experiential one, in which the aesthetic is no longer defined as an inherent quality of an object, but as a specific experience with that object.57 For Dewey, we need an aesthetic attitude in order to have an aesthetic experience with an aesthetic object. This is what Bourdieu later calls the aesthetic disposition. Even when an object is already designated for such an experience, for Dewey it is the aesthetic attitude that turns any object into an object of aesthetic experience.58 Although Dewey still holds that aesthetic experience reaches its fullest expression in the experience of art, and thus of the art object, 54 | Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” 32. 55 | Ibid., 39. 56 | Winfried Fluck rightly argues that John Dewey’s aesthetic theory is a major mile­s tone in American aesthetic theory. See Fluck, “The Search for an ‘Artless Art’: ­A esthetics and American Culture,” 36. 57 | ———, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience,” 229. 58 | The quote often used to point out the importance of the aesthetic attitude is ­D ewey’s recollection of a situation that Max Eastman describes in his Enjoyment of ­P oetry. There, Eastman sketches the different ways in which a passenger on a ferryboat can perceive the approaching New York skyline. Of these, the aesthetic attitude is the one in which “the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river,” an attitude that “is con-

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aesthetic experience is now part of a continuum of everyday experiences and is no longer radically set apart from them. This also gives it the pragmatic power to enrich lived experience more generally.59 Dewey does not uphold what philosophical aesthetics calls the radical difference of aesthetic experience, because this difference is only needed if aesthetic experience is seen as coextensive with the realm of art. Dewey’s approach suggests that aesthetic experience does not happen with all artworks. Moreover, aesthetic experience can also happen in realms of life other than art. When aesthetic experience is located on a continuum of expe­r iences, it can include commercial products and presentations, as well as products of the culture industry and popular culture. Such a view significantly opens up the concept of aesthetic experience, when compared to theories that focus on high art (critical theory); meaning (hermeneutics and structuralism); or supposedly neutral description (analytical philosophy). Dewey does not circle in on the question of art in particular. Rather, he situates art as the horizon against which to think about experience in general. Accordingly, art is no longer an emphatically autonomous sphere defined by a certain type of aesthetic object or experience. From the perspective of Shusterman’s second axis, Dewey’s approach is exceptional in stressing the importance of the phenomenological aspect of aesthetic experience. We have to understand this in relation to the theories that Shusterman turns against, in particular the influential hermeneutic ­approaches of Danto and Goodman.60 Shusterman emphasizes that Dewey does not relinquish meaning, but rather restores the balance between immediate experience and interpretation, against “a radical anaestheticization of aesthetics.”61 We should therefore not mistake Dewey’s approach for an absolute turn to the phenomenological side of aesthetic experience. Rather, aesthetic experience for Dewey integrates the somatic and the semantic, sensation and meaning, form and content; in short, it constitutes an experience of fullness:

cerned with a perceptual whole, constituted by related parts.” (Dewey’s italics) Dewey, Art as Experience, 140f. 59 | “But whatever path the work of art pursues, it, just because it is a full and intense experience, keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness. It does so by reducing the raw materials of that experience to matter ordered through form.” Ibid., 138. ­ arvard 60 | Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: H University Press, 1981). Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 61 | Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” 38.

Ar t Objects/Brand Products “In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, ­o b­­j ec­t ­i ve material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all trans­ figured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.”62

Finally, when considering Shusterman’s first axis, Dewey’s approach is evaluative yet very open, understanding aesthetic experience as an inherently positive, “satisfyingly heightened, absorbing, meaningful, and affective experience.”63 For Dewey, the special quality of aesthetic experience lies in its intensity, not in its function. It is this intensity that distinguishes aesthetic experience from other kinds of experience.64 Fluck further specifies on the basis of Dewey’s thoughts that “aesthetic experience is not merely constituted by the perception of wholeness but by an experience of tension, a rhythm of conflict and adaptation.”65 Fluck rightly points out that there is a normative dimension to this conceptualization; in Shusterman’s terminology, it is evaluative and not just descriptive. There is a special set of qualities—fullness, wholeness, integration, as well as simultaneous tension and conflict—that differentiates aesthetic expe­r ience from other experiences. This difference, however, is gradual instead of radical. In comparison to Adorno’s view of aesthetic experience, Dewey’s approach focuses significantly less on the object and instead reconsiders the crucial role of the spectator. As such, it is more suited for thinking about different contemporary aesthetic phenomena, as well as about the subject’s role in the perception of art. Whether we have an aesthetic experience or not depends less on the object than on the attitude we take towards the object of our perception. This conception of aesthetic experience raises the question of what factors influ­ ence whether or not we assume such an aesthetic attitude. I suggest that we should not simply understand this process to be driven by subjective disposition. I­ nstead we should consider here two major factors that influence whether or not an aesthetic attitude is assumed: context and object. As the last chapter has shown, contextual factors in the perception of art, such as space, atmosphere, and institution, have been destabilized by art strate­ gies. As I will argue shortly in recourse to the avantgardist strategies of Conceptual Art, the aesthetic object has likewise been destabilized. Conceptual Art pushed forward the dematerialization of the object and the de-­objectification 62 | Dewey, Art as Experience, 309. 63 | Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” 38. 64 | “There must be a criterion of intensity or successful integration in order to distinguish aesthetic experience from other experiences.” Fluck, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience,” 233. 65 | Ibid., 232.

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of art. Moreover, one of the major developments it introduced was the de-­ aestheticization of art. This meant not only that the aesthetic properties of the object became less important, but also that aesthetic experience as an experience of art lost ground. As we will see, it was one goal of many Conceptual­ ists to minimize the category of experience (with an emphasis on its sensory, pheno­menological side) and to push it out of the center of art. Arguably, this opened yet another door for marketing strategies to take over what had once been considered a primary domain of art. I will elaborate on this thought more in depth throughout the rest of this chapter. For the moment, let me come back to my discussion of aesthetic experience in order to shed light on the function of the object in aesthetic experience. Although the contemporary recuperation of Dewey’s theory shows a clear shift from aesthetic object to aesthetic attitude as the factor that determines whether or not we have an aesthetic experience, the importance of the aesthetic object cannot be completely discarded. “We are not exposing ourselves to aesthetic objects, at least not primarily, for the infor­ mations they carry, the arguments they make, or the opinions they express, because such meanings can be communicated more directly and less ambiguously by other dis­ cur­s ive forms. We are exposing ourselves to aesthetic objects because they provide an experience that goes beyond the mere communication of meaning.”66

Fluck’s statement makes clear that although the spectator’s attitude is now crucial, we must still consider what characterizes an aesthetic object that facilitates aesthetic experience. I have argued that aesthetic experience is not bound to a particular quality of the aesthetic object. But if an aesthetic attitude can still be facilitated by certain objects, what kind of objects would these be? To answer this question, we can turn to Dewey’s Czech contemporary Jan Mukarovsky.67 Like Dewey, Mukarovsky was a pioneer in opening up the concept of aesthetic experience beyond the scope of art and into everyday life. A ­ large part of his thinking focuses on the relation between the aesthetic object (or situation), and our perception of it in the aesthetic process.68 Mukarovsky 66 | Ibid., 227. 67 | Jan Mukarovsky, Kapitel aus der Ästhetik, trans. Walter Schamschula (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, [1935] 1970). 68 | To be more precise, in his discussion of Mukarovsky’s work, Willem Elias distin­ guishes three phases: the first from 1928 to 1934, in which Mukarovsky focuses on the aesthetic object and the inner structure of the work of art; the second from 1934 to 1939, in which he thinks about the norms that govern the work of art; and the third from 1939 to 1948, in which he shifts his thinking towards the role of the subject. Willem Elias, Signs of the Time (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997).

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distinguishes between three functions of objects—referential, pragmatic, and aesthetic. All objects and actions carry these three different functions, therefore they neither inherently possess nor fundamentally lack an aesthetic function. There is, accordingly, no clear answer as to what type of object is an aesthetic object, because “by emphasizing the essential poly-functionality of all human actions and products, Mukarovsky fuses the world of art and the world of nonart”69 —or, as I would put it, the world of not-art.70 What distinguishes art from other realms, however, is the dominance of the aesthetic function over other functions. This aesthetic function is characterized by art’s self-referentiality and its negation of any other meaning or function besides the aesthetic.71 If all objects have an aesthetic function among their other functions, then the important question is what determines whether this function becomes dominant. For Dewey, the attitude of the spectator is the answer. Mukarovsky, with reference to Dewey and ultimately to Kant, grasps the spectator’s act of perception with a dual structure of immediate experience and creation of meaning—in other words, of phenomenal reality and semiotic sign value. However, more directly than Dewey, Mukarovsky sees a relation between the spectator’s attitude and the structure of the object in question: “Es gibt jedoch—in der Kunst und neben ihr—Dinge, die nach ihrer Anordnung auf eine ästhetische Wirkung hinzielen; dies ist letztlich das Wesensmerkmal der Kunst. Aber die aktive Qualifikation zur ästhetischen Funktion ist keine reale Eigenschaft des ­G egenstandes, selbst wenn er absichtlich auf die ästhetische Funktion hinzielt, sondern sie tritt nur unter bestimmten Umständen, nämlich in einem bestimmten gesellschaftlichen Kontext zutage: eine Erscheinung, die zu einer bestimmten Zeit oder in einem bestimmten Land eine privilegierte Trägerin einer ästhetischen Funktion war, kann zu einer anderen Zeit oder in einem anderen Land für diese Funktion ungeeignet sein.”72 69 | Ibid., 180. 70 | As I have detailed earlier in this book, I understand non-art as being dependent on the values of art at the time, rather than a residual category. Non-art is not everything that is not art, which is why, to designate all of the areas of life that are different from art, I prefer the term not-art. 71 | “The aesthetic function is, so to speak, the necessary dialectical negation of the function in general.” Ibid., 183. 72 | “However, there are objects—in art and elsewhere—whose structure is aimed at an aesthetic effect; ultimately, this is what characterizes art. Yet the active qualification for an aesthetic effect is not a real attribute of the object, even if it deliberately aims at an aesthetic effect. It only emerges under certain circumstances, namely in a specific social context. A phenomenon that might have been a privileged medium of aesthetic function in a particular time or place might be unsuitable for this function in a different time or place.” (My translation) Mukarovsky, Kapitel aus der Ästhetik, 13f .

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There is, in other words, a specific relation between the aesthetic object and the aesthetic attitude. Even if this relation is not exclusive, the structure of certain objects in a certain time and place—in a certain cultural moment—influences whether the spectator takes an aesthetic attitude and, accordingly, whether he or she has an aesthetic experience.73 Fluck summarizes that “aesthetic experience is constituted by a transfer between an aesthetic object toward which we take a certain attitude and the recipient.”74 Mukarovsky’s theory thus helps us to conceive of aesthetic experience not as an arbitrary choice of the spectator, but as an event that can take place between the aesthetic object and the spec­ tator, provided an aesthetic attitude is assumed. This discussion of three seminal approaches to aesthetic experience and its relation to the aesthetic object has shown that Horkheimer and Adorno’s emphasis on the structure of the object as the source of aesthetic experience is rather one-dimensional. It stems from their strong motivation to differentiate art as emphatically autonomous from other spheres of life, and from instrumental reason in particular. Other approaches with a less pessimistic perspective—perhaps it is not incidental that these approaches predate Horkheimer and Adorno’s experience of Nazi Germany—have placed less emphasis on the radical difference between art and life, between aesthetic experiences and other experiences, and between the aesthetic object and other objects. Dewey and Mukarovsky have recently been rediscovered for aesthetic the­ ory, because they seem to be more helpful for grasping contemporary aes­t hetic phenomena. They take aesthetic experience and the aesthetic object out of the exclusive domain of art and bring them into life. Dewey puts aesthetic experience on a continuum with other experiences; Mukarovsky distinguishes an aesthetic object from other objects, not by category but only by momentary function. Yet, even as these approaches leave behind a radical differentiation between art and not-art, they retain a relative difference between a­esthetic expe­rience (which does not have to be an experience of art) and aesthetic ­o­bjects (which do not have to be artworks), on the one hand, and experiences and o ­ bjects that are not primarily aesthetic, on the other. This difference can be located in a certain intensity and meaningfulness of the experience, as well as in a certain level of autonomy of the aesthetic. This autonomy means that the primary function and use of an object or experience is aesthetic rather than referential or pragmatic. Thus, the aesthetic moves into life, and art turns from a metaphysical into a functional category. A question results from this conceptualization of aesthetic experience: To what extent do the forms of experiential brand marketing that I will discuss 73 | This approach is later taken up and developed in detail by the Konstanz School of reception aesthetics. See Fluck, “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” 74 | Ibid., 141.

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amount to or emulate aesthetic experiences? If the anaesthetic, conceptual tendencies of some contemporary art might not satisfy the human need for experience that includes both sensations and meaning, perhaps certain forms of branding do so. Where art is less experiential, or less accessible, brand experiences become more important for individual and cultural processes of meaning creation. In contrast, where art is highly experiential—for example, in some of Olafur Eliasson’s installations, or in various forms of performance—branding can copy, adapt, or take such works as inspiration for their creation of brand experiences. Yet, if the aesthetic or experiential value of such experiences is essentially the same as that of art, it becomes difficult to discard some experiences and value others exclusively on the basis of whether they are branded (as in Eliasson’s project for the BMW Art Cars) or unbranded (as with autonomous art). Instead, it might be helpful to have a closer look at brand experiences, with an eye towards the phenomenal and semantic opportunities they offer, their transformative potential, and their cultural and individual functions.

The D ematerializ ation of A rt : C oncep tual A rt Before discussing particular examples of experiential branding in terms of their aesthetic function, I would like to follow up on the notion of anaestheticization, which Shusterman applies to contemporary culture in general. While the observation of anaesthetic tendencies is certainly accurate, I would suggest that these tendencies are not as general as he suggests; rather, they are particu­ larly pronounced in some influential strands of contemporary art—and especially in Conceptual Art—with some clear influence on our culture at large. Where Minimal Art shifted the focus of aesthetic experience decidedly towards the subjectivity of the spectator, Pop Art with its use of brands and brand products increasingly shifted the experience towards the images and labels of consumer culture. Where Jasper Johns still emphasized the specific artistic materiality of his sculptures, for example with his Ballantine Ale cans, Andy Warhol went significantly further by making some of his works, like the Brillo Boxes, virtually indistinguishable from the actual consumer products. These Pop practices, which reworked in various forms the principle of Duchamp’s readymade, have themselves been taken up by postmodern art, for example in Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa. However, it was Conceptual Art in particular that pushed the boundaries of art to yet another extreme. Conceptual Art did not simply put the materiality of the object uncomfortably close to consumer culture; it undermined the object’s materiality altogether, while simultaneously minimizing the role of aesthetic experience.

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It was the Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s that first and most emphatically put forward the idea of the dematerialization of the art object.75 The process had begun with Minimal Art and was epitomized by Conceptual Art. Its legacy has carried on ever since, for while artworks b ­ ecame more material again after Conceptual Art’s experiments with dematerialization, the object’s conceptual dimension has remained of central and ­often defining importance. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s formulation from 1968 has since become a fundamental aspect of any kind of art.76 The question of w ­ hether or not something is art can no longer be answered by evaluating an ­object or action and considering how it looks, feels, sounds and smells. ­Conceptual Art turned art’s quest away from formal matters like material or color—with which Minimalism in its examination of materiality was still concerned—and towards a conceptual self-examination of the nature of art. As Erickson puts it, “Conceptual art is implicit in minimal art. The radical break conceptualism makes with material forms is a break instigated by the tendency of those forms to draw attention to themselves as de facto material and nothing else, resisting the tendency of language to interpret the forms. … Conceptualism was provoked by the materiality of the work resisting designation into examining designation itself as the cultural and critical basis of art. The primary designation to worry about, now that sculpture and painting were irrelevant terms, was art itself.”77

Conceptual Art proposed an art in which the materiality of the object was e­ ither non-existent or close to irrelevant, an art based primarily or only on ideas. This dematerialization of the art object has had a fundamental impact on the contemporary understanding of what art is, notwithstanding any later swings of the pendulum back to realism and representation. Conceptual Art took the self-reflexive interrogation of art, which Clement Greenberg considered to be the driving force of art and art history, one step further and beyond. Greenberg and the art he championed still dealt primarily with formal concerns like color, composition, and material. In contrast, the 75 | Conceptual Art received wider recognition after two crucial exhibitions: Seth Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969, in which no objects were exhibited, and Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects in 1970 at the New York Cultural Center. ­ onceptual 76 | Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in C Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1999). Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31-36. 77 | (Erickson’s italics) Jon Erickson, The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 123.

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Conceptualists focused primarily on ideas and language, thus largely leaving behind the traditional techniques and media of art. However, the often highly formalized style in which Conceptual Art was presented, and even more so Conceptualism’s self-reflexive interrogation of the forms and content of art, ­reveal that this art was still strongly committed to formal concerns. Conceptual Art can thus be understood as the apex and supersession of the formalist understanding of art. Even if Minimalism’s emphasis on presence in time and space stood against the Greenbergian principles of autonomy, as Michael Fried elaborated, it was still engaged in a self-reflexive questioning of materiality and form. A cube was a cube was a cube. Conceptualism hypostatized this formalism by pushing the self-reflexivity to its extreme. What made Conceptual Art artful was the idea that stood behind it and that was declared to be art, and this circle could just as well be valid as it could be null: what made art art was the declaration that it was art. Art was art was art. It is precisely because of this subversive self-definition that Conceptual Art can be considered avantgardist. Lippard and Chandler discuss the double nature of Conceptual Art as both formalist and transgressive in their 1968 essay and draw a significant conclusion for the definition of art. As a result of this particular tension inherent in Conceptual Art, the viewer has more responsibility of “thinking about what they see rather than simply weighing the formal or emotive impact.”78 The self-reflective questioning of what art is and how we experience it is of crucial importance both for the artist and for the spectator. The move towards the dematerialization and discursivization of art is closely related to a more general cultural development, namely the increasing abstraction and dematerialization of the economy, which takes place with the economy’s transition from an industrial to a financial/informational stage. This economic development has a strong impact on society and culture. J­ oshua Shannon, for example, has traced The Disappearance of Objects that started in the 1960s, when consumption patterns became more rapid and immaterial.79 This shifted consumption from objects to images, particularly in advertising and product branding. Shannon suggests that the early artworks of Claes ­Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd in the 1960s dealt with these economic and cultural processes through their intense engage­ ment with material and materiality. These works reveal an ongoing negotiation between resistance to and acknowledgement of the dematerialization of 78 | Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 49. 79 | Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). See also Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image. A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Random House, [1961] 1992).

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culture—of the economy, consumption, the urban landscape, and everyday life. These artists’ works can be conceived of as a last intense negotiation of mate­r iality. In the late 1960s, art subsequently turned towards the less and less materially based practices of late Pop Art and particularly of Conceptual Art, which followed suit with broader cultural developments. In the wake of this intense engagement with materiality in the early 1960s, conceptual approaches emerged in several different fields of art making t­ owards the end of the decade. These included Minimal Art, Land Art, Earth Art, and Process Art. While it is difficult to bring these diverse practices under one label, they can be characterized as concerned primarily with ideas, information, and concepts. Lucy Lippard summarizes: “Conceptual Art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘demateri alized.’”80 In spite of disagreeing with ­some of Lippard’s assessments, Benjamin ­Buchloh later formulates this de-objectification and dematerialization even more to the point. “Because the proposal inherent in Conceptual Art was to replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience by linguistic definition alone (the work as analytic propo­ sition), it thus constituted to most consequential assault on the status of that object: its visuality, its commodity status, and its form of distribution.”81

Examples of the various forms of de-objectification in Conceptual Art in­clude Joseph Kosuth’s or Laurence Weiner’s language-based works, Sol LeWitt’s highly geometrical patterns and constructions, and Hans Haacke’s research or information-based and socially critical documentary work. While these works interestingly coincided with the more general cultural tendency of demateriali­ zation, they also often had a politically and socially resistant impetus. In fact, one of the main motivations for conceptualist practice, Lippard suggests, stemmed from the artists’ political and cultural engagement in the late 1960s, and from their avantgardist orientation towards political and/or cultural utopia.82 With its ideational focus, Conceptual Art strove to present such utopian ideas and to position itself outside of contemporary consumer society. By making the work of art as idea-based and often as immaterial as possible, Conceptual Art attempted to take it out of market circulation and thus to decommodify 80 | Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, [1973] 2001), vii. 81 | Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Admini­s tration to the Critique of Institutions,” in October: The Second Decade, 19861996 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, [1990] 1997): 117-155, 119. 82 | “Unfettered by object status, Conceptual artists were free to let their imaginations run rampant.” Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, vii.

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it. Lippard’s perspective is thus slightly different from Shannon’s later view. Writing during the historical moment of the emergence of Conceptual Art, Lippard sees the movement as oppositional to—rather than affirmative of—the contemporary consumer culture. Benjamin Buchloh agrees with this analysis of the movement’s resistance to the market; however, he disagrees with Lippard’s perspective on the broad utopian impulse of Conceptual Art. In contrast to Lippard, Buchloh holds “that it was precisely the utopianism of earlier avantgarde movements (the type that Lippard desperately attempts to resuscitate for the occasion) that was mani­festly absent from Conceptual Art throughout its history.”83 Still, he acknowledges the impetus of Conceptual Art to separate itself from capitalist market logic, insofar as “it managed to purge artistic production of the aspiration toward an affirmative collaboration with the forces of industrial production and consumption.”84 This differentiates Conceptual Art from both Minimalism and Pop Art, which still attempted such “collaboration.”85 Indeed, Conceptualist artists went about such withdrawal from consumer culture by ­de-aestheticizing and ­de-objectifying their works, sometimes even building them solely on words or even only on an idea. In his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Sol LeWitt pointed to this de-­ aestheticization with his statement that Conceptual Art is “made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye.”86 Certainly, no product of human expres­sion can be thought of as completely anaesthetic, insofar as such pro­­d­ ucts are always created and perceived with our senses. Sol LeWitt’s drawings and sculptures are good examples here. Even though their function or goal might be primarily conceptual, they still work on the visual level. Even if a work is language-based or exists only as an idea, the artist’s and the audience’s imagination give it a mental form that eventually relates to our sensory faculties. That said, Conceptual Art decisively moved away from formal concerns with art’s traditional methods and materials, and towards ideas and information, thus minimizing the importance of the material, aesthetic form and its perception. Joseph Kosuth summarized this approach of Conceptual artists as follows. “Conceptual Art, simply put, had as its basic tenet an understanding that artists work with meaning, not with shapes, colors, or materials. Anything can be employed by the 83 | Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” 153. 84 | Ibid., 154. 85 | Ibid. 86 | Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical ­A ntho­l ogy, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1999). Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79-84.

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Conceptual Art moved away from painting and sculpture, and thus from ­im­­a­­ges and visual pleasure. It also proposed an approach to consumer culture that was strongly at odds with both earlier and contemporaneous artistic approa­ches—in particular the imitational one presented by Pop Art. We can find the dematerialization and de-aestheticization that Shusterman observed in culture at large the approaches that Conceptual Art put forward. The consequences of these art historical developments are complex. Essentially, Conceptual Art destabilized the categories of art by dematerializing and de-objectifying it, simultaneously also “liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience.”88 Conceptual Art thus subverted two major categories of art: material object and experience. If we can still talk about aesthetic experience in regard to Conceptual Art at all, then this experience became decidedly less sensory. Conceptual Art thus upset the balance of intellectual and sensory experience that had been considered a fundamental quality of aesthetic experience since Kant. At the same time, this destabilization of art is closely related to the aestheticization of consumer culture, as we will shortly see. The Conceptualist engagement with the dematerialization, de-objectification, de-aestheticization and decommodification of art is closely related to a para­doxical gesture that is, on the one hand, a renunciation of artistic subjectivity and authorship, and on the other, an empowerment of the artist. This empowerment came about not least because Conceptual Art coincided with the first generation of artists who received a formal art education and art d ­ egrees from universities. The writings of the Conceptualists took the verbal and conceptual empowerment that we have already observed in Minimal Art a step further. Key artists of Conceptual Art, among them Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson, and Hans Haacke, published theoretical writings on their work and on the idea of Conceptual Art in general. One of the crucial questions in this regard was how the artist’s intention figured in the production and reception of art. Conceptual Art offered a paradoxical answer. On the one hand was the theory that the idea, rather than the artist, worked as the productive force, which then functioned according to its own logic and 87 | Joseph Kosuth, “Intentions,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. A­ lexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 461. Originally ­p ublished in Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (September 1996): 407-412. 88 | Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” 143.

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almost received a life of its own. As Sol LeWitt put it in his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”89

While the artist’s intention and creative process are still central, for it is the artist who chooses the idea for the work, the process of creation is not considered to be the subjective expression of the artist.90 The artist is the generator of the concept, but the execution has to stay as mechanical and impersonal as pos­sible. In this regard, Conceptualism and Minimalism share an anti-­ expressionist and anti-subjectivist impulse. On the other hand, however, Conceptualism is by no means a self-­abolishing gesture of the artist. Quite on the contrary, the artist remains crucial for the process and the result of the work, and even more importantly, for the very definition of what is to be considered art. One theoretical approach that conveys this massive empowerment of the artist is found in Joseph Kosuth’s seminal 1969 essay “Art after Philosophy.” The essay proposes a definition of art that is very much in line with the de-aestheticizing and discursivizing tendency of Conceptual Art. At the same time, the author positions himself—the artist and theorist—at the center of this discourse. Art, for Kosuth, can no longer be defined in any aesthetic terms. This is why the question of whether something functions as art or not can only be determined by the concept of art: “Any and all of the physical attributes (qualities) of contemporary works if considered separately and/or specifically are irrelevant to the art concept.”91 The concept is all but removed from the aesthetic side of art; it is, however, determined by the artist. By developing and communicating the concept and thus engaging in the conceptual discourse, Kosuth empowers himself to set its terms. Such gestures of self-empowerment were made not only in the theoretical discourse on art, but also in its practice, particularly in what later came to be 89 | LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 12. 90 | LeWitt differentiates between the overarching concept of a work and the individual ideas that are elements of the concept and implement it. See Sol LeWitt, “­ Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and ­B lake Stimson (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1999), 106. Originally p­ ub­l ished in 0-9, no. 5 (January 1969): 3-5. 91 | Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1999), 169. Originally published in Studio International 178 (October, November, December 1969): 134-137, 160-161, 212-213.

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understood as proto-Conceptualist works. A good example of this is Robert Rauschenberg’s 1961 telegram, which he sent as his contribution to a portrait exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” Another telling example is Yves Klein’s even earlier Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility), a work he started in 1959. The work consisted of empty space for which Klein sold documentations of ownership (in the form of checks certifying the purchase) in exchange for gold. The exchange could be completed on demand by the buyer’s burning of the check and by Klein’s throwing half of the gold into the Seine.92 These writings and works exhibit a complex negotiation of the role of the artist, who relinquishes skill and creativity in the fabrication of a work, while simultaneously strengthening his definatory and discursive power. Both in writing and in practice, much Conceptualist work deals with this tension between de-subjectification and self-empowerment. Yet this tension only seems contradictory at first sight. It becomes clear when we consider that many Conceptual artists’ impulse to withdraw their artistic subjectivity from the process of creation was linked closely to their simultaneous attempts to define the terms of art—both theoretically and practically, as well as in general, even universal, and thus non-subjective ways.93 The inception and realization of much Conceptual Art bears only minimal traces of an artistic creative subjectivity. Whether the artwork consists of geometrical structures, sentences on a wall, or the documentation of events, the artist as creator and the traces of creative work are effaced in favor of an impersonal yet questionably more universal approach. This finds expression in many works, but it is also prominent in the written statements, whether these accompany the works or are published independently from them. The anti-subjectivist approach of many Conceptualists goes hand in hand with an unprecedentedly strong discursive position. This discursive empowerment of the artist is therefore more than just ­another way of opposing the strong discursive power of art criticism, theory, and history. Significantly, it is also closely connected to an attempt at self-separation from yet another significant discursive force, namely from the market, in the form of the art market and commodity culture in general. Kosuth formu-

92 | Incidentally, Conceptual Art is also the beginning of the transnationalization of the art world, after New York had moved center stage in the wake of World War II. New York remains an important center of production, but artists from all over the world are now recognized as moving forces. Important international contributions in the field of Conceptualism were made by Yves Klein in France and the Art & Language Group in England, among others. 93 | Similarly to Minimalism, this generalizing tendency was exhibited particularly by those artists who dominated the movement, the majority of whom were male and white.

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lates this claim most succinctly, maintaining that the artist’s intention is what separates his product from the market and from commodity culture: “If my intention is denied at its inception, then my responsibility for the meaning I generate in the world as an artist is also nullified. The artist becomes just another producer of goods for the market, where the work finds its meaning.”94

Kosuth’s statement emphasizes the paradox of Conceptual Art, which has a strong anti-subjective thrust, while at the same time reserving importance for the artist’s discursive position and his capacity as a generator of meaning. In Kosuth’s view, it is not the spectator who defines the meaning of the work, it is the artist. This discursive and semantic power of the artist is not to be misunderstood as a philosophical self-realization of art in Hegel’s or Danto’s terms; here, art is self-defining on its own terms, rather than on philosophical terms.95 Many of Kosuth’s works make this power of self-definition particularly clear with their tautological self-referentiality, such as Four Colors Four Words (1966), an installation of neon tubes on a wall spelling out these four words in four different colors. In their refusal to signify beyond themselves, the words and the work deny a philosophical surplus. One of Kosuth’s later works makes this even clearer using the same format and materials: No Number #6 (On Color, Blue) (1991) states in blue letters “I am only describing language, not explaining anything.” Here, even the (Wittgensteinian) language itself refers back to its own enclosed self-referentiality, functioning not as referential system to an outside world, but as an instrument to define itself and at the same time to refuse signification beyond the immediate conceptual system of the work. While the artist assumes a strong discursive position by choosing the ‘I,’ the work itself remains contained within its own structure of meaning. Like other Conceptualist works, it is a self-reflexive definition of its own ‘art-ness.’ Kosuth maintains the power of signification over his work by enclosing it in a discursive circle that virtually severs any relation to the outside. Here we can find the utopian aim of decommodifying art that Lucy Lippard hoped to ­observe closely connected with a double gesture of the self-empowerment and discursive dominance of the artist.

94 | Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy” 463. 95 | Brigitte Hilmer, “Being Hegelian after Danto,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 37: Danto and His Critics: Art History, Historiography and After the End of Art, no. 4 (­D ecember 1998): 71-86. William Fowkes, “A Hegelian Critique of Found Art and Conceptual Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 157-168.

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Image 25: Self-referentiality in Kosuth’s conceptual works

Joseph Kosuth, Four Colors Four Words, 1966. Neon and transformer, 4 x 72 x 2 1/2 inches (10.2 x 182.9 x 6.4 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2002. Photography by Lee Stalsworth. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014. Courtesy of Jospeh Kosuth Studio.

In the context of the present discussion, it is particularly interesting to consider the three-fold connection between the decommodification of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic experience. Although the radiating vibrancy of Kosuth’s neon colors is a telling case in point that no work can be perceived completely anaesthetically, Kosuth emphasizes that Conceptual Art leaves the definition of art squarely on its own ground. “In an age when traditional philosophy is unreal because of its assumptions, art’s ability to exist will depend not only on its not performing a service—as entertainment, visual (or other) experience, or decoration—which is something easily replaced by kitsch culture and techno­logy, but rather, it will remain viable by not assuming a philosophical

Ar t Objects/Brand Products stance; for in art’s unique character is the capacity to remain aloof from philosophical judgments. … Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art.” 96

Art, in other words, is neither philosophical nor experiential, but just—and again, tautologically—art. Furthermore, Conceptual Art decisively renounces competition with the experiential richness introduced by contemporary techno­ logy, media, and new means of transportation.97 Image 26: Self-definition in Kosuth’s conceptual works

Joseph Kosuth, No Number #6 (On Color, Blue), 1991. Neon tubing with argon gas and mercury, 4 x 108 inches (10.2 x 274.3 cm). Photography © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014. Courtesy of Jospeh Kosuth Studio.

96 | Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” 170. 97 | “In our time we have an experientially drastically richer environment. One can fly all over the earth in a matter of hours and days, not months. We have the cinema, and color television, as well as the man-made spectacle of the lights of Las Vegas or the skyscrapers of New York City. The whole world is there to be seen, and the whole world can watch man walk on the moon from their living rooms. Certainly art objects of painting and sculpture cannot be expected to compete experientially with this?” Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” 168.

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For Kosuth, this de-objectification, dematerialization and de-aestheticization of art does not confirm more general trends towards the dematerialization of culture. Quite on the contrary, by trying to withhold any experiential quality from the viewer, conceptual works are oppositional and resistant gestures. This resistance is directed specifically at the category of experience. Buchloh later maintains that Conceptual Art “succeeded in purging itself entirely of imaginary and bodily experience.”98 With Conceptual Art, aesthetic experience as a category of art is undermined. At this point, my claim that Conceptual Art opened up the categories of art to commerce might not yet seem completely convincing. As I have argued, ­Conceptual Art emphasized the self-reflexivity and thus the autonomy of art. I have further shown that its aim was to strengthen the position of the artist. Finally, I have suggested that by itself dissociating from materiality and experience, Conceptual Art strove towards an ideal of art that was as removed as possible from the art market and from any market-driven possibilities for its exploitation. How, then, are we to understand Conceptual Art as an opening up of art—towards the influx of the commercial, and towards a postmodern indistinction of aesthetics and market, of the commercial and non-commercial realms? My contention here is that this opening up can indeed be attributed to, firstly, the de-subjectifying, universalizing tendency in production discussed above, and secondly, to Conceptual Art’s abandonment of the object, materiality, and aesthetic experience in favor of the idea. These two avantgardist strategies destabilized fundamental categories of art, and paradoxically led to a commodification of these very categories. I would like to begin to elaborate on these claims by referring back to ­Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh also observed Conceptual Art’s risky negotiation of resistance and affirmation. He notes the opening of art towards commerce and marketing, and roots this trend in the major paradoxes inherent in ­Conceptual Art, observing “that the critical annihilation of cultural conventions itself immediately acquires the conditions of the spectacle, that the insistence on artistic anonymity and the demo­ lition of authorship produces instant brand names and identifiable products and that the campaign to critique conventions of visuality with textual interventions, billboard signs, anonymous handouts, and pamphlets inevitably ends by following the pre-­ established mechanisms of advertising and marketing campaigns.”99

Buchloh suggests that Conceptualism’s attempts to distance art from marketing and market logic essentially backfire. His perspective reveals that the com98 | Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” 143. 99 | Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” 140.

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plex tensions within Conceptualism go even deeper than what I have sketched out thus far. On top of its inherent tension between empowerment and de-­ subjectification, Conceptualism carries the risk of producing the very effect it tries to avoid, namely the branding, and thus the commodification, of the artist and artwork. Buchloh further stresses that much Conceptual Art effectively uses the methods of the very commercial sphere it wants to separate itself from. His point about the condition of spectacle, which builds on the work of Guy Debord, emphasizes that despite attempts at decommodification, conceptual works still run a high risk of becoming spectacle, that is, of being commodified and consumed.100 This criticism can be read particularly in regard to the reliance of many conceptual works on representational images and texts. We can better understand Buchloh’s critique when we consider that many conceptual works were perceived by means of documentational material, mostly in the form of photographs, either in books or in the exhibition. These works were thus based on images and representations. One example is Hans Haacke’s much-discussed Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. The Guggenheim Museum canceled the exhibition of which it formed part six weeks before its opening, arguing that the work was a research study rather than a work of art. The work included 146 photographs of New York apartment buildings, six pictures of financial transactions, and maps of Harlem and the Lower East Side, as well as a wall panel that explained the work. The decision to cancel the exhibition has variously been explained with its unwelcome exposure of an alleged involvement of some of the trustees in real estate speculation. Notwithstanding the contentious nature of this explanation (or excuse) for not displaying the work, the cancellation of the exhibition on the official grounds that it weren‘t art underlines the disruptiveness of the work’s use of material and deastheticizing impulse. 100 | Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle has multiple levels and facets, with which the present discussion need not engage too deeply. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner give a concise summary of the different levels of this concept: “In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles, but the concept also refers to the vast institutional and technical apparatus of contemporary capitalism, to all the means and methods power employs, outside of direct force, to relegate subjects passive to societal manipulation and to obscure the nature and effects of capitalism’s power and deprivations.” Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “Debord and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle,” http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell17.htm. Here, my reading of Buchloh’s reference to Debord is concerned with the most basic level of spectacle, that which Best and Kellner call “the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles” in the media and consumer society.

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Similarly, two works I will go on to discuss in more detail—Robert ­Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field—­fundamentally rely on images and texts, and not just as documentation. Because of their very remote locations, these works rely on images as their primary means of circulation. The images thus take on an uneasy double nature as artistic documentation and public relations material. In this sense, the de-objectification of Conceptual Art results in the perception (and consumption) of many conceptual works as images or representations, rather than as objects—one condition of Debord’s “spectacle.” Buchloh’s argument reveals this inherent paradox of Conceptual Art, as well as its unwilling opening up to the logic of the capitalist market. I would like to take a look at this argument from a slightly different perspective and to focus on the two points I singled out earlier: the de-subjectification of the work on the part of the artist and the paradoxical attempt at de-­ aestheticization when it comes to the question of perception. Firstly, in regard to the production of art, the use of theoretical texts and documentary images has an effect of separating the creative artist from the work. The aesthetic product moves away from the traditional material and media of art, and away from the individual’s subjective expression of, for example, a brushstroke. Secondly, in terms of reception, the work frees itself from the traditional forms of art experience by emphasizing a conceptual understanding of the work at the expense of sensory aesthetic experience. This de-aestheticization gives art a v­ acuum-like quality, and thus brings a paradoxical element into Conceptual Art. By shunning sensory experience in order to be less commercial, ­Conceptual Art gives up to the world of commerce what was traditionally a strong instrument of art. Conceptual Art’s subversive, avantgardist approach to the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience rids art of its traditional instruments. This renunciation paradoxically paves the way for a heightened emphasis on the category of expe­ rience outside of art, and ultimately for the ensuing objectification and commodification of this experience. Both in the first case of the separation of the artist from the work and in the second case of the paradoxical strengthening of the importance of experience, we can assess a risky closeness of Conceptual Art to what Debord termed spectacle. In terms of the first tendency, I propose that although the conceptual approach is, according to Kosuth, meant to strengthen the authorship and semantic power of the producer of art against the market and the consumer/spectator, there is a yet another paradox inherent in this ambition of Conceptualism. The conscious denial of subjectivity and subjective expression in the creation of the work, and the ensuing lack of the artist’s visible, personal investment in the work, also have a contrary effect. By hypostatizing the anti-­subjectivist, self-­examining nature of art, the work appears not only autonomous, but also ­utterly self-enclosed. This has two major consequences.

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For one, the work is at risk of being affectively and emotionally separated from the producer as well as the spectator. This separation likens the work to the depersonalized products of consumer society. At the same time, the reverse possibility emerges for marketing products to be perceived as art. If the subjective investment of the artist in the work itself often seems hard to make out, this abstraction from the personal investment of the work’s creator—­ abstraction both in the sense of separation through the method of conception and realization, as well as in the sense of thought rather than material form— aligns the work with a central characteristic of most branding and marketing campaigns. For in the commercial sphere, too, the subjective view of the ­creator ultimately counts less than the perception of the spectator/consumer: the customer is king. Kosuth clearly points to this risk with his wariness of being denied responsibility for the meaning he generates. The line between the spectacularization of art and the artification of spectacle blurs. Further, when we put Conceptual Art’s attempt to de-objectify art in relation to Fried’s earlier discussion of Minimalism, Conceptual Art appears as a turn back to the self-reflexive modernist aesthetic that Fried supported. After all, Fried criticized Minimalism for making the literal value of the object and its phenomenal experience central to the conception and experience of art. This stood in clear opposition to modernist art, which Fried considered paradig­matic, and which had as its imperative to “defeat or suspend its own objecthood.”101 Fried saw the Minimalist emphasis on the objecthood of the object as an ­anti-art tendency. Conceptual Art, in turn, can be seen to perform a modernistic, self-reflexive examination of its own categories. In its its renunciation of the art object, it seems to align well with Fried’s modernist perspective. However, Conceptualism is not to be understood simply as a turn back to modernist aesthetic values. It is also a decisive step towards the discursive delimitation of the ever-more unstable categories of art. The decisive difference lies in the concept of aesthetic experience, which turns out to bear crucial similarities in Minimalism and Conceptualism. When Fried denounced Minimalism as “theater” rather than “art,” he criticized the kind of aesthetic experience it offers: one that is not object-bound, but ­constituted by a whole “situation” that requires the active presence of the spectator. Similarly, when Conceptual Art moves away from the object and instead empha­sizes the idea, the kind of experience that emerges assumes a comparable constellation. In what appears to be a radical continuation of Minimalism’s orien­ tation towards the spectator, Conceptual Art cannot exist without the spectator. Conceptual Art may aim at the self-definition of art and at a discursive empower­ment against the dominance of art historiography, art criticism, and the art market. Still, the side of reception cannot simply be forfeited. In spite of the 101 | Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 119f.

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strong semantic power that Kosuth confers on the artist, the emphasis on the subjective reception of the spectator remains strong. As Lippard observes, the viewer has the responsibility to think about the work, which, I would like to emphasize, includes the responsibility to determine whether it is art or not. The spectator is once more being told, for better or worse, that art is what he or she thinks art is, and that anything might or might not be art. This openness moves Conceptual Art away from the modernist paradigm and onto the ­un­stable terrain of postmodernism. If we formulate this in terms of the aesthetic theories I have discussed ­earlier in this chapter, the turn away from the art object and towards the ­attitude of the spectator carries the risk of making the aesthetic object completely arbitrary. While this might not be considered a problem in our culture at large, it is certainly a major challenge for the definition and (self-)legitimation of art. This is why even in an open approach to the question of aesthetic experience which discards a radical philosophical difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, the question of a relative difference of aesthetic object and aesthetic experience from their non-aesthetic counterparts remains important. Where art strategies give up the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience (and aesthetic theories conceptualize this accordingly), the risk is that the utopian impulse may backfire. This would turn Conceptual Art’s gesture of separation from the market, and its avantgardist subversion of then-dominant art discourse, into a Trojan horse for de-subjectified commercial endeavors to potentially look like art, and vice versa. Conceptual Art can thus be understood as an opening up of the categories of art, such that anything might or might not be art. In contrast to Kosuth’s declared intention, the spectator acquires the crucial role of not just perceiving but completing the artwork. Just as Minimalism in its phenomenal orientation needed the spectator’s experience in time and space, Conceptual Art needs the spectator to think about it, interpret it, and make sense of it. Rather than being strictly autonomous, as Fried and Greenberg would have it for modernist art, Conceptual Art closes itself down phenomenally, while at the same time entering circulation on a higher level. As Laurence Weiner reportedly said, “Once you know about a work of mine, you own it. There’s no way I can climb inside somebody’s head and remove it.”102 This is one of the fundamental aspects of Conceptual Art’s utopianism, as pointed out by Lucy Lippard. The less physical the work, the more can it be democratically distributed and experienced by everyone, even if only as an idea.

102 | See, for example, Anny Shaw, “Spreading the Word,” The Art Newspaper 3 ­D ecember 2011. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/­S preading+the+word/ 25272.

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To summarize, on the one hand, Conceptual Art strengthens the artist’s discursive position in an unprecedented way, both by declaring that art is what the artist says is art, and by suggesting that an artwork can exist only in the mind of the artist without ever being produced or even expressed. Yet on the other hand, there is also a pronounced emphasis on the role of the spectator, who is put in the position to intellectually deconstruct the art work, determine its meaning, and to decide whether it is art. While the experiential, phenome­ na­l aspect is fundamentally undermined and the dual character of aesthetic expe­rience is thus unbalanced, the move away from materiality, objectness, and aesthetic experience also means that the spectator is confronted with the question of the artness of this art. Instead of the aesthetic object, the attitude of the spectator becomes central. Conceptualism’s de-object­ifying impetus thus leads to a bypassing of the object, and instead to an emphasis on ideas. This destabilizes the traditional concept of aesthetic experience. Paradox­ ically, this results in a subsequent emphasis on the non-intellectual, s­ ensory forms of experience in both art and consumer culture. Although much ­Conceptual Art decisively moved away from experience and denounced the ­culture that developed around it, this de-aestheticizing tendency c­reated a ­vacuum of experience. When we look at the developments that follow C ­ onceptual Art, an argument can be made that Conceptual Art’s strong tendency towards dematerialization, de-objectification, and de-aestheticization called attention to the absence of sensory experience and therefore paradoxically emphasized its importance for the reception of art, as well as its central function in culture at large.

R ecovering E xperience : S hif ting P ercep tion in L and A rt and P erformance A rt Looking only at the de-objectifying, dematerializing, and de-aestheticizing aspects of Conceptual Art yields an incomplete picture of its relation to and influence on the question of (potentially aesthetic) experience in art. As we have seen, earlier Minimal Art shifted the focus from the artist to the viewers and their experience, emphasizing what Fried criticized as theatricality: an im­mediate, subjective experience in time and space. In Minimalism, the experience was still related very closely to the materiality of object and space. While strategies in Conceptual Art moved away from this phenomenal experience of object and space and entered an almost exclusively semantic sphere, Conceptual Art was soon complemented and counterbalanced by practices that positioned strong subjective experience as the object of art. One of these art forms, Land Art, emerged in close reaction to and negotiation of the terms of

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Conceptual Art; the other one, Performance Art, had been on the scene before, but acquired a new level of presence and expressiveness in the early 1970s.103 Similarly to Conceptual Art, Land Art moved away from established forms of materiality and space; however, these works also emphasized the viewer’s subjective phenomenal experience. In order to grasp the strong counterpoint to the purely conceptual dematerialization of the object that emerged from the conceptually influenced Land Art, we will look at two prominent examples: ­Spiral Jetty and Lighting Field. Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty plays with some crucial aspects of the intensification of subjective experience in a ­de-objectified art. The Spiral Jetty is an approximately 4.6-meter-wide and 460-meter-long, counterclockwise coil built of mud, rocks, water, and salt crystals on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Image 27: Aerial view of Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, 1970. Great Salt Lake, Utah. Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water. 1500 x 15 feet. Photography by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

103 | It is worth pointing out again that labels such as Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, and Land Art are used primarily for practical reasons. These categories are drawn somewhat artificially, and even arbitrarily. They are always only applied post factum, and artists mostly worked across such lines of distinction, combining them in their oeuvre or even in individual works. Examples of such sweeping approaches include the works of Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, and many others.

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In addition to the fact that the jetty is obviously exposed to change by the elements of nature, its visibility and walkability depend on the water level; a few years after its construction, the jetty was submerged by water, and only became visible and walkable again in 2004. One primary effect of the jetty might be summarized as ‘now it’s there, now it’s not,’ and this is not simply due to its subjection to nature or to the difficulty of referring to rocks and earth dumped into water as an ‘object.’ Rather, the jetty’s presence/absence is a consequence of its scale. As a whole, the jetty can only be perceived from far away, ideally from a helicopter, which is the unstable and indefinite location from which Smithson observed its construction and made a documentary video. From afar, however, the jetty is more of a form than an object, a symbol drawn into the indefinite waterfront terrain. In order to actually experience the jetty, one has to walk on it. And yet, the scale of the work makes it impossible for the spectator to perceive more than the small part of the jetty that he or she is walking on. Thus, the object can never be perceived in its entirety: when seen from far away or thought about, it is only an image, a concept, or a symbol; when walked on, it is only an experience. Image 28: Documenting the Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty in Red Salt Water, circa 1970. Graphite on paper, 9 x 12 inches (22.9 x 30.5 cm) © The Estate of Robert Smithson/VG BildKunst, Bonn 2014. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

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This in-betweenness of the work, which moves back-and-forth between image/ concept and experience, amounts to an intense negotiation of concept, aesthetic object, and aesthetic experience. In addition, we have to think about the question of objecthood in relation to Smithson’s multimedia approach to the work, which consisted not only of the jetty but also of a written statement, photo­ graphs, maps, drawings, and video material. While these were not works of art in and of themselves, they can be considered crucial parts of the whole work. Image 29: Circulation of images of the Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson, Stills from the Spiral Jetty Film, 1970. Photographs on panels. Three panels, each with twelve photographs. Panels, each: 26 x 44 inches. Collection: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Norway © Estate of Robert Smithson/VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn 2014.Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

As a consequence of the jetty’s remote location, these documentary media are both how and what most people know of the artwork. Here, again, the dual­ ity of image/concept and experience is reinforced. One can (and will) imagine what the experience of the work might be through the still and moving images of it that are distributed in catalogues, books, and on the Internet. Moreover, we again encounter the risk of spectacularization because the documentary material also functions as public relations material that circulates images of the work and potentially draws more visitors. Spiral Jetty can be conceived of as a complex negotiation of the relation between idea/concept and aesthetic object/aesthetic experience. It remains open to discussion and to the position of the perceiving subject whether the conceptual or the experiential side domi­ nates. The work is a case in point for the dematerialization of the art object that

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leads to an increased emphasis on experience, whether in physical or in virtual terms. Walter De Maria’s 1977 Lightning Field is another striking example of this phenomenon. Situated in an utterly remote location, the work consists of 400 polished stainless steel poles arranged geometrically on one square kilometer. The metal poles, which are at times barely perceptible, might or might not attract lightning during the visitor’s 24-hour stay at or on the field. Similarly to Smithson’s jetty, this work is so remote and difficult to reach that it exists primarily in documentation and ideas.104 In addition, even for someone who actually makes it out to New Mexico, it is impossible to perceive the installation in its entirety. The point of the work seems to be less that spectators admire one pole, or two, or ten, but rather that they expose themselves to the experience of wandering through the field and witnessing the violence of the lightning strike—if it occurs. The only actual material element of the work, the poles, are set up in a way that complicates their materiality and aesthetic effect: they are difficult to experience, and they are presented as primarily functional elements—conduits for the Lightning Field. In this way, a field of tension is created in between the conceptual idea of how to attract lighting and the specific experience of (waiting for) the strike of lightning, a tension that all but leaves out the object at its center. De Maria’s work is comparable to the Spiral Jetty in its complex negotiation of objecthood, experience, and idea.105 The second development in the art world that stood in close relation to Conceptual Art but took a decisive turn towards subjective experience was Performance Art. Performance Art and Conceptual Art developed more or less contemporaneously, and many of the most well known works of the time are in fact hybrids of the two approaches. One significant, early example of such a combination was Yves Klein’s Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, which I already briefly mentioned earlier in this chapter. In Klein’s work, we can see two aspects that later became central to much conceptual practice, namely the emphasis on ideas instead of objects, as well as on the artist’s power to define what art is. However, in this work we can also observe two major differences

104 | Interestingly, the photographs of Lightning Field seem to be considered such inte­g ral, essential parts of the work that their use was not permitted in this publication. In contrast, permission was kindly granted by the same foundation for the use of photo­ graphs of Judd’s outdoor works. This suggests a categorical difference in the impor­ tance of image, object, and experience in Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. 105 | I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Laura Bieger for her vivid descriptions of her live expe­ riences of Spiral Jetty and Lightning Field, as well as for her insightful analytical suggestions.

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from the practical and theoretical endeavors of Conceptual Art that I have discussed so far. Firstly, although this concerns only the optional part of the work, burning the check and throwing gold into the Seine can be conceived of as an event in which artist and spectator came together to execute an action—which is fundamental to the definition of performance. With both Klein and the buyer appearing in person, this part of the work emphasized that there were two subjects involved in an action in time and space. This is also echoed in the t­itle of the work: an ‘immaterial pictorial sensibility’ is clearly a perception or a feeling that relies on the subjective experience of the artist and/or spectator. This empha­ sis on experience, while rather subdued in purely conceptual ­approaches, is typical for performance work and for hybrid approaches. Secondly, whereas Conceptual Art was concerned with the decommodification of art, primarily by means of de-objectifying it, the crucial point of Klein’s work was the act of selling a documentation of ownership. Klein thus expressly thematized the market condition of art. At the same time, however, he also ironized and undermined the question of market value: what he sold was literally air—empty space—and he subsequently even proposed to have the proof of this pointless transaction destroyed. Still, in yet another turn, he then undermined this critical approach by throwing away only half of what he received for the work, thus ultimately reaffirming (half) the value of the artist’s work. Klein’s Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle is thus an early example of a hybrid between Performance Art and Conceptual Art: it relied on the category of experience, with the performer and spectator sharing a time, space, and particular action; but as the title of Klein’s piece expresses, it worked primarily with an idea rather than with an object or a subject’s body. Jon Erickson formulates the relation between Conceptual Art and Performance Art most succinctly when he points out that “conceptual art dissolves the object into subjective space,” while “performance art reconstitutes the lost object in (as) the subject itself.”106 Who is the subject in question here? It is both the performer and the spectator, yet the emphasis is on the spectator. It is through his or her experience of the situation—of the time, space, and action of the performance—that the spectator experiences her or his subjectivity. And it is also by way of experiencing the performer’s subjectivity—the corporeality, presence, investment, and specificity of the performer’s body and actions—that the spectator is thrown back onto his or her own subjectivity. It is not the goal of this book to describe all the facets of Performance Art, from its roots in Happenings and Fluxus in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through to the works of the 1960s and 1970s, and until today. Rather, the crucial point for the present discussion is that while these works developed out 106 | Erickson, The Fate of the Object, 129.

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of the context and discourse of visual art, they moved away from traditional art objects and put subjective phenomenal experience in their place. Many performances incorporate objects and/or the performers’ bodies, such as, for exam­ple, Allan Kaprow’s assembled, environmental installations in his 1959 6 Happenings in 18 Parts; Carolee Schneeman’s 1964 Meat Joy, which involved the artists’ bodies and various objects and materials such as raw meat and wet paint; or Chris Burden’s 1971 Shoot, which consisted of the artist being shot in the arm with a gun. However, the central aspect of these works, and of performance work in general, is the interactive experience in time and space that performers and spectators share, and which can make their subjectivity a shared, lived experience. This expressed emphasis on presence and subjectivity of the spectator is the crucial difference between Conceptual Art and Performance Art, marking the latter as an alternative approach to the artist’s universalistic subject-position of the former. In his essay “Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art,” Frazer Ward traces how Conceptualism’s move onto the open terrain of postmodernism in regard to the definition of art is complicated through its rationalist and de-subjectified approach: “Conceptual Art undertook the removal of traditional elements of aesthetic expression from art. … However, despite the rationalist, democratizing grounds on which it sought to demystify aesthetic experience and mastery (‘Anybody can do that’), it maintained the abstraction of content crucial to the high modernist art that had until then been institutionally valorized (and remains so). If modernist painting was just about painting, Conceptual Art was just about art. In this way, it maintained the somewhat elitist disembodiment of its own subject, and its rationalism remained abstract, and only abstractly communicative.”107

In contrast to the disembodied artistic subjectivity and abstract approach of Conceptual Art, performances communicate very directly through shared experience and an embodied subject. They do so without going back to the traditional methods and materials of art. Performance Art leaves behind any attempt at or pretense of a universalist overcoming of the singular subjectivity of the artist or spectator. We can thus see how the strongly idea-based conceptual approach was soon counterbalanced by various alternative forms, among them Land Art and Performance Art, which negotiated the question of the de-­ objectification and de-aestheticization of art by emphasizing its phenomenal, experiential quality. 107 | Frazer Ward, “Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art,” Art Journal 56, no. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century (Winter 1997): 36-40.

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Where Minimalists chose materials and modes of production, Conceptualists chose ideas and methods. Both the process of production and its results came to reside primarily in the sphere of ideation rather than in the sphere of visual and haptic material, which had until then been central to art. Conceptual Art should therefore be understood as an instance of a strong avantgardist impetus that undermined the categories of art, particularly in terms of the aesthetic art object and aesthetic experience. Considered from our contemporary perspective, this avantgardist impulse of Conceptual Art has played out as yet another opening of the boundaries of art as they had been established by modernism. In today’s postmodern situation, virtually any kind of aesthetic work, independent from medium, form, producer, and even from material manifestation, can be considered art. Art can take any kind of material shape—or none— and can facilitate any kind of experience, be it phenomenal or conceptual—or none. Lucy Lippard, writing a “postscript” twenty years after the first version of her article on the dematerialization of art, assessed that her earlier hope for a utopian, decommodifying potential of Conceptual Art had proven futile. We can understand this as a consequence of the virtually limitless expansion of the boundaries of art in postmodern culture that was crucially facilitated by Conceptual Art.108 As a consequence of this and other avantgardist approaches, there is now little orientation for the viewer in terms of what something has to be, look or feel like in order to qualify as art. This certainly should not be seen only in negative terms, as it empowers the viewer and democratizes art. It also holds the potential to transform not just art, but also everyday life, in aesthetically meaningful terms. However, this delimitation of art also means that anything can be considered art, and therefore put on the market as art. In addition, the reverse appears to be true, namely that aesthetics can be used to sell anything. In this way, the boundaries of art and commerce blur, demo­ cratizing art and simultaneously achieving the market goals of a culture of commodification. Our discussion of the role of experience in Conceptual Art and conceptually influenced Performance and Land Art shows that the commodification of experience that follows Conceptual Art’s autonomization from the object should not be understood simply as an encroachment of commerce upon the sphere of art. Just as much, it has been propelled by avantgardist strategies emerging from the sphere of art. Conceptual Art attempted to decommodify art by getting rid of its sensory, experiential aspects. However, this move away from phenomenal perception and towards conceptual thought effectively undermined aesthetic experience in art as an experience that includes both sensations and meaning. This created what I have called a vacuum-like, present absence of experience, 108 | Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object.

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a need which found an interesting expression in the negotiations of object and experience presented in Land Art, and in such strongly experience-oriented art forms as Performance Art. Conceptual Art’s one-sidedly ideational approach can be considered an avantgardist gesture that led to the destabilization and delimitation of core categories of art—the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience. Paradoxically, this amounted to a handing over of art’s methods to the commercial sphere, which today finds expression in the complex nature of the commodity object, the renewed importance of experience, and its ensuing commodification as experience value. Particularly experience value as a subcategory of aesthetic value has acquired fundamental importance in contemporary culture. This impor­tance stems firstly from the establishment of aesthetic value as a value in itself; it is no longer a subcategory of either use or exchange value, as Böhme has suggested. Secondly, experience value, and with it aesthetic value, becomes increasingly autonomous from a specific object. This de-objectified experience value is subsequently commodified. Experience has become a crucial concept in contemporary culture. At the same time, the question of what aesthetic experience is or can be has become even more difficult to answer. If a lot of conceptual approaches in art have been taking us away from the sensory side of experience, consumer culture is often inviting us to live moments of heightened sensory and emotional engagement. And if aesthetic experience in a modernist understanding was predicated on a particular kind of object, contemporary aesthetic theory now needs to account for the shifting function of objects and the importance of the spectator’s atti­ tude towards them. Aesthetic experience is no longer bound to a particular type of object, or even to an object at all, and the experiences we can have in our culture at large are variegated and differ in intensity, both in phenomenal and in semiotic terms. This is the case irrespective of whether such experiences occur in a commercial context or in a context of supposedly non-commercial, autonomous art.

B r anding : F rom O bject to E xperience A closer look at contemporary marketing strategies can help us to understand how the relation of object to experience has changed in the economic sphere. This change is in many respects analogous to the developments spurred by Conceptual Art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Branding, which is the most common and most written about marketing approach since the 1980s, is also the one that best traces the evolving valuation of the commodity in contemporary consumer culture. Originally, the term branding was used for the brand-

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ing of cattle by farmers with their symbol or name. The brand denoted both ownership and quality. When the mass-market economy emerged during the Industrial Age, product branding became an important means for manufac­ turers to provide orientation and assurance to customers in an increasingly impersonal marketplace. The practice and theory of branding finally moved center stage in the 1980s, when companies recognized that brands were not ancillary but rather central to their products and business. In an oversaturated market, people bought brands rather than products.109 The value of a brand now came to be assessed and recognized as part of a company’s intangible ­assets; brand equity became core to a company’s overall worth.110 Accordingly, the approach to branding changed. Marketing efforts focused increasingly on creating a brand rather than on communicating information about the product. Instead of convincing the customer using a traditional features and benefits (F&B) approach that employed the brand only as an identifier, marketing strategists strove to create brands that conveyed images and emotions. The customer was to be won over by these imaginary associations rather than by the actual features of the product, which in many cases differed only marginally between brands. In the course of this expansion of the meaning and importance of brands, it has become difficult to define exactly what a brand is—a product, the name of a product, the identity or image created by a company or agency, the idea people have of a product or company, and so on and so forth—to the extent that today it is possible for any kind of label to be called a brand.111 While it is becoming increasingly difficult to narrow down what a brand is, it is clear what it is not: the material product.112 Following a phase that was oriented towards images and messages, branding and marketing have in the last two decades developed an increasing focus on the creation of experiences. These experiences go far beyond the communication of qualities and messages—both those closely related to the product, as in early marketing approaches, or the loosely related ones of later marketing strategies. Today, the consumer’s manifold experiences with the brand often seem more important than the product to be sold. While experiential marketing will in many cases include the customer’s direct experience of the product, 109 | See, for example, Naomi Klein’s highly critical, perceptive account of the importance that brands and branding reached in the early 1990s. Klein, No Logo. 110 | In 1989, brand valuation was endorsed by the London Stock Exchange. See Rita Clifton and Sameena Ahmad, Brands and Branding (London: Bloomberg Press, 2009), 30. 111 | See, for example, Paul Manning, “The Semiotics of Brand,” Annual Review of ­A nthropology 39 (2010): 33-49, 34, or John Grant, After Image: Mind-altering ­M arket­i ng (London: HarperCollins Business, 2002). 112 | Manning, “The Semiotics of Brand,” 36.

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many notable examples move away from the relation to the product and towards a more general and abstract relation with the brand. In creating this distance between object and brand, experiential marketing shows a development that is very similar to the dematerialization and de-objectification of art that Conceptual Art initiated. One way to explain this move of marketing away from the products is to consider it in terms of the needs of capitalist economies. It is a necessity of current capitalist markets to increase the turnover time in consumption, that is, to make people buy things more often and beyond what traditional patterns of consumption suggest. Such an acceleration is made possible by selling feelings, emotions, and ideas, because these are the most ephemeral, non-material ‘products’ and can be fully experienced only in the very moment of their occurrence.113 We can summarize this development as the transition of our capitalist economy from a product-driven stage, through a service-driven stage, to its contemporary experience-driven stage. Various thinkers have observed the cultural importance of living and selling experiences from the 1990s onwards. From a more general perspective, German sociologist Gerhard Schulze assessed in 1992 that people define their lives increasingly by means of subjective experience and inner orientation ­rather than by external factors. On this basis, experiences gain a particular importance for individual self-definition.114 Accordingly, it seems that over the course of the decade an increasing number of businesses stepped in to fill this indivi­dual need for experience, so that in 1999, B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore presented their observations on an emerging Experience Economy. Pine and Gilmore pointed out that more and more businesses were turning their attention away from the mere provision and marketing of goods and services and towards the creation of experiences to “engage customers, connecting with them in a personal, memorable way.”115 Brand creation and brand marketing have become increasingly experience-based. This shift in focus does not only refer to experiences like traveling, sports, or events. Such experiences may also include the act of visiting a store, brand center, or brand exhibition (even, and crucially so, without the act of buying); engaging in activities presented by the brand (like the sports activities orga113 | “Eventually, the necessary acceleration of turnover time in consumption shifted consumer attention further and further away from the merchandise itself centering it progressively on ephemeral commodities such as services, media images, and events.” Klingmann, “Eyes Which Do Not See,” 4. 114 | Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1992). 115 | B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 3.

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nized by Nike or the concert series presented by Absolut Vodka); or witnessing street installations and street campaigns (such as the one by Hollister described later in this chapter). Following Pine and Gilmore’s observations, several studies have dealt with the question of how to strategically create such experiences. These strategies are variously referred to as experience/experiential, sensory, or emotional marketing and branding.116 All of these efforts aim to engage the customer on different levels of experience—sensual, emotional, and rational. Most marketing literature today suggests that only such holistic approaches have a chance of standing out in the cluttered marketplace. This focus on experience rather than on the functionality or symbolic qua­ lity of the product means that the question of value shifts towards what I have called experience value. As Bernd Schmitt proposes, “in sum, experiences provide sensory, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and relational values that replace functional values.”117 I would go even further to propose that all of the qualities connected to the material existence of the commodity lose importance, whether these are related to its use, exchange, or symbolic dimension. Instead of the commodity object, experience now becomes decisive, and it can stand in very loose relation to the consumer product. The value of the experience is twofold. It has both a performative and a semiotic side; immediate sensory perception and the creation of meaning work together to make the specific experience a valuable moment and memory. We can recognize here the two sides of ­aes­­th­etic experience that I discussed earlier. Just like an aesthetic experience, brand expe­r ience can offer a potent cultural instrument for both sensory perception and meaning creation.118 116 | See, among others, Max Lenderman, Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Brand World (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006). Bernd H. Schmitt, Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brand (New York: The Free Press, 1999). Bernd H. Schmitt, David L. Rogers, and Karen Vrotsos, There’s No Business That’s Not Show Business: Marketing in an Experience Culture (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2004). Christian Mikunda, Brand Lands, Hot Spots & Cool Spaces: ­Welcome to the Third Place and the Total Marketing Experience (London; Philadelphia: Kogan, 2004). Marc Gobé and Sergio Zyman, Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm of Connecting Brands to People (New York: Allworth, 2001). Martin Lindstrom, Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound (New York: Free Press, 2005). Adam Lindgreen, Joëlle Vanhamme, and Michael B. Beverland, eds., Memorable Customer Experiences: A Research Anthology (Farnham; Burlington: Gower, 2009). 117 | Schmitt, Experiential Marketing, 26. 118 | Accordingly, Lanier and Hampton suggest that experiential marketing employs “perspective and meanings” as its main resources. Clinton D. Lanier and Ronald D.

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In marketing terms, this means that the marketing of goods and services is substituted for the logic of experience marketing. Such experiences are impor­tant in terms of both use and exchange value, but they are not limited to ­either and go beyond both. The experience-oriented approach is considered a ­highly promising yet still underexploited instrument of marketing, as Gobé and Z ­ yman point out: “Sensory experiences are immediate, powerful, and capable of changing our lives profoundly, but they are not used to their full extent in branding, particularly at the retail level. … In the stores of tomorrow, ‘buying’ will be outmoded as a sterile activity and in its place will stand ‘the art of shopping’ which is less about purchasing and more about experiencing a brand.”119

Whereas before, brands were used mainly as identifiers of products, they are now increasingly independent from actual material objects and have evolved into whole systems of signification. As consumers, we are offered more and more options to use brands as structuring and signifying devices for our every­ day lives. In Jonathan Schroeder’s words, “brands are not only mediators of cultural meaning—brands themselves have become ideological referents that shape cultural rituals, economic activities, and social norms.“120 Rather than being just signs, brands offer experiences that are both sensory and semantic. Brands (and the companies behind them) thus provide more than individual practices of signification—like wearing a particular brand to express a parti­ cular individual and/or social meaning—and instead offer more encompassing cultural practices of meaning creation. This shift towards the experiential side of consumption means that the consumer product as material object loses importance in relation to the experience. This amounts to a dematerialization of brands, which allows for processes of signification that are no longer contingent upon the object: “Brand discourse defines brand in opposition to the material properties of the product, leading to a dematerialization of brand, which erases the messy materialities, contingencies, and hybrids that continually arise in the material semiosis of brand.”121 ­H ampton Jr., “Experiential Marketing: Understanding the Logic of Memorable Customer ­E xperiences,” in Memorable Customer Experiences: A Research Anthology, ed. Adam Lindgreen, Joëlle Vanhamme, and Michael B. Beverland (Farnham; Burlington: Gower, 2009), 10. 119 | Gobé and Zyman, Emotional Branding, xxv. 120 | Jonathan E. Schroeder, “The Cultural Codes of Branding,” Marketing Theory, no.­ 9 (March 2009): 123-126, 124. 121 | Manning, “The Semiotics of Brand,” 33.

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In other words, the product, with its look, feel, and taste, loses importance; ultimately, the consumer can have experiences with the brand that are all but unrelated to the product. This dematerialization also means that branding can expand into a significantly larger portion of our everyday life experience. In a way, this is a perverse reiteration of what Conceptual Art attempted. Conceptual Art de-objectified art in order to take it out of market circulation; at the same time, this utterly democratized art by turning it into its most highly circulable form—the idea. Today, the de-objectification of branding similarly facilitates the circulation of brands in our everyday life, so that the boundaries between branded and non-branded life increasingly blur. Naomi Klein observed this development even before experiential marketing started to boom. She argued that the public promotion of brands takes away personal and public spaces of intellectual freedom and leaves no room for a “metaphorical space: for release, for escape, for a sort of freedom with an open exit.”122 This thought builds on Adorno and Horkheimer’s earlier critique that the cultural dominance of market principles leads to the domination of consumers’ minds. Taking this argument a bit further, one could add that marketing and branding do not offer the openness and polyvalence of aesthetic meaning that is prevalent in art. Rather, it is the goal of branding to influence and manage the customer’s experience in order to ensure a positive valuation of the brand. While this argument is certainly right in many cases, I would like to suggest that the experiences customers have with brands are often more complicated than such cultural criticism allows. The recent development of branding theory and practice indicates that marketers are gaining an understanding of the intense complexity of experience. Instead of older, essentialist models, such as the brand essence or brand identity models, which focused only or primarily on the producer side of meaning, newer approaches suggest that more open models, like the brand universe model (elaborated by Franz Liebl), or the brand culture approach (put forth by Jonathan Schroeder), are necessary to understand how brands function. Such newer models acknowledge that it is not the company but the customer who ‘owns’ the brand.123 The concept of branding is changing. It is increasingly obvious to marketers that a brand is not simply the

122 | Quoted in Wolfgang Ullrich, “Art and Brands: Who Learns from Whom?” in Art & Branding: Principles–Interaction–Perspectives, ed. Hans-Jörg Heusser and Kornelia Imesch (Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2006), 44. Original quote in Klein, No Logo, 81ff. 123 | Patricia B. Seybold, Ronni T Marshall, and Jeffrey M. Lewis, The Customer ­R evolution: How to Thrive When Customers Are in Control (New York: Crown Business Press, 2001).

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product of a company or agency, but rather comes into being only through the experience and in the mind of the customer. Franz Liebl summarizes: “Brands may legally ‘belong’ to companies and be ‘managed’ based on decisions t­ aken by management, yet they are ‘in the possession’ of consumers, because the latter ­­­­exploit and experience brands, interpret them in their own way, compare them with ­o ther brands, and share their experiences and fantasies with other consumers.”124

Ultimately, brands are created not in a company, agency, or abstract marketplace, but in the minds of the consumers. The problem of brand perception is therefore quite similar to one of the core problems of signification in art: what the recipient makes of the experience is not coextensive with the intentions of the producer. Thinkers from the ­Birmingham School of Cultural Studies elaborated on this insight, signifi­ cantly modifying critical theory as it had been proposed by the Frankfurt School. Following a similar insight in marketing, the focus of attention in branding has shifted from object to subject, and from product to consumer. In this sense, consumer culture mirrors developments that originated in the art world two decades earlier, decisively moving away from the producer and the product ­towards the recipient, and emphasizing the subjective and individual experience of the spectator/consumer. Accordingly, marketers’ efforts are increasingly directed at creating comprehensive experiences that can ideally shape the individual customer’s experience in a positive way. As we have seen, the white cube is an exhibition strategy derived from the art world and used in various retail spaces to present products in a setting that suggests eternal value. At least as important as this function is the way in which the white cube creates a specific atmosphere that allows for a particular kind of shopping experience. Experiential marketing includes this spatial concept, but it also goes far beyond this elementary level to include more advanced fields of aesthetic production. As Schmitt and Simonson summarize: “In einer Welt, in der die Grundbedürfnisse der meisten Konsumenten befriedigt sind, kann ein Nutzen dadurch angeboten werden, dass der Erfahrungs- und Erlebnis­ hunger der Verbraucher gestillt wird—ihre ästhetischen Bedürfnisse somit befriedigt werden.”125 124 | Franz Liebl, “From Branding Goods to Hacking Brands: A Beginner’s Guide to the Brand Universe,” in Art & Branding: Principles–Interaction–Perspectives, ed. Hans-Jörg Heusser and Cornelia Imesch (Zürich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2006), 29. 125 | “In a world in which most consumers’ basic needs are met, value can be offered by satiating their hunger for experience and excitement, and thus by satisfying their aes­ thetic needs.” (My translation) Bernd Schmitt and Alex Simonson, ­M arketing-Ästhetik.

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Clearly, this argument has a similar logic as Böhme’s, this time from the perspective of marketing. What kind of aesthetic needs or desires are we talking about here? As discussed earlier in this chapter, aesthetic experience is one of the most potent, ­effective, intense, and memorable kinds of experience. While not every i­ nstance of experiential marketing will be an aesthetic experience, and while the emergence of this experience strongly depends on the attitude of the spectator/ consumer, I suggest that it is an important goal of experiential marketing to enable and facilitate aesthetic experiences. As the role of marketing is increasingly to “provide the right environment and setting for the desired customer experience to emerge,”126 holistic, aesthetic work becomes a crucial element of consumer-focused marketing. This leads to the decreasing importance of products and the increasing importance of a more encompassing type of expe­ rience. This experience—no longer restricted to, centered on, or even necessarily related to the object that is to be sold—might well be the quintessential aesthetic experience of today. This new understanding of aesthetic experience obviously stands in contrast to the modernist understanding of art. The function of art, ever since it came to be seen as an autonomous sphere during the paradigmatic cultural changes of the Enlightenment, has generally been considered distinct from instrumental reason and material value. For the most part, this aesthetic autonomy has been seen as differentiating art and aesthetic experience from any kind of marketplace endeavor such as brand marketing. However, we should bear in mind that the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy has also propelled the development of manifold strategies of value generation in art, including concepts of value that significantly exceed the mere materiality and functionality of the object. What is important about a work of art is not simply its materiality, the crude reality of its material existence, but rather the meanings, sensations, and emotions that are generated in the mind of the spectator when she or he experiences the work of art. It is the goal of art, just as much as it is the goal of branding, to generate qualities that exceed the object/product and to give it value far beyond its materiality and functional use. This importance of producing sensations and meanings that exceed the materiality of the object has today led to a situation in which what is actually being sold is the experience rather than the product. Today, both in art and in branding, one of the most important forms this excessive quality takes is that of a special experience—ideally aesthetic—which includes an emphasis on both immediate sensory perception and subjective meaning creation. Strategisches Management von Marken, Identity und Image (München, Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1997), 23. 126 | Schmitt, Experiential Marketing, 60.

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Before continuing this discussion with some specific contemporary examples, I would like mention that in spite of the autonomous ideal of art, there are, of course, various well-established connections between art and branding. On the most obvious level, companies employ art in their branding strategies, by using artworks in their communications or including art sponsorship in their company portfolios and corporate images. These uses of art are best under­ stood as mechanisms of social distinction, signaling the cultural capital and philanthropic engagement of the company—and by extension, that of the customer. On a more conceptual level, a historical perspective reveals how practices employed in art for centuries have functioned as forerunners to branding. As various writers have observed, artists have long practiced prototypical forms of what today is known as branding.127 For example, Jonathan Schroeder rightly notes that ever since artists had to compete in the marketplace, they have essen­ tially developed brands and have branded their products.128 In developing particular, personal styles, creating work on demand or for target audiences, and signing their works, painters and sculptors developed means of differentiating and positioning themselves in the art markets of the time, whether these were dominated by aristocratic, bourgeois, or democratic audiences and buyers. It would be beyond the scope of this work to establish clear, continuous historical lines of influence and imitation between art practices and branding. Yet even this cursory glance reveals that what I am discussing here is not a new development. What is particularly interesting about the contemporary situation, however, is that the conceptual similarities between art and brand marketing have reached yet another level of implication. We can understand this situation as a consequence of two developments. On the one hand, one of the driving forces of art history has been the constant attempt to rework the tension ­between aligning with the label of dominant art and creating a novel experience that attempts to be in some way fresh, captivating, or even shocking. Avantgardist art practices have continuously questioned the categories and boundaries of art on both the sensory and the semantic levels. On the ­other hand, in answer to the demands of contemporary capitalism, increasingly holis­tic marketing efforts have extended aesthetic methods into more and more 127 | See, for example, Otto Karl Werckmeister, Versuche über Paul Klee (Frankfurt a.M.: Syndikat, 1981); ———, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt als Unternehmer: Sein Atelier und der Markt (Köln: Dumont, 2003). Oskar Bätschmann, Der Ausstellungskünstler (Köln: Dumont, 1997). ­ arket­i ng 128 | Jonathan E. Schroeder, “The Artist and the Brand,” European Journal of M 39, no. 11/12 (2005): 1291-1305; ———, “The Artist in Brand Culture,” in Marketing the Arts: A Fresh Approach, ed. Daragh O’Reilly and Finola Kerrigan (London; New York: Routledge, 2010).

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spheres of life. Today, brand marketing is blurring the boundary between market and life by offering means of sensory experience and subjective meaning creation. Art and branding are thus converging.

Tr ansitions : A esthe tic E xperience /B r and E xperience I will begin our discussion of exemplary cases of experiential marketing with an installation that strongly follows the experiential approach in branding. One of the crucial elements of the car manufacturing company BMW’s marketing strategy, as their US website shows, is to communicate and provide “The ­Ultimate BMW Experience.”129 Their approach to experiential marketing can be differentiated into two categories; one is a directly art-related approach, while the other is a more general, aesthetic approach to presenting the BMW brand and products. The most striking example of the first type is the BMW Art Car series that was founded in 1975, when the company started commissioning well-known artists to artistically process BMW cars which would then be exhi­ bited in different locations, both in art spaces and in non-art spaces. Among the 16 artists who have contributed to the series are Frank S ­ tella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, and Jenny Holzer. The BMW Art Cars have been exhibited at the world’s most ­renowned museums, including the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou in ­Paris, the W ­ hitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Royal Academy in London, and the Eremitage in St. Petersburg. They have also been shown in more public settings, such as New York’s Grand ­Central Station. In order to see all of the BMW Art Cars, one would have to travel to various museums across the world. This fact is also stressed on the website that was designed on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the art car collection, which for the first time presented all of the cars in one (virtual) place.130 Before becoming part of museum exhibitions, most of the cars also participated in the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car endurance race (the Grand Prix of Endurance), thus demonstrating their practical use as high-­ performance race cars. Some of the cars even went into mass production, the first one being Robert Rauschenberg’s 635 Csi. The BMW Art Cars are hybrids between art and commerce. When we look at specific examples, two distinct approaches stand out. Over the four decades of this project’s existence, most artists have followed an orna129 | “BMW USA,” http://www.bmwusfactory.com/ultimate-bmw-experience/; http:// www.bmwusa.com/standard/content/experience/default.aspx. 130 | “BMW Art Cars,” http://en.bmw-art-cars.de/.

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mental approach to their task. When analyzed in marketing terms, this strategy can be conceived in terms of social distinction, since cultural meaning and recognition is bestowed on a brand through its association with renowned art and artists. However, some recent works point in a different direction. The 16th piece in the series is Olafur Eliasson’s 2007 “Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R Project.” What is special about this work is that it clearly departs from the ornamental approach, thus exemplifying a turn away from the object and towards the creation of a particular experience. The BMW H2R Project was also the centerpiece of Eliasson’s touring retrospective, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007. Eliasson’s work consisted of removing the outer shell of the hydrogen-powered BMW H2R and replacing it with steel mesh. The mesh was then covered with several layers of water, which subsequently was frozen to ice. While the process of production was elaborate, the crucial part of the work was its perception. Image 30: Multi-sensory experience of art/BMW

Studio Olafur Eliasson/BMW Group, BMW H2R Project: Your Mobile Expectations, 2007. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. © Studio Olafur Eliasson/BMW Group. Courtesy of BMW Group.

In order to experience the BMW H2R Project, visitors were equipped with blankets and had to enter a custom-built freezer in small groups, where they could then face “Your mobile expectations.” With this work, Eliasson made the BMW car almost invisible: no features of its design or technology were on display. Instead, he engaged the viewers both on the somatic level—not least through the ice-cold environment—and on the semantic level. While the somatic expe-

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rience was in itself very unique, the aesthetic processing of the car using ice also provoked thoughts about the relation between cars and nature, or, more specifically, between cars and climate change. Eliasson’s work can thus be read as a conceptual installation that dematerializes the object and puts (aesthetic) experience in its place. The BMW H2R Project: Your Mobile Expectations is also interesting ­because Eliasson’s conceptual approach appears to be situated squarely within the framework of BMW’s experiential marketing approach. Examples of this ­approach include Performance Driving Schools, where drivers can test the limits of a BMW car, or sightseeing road trips through Europe which begin with an elaborate ritual of personally picking up one’s new BMW at the Munich plant. The potential customer’s immediate experience is central to this marketing strategy. As BMW’s Vice President of Marketing stated, “In the last dozen years there has been a significant investment on BMW’s behalf globally and domestically to engage consumers and prospects with our brand experientially.”131 A second work worth considering in this regard is Robin Rhode’s 2009 An Expression of Joy.132 Image 31: Creating and conserving an art/car experience

Robin Rhode/BMW Group, BMW Z4 - An Expression of Joy, 2008. © BMW Group. Courtesy of BMW Group. 131 | www.eventmarketer.com, “BMW’s Experiential Marketing Mix. BMW uses f­aceto-face experiences to get consumers in the driver’s seat,” http://www.event­m arketer. com/article/bmws-experiential-marketing-mix. 132 | “BMW. An Expression of Joy,” http://www.expressionofjoy.com.

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Rather than transforming the car, Rhode chose to use the car as a transformational tool itself, applying it as a paintbrush to a giant 100 by 200 feet canvas. Paint containers installed above the wheels dispensed paint onto the wheels while a driver raced the car across the canvas. Subsequently, the artist dripped and splattered some additional paint, leaving behind a canvas covered with colorful traces reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. The process and result were filmed and can now be viewed on the website. Rhode’s work is interesting for our present discussion because it seems to perfectly align with BMW’s experiential marketing approach. Rather than focusing on the car, the work focuses on the experience of driving it, traces of which are captured on a canvas. The work merges an Abstract Expressionist approach (the method of using paint) with a conceptual approach (generating and planning the idea with the artist’s limited involvement in the execution), resulting in a product that is more focused on the process and the imaginary experience than on the object it produces—the canvas. At the same time, traces of this experience are being captured on the canvas, which conserves the event and thus takes on a value of its own. Both the canvas and video footage of the process of painting it have subsequently been exhibited in BMW Art Car exhibitions. We have to note, however, the object involved in the produc­ tion of the work—the car—is still quite prominently featured. The website wel­ comes the visitor with the line “One renowned artist is given a 300-horsepower paintbrush and total creative freedom,” and most of the videos show the car in action. In this regard, Rhode’s work exemplifies BMW’s broader approach to experiential marketing: the experience is crucial, but it remains based on the product in question. At second looks, this focus on the product also turns out to be dominant in the BMW Art Car series. Eliasson’s and Rhode’s works mark clear exceptions from the approaches taken before of after. The next artist to design a BMW Art Car was Jeff Koons (2010), who by painting a BMW M3 GT2 in bright graphic patterns followed suit with his predecessors in the art car series. This ongoing relevance of the car itself emphasizes a general approach in all of BMW’s expe­ riential marketing. The category of experience is central and emphasized, both in writing and in the various events and activities organized by BMW. Nonetheless the material product remains at the center of the experience. Even though BMW expressly follows an experiential marketing approach, we cannot observe the diminishing importance of the product noted by many theoretical marketing analyses. Experience, in the case of BMW, means using the product. This can occur before, and even without, buying it, but it remains centered on the material object.133 Moreover, while such driving adventures might well be out 133 | BMW’s Manager of Consumer Events, Thomas Salkowsky, stated: “Our research shows that our consumers very much want to drive the cars and they don’t want to be

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of the ordinary for many potential customers, there is no particular emphasis on the creation of specifically aesthetic experiences that go beyond the prod­ uct and brand. In the case of BMW and their high-performance, up-market products, the de-objectification and dematerialization of marketing remains a minor development in relation to the ongoing centrality of the brand product itself. The second example of experiential marketing comes from a completely different sector of the economy, one with very fast turnover times and ­rather inexpensive products. It is a type of public live performance known as the “flash mob.” Initially, flash mobs were—and in many instances still are—a non-­commercial activity initiated for artistic, political, and sometimes simply entertainment purposes. However, this aestheticized form of public group expres­sion has quickly been picked up for marketing purposes. A flash mob is an event in which a large number of people meet at a predetermined, public location that has been communicated to participants beforehand, usually by online social networks or email. Participants then execute a short, more or less synchronized action, after which they quickly disperse. This form of public performance reputedly emerged in Manhattan in 2003,134 and various organizers and groups have since engaged in planning and sometimes pre-choreographing such events.135 I would like to suggest that the basic elements of flash mobs indicate that we can conceive of many of these events as contemporary, democratized forms of performance art. One of the most active groups that organize public events with these characteristics is the New York-based Improv Everywhere. They date their first ­action back to 2001.136 While they wouldn’t call their events flash mobs, the basic pressured for a sale. Their ultimate goal is to come out and drive as many BMWs as they can ... It’s like if you go into the Apple Store to look at a new computer. You just want to play with the Mac and not be hassled. We always remember that point of view.” … “It’s not all about ‘did we sell a car or will we sell a car in a week or month?’ It’s more about brand impressions and an experience that we’re creating for a consumer.” www.event marketer.com, “BMW’s Experiential Marketing Mix. BMW uses face-to-face experiences to get consumers in the driver’s seat.” 134 | “Perspectives,” Newsweek Magazine, 17 August 2003; Sandra Shmueli, “’Flash mob’ craze spreads,” CNN.com (August 9, 2003), http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ internet/08/04/flash.mob/. 135 | See, for example, “Improv Everywhere,” http://improveverywhere.com. For a listing of flash mob events worldwide, see “Flashmob.co.uk: Out of Knowhere,” http:// www.flashmob.co.uk. 136 | It should be emphasized that Improv Everywhere does not employ the term flash mob for their performances, but rather refers to itself as a prank collective. However, their website states that one of their main reasons for avoiding this label is that “over

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e­ lements of the group’s performances are often very similar to what later came to be known under this term. This includes an initial, core idea, a number of people who come together without commercial intent and on the basis of web-based information, and an action in a public space that affects bystanders in various ways, leaving them surprised, impressed, touched, and making them participants in an extraordinary event. Two of Improv Everywhere’s performances were part of the 2011 New York Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition ­stillspotting ( ) nyc, a multidisciplinary project in urban space about the experience of escape, peace, and stillness in the ever-bustling metropolis.137 One of these performances was “The Mute Button,” an event in which a group of what the collective calls “agents” met in Prospect Park and engaged in noisy activities, such as playing the saxophone, speaking on cell phones, quarreling, or breakdancing to loud music. The performers then suddenly and synchronously switched all of these activities into mute mode, creating an un­ expected and strongly perceptible silence, which left the unsuspecting spectators baffled, and often mute themselves. Following this silence, the normal volume of these activities was turned back on, again emphasizing the ­level of noise that surrounds us in our everyday urban environment.138 Judging from the video recorded at the event and posted online,139 the performance was ­highly aestheticized. It seems to have been intended to prompt and likely did gene­rate an aesthetic experience, involving both sensory experience and a conceptual idea, which transported spectators momentarily into a different reality of calm and silence. Drawing their inspiration from such types of public performance, several companies and agencies have taken to staging similar flash mob-like events. Among many examples, Trident Chewing Gum, the mobile phone provider T-Mobile, and the soft drink brand Dr. Pepper have organized flash mobs, in which participants synchronously performed pre-choreographed dances in (semi-)public spaces. Trident did so in Piccadilly Circus, and T-Mobile in ­L iverpool Street Station (both in London); Dr. Pepper organized a flash mob at the New York Stock Exchange. In these cases, hired dancers performed the the years the term ‘flash mob’ has been beaten to death by the media and co-opted by marketers.” As this is precisely what is at issue here, it is worth having a closer look at Improv Everywhere’s performances and their relation to marketing flash mobs. 137 | “stillspotting ( ) nyc,” http://stillspotting.guggenheim.org. 138 | Improv Everywhere’s other contribution to the exhibition was an interactive ­in­s tal­­lation: a wooden lectern with a megaphone and a sign that read “Say something nice” was installed in different locations around New York City and prompted any passerby to spontaneously participate. 139 | http://stillspotting.guggenheim.org/visit/improv-everywhere/; http://improvev erywhere.com/missions/

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choreography, sometimes joined by volunteers. From the perspective of prod­ uction aesthetics, these commercial flash mobs are fundamentally different from those organized without money and performed by people for the pleasure and effect of it. These marketing flash mobs also might not be particularly strong examples of events prompting aesthetic experience, mainly because their conceptual side is rather undeveloped. The motto of T-Mobile’s flash mob dance, for example, was “Life is for sharing,” and the event consisted of a choreographed group dance to a song with the same title. We can instead think of these examples as surprising and oftentimes quite successful forms of street entertainment, which function both as immediate, live experiences, and as viral marketing, with videos shared online often reaching very large audiences.140 Notwithstanding their aesthetic and conceptual simplicity, these performances do create surprising moments and impressive experiences for those who witness them. They do so without emphasizing or presenting a specific product and its qualities at the event; often, the brand is mentioned only briefly afterwards or online. Thus, these flash mob events clearly exemplify the repositioning of marketing, especially in lower market segments, from a product-oriented towards an ­experience-oriented practice. So far, I have discussed two forms of experiential marketing, one of them in the up-market sector, the other in a lower market sector. Both of these examples emphasize the experiential side; however, one of them remains strongly ­object-oriented, and neither of them specifically fosters the type of experience we have called aesthetic, which involves an intensified form of experience that is both aesthetically and semantically charged. This poses the question of whether, in spite of all the theoretical marketing discourse, there might not be any examples of experiential marketing that address our senses and our subjectivity in the way aesthetic experiences can. To answer this question, let us turn to a third example of aesthetic experience, this time from the mid-market fashion sector. Imagine walking down New York’s Fifth Avenue, passing boutiques like Chanel, Fendi, Prada, and Armani. The streets are full of traffic; the sidewalks bustle with people. At once, a sudden view of the sea opens up. You hear the sound of crashing waves. On the other side of the street, you see a rolling surf, and surfers—on an immense video wall. In the middle of busy New York, this might be quite an unexpected and captivating experience for you. Like many others, you stop. You watch, listen, and enjoy. You forget about the rushing crowds of people around you; you relax; you dream yourself away, on a beach,

140 | As of December 2013, the T-Mobile dance has close to 38 million hits on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

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in the sea. It seems as if you were looking through a huge window into a world that could not be more different from your present environment. Image 32: Hollister video wall on 5th Avenue, New York

Hollister storefront, 5th Avenue, New York. 169 flat-screen LCD displays with live video stream from Huntington Beach. Photography © Milo Baumgartner, 2012.

With this 2011 video sculpture in New York City, Hollister, a California-based casual wear brand, presents a captivating example of experiential marketing at their midtown Manhattan flagship store, located at 668 5th Avenue. The whole front of the store is covered by 169 flatscreen LCD displays, measuring 46 inches each and displaying a live video feed from Huntington Beach in California, as small letters in one corner of the video wall explain. According to project integrator Jeff Anderson of G-Force Engineering LLC, “The monitors are mounted in portrait mode with virtually no mullions (vertical columns ­be­t ween the monitors) and offer a total pixel count of 7290 x 3360.”141 Although the video wall is interrupted by a large gray metal bar in the middle that ­bears the Hollister brand logo, it is kept rather discreet—so discreet that when expe­ riencing the installation for the first time, one might not notice the logo. Even after crossing the street to get closer to the video sculpture, what is most noticeable is not the logo but rather the little pools of water installed in front of the wall at street level. Even the entrance to the store might be missed by the spectator. In fact, the experience of the video seems more impressive when one stays on the opposite side of the street; the immensity of the video wall is lost 141 | http://www.industrycortex.com/datasheets/profile/1001024202/vista-spyder -x20-brings-sun-and-surf-to-fifth-avenue-shoppers-at-

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when one comes closer. With the whole storefront covered by screens, the video wall can be experienced practically without any kind of interaction with what is being sold inside the store.142 Seeing and hearing the rolling surf through this immense digital window in Midtown Manhattan is an intense experience, both perceptually and conceptually. It is left open at first, and even at second sight whether the spectator is dealing with an art installation or a marketing ploy. Is this an aesthetic expe­r ience that prompts both heightened perception and meaning in the non-­ functional context of art, or is it an experience whose perceptual and concep­ tual dimensions are hollowed out for commercial gain, ultimately leaving us with an experience that is mere deception and spectacle? Even when we diligently use the categories for aesthetic experience that I have discussed above in order to think about this question in relation to the Hollister video wall, the answer remains complex. The video wall catches our attention through both its visual and audi­tory phenomenal aspects: the unexpected view of the sea in an urban environment, the size of the video wall, the immensity of the rolling surf displayed on the screens, and the sound that accompanies it. The installation also activates the viewer’s mind in both imaginary and conceptual ways, catapulting us into the dream of being on the beach or at sea. Furthermore, it makes us think about and perceive the hustle and bustle around us and inside of us, which characterizes our everyday lives in the city. The installation incorporates both pheno­ menal and conceptual aspects and enables us to experience something that goes beyond the presence and reality of both New York City’s urban environment and the Pacific waves, momentarily opening up another perspective on our every­day experience of the city and on our inner imaginary worlds. The ­v ideo wall creates a special, captivating moment. At the same time, it also has a distancing quality, insofar as the present/absent urban environment and the absent/present sea become mirrors for one another: focusing on one turns its counterpart into the present/absent other. The video sculpture thus creates an opportunity for the viewer to experience his or her subjectivity, feelings, state of mind and body, in a little time-out from city life, while never quite effacing its reality.

142 | However, when entering the store, the sea experience continues for the customer. Inside the Hollister store, five additional video walls continue the illusion that shoppers are “in a shop on the Huntington Beach pier,” Anderson said. “The monitor walls are set up to look like windows, so where you look determines what you see— the right side of the pier, the left side of the pier, or the ocean and surfers coming straight toward you.” Jacob Slevin, “Trend Forecasting: Digital Surfaces to Transform Spatial Design,” www. huffingtonpost.com, 12 May 2011.

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When we think about this installation in terms of Richard Shusterman’s model for aesthetic experience, we can see that firstly, the video wall can be considered in evaluative rather than merely descriptive terms. This is because the sea, both in our experience of it and in its semantic connotations, refers to a realm of freedom, pleasure, and even transcendence. Secondly, the experience of the video wall combines a phenomenal with a semantic side; it creates a strong, unexpected, sensory effect that catches the attention of the passer-by, which then leads to further reflection. Thirdly, the experience can be considered to have a transformative function, as it steps outside of the traditional discourse and institutions of art-related aesthetic experience and into everyday life, blurring and undermining rather than demarcating the boundaries of art. In this regard, it goes hand in hand with Dewey’s evaluative, phenomeno­ logical, and transformative approach that gives the experience primacy over the object, frees it from its dependency on the delimited sphere of art, and integrates it into everyday life. Further, as my description may have suggested, in the process of perceiving this installation, we can also observe the qualities of intensity and wholeness of experience, as well as tension and conflict that stand in a rhythmic interaction with moments of integration and adaptation. As we have seen earlier, these are the qualities that Dewey uses to gradually distinguish aesthetic experience from other kinds of experience. Dewey argues that we can take an aesthetic attitude towards, and have an aesthetic experience with, any object. I have added Mukarovsky’s perspective that any object carries an aesthetic function, which can become dominant in our act of perception. Following this logic, it might seem pointless to discuss the aesthetic qualities of the Hollister video wall using the proposed frameworks. However, a question remains as to what characterizes objects in which the aesthetic function is privileged over other functions, even if we don’t end up using this to determine what is art and what is not. I should clarify that my aim here is not to show how the categories of art have been destabilized, or to further expand the definition of art to include formerly excluded works, based on yet another catalogue of qualities that supposedly define art. Rather, the point is to think about the video wall as bringing together in a controversial way several of the thoughts on the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience that I have discussed in this chapter, allowing us to rethink these categories in the context of contemporary culture. The experience of the video wall is one in which the aesthetic and the pragmatic function (more specifically, the economic function as an instrument of brand marketing) are in a constant and shifting relationship. Both functions, the aesthetic and the commercial, strongly define the video wall, and I would suggest that this ambivalence is a crucial quality of the installation. In certain aspects, this is similar to the example of Prada Marfa, in which the brand experience and the (potential) aesthetic experience meld into one. In the experience

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of the Hollister video wall, the aesthetic function does not clearly dominate; rather, the installation sustains an ongoing tension between inherent value and external valuation, aesthetic autonomy and commercial instrumentalization. Rather than thinking about the Hollister installation as art, which would miss the point, we should think of it as an example of a category of aesthetic phenomena that intentionally shift back and forth in their function. This becomes clear when we connect the installation visually and conceptually both with the discourse of art and with the discourse of marketing. Whether we consider the installation in terms of the unresolved tension ­between its aesthetic and commercial functions, or else as a successful marriage of these two functions, it is this dual functionality that makes it interesting in the context of our present discussion. On the most obvious level, the tension is created by the work’s context of presentation. Part of the work’s tension effectively results from its location. It stands both in contrast to its surrounding environment, as we have seen in the description above, but it is also in accordance with it, assuming that passerby identify it as the exterior of the Hollister store. On the one hand, its location on 5th Avenue is a prerequisite for its strong effect of surprise and the daydreaming quality it has; on the other hand, this very location also marks the commercial context in which the work is situated. From the perspective of art discourse, the video wall can be considered a public, site-specific work; its dominant level of site specificity is the level of physical location.143 It is primarily the contrast between the urban environment and the sea, two very distinct and different environments, that creates the effect of the work. However, just as the importance of social and discursive site specificity in art has grown, it can be argued that this work also shows an interesting a­ spect of the second and third dimensions of site specificity described by Miwon Kwon. For just as the world of commerce embraces the strategies and forms of art, so too do the discourse and social reality of art gradually become interlaced with commerce, both in visual and in conceptual terms. If there is a more general validity to the convergence I am discussing here, then 5th Avenue as the paradigmatic shopping mile is not only a physically specific location; it is also a specific social and discursive site for such hybrid forms as the Hollister video wall. If art becomes the physical, social and discursive site of commerce and commerce becomes the same for art, what could be a more fitting environment for such hybrid phenomena than 5th Avenue? When we continue this discussion of the video wall from the discursive context of art, we can think of the work as tapping into several of the openings created by Conceptual Art. First of all, it is a work that employs video as its medium; but the video displays a live feed of Huntington Beach, and the 143 | See chapter Art Spaces/Commercial Spaces.

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i­mages have not been pre-recorded, altered, choreographed, or influenced in any way. While in the past, this relatively unfiltered quality might have aesthetically distinguished the installation from a work of art, Conceptual Art made it possible to think of the idea—in this case, bringing the sea into the city—as the core of the work.144 Furthermore, one strong characteristic of the video wall is that it seems dissociated from its producer and oriented strongly towards the consumer/spectator. When looking at the video wall from the other side of the street—the best vantage point—the Hollister Logo is easy to overlook. It might therefore not be evident to the viewer who initiated the project, not only on the personal level but even on the level of brand. In addition, the fact that the video is not altered and merely displays live images captured in real time by two HD cameras in Huntington Beach also largely circumvents the subjective creative intervention of the producer. Thus, the idea is the only subjective act in the creation of the video wall. In this sense, the video wall is the expression of a de-subjectified approach similar to that proposed by Conceptual Art; at the same time, it is in line with a common aesthetic approach taken in marketing. We can find here an involuntary consequence of the subversive strategies in Conceptual Art, which opened art towards commercial marketing by distancing it from its producer and creating conditions in which art can look like marketing and marketing can look like art. There is a fourth important aspect at issue here, namely the question of de-objectification and dematerialization. A first approach here is to look at the materiality of the work, which consists of video screens, digital images, sound, and water pools right in front of the video wall. The relation between the water pools and the video screens is reminiscent of the approach discussed above in regard to Spiral Jetty and Lightning Field. The closer we get to the material element of the work, the pools and the video wall, the more does the wall lose its effect and become mere pixels on LCD video screens. In turn, when we look at the wall from further away, the materiality of the rolling waves draws attention more than the materiality of the screens or even of the water pools, which are difficult to make out from across the street. The materiality of the sea is as vivid as it is only mediated. What is important in the video wall is thus less the question of materiality than the way it deals with dematerialization. In this way, the video wall negotiates de-objectification and dematerialization in the digital and informational age. When we look at the video wall from the perspective of marketing discourse, we can see that it is a manifestation of a marketing approach that furthers the de-objectification and dematerialization of brands. The entire outside of the store does not show a single reference to the clothing sold inside. Rather than 144 | The work could even be conceptualized in terms of an extension of Pop Art’s approach, and the earlier approach of found objects/object trouvées.

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(re)presenting the brand products to be sold, the video wall c­ reates a striking experience that engages our senses, imaginations, and minds. Certainly, this experience may make a favorable impression on someone who already knows about the Hollister brand and is interested in buying Hollister clothing. Yet, rather than simply selling the product or brand, this experience may also r­ emain an aesthetic experience in its own right without effectively creating an impulse for a passerby even to enter the store. And while it links up with the aesthetic discourses of dematerialization and de-objectification from Conceptual Art, the Hollister video wall retains one major difference from this art movement. Conceptual Art dealt with an emerging dematerialized, informational culture by moving away from the art object and sensory experience.145 Half a century later, the video wall is strongly embedded in this culture, u ­ sing sensory experience to its fullest. In moving away from the brand product and the material manifestation of brand, the installation turns emphatically ­towards the realm of sensory, and potentially aesthetic, experience. The present example shows the expansion of branded experience into public space and public discourse, as well as the merging of life and brand, which is achieved particularly through the dematerialization of the brand. It also shows the commodification of aesthetic experience. The Hollister example of experiential marketing shows how the anaesthetic approach of Conceptual Art hoped for a decommodified art, but instead initiated a risky situation for art in two ways. Firstly, by moving the definition of art one last, decisive step away from any kind of aesthetic determination, it opened up the sphere of art in unprecedented ways. Combined with Conceptual Art’s move into different media, including books and magazines, as well as with the older and more general impetus of avantgarde art to merge life and art and to move out of traditional contexts of art presentation, this expansion made it possible for art to appear anywhere and to look like anything. Secondly, Conceptual Art’s turn away from aesthetic experience, and in particular from its sensory, experiential side, seems paradoxically to have empha­sized a cultural, and perhaps even anthropological need for immediate sensory experience. It appears that such immediate and corporeal experience, both in the contexts of art and commerce, has a much stronger resonance than approaches that are primarily or even exclusively intellectual, rational, or ideational—such as the one proposed by Conceptual Art. Marketing strategists seem to have had the same insight, moving away from explaining and even from presenting products, and towards creating more encompassing sensory experiences. From our contemporary perspective, we can summarize that Con145 | As Jon Erickson concisely observed, “conceptual art marks a shift from a production economy (finding its terminus in the blank industrial constructions of minimalism) to an information economy...” Erickson, The Fate of the Object, 124.

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ceptual Art’s approach of dealing with an emerging informational culture by moving away from aesthetic experience apparently destabilized art. In particular, this approach rid art of this ‘Unique Selling Point’ in the context of a general and all-encompassing performativization of culture, which is increasingly focused on immediacy, sensuality, and corporeality. Aesthetic experience remains crucial for art as well as for contemporary culture more generally, on both its sensory and its semantic or conceptual l­ evel. This observation stands in contrast to Shusterman’s thesis that aesthetic experience has lost importance culturally. Shusterman’s claim is only true if we conceive of aesthetic experience in rather narrow terms, and thus disregard all of the different notions of this concept that Shusterman himself unearths. Rather, it seems that aesthetic experience is increasingly summoned in many areas of everyday life, of which the commercial context is a crucial one. As the example of the Hollister video wall shows, it is a complicated, paradoxical, and interesting cultural development that experiences created in the commercial realm carry a dominant aesthetic function. This is, on the one hand, a way in which aesthetic experience moves into everyday life, helping us to experience a special moment of imaginary, subjective freedom in the midst of the humdrum of commodified, day-to-day existence. Aesthetic experience, here, can ­remain “directional, reminding us of what is worth seeking in art and elsewhere in life.”146 In this sense, this development is a continuation of the avantgardist logic of merging art and life. However, it is also an aestheticization of everyday life that carries both posi­ tive and problematic consequences, for on the other hand, we cannot overlook the fact that the presence of brands also shapes our experience and the ways in which we create cultural meaning. When we do eventually discover that the video wall was a project by the company behind the Hollister brand, this might not alter the aesthetic experience we had with the video wall when we stumbled upon it on 5th Avenue. Neither might it affect our conscious decision about whether to buy a Hollister product. But who knows, maybe the next time we stand at the edge of the sea looking at the rolling surf, we will be reminded of the installation, and with it, of Hollister? If we think of this on a larger scale, might the world around us be undergoing a process of increasing infusion with brand messages? And as a consequence, might the ways in which we construct and deconstruct cultural meaning fall under the increasingly pervasive influence of brands? To put it more bluntly, if we Google information and Facebook people, might it be possible for our experience of the sea to become merged with the Hollister brand? More than ten years ago, Naomi Klein accurately observed that consumers’ minds have become dominated by brands. We have to consider this observation 146 | Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” 39.

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as the commercial flip side of Laurence Weiner’s insight, that “Once you know about a work of mine, you own it. There’s no way I can climb inside somebody’s head and remove it.” Once we have formed an experience, we own it, whether it is branded or not. Some brands try to bring such experiences to us in our everyday culture, attempting to engage us in experiences whose function hovers indecisively between the aesthetic and the commercial. These brands are also likely to stick in our minds and strengthen their position as significant elements of our cultural and personal knowledge and repertory. What is the consequence of this assessment? Does it mean that the only way to allow for freedom of the intellect and imagination—for a “metaphorical space: for release, for escape, for a sort of freedom with an open exit”147 —would be to ban brands and brand marketing from our culture? Apart from the questionable feasibility of this suggestion, my reading does not imply such a conclusion. First of all, whether we consider postmodernism in a celebratory or melancholic light,148 we cannot simply denounce the blurring of boundaries between high culture and popular culture, as well as between aesthetics and commerce. We should instead treat this development in a more nuanced and productive way, and reassess the modes and spaces of agency that it holds. Even in the face of the encompassing presence of brands and commercial selling techniques in our lives, it remains a question of cultural literacy—and thus the responsibility of the consumer/spectator—to learn and maintain the difference between the world that surrounds us and the meaning we make of it. The Hollister video wall is a telling example of this distance between prod­ uction and reception that is well-known in art. Marketing theory, too, is aware of this distance, and is continuously trying to eliminate it in order to achieve the desired effect of positive brand valuation. Still, judging from centuries of artistic production and aesthetic theory, and against all too pessimistic evaluations of contemporary culture, I would assume that not even brand marketing will be able to close this distance once and for all. Just as there is a difference between what the artist intends and what the spectator sees or interprets, there is a difference between the experiences designed by brand marketing (as well as the ultimate intention of all marketing, namely to win new customers,) and what we make of such experiences. We should remind ourselves of this distance when we think about contemporary culture. However, the Hollister Pacific Ocean video wall does achieve a strong inte­ gration of the aesthetic and the commercial. Moreover, it does so on such a 147 | Quoted in Ullrich, “Art and Brands: Who Learns from Whom?” 44. Original quote in Klein, No Logo, 81ff. 148 | For these two different interpretations of postmodernism, see Fredric Jameson, “­P ost­m odernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. ­M ichael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

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sophisticated level that it moves beyond the notion of a mere commercial aesthetic that remains bound to the commodity, putting into question fundamental notions of aesthetic experience. The video wall opens up the potential for an aesthetic experience and a space of imaginary freedom in the midst of a commercial world. It maintains an ongoing, productive tension between the dominance of its aesthetic and commercial functions. It cannot, however, claim to be emphatically autonomous. Depending on the perspective, this either democratizes aesthetic experience or puts it up for grabs. On the one hand, what we have here is an example of the logic of commodification which has reached the level of aesthetic experience. This subjects the category of aesthetic experience to the logic of the market: its internal structure might fit with major conceptualizations of aesthetic experience, even as it misses the mark of autonomy from the instrumental realm. On the other hand, contemporary art strategies have themselves fundamentally questioned this supposed autonomy of art, undermining the categories that aesthetically and institutionally used to secure the idea of autonomy. Whether or not the autonomy of art was a pretense, it has been undermined in many ways, both internally and externally. And if art apparently no longer has to be emphatically autonomous, why would we judge commercial aesthetics by this outmoded standard? The aestheticization of the commercial and the commercialization of the aesthetic thus intersect in ways that fundamentally question the form and function of art in contemporary culture. To summarize, the three examples above have shown that experiential marketing involves potential customers on sensory, emotional, and rational levels, and that such involvement is an important component of contemporary marketing. Yet such experiences are neither always independent from the product, nor are they always experiences of the special kind that we could call aesthetic. Especially for brands in upmarket sectors, such as BMW, the product may ­remain at the center of the experience. For lower market segments, which ­include everyday consumer goods like chewing gum and soft drinks, it may be more important to get attention and provide entertainment than it is to generate a conceptually and aesthetically complex—and thus potentially more meaningful—experience. However, there are also examples of experiential marketing, such as Hollister’s video wall, which simultaneously garner attention and create the possibility of a meaningful experience that is both aesthetically and conceptually engaging, and which clearly moves away from the product. When such marketing endeavors successfully manage to provide spectators with a type of experience that is familiar to us from the context of art, and not from the shops on 5th Avenue, then the aesthetic and discursive function of art in contemporary culture is put into question. Notably, art movements themselves have made possible this fundamental questioning of what art is and what art does. Conceptual Art, in its move

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away from the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience, propelled one of the most consequential openings of art towards this contemporary blurring of art and commerce. The complex ambivalence of these developments lies in the fact that they are, on the one hand, transformative and transgressive, as they significantly extend aesthetic experience into everyday life; on the other hand, these developments undermine the core categories of art, and thus question the very concept of art. In this sense, the developments set in motion by the avant­ gardist endeavors of Conceptual Art offer variations on the recurring question of post-war avantgarde art: how far can art undermine its own categories and still remain art?

Artist/Entrepreneur “I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business ­A rtist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.” A ndy Warhol

The tradition of business entrepreneurship is ingrained in American c­ ulture. The American economy and society would not have developed from a dependent colony into one of the world’s chief economic powers, had it not been for daring, creative individuals who were willing to take risks to realize their ideas and achieve economic success. Such individuals acted as motors of economic development. It is also not a new cultural development that artists have to consider the customer and the market in order to sell the works they produce. However, in recent years the ideas of what makes a successful businessman or businesswoman and what makes a successful artist seem to have become strikingly similar. With the development of what is variously termed the post-industrial, creative, or knowledge economy (to name only a few terms for the dominant contemporary form of economic value generation), creativity, originality, and innovation have become quintessential conditions for market success. At the same time, the idea of how an artist acts in the marketplace has changed fundamentally. Well into the mid-20th century, artists portrayed themselves and were portrayed as withdrawn, original creators, at odds with or at least not squarely a part of America’s mainstream, middle-class culture. This image effectively kept up a European tradition of bohemianism and avantgardism. The fact that artists participated in society and in market endeavors was not a defining part of their image or identity, and neither was it a factor that determined the cultural value of the artist’s work. However, this has changed since the early 1960s— most emphatically, visibly, and consequentially with Pop Art. Today, the artist no longer needs to hide his or her market entrepreneurialism. The economic success of an artist is more than just proof of the aesthetic value of his or her work; in some cases, it actually seems to establish and define aesthetic value. Today, market success may well be the biggest art of the artist, as Warhol sug-

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gested. The cultural position of the artist has changed accordingly: from bohemian outsider to economic role model. In order to trace this transformation of the image of the artist, this chapter will start out by sketching the fundamental characteristics of Abstract Expressionism and the related image of the artist. This art movement, also known as the New York School, established American art at the center of the inter­national art scene. It also set the terms against which ensuing movements would have to define themselves. The subsequent discussion will engage with the landslide changes that Pop Art, and above all its most notorious representative, Andy Warhol, introduced to the image of the artist. This particular aspect of Pop Art is often neglected in favor of a discussion of the increasing commodification of art. While the changing status of the art object and of aesthetic experience are important aspects of the convergence of art and commerce, Pop Art’s major legacy lies in the new idea of the artist that it promoted. Later, this idea of what an artist is and does was picked up by Neo-Pop artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, with even more radical consequences. The second part of this chapter will change perspectives from the aesthetic to the economic. This will highlight not only the artist’s move into the economic realm, but also how the economic realm has largely come to be understood as the sphere of creativity and innovation. The importance of terms and concepts like ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative industries’ testifies to the new exigencies of an economy that is no longer based on production but on the creative generation of ideas and experiences. The image of the successful, creative entrepreneur has become one of a free-spirited, alternative, even bohemian individual who is at least temporarily at odds with the surrounding conventional, mainstream environment. Particularly striking examples of this new type of entrepreneur include Steve Jobs, the charismatic co-founder and long-time CEO of Apple, as well as Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin group, which now encompasses more than 400 companies. Focusing the brand on their personas, individual creativity, and innovative thinking, these entrepreneurs displayed some core characteristics of an artist persona. At the same time, artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami overtly present themselves as entrepreneurs and businessmen. While businessmen have become more like artists, artists have become more like businessmen.

M odernism and B e yond : F rom A bstr act E xpressionism to P op A rt Although the focus of this chapter is on Pop Art and the new type of artist persona it put forward, it is worth looking at the Abstract Expressionist image of the artist, as well. This is crucial for understanding the narrative of art that was

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dominant at the time when Pop Art entered the scene, and thus the ideas of art and the artist against which Pop Art turned. In so doing, Pop Art established what would become a role model not only for many contemporary artists, but also for many other spheres of contemporary culture. Abstract Expressionism marked both the advent of Modernism in Ameri­ can art and the beginning of an American turn against this Modernism. With the onset of Modernism in 19th century Europe, the boundaries of art had been consistently pushed. Whether we conceptualize Modernism as a turn away from the representational concept of art to the formal and/or expressive one, or as a self-reflexive move towards the materiality and mediality of art, it marked a fundamental change in the concept and practice of art. European modernism developed in the late 19th century and made its first major e­ ntrance in the United States with the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Yet it was not until Abstract Expressionism that a modernist art movement developed on the American scene. This was the first time that an American art movement was thus acknowledged, both by art criticism and the art market, on a national and inter­ national scale. Abstract Expressionism as it developed between the late 1940s and the early 1960s turned out to be a highpoint of American modernism. Its success was such that by the 1950s, New York had replaced Paris as the international capital of art.1 Like any other stylistic label, Abstract Expressionism is an umbrella term that brings together various types of painting and sculpture with different, some­times even divergent, characteristics. What these works generally share is an approach that sticks to the non-representational, strongly favors the non-­ figurative, and brings the material of creation into focus—in this case, the (preferably large) canvas, paint, and tools. From here, Abstract Expressionism can be roughly divided into two aesthetic and two critical approaches: ­Action Painting and Color Field Painting (two generalizing terms, again), along with the critical interpretations of these works by Clement Greenberg on the one hand and Harold Rosenberg on the other. These aesthetic and theoretical approaches are relevant for understanding the cultural historical function of Abstract 1 | Many of the artists who played a fundamental role in the development of Abstract Expressionism were, in fact, immigrants from Europe, among them Hans Hoffman, ­A rshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning. Yet, these artists took their crucial steps towards this new movement while already in the United States, and as such these developments were considered ‘American.’ Abstract Expressionist works were fundamentally different from the modernist works presented at the 1913 Armory Show. The modernist work were renowned, culturally highly influential, and sold well on the developing American art market (particularly the European works), yet they were clearly representational; they were European or showed strong European influences, such as Impressionism and Cubism.

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Expres­sionism, for they shed light on this new moment in American art. For both, the understanding and role of the artist as individual is crucial. With its turn away from representational painting, in particular from ­Social Realism and Regionalism, and its move towards a self-reflexive­­treatment of both the material of artistic creation and the individual artist, Abstract Expres­­ sionism was a fundamentally modern art movement. Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, Franz Kline’s (seemingly) spontaneous lines, or Willem de ­Kooning’s biomorphic, even figurative, but wild and grotesque paintings were dubbed Action Painting by critic Harold Rosenberg.2 This type of painting was known for its spontaneous-looking, gestural, and expressive practices.3 ­Color Field Painting, as presented by Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and Mark ­Rothko, might at first sight appear almost diametrically opposed to Action Painting: it was calm, well-organized, and featured monochrome rather than wild and/or colorful sections and surfaces. However, Color Field Painting has been mostly interpreted as an expression of interests similar to those that guided the Action Painters: the non-representational, the expressive (focused more on individual expression in Action Painting, and more on the expression of the inexpressible and transcendental in Color Field Painting), as well as the very conscious use of paint and canvas. Both Action Painting and Color Field Painting brought to the fore the material and procedural specificity of painting—a process of two-­dimensional creation with paint on a surface—and with it, the highly individual act of painting. When we move away from these general commonalities between the works of the painters known as Abstract Expressionists, the interpretations vary ­greatly. What was characteristic of this movement? Who where its most im2 | Greenberg and Rosenberg did not agree about this label, among many other things. Greenberg considered Willem de Kooning’s work as action painting, focusing on the character of the finished painting and disregarding the various sketches and preparations he executed beforehand. Rosenberg, on the other hand, labeled Jackson Pollock the quintessential Action Painter, highlighting the process of his work rather than the finished product. In this case, Rosenberg’s interpretation turned out to be the more lasting one. 3 | Greenberg, as opposed to Rosenberg, holds that the spontaneity in these paintings is only a superficial impression: “The pictures of some of these Americans ­s tartle ­b ecause they seem to rely on ungoverned spontaneity and haphazard effects; or ­b e­c ause, at the other extreme, they present surfaces which appear to be largely devoid of pictorial incident. All this is very much seeming. There is good and bad in this art, and when one is able to tell the difference between them he begins to realize that the art in question is subject to a discipline as strict as any that art obeyed in the past.” ­C lement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: ­B eacon Press, 1961), 210.

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portant representatives? What art historical significance did it have? The two most prolific, influential, and antagonistic critics to ponder these questions were Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. These two critics essentially defined aesthetic thought in the 1950s.4 They presented not only two different interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, but also two fundamentally differ­ ent narratives on the development of art. One based his criticism on the idea of continuing formal purification or abstraction, while the other was influenced by existentialist thought and championed the idea of original, individual, creative acts in search of the new. These two views fundamentally shaped the idea of art in the United States of the 1950s and onwards. My main interest in Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s pivotal texts lies not in their judgments or opinions on particular art movements, artists, and paintings, but rather in the frame of thinking that their judgments betray.5 In their writing about what is relevant in art, there is a distinctly modern, normative set of ideas, which would be thoroughly overturned by the art movements to come in the 1960s. With the further development of art in the decades following the two critics’ heyday in the 1950s, their normative system seemed to reach its limits. Thus, while they continued to exert influence on the art scene well into the 1970s, their authority as art critics and theorists started to diminish from the mid-1960s on.6 In this sense, Greenberg and Rosenberg were not only thinkers of the first internationally respected American art movement;7 they 4 | “Coming from similar cultural, political, and intellectual backgrounds, Greenberg and Rosenberg indelibly shaped the discussions of the art of their time, defining the era’s most influential aesthetic ideas and identifying the artists who were central to the new expressive abstraction in the United States after World War II. Their formidable opinions helped catapult American art onto an international stage and made New York the successor to prewar Paris as the mecca for contemporary art.” Maurice Berger et al., Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2008). 5 | To the interviewers questions “Is any part of your motive an intention to try to get other people to see paintings as you see them?” or “hoping they will come to share your criteria or judgment or perception?” Rosenberg answered: “No, not my criteria; my opinion about this particular work. … I want them to see what I saw in this work of art. That’s all.” Harold Rosenberg, The Case of the Baffled Radical: Essays and Interviews (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 258. I am interested in the context and criteria that shaped this opinion. 6 | Berger et al., Action/Abstraction, 1. 7 | “Labeled variously as ‘abstract expressionism,’ ‘action painting,’ and even ‘­ abstract impressionism,’ their works constitute the first manifestations of American art to draw a standing protest at home as well as serious attention from Europe.” Greenberg, ­“ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” 209.

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were also exponents of a way of thinking about art that was on the verge of fundamental change. For Greenberg, Abstract Expressionism was the style of the ­contemporary avantgarde, and the latest step in a formal development of art that he saw as an almost teleological movement towards abstraction.8 Abstraction, for Greenberg, ­meant that in a Kantian motion of self-reflection, every art would abandon any influ­ence from other art forms and continuously reduce itself to its own specific means of expression.9 “Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ­‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.”10 For painting, this meant a continuing concentration on flatness (in formal terms) and on visuality (in terms of experience).11 While this was a forward development—painting, after all, was to Greenberg “the most alive of the avant-garde arts at the present moment”12 —it was also a “search of qualities analogous with those [artists] admired in the art of the past.”13 Ab­stract Expressionism, in this view, did not constitute a break with tradition. Rather, it was the contemporary expression of an ongoing tradition of formalization and abstraction that Greenberg considered characteristic of art in general, and of painting in particular: “Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is, among many other things, continuity. Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as Modernist art would be impossible.”14 8 | Greenberg, in fact, did not like the term “abstract expressionism,” which he credited Robert Coates from The New Yorker with inventing. Neither did he approve of “Action Painting, which “was concocted by Harold Rosenberg in Art News.” This is why ­G reenberg chose the term “American-Type Painting” as the title of one of his seminal essays. He resorted to using “abstract expressionism” only because it “is the most current term.” Ibid., 209. 9 | “Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist. The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 5. 10 | Ibid. This purity, of course, included a separation not only from other art forms but also from everyday life and from mass culture. Here Greenberg is very close to Adorno. 11 | Greenberg made a similar argument for the development of sculpture in his essay: Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Sculpture, Its Pictorial Past,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 12 | Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” 208. 13 | Ibid., 209. 14 | Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 10

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The criteria of Greenberg’s famously harsh neo-formalist art criticism were fundamentally based on an historical understanding of art: what was good art was defined by its reference to and its position within art history, and it was so defined in almost exclusively formal terms. With this emphasis on historical development, Greenberg was naturally opposed to “a kind of art in which every­thing was allowed.”15 In Abstract Expressionism, the distinctions inside the picture frame had “been, literally, exhausted and invalidated; [so] that no area or order of experience is intrinsically superior, on any final scale of val­ ues, to any other area or order of experience.”16 Yet, the hierarchies of art itself stood strong. Yes, modernist art was a critical self-examination of art, “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself,”17 but it still had to follow the “norms or conventions of painting;” and the stricter the conventions, the more it probed them.18 Greenberg’s formalism relied on art history as a frame of reference to which objects had to refer in a mode of abstrac­tion as they aspired to be true art. Harold Rosenberg similarly saw art history as a crucial category in considering artworks, and he considered Abstract Expressionism to be the avantgarde art of the time. Yet, his understanding of this avantgardist character was fundamentally different from Greenberg’s. We could even go so far as to call Abstract Expressionism—in the way Rosenberg understood it—a revolution in art. In an essay written in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, Rosenberg con­ densed its avantgardist characteristics into two: the first was the alienation of the artist from the middle class and the ensuing rejection of “commercialism and careerism.”19 The second characteristic was Action Painting’s demand for “the demolition of existing values in art”:

15 | Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” 222. 16 | Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 157. 17 | Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 5. 18 | “The essential norms or conventions of painting are at the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back indefinitely—before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed and indicated.” Ibid. 19 | “There was not in Action Painting as in earlier art movements a stated vanguard concept, yet it carried implicitly the traditional assumptions of a vanguard. … Certain ruptures were taken for granted. Foremost among these was the rupture between the artist and the middle class. Commercialism, careerism, were spoken of disdainfully as a matter of course.” Rosenberg, “Action Painting: Crisis and Distortion,” 40.

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Ar t/Commerce: The Convergence of Ar t and Marketing in Contemporar y Culture “The revolutionary phrase ‘doing away with’ was heard with the frequency and authority of a slogan. The total elimination of identifiable subject matter was the first in a series of moves—then came doing away with drawing, with composition, with color, with texture; later, with the flat surface, with art materials. (Somewhere along the line Action Painting itself was eliminated.) In a fervor of subtraction art was taken apart element by element and the parts thrown away.”20

While this view might at first seem quite similar to Greenberg’s theory of incre­ mental abstraction, it actually stands in contrast to this position. Greenberg constructs a narrative in which the values of art—namely, its formal characteristics—are increasingly enhanced. Rosenberg, on the other hand, sees Abstract Expressionism as a destruction of old values, if not an abolition of aesthetic values in general. The revolutionary impetus and the violent, destructive move against established norms in art make Rosenberg’s narrative one of disruption rather than of continuity. It is crucial for Rosenberg that this disruption not be limited to formal criteria in art. For him, Abstract Expressionism shifted the focus of art from the finished product to the process and act of its creation, and thus also to the individual artist as creator: the individual and his creativity were emphasized.21 Rather than formal criteria, the subjective experience of the individual stood at the core of Rosenberg’s understanding of art.22 In this view, Abstract Expressionism was the type of art for an individual to realize himself, for it granted the utmost freedom in art history: not just freedom from representation, but the freedom from producing a defined work of art.23 20 | Ibid., 41. 21 | I am consciously writing “his creativity” because for Rosenberg, Greenberg, and most critics of the time, generally the artist was a male individual. While there were a number of significant female Abstract Expressionists, among them Helen F­ rankenthaler and Lee Krasner, they were decisively less exhibited and recognized. Today, this is gene­ rally attributed less to the quality of their work than to patriarchal structures in the art world of the time. 22 | “Art is the one vocation that keeps a space open for the individual to realize himself in knowing himself.” Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art, 14. 23 | Notably, for Rosenberg freedom from representation did not mean freedom from subject matter. Quite on the contrary, he held “that the subject matter of the artist is the most important thing to consider about his work.” Subject matter, not being equal with object matter, with what was represented in the picture, could be “extensive,” and even “infinite,” depending in particular on the critic’s interpretation. Rosenberg, The Case of the Baffled Radical: Essays and Interviews, 243 f. This was another difference between Rosenberg and Greenberg, for the latter found that with the development of the avantgarde, “subject matter or content [became] something to be avoided like a plague.” In line with his idea of abstraction, for Greenberg, the only subject matter of art was the

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The action painter lived on the canvas rather than representing s­ omething on it, be it another object or his inner life. With such iconic paintings as ­Autumn Rhythm, Jackson Pollock became the emblem of such a subjective creator, as we will shortly see in more detail. This creative act extended beyond the canvas; it was the creation of self: “Whoever undertakes to create, soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.”24 The painting was an immediate expression of the artist’s inner self. This freedom of creation also had a fundamentally political impetus. “The big moment came when it was decided to paint … just TO PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from value— political, esthetic, moral.”25 In political terms, this meant that in opposition to the “depersonalizing machine of capitalist society … the American painter discovered a new function of art as the action that belonged to himself.”26 The freedom of the individual from capitalist society’s instrumental demands was at the heart of Rosenberg’s interpretation of Abstract Expressionism.27 For several decades, Greenberg’s neo-formalist approach was more domi­ nant than Rosenberg’s interpretation, breeding significant followers like ­Michael Fried, as well as offering the recurring point of attack for generations of subsequent artists and art critics. Yet, Rosenberg’s approach, through both implicit and explicit references, has recently regained currency. Among many critics of Greenberg, Jackson Lears even goes so far as to maintain that ­“nothing could be further from the truth” than Greenberg’s formalist narra­ tive. Without referring to Rosenberg, he states that we should, instead, understand the aesthetic approach of Abstract Expressionism as a “resolute antiformalism.”28 Discussing this art against the backdrop of American advertising of the time, Lears holds that individual expression was a core concern, both for the spontaneous and rough techniques of Action Painting and for the spiritual medium the artist worked with. Cp. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in ­­­­A­­r t and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, [1939] 1961), 6. 24 | Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959). 25 | Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: ­H orizon Press, 1959), 30. 26 | Rosenberg, The Anxious Object. Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), 39. 27 | Rosenberg did not consider this individual freedom to consist of individual revolutionary acts with a bigger goal in mind: “About the effects of large issues upon their emotions, American tend to be either reticent or unconscious.” Still, the summation of private acts amounts to a bigger liberating gesture. “A far-off watcher unable to realize that these events were taking place in silence might have assumed they were being directed by a single voice.” Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 30. 28 | Jackson Lears, “Uneasy Courtship: Modern Art and Modern Advertising,” American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1987): 133-154, 147.

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orientation in Color Field Painting. Standing in contrast to a mass consumer culture of increasing standardization, painting was to be the last resort of the self-searching individual. Lears contends that this search for identity can also be understood as a search for truth. This was, for Lears, what held Abstract Expressionist art at a distance from commercial consumer culture.29 We should note that while a critique of Greenberg’s approach might be warranted in view of his theories’ long-standing dominance, it would still be over­ simplifying to think that for Greenberg value in art depended simply on the fulfillment of formal criteria of abstraction. Even for him, the ­individual remained crucial: “Quality, aesthetic value originates in ­inspira­tion, ­v ision, ­‘content,’ not in form.”30 As we can see here, Greenberg’s historical a­ ccount, in spite of the almost teleological movement towards abstraction that it s­ uggested,31 was not self-fulfilling. The individual artist remained the c­ onditio sine qua non in the development of art history. Equally important in this a­ ccount was the role of the individual art critic, who could then assess the aesthetic value of the artist’s work. Greenberg insisted that critical competence grew exclusively out of individual aesthetic experience, meaning both the immediate act of perception as well as the accumulation of such acts in memory. From these experiences, ideally taste would develop: “Taste develops as a context of expectations based on experience of previously surprised expectations. The fuller the experience of this kind, the higher, the more truly sophisticated the taste.”32 The cultural authority of the critic found expression in the concept of taste; it resulted from art historical expertise and the accumulation of informed but subjective aesthetic experiences of art. The critic had to be simultaneously open to new aesthetic experiences and informed by previous ones. Greenberg’s inter­pretation of Abstract Expressionist art—and in this regard Greenberg and Rosenberg 29 | Ibid., 149. 30 | Clement Greenberg, “The Necessity of Formalism.” Quoted in Robert C. Morgan, “The Crux of Modernism.” Published in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Clement Greenberg and Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xix. 31 | “The immediate aims of the Modernists were, and remain, personal before anything else, and the truth and success of their works remain personal before anything else. And it has taken the accumulation, over decades, of a good deal of personal painting to reveal the general self-critical tendency of Modernist painting. No artist was, or yet is, aware of it, nor could any artist ever work freely in awareness of it. To this extent—and it is a great extent—art gets carried on under Modernism in much the same way as before.” Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 9. 32 | Clement Greenberg, “Counter Avant-Garde,” in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, 14f.

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were close, after all—can only be fully grasped by considering the importance that was conferred upon the aesthetic authority of the art critic, as well as on the individual aesthetic inspiration of both artist and critic. We can see that Greenberg’s formalism took a markedly different approach from Rosenberg’s existentialist individualism, yet in both we find an unabated belief in the individual, his creativity, and his authority. This importance of the individual is closely linked with the idea of the autonomy of art. Again, for both critics the notion that art stands in opposition to the rationalizing and standardizing mode of capitalist society was highly important.33 And again, what they made of this conviction differs. Greenberg considered even the avantgarde to be financially dependent on bourgeois society.34 This is why for him, the artwork (and not the artist) could be the only place of freedom. In this contention, we can clearly recognize Greenberg’s closeness to critical theory. In contrast, for Rosenberg the process of creation was an artist’s individual struggle for freedom. Rosenberg’s focus on the creative process of painting brought with it this placement of autonomy in the artist rather than in the finished artwork. In summary, what do we make of Greenberg and Rosenberg, these two critics known for their fiery intellectual opposition? The two were art critics and insisted that their judgments of art were subjective and relied on their personal experience and/or taste. Yet, they were also two crucial exponents of an era in which the art critic was still a figure of cultural authority. In this way, their admittedly subjective views also transcended the individual level, and can be considered representative of a broader frame of thinking. Either way, their views are theoretically interesting. In an inversion of Noël Carroll’s obser­vation that with changing theoretical paradigms, theory becomes art criticism,35 I would like to propose that Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s art criticism 33 | “And it is understood, I hope, that conventions are overhauled, not for revolutio­ nary effect, but in order to maintain the irreplaceability and renew the vitality of art in the face of a society bent in principle on rationalizing everything.” Greenberg, ­“ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” 208. 34 | “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always ­r emained attached by an umbilical cord of gold.” Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 8. 35 | “Art theorists in the past, like the expression theorists and the formalists, were mistaken in believing that they could provide an essential definition of art. In that they were attempting to do the impossible, and their efforts were futile. But, without knowing it, they were also doing something else, and that ‘something else’ is valuable. What was it? Art criticism.” Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 216.

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can also be brought to fruition as art theory when we make clear the frame of thinking in which this criticism was anchored. Both critics would not set up an explicit distinction between art and non-art, and would not give fixed criteria for good art. Still, aesthetic value was of essential importance to them, and they consid­ered a good art critic to be able to recognize this value. Greenberg’s following statement, which may sound paradoxical to the contemporary reader, makes clear this tension between the belief in aesthetic freedom and the belief in aesthetic values: “art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles, and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.”36 ­Greenberg held these values to be inspirational yet formal and related to art history. Rosenberg considered the value of an Abstract Expressionist artwork to lie in its authenticity as an expression of an individual psychological process: “A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an ­action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist.”37 Although the two critics approached art from perspectives they themselves often found utterly irreconcilable, both Greenberg and Rosenberg relied on a set of core aesthetic values. Art and theory would later thoroughly deconstruct these values. Both the differences and the convergences between Greenberg and ­Rosenberg­sug­gest that we have to read their approaches together—­evolu­­tion and revolution, formalism and individual creativity. Only then can we fully grasp Abstract Expressionism, which came to consitute the pervasive art discourse of the time, and thus the backdrop against which future art move­­ments would have to be read. In the words of Norman Kleeblatt, “A reexamination of the art world as defined by the Greenberg-Rosenberg debates transports us to a simpler moment, when beliefs seemed clear-cut, even if only on the surface.”38 This simpler moment includes the relative clarity of the values in art, the image and role of the artist, and the cultural authority of the critic. Only against this

36 | Clement Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational, and So Forth.” Quoted in ­M organ, “The Crux of Modernism,” xxiii. Some authors have considered this tension a defining characteristic of Abstract Expressionism, both in practice and in theory, and as the point of contact with the political use to which the art movement was put during the Cold War. For more on this topic, see: Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001); Michael ­K immelman, “­ Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War,” and Eva ­C ockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York; London: Routledge, [1985] 2000). 37 | Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 33. 38 | Berger et al., Action/Abstraction, “Preface,” xi.

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background will we be able to grasp the changes in the art world in the decades following Abstract Expressionism. The question here is: did the Greenbergian-Rosenbergian ­moment mark the beginning or the end of a certain way of thinking about art? It did both—yet the former slightly more than the latter. As the ensuing art move­ments show, the importance of the two core notions put forth by Greenberg and Rosenberg— formal criteria in art and the individual in art—increasingly lost ground. In this sense, Abstract Expressionism marked the apex of these moder­nist categories, which were to be hypostatized once more in Minimal­ism, ironically subverted in Pop Art, problematized in Conceptual Art, and to lose ground in postmodernist art practice. At the same time, this art movement also pointed towards future developments. In his 1967 essay “Recentness of Sculpture,” Greenberg stated that A ­ bstract Expressionism “first acclimatized and then domesticated” a new understanding of art, introducing “the look of both the accidental and the empty.”39 Greenberg obviously referred to both Action Painting (“the accidental”) and Color Field Painting (“the empty”). In a typical avant-garde gesture, Abstract Expressionism clearly tested the boundaries between art and non-art. Jackson Pollock, for example, likely the most notorious of the Abstract Expressionists, remained largely incomprehensible to the art world until the early 1960s, according to Greenberg. Greenberg’s assessment of how long it took until the aesthetic values of Abstract Expressionism became established interestingly correlates with the moment when the market value of these works rose significantly. It even ­appears that Abstract Expressionism opened the door for a renewed convergence of avantgarde art and commerce. With Abstract Expressionism’s national and inter­national success, the American market for modern art erupted. When the modernist demand to ‘make it new’ (understood either in revolutionary or in evolutionary terms) found its American moment, the art that resulted encountered not only the interest of the critics, but soon also that of collectors and of a mass audience. Notably, it was not the mere fascination with or understanding of this new art that was able to spark this wide interest, but rather the em­brace of Abstract Expressionism by popular and commercial culture. While the 1940s and early 1950s had seen an increasing public interest in buying and experiencing art, the market for modern art, and in particular for early modern American art, had remained small.40 In the late 1950s, however, 39 | Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed.­ Gregory Battcock, 180-186 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 181. 40 | Deirdre Robson, “The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time Lag between Critical and Commercial Acceptance,” Archives of American Art Journal 25, no. 3 (1985): 19-23, 20f.

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both the prices and the volume of sales on the market for modern American art— mainly for Abstract Expressionism—increased sharply. Simultaneously, art and ­artists became part of popular culture. If the style of European modern art had ­already been incorporated into advertising in the first half of the 20th century, now public and media attention spectacularized the new American art and the art world itself. Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko were p ­­ ort­rayed, interviewed, and photographed for Life magazine, Time magazine, The New ­Yorker, and Vogue.41 Life magazine, hugely popular at the time, ­ published a spread in 1949 asking: “Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Artist in ­A merica?” In a similarly spectacularizing vein, in 1956 Time magazine labeled Pollock “Jack the Dripper.”42 Image 33: Jackson Pollock in his studio, photographed for Life magazine

Artist Jackson Pollock dribbling sand on painting while working in his studio. © Getty Images/Time & Life Pictures/Martha Holmes, April 1949. Photographer: Martha Holmes for Life magazine.

41 | ht t p://w w w.war hols t ar s.or g /ab s t r ac t ex pr e s sionism/t imeline/ab s t r ac t _­ expressionism3.­­html; Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 42 | “The Wild Ones,” Time Magazine, 20 February 1956. http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,808194-2,00.html

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A combination of Jackson Pollock’s early death in 1956 and the institutional vali­ dation of Abstract Expressionism gave the market an additional boost. W ­ hile Abstract Expressionist paintings had rarely even sold for $3,000 in the early 1950s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm for $30,000 in 1957. As Deirdre Robson points out, “this sale served as an impor­ tant validation of Abstract Expressionism for it was the first time that a major museum had bought a painting in this style for a price commensurate with what it might pay for a work by a major European artist.”43 In this way, cultural recognition and commercial valuation of Abstract Expressionism went hand in hand. With media attention of this kind and the booming art market of the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism turned out to be not only a high point of modernism in the United States, but also an important step towards the convergence of art and commerce that would intensify in the following decades. Yet, this new media attention for art and the artist persona in Abstract Expressionism still ad­hered to the romantic, outcast version of the artist. Rosenberg’s interpretation of the movement also strongly reflected this view of the artist. Understanding this view sheds light on the urgency with which the movements that followed, Minimalism and Pop Art, presented a new idea of the artist that cut against the very romantic individualism that Abstract Expressionist painters had embodied. When Minimalism and Pop Art entered the stage as Abstract Expressionism’s successors on the contemporary art scene, media portraits of artists were nothing new. However, from the Abstract Expressionists to the Minimalists and Pop Artists, we can observe a clear change in imagery. A few weeks after the Primary Structures exhibition in 1966, which marked the recognition of Minimalism in the art scene and the wider public, H ­ arper’s Bazaar “proclaimed the triumph of a ‘minimal look,’” publishing spreads with artists and women wearing fashion that had purportedly been inspired by these artists’ work.44 Now, the artists were presented as part of the lifestyle or fashion section, promoting themselves, their work, and even the products in the picture. Already in the early 1960s, artists both used marketing strategies and were, in turn, used for them by magazines. Artists started making use of commercial culture, and so did commercial culture make use of them. This closeness to mass culture was a clear denial of Abstract Expressionist values, and the industrial aesthetic and fabrication of many Minimalist works marked a break with the ethos of individual expression. However, Minimalism and its artists still maintained a distance from nonart and situated themselves squarely within the discourse of art. Minimalist artists did not portray themselves as businessmen or employers, even though 43 | Robson, “The Market for Abstract Expressionism,” 22. 44 | Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 24.

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they contracted out part of the production process of their works. Further, they maintained a distance to commerce not only in formal, but also in functional terms. Separating his artworks from his furniture designs, Donald Judd, for example, set apart the functionally determined dimension and shape of design objects from the idiosyncratic dimension and form of art objects which fol­ lowed the subjective decision of the creator. Accordingly, Judd tried to keep his design objects out of art galleries.45 Here, the intention of the creator as subject remained important, in spite of the rather objectivist touch of Minimalist works.46 Finally, as we have seen in the examples of Donald Judd’s and Robert Morris’s writings, these artists had a pronounced theoretical orientation, thus situating themselves in an art discourse and communicating with a specialist audience rather than with a mass public. In contrast, Pop Art, and most strikingly Andy Warhol, made a much more decisive and ostentatious step towards consumer society and against the myth of the artist as rebellious outcast or romantic hermit.

A N e w A rt, a N e w A rtist : P op A rt Warhol was part of a new generation of artists that emerged at the end of the 1950s and turned against Abstract Expressionist values. They searched for a more relaxed (yet not one-dimensional) relation to American post-war consumer culture, which had taken up speed by then. The new art was received by critics in highly controversial terms, particularly because of its methods of production and its closeness to mass consumer society.47 The controversy around Pop Art can also be conceived of as a reaction to these artists’ refusal of the core 45 | Judd, “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” 54. 46 | “The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. … The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair. … The art in art is partly the assertion of someone’s interest regardless of other considerations. A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.” Ibid., 50. 47 | Cp. Sidra Stich, Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the ‘50s & ‘60s (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 2f. See also Carol A. Mahsun: “For many sophisticated viewers the use of commercial techniques such as photo-engraving dots, billboard paint-handling, stencils and silk screens, which lend a mechanical, reproducible, not hand-made look to the work, is even more objectionable than the unpleasant imagery.” Carol A. Mahsun, ed., Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 193.

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notions of modernist art, namely the idea of autonomy and the central importance of the individual in the creation of art. Pop artists drew on mass consumer culture rather than on individual experience. They produced their works in a mass consumer product aesthetic, had works produced or finished by helping hands, stayed out of the theoretical aesthetic discourse with which Minimalists and later Conceptualists claimed definatory power over their work, and undermined the importance of the presence of the artist in the work, in favor of the presence of the artist in the marketplace. At the same time, these artists took their fate into their own hands and became individualistic in a very American sense of that word, namely by becoming entrepreneurs. One way to understand this turn towards the importance of entrepreneurial qualities in an artist is as part of the larger process of the Americanization of American art during the 1950s and 1960s.48 Although Abstract Expressionism is widely considered the first truly American art movement and a final liber­ ation from European dominance in the art world, there were no explicit references to American culture or the American way of life in these paintings, and the liberation remained primarily personal.49 In 1952, the leading vanguard journal Partisan Review noted in relation to the American art of the period, Abstract Expressionism, that “the enormous and ever-increasing growth of mass culture confronts the artist and the intellectual with a new phenomenon and creates a new obstacle: the artist and intellectual who wants to be part of American life is faced with a mass culture which makes him feel that he is still outside looking in.”50

In contrast to this outsider position, starting in the mid-1950s, artists like Larry Livers, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and even more so Robert I­ ndiana, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, and Andy Warhol, turned away from abstraction and subjectivist expressionism. ­Instead, they took up themes and images from American life and media. Rather than embodying the alienated artist who is seeking the liberation of self on the canvas, the new generation of artists interacted strongly with mainstream culture, including both its positive and its negative sides. In this interaction, they mostly maintained a personally detached position that left open whether the works were to be understood as affirmative, ironic, or subversive. ­L aurence Alloway has considered this attitude less as indecisiveness and more as an “inimi­table play within Pop art of the colloquial and the typical, on one side, and the evasive and estranged, on the other”—that is, as a way of dealing 48 | Stich, Made in U.S.A. 49 | Cp. Ibid., 7. 50 | Quoted in Ibid., 9.

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with the new experience of mass media culture while trying not to be swallowed by it. Alloway sheds a helpful light on this duality of Pop Art’s relation to the culture from which it emerged: “The attitude of the Pop artists toward the signs and objects that they use is neither one of simple acclaim, celebrating consumer goods, nor of satirical condemnation of the system in favor of some humanistic norm of conduct. On the contrary, they use the objects of the man-made environment with a sense of meaning in process, an experience based on the proliferation and interpenetration of our sign- and symbol-packed culture.”51

In other words, Alloway sees Pop Art as a way of using signs and images as floating signifiers, as “meaning in process.” This reflects the changing nature of signifiers in media and mass consumer culture, and simultaneously also suggests that the meaning these signifiers carry in mainstream culture can become different in the new context of art. One typical method of changing the signification of an image was Warhol’s use of repetition. On the one hand, this method intensified the sensationalist character of its subjects, for example in the shocking photographs of accidents in his disaster series, or in his star images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, or Elizabeth Taylor. On the other hand, as Hal Foster has argued, this constant repetition can be conceived of not simply as an increasingly superficial treatment of the image, but rather as a way of making the real peek through the symbolic: a little crack opens up through the insistent seriality of these images, which affords the viewer a glimpse of the actual calamity or person behind the flat, spectacularized surface of media culture.52 Pop Art thus proposed an understanding of art that was fundamentally different from Abstract Expressionist modernism. Its opening towards American consumer and media culture showed a new direction in the ‘Americanness’ of American art, with artists directly taking up the reality of everyday life in Amer­­ica with their subject matter, forms, materials, and techniques.53 This opening 51 | Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 47. 52 | “Repetition in Warhol is not reproduction in the sense of representation (of a referent) or simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier). Rather, repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need also points to the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition.” Foster, The Return of the Real, 132 (Foster’s italics). 53 | Lichtenstein’s answer to the question “Is Pop Art American?” was as follows: “Everybody has called Pop Art ‘American’ painting, but it’s actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew. I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial, it’s what all the

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can be considered a democratization in terms of subject matter and accessibility to a wider audience; simultaneously, it went along with a distancing of the artist from the work. While the actual, personal investment of the artist in the work as such might or might not have diminished, the way this investment was expressed and communicated changed. Minimalism had already initiated this development, and with Andy Warhol, Pop Art brought it to full fruition. We can trace this change in the idea of what characterizes an artist by comparing the two notions of individualism implicit in Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Abstract Expressionism propagated a notion of individualism that we could call romantic, which relied on the transcendentalist philosophy put forward by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, later by Walt ­Whitman, and also, contemporaneously with Abstract Expressionist art, by the beat poets. This type of individualism focused on the search for and expression of the true self, independently from and, if necessary, in opposition to society. Romantic individualism was thus not only fundamental for the traditional notion of the artist as social outsider, alienated from the conformist mainstream; it is also a fundamental ideology of American culture. This romantic individualism has an equally important and culturally influ­ ential counterpart, which has been called entrepreneurial individualism (or ‘rugged individualism’ in the context of the Progressive critique of the ­‘robber barons’ in the late 19th and early 20th century). This strain of individualist think­ing is based on the Protestant virtues of laboriousness and achievement, as most famously analyzed by Max Weber, as well as on the idea of self-­perfection and the self-made man. The most influential work in this regard has probably been Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Another crucial perspective on this facet of individualism was presented by Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Accordingly, this entrepreneurial version of individualism is most closely bound up with the myth of the American dream and of individual success in the New World.54 world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it won’t be American; it will be universal.” Gene Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters. ­I ­n terviews by Gene Swenson,” Art News November 1963 and February 1964, no. 7 and 10 (1963-1964). 54 | Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: ­R outledge, [1905] 2012). Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography & Other Writings (New York: ­B antam Dell, [1791] 2008). Frederick J. Turner and John Mack Faragher, Rereading ­F rederick Jackson Turner: “The significance of the frontier in American history” and other essays (New York: H. Holt and Co., [1920] 1994). Already Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations about American culture rest on the fundamental insight that one of the inherent dynamics of democracy is the resulting motivation of people to individually distinguish themselves from others and to achieve personal success: “they have lost

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This second version of individualism became crucial for a booming Ameri­ can economy and an expanding American mass consumer society. I would like to suggest that along with this development of the economy, and even more so with the development of what I will later discuss as the creative economy, entrepreneurial individualism became an ideology that would guide not only the common man striving to achieve economic success, but also the artist. Pop Art initiated a fundamental change in the image of the artist, moving it from romantic individualism to entrepreneurial individualism. Artists who were commercially successful and participated in mass consumer culture were no longer anathema to art. This brought the cultural image of the artist closer to the cultural image of the entrepreneur. The convergence of art and business in the persona of the artist can be understood as a particular mode and intensification of a more general conver­ gence of art and life that many Pop artists pursued. In contrast to earlier avantgardist attempts to overcome the separation of art and life, this convergence took a specific form in Pop Art. The life with which Pop Art merged was one defined increasingly by commercial culture; therefore, the merging of art and life took the shape of a merging of art and commerce. While Abstract Expressionism had exhibited commercial tendencies at best on the level of marketing and public promotion, Pop Art moved further into the commercial realm. It also went significantly further than Minimalism, which used industrial mate­ rials and began to change the image of the artist as a lonely creator, but still remained squarely within the logic of autonomy, abstraction, and aesthetic as well as theoretical distance from middle-class consumer culture. Sidra Stich succinctly summarizes this new orientation of Pop Art: “In most general terms, the shift was from a subjective art, separated from life and premised on originality, to an objective art, bound to life and based on borrowed or reproduced imagery, manufactured materials, and mechanical techniques.”55

Pop Art turned away from the subjectivity and alienation from society that was prevalent in Abstract Expressionism; this movement also included a refusal to conceive of perception and feelings as belonging to and shaped by the indivi­ dual, as well as a generally diminished valuation of individual originality in

sight of their former equals and feel no longer bound to their fate by a common interest; each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Bantam, [1835] 2000), Book 2, Chapter 3, 633. 55 | Stich, Made in U.S.A., 10.

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art.56 Instead, processes of production and reception that were typical of consumer society entered the art world on a larger scale, and led to the convergence of Pop Art with consumer and commercial culture. This convergence can be ­observed particularly on four levels; firstly, in regard to the subjects, imagery, and m ­ otifs these artworks used; secondly, in regard to their techniques and ­materials of production; thirdly, in regard to the marketing of Pop Art; and finally, in regard to the new image of the artist. Firstly, we have already seen how Pop Art changed the subject matter of art from subjective expression of the individual artist—or, as Greenberg would have it, from an almost pure emphasis on form—to very concrete images and ­objects of everyday life in America. This included objects meant for purchasing and consumption, such as the fast food Claes Oldenburg often depicted or the detergent boxes and soup cans Andy Warhol used for his two- and three-­ dimensional series. Pop imagery often also resembled comic books—such as in Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings—or advertisements, as in Robert Indiana’s or James Rosenquist’s works, and even more strongly so in Tom Wesselman’s collages, which included actual printed advertisements of much-bought American consumer brands. Secondly, this use of widely, commercially circulated images and ­objects was accompanied by specific techniques and materials of production. Most of the artists created their works with the help of others, using techniques that allowed for serial production and repetition, and which minimized or even eliminated the uniqueness of the artist’s touch. The most important of ­these techniques was silk-screening, most famously used by Andy Warhol in his serial paintings, but also employed, for example, by Robert Rauschenberg in the combines he started making in 1962. By turning to rubber stamps and silk-screening, Warhol’s techniques replaced the artist’s intention with repetition and chance. Variation occurred primarily through ‘mistakes’ like slipped screens or canvases, or an uneven amount of color applied to the screen, rather than through planned process or artistic intention. In a sense, this can be conceived of as a radicalization of Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, which also relied on chance. Indeed, some of Warhol’s works show a strong interest in this type of artistic expression, even if in more complex and ironic terms.57 ­However, 56 | Cp. Peter Benchley, “Special Report: The Story of Pop,” in Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, 63. 57 | Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (also referred to as his Piss Paintings) come to mind here, attributed to a time period between the early 1960s and the late 1970s, in which his assistants (and not Warhol himself, according to many accounts) urinated on canvases that had been covered with wet copper coating, which caused the paint to oxidize and turn into a different color, leaving spots, drips, and lines on the canvas not unlike those of Abstract Expressionism.

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the most noted and iconic works of Pop Art were produced with m ­ eans and methods that clearly separated them from individual expression and intention, and aligned them with the aesthetics and production of consumer culture and marketing. Even though Warhol toyed with the Abstract Expressionist image of the artist as freewheeling creator, he also fundamentally undermined it. Laurence Alloway summarized this new technical approach with the term “process abbreviation,” which removed the work from detailed planning and execution—either in fact, as in the silk-screening technique, or in ­appearance, as in Lichtenstein’s paintings, which only appeared to be mechanically produced.58 In its seriality and methods of production, Pop Art was related to its contemporary, Minimalism. However, it significantly differed from Minimalism in that it gave up the distance to consumer culture which Minimalism had retained by refusing to signify beyond the individual work. Minimalism used materials and methods from industrial production to achieve the clean, smooth surfaces that were as typical for it as the seriality of simple objects, marking a strong turn towards the phenomenal side of experience, the here and now of the spectator. Objects in Minimalism negotiated their self-­referentiality and autonomy, simultaneously pointing back to their status as industrial products. In this way, Minimalism upheld an unresolved tension between autonomy and commercialism. In comparison, Pop Art’s seriality can be understood as a phenomenal method to the effect of letting in the real through a crack in the surface, as Hal Foster suggested. ­However, in contrast to Minimalism, Pop Art’s works signified well beyond themselves. One need only look at Pop Art’s overwhelming use of mass culture’s very imagery to dismiss any suggestion of artistic seclusion or modernist autonomy. The tension I discussed earlier as the crux of Minimalism does not present itself similarly in Pop Art. Rosalind Krauss claimed that Minimal­ism’s seriality “seals the object away from any condition that could possibly be thought of as original and consigns it to a world of simulacra, of multiples with­out originals.“59 Her claim could be disputed with Adorno’s negative dialectics, in which art stands in an ambivalent relation to the society from which it emerges, as we have seen earlier. Such a discussion, however, needs to assume that art is in some way autonomous from this society. This condition is thoroughly undermined by Pop Art: by its motifs, techniques, and methods of promotion, and not least by the new image of the Pop artist as a frugal, inventive, efficient and economically enterprising individual. Thus, thirdly, part of this image was conferred by the marketing principles that were visibly employed by many Pop artists. Christin Mamiya summarizes,

58 | Alloway, American Pop Art, 16. 59 | Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 10.

Ar tist/Entrepreneur “the significant point is that Pop art actively entered into the discourse established by consumer culture. The incisive marketing of the Pop movement ensured its success and was a catalyst for the commodification of art. In this manner, Pop art capitalized on the immediacy and recognizability of the imagery of commodity exchange while simultaneously reinforcing that very culture.”60

From the perspective of marketing theory, the use of easily recognizable cultural imagery like popular brands and icons can be considered a variant of what today is called co-branding: the combination of two (or more) products or brands to achieve increased public attention for and thus success of both.61 This effect is called image transfer. For example, by using images such as the one of Liz Taylor as motifs for his silk-screens, Warhol capitalized on the popularity of cultural icons, thus using co-branding with the effect of image transfer. Image 34: Image transfer in Warhol’s star images

Andy Warhol, Liz, 1963. Silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, 40 x 40 inches. Image and Artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./licensed by ARS, 2014.

60 | Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 71. 61 | Tom Blackett and Bob Boad, eds., Co-Branding: The Science of Alliance (Houndsmills; London: Macmillan, 1999).

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Art critic Laurence A ­ lloway implicitly expressed this principle when he stated that “the material of many of these works was familiar to the spectator and its success depended upon familiarity.”62 This way of capitalizing on icons of popular culture opened up the art world to a broader target group, namely the newly affluent American middle-class. The apparent ease with which Andy Warhol and his contemporaries pursued this opening towards a middle-class consumer culture and its market could be explained by their backgrounds in commercial advertising.63 Before venturing into fine art, Warhol had been a commercial artist and illustrated advertisements and marketing materials for more than ten years. This experience gave him valuable insight into the positioning and marketing of products.64 Pop Art’s use of imagery from mass culture can be considered a democratizing ges­ ture, as well as an opening up of art and artists towards their cultural environment and the realities of the society that surrounded them. At the same time, it was effectively also a way of catering to the audience. The secluded production of art became less important than its proactive presentation to large audiences. The opening up of Pop Art to a wider audience can also be observed in regard to the self-promotion and self-marketing of the artist. In contrast to ­Minimalist and Conceptualist artists, Pop artists generally did not publish sig­ nificant theoretical elaborations or manifestos. This theoretical abstinence is not necessarily an expression of a lesser theoretical commitment on the part of the artists. It does, however, suggest a different strategy of presenting them­ selves and their art and of addressing their target audience. The theoretical depth and complexity of Judd’s, Morris’s, LeWitt’s and Kosuth’s writings premised a strong intellectual background and commitment of the reader, thus addressing an audience of artists, critics, academics, and art aficionados. In contrast, the most important statements of Pop Art can be found in rather readable interviews with the artists, which appeared both in art journals and in lifestyle magazines. In this regard, the series of interviews that Gene Swenson conducted with eight Pop artists for Art News was particularly important. In these inter­v iews 62 | Alloway, American Pop Art, 80. See also Nina Tessa Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst. Andy Warhol und der Umbau des Kunstbetriebs im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/ Main: Campus Verlag, 2005), 180. 63 | Similarly, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns designed commercial window displays early on in their artistic careers, for example for Tiffany & Co; James Rosenquist supported himself as a billboard painter for three years as well as designing window displays for Tiffany’s, Bonwit Teller, and Bloomingdale’s; Claes Oldenburg was an apprentice at an advertising agency in his early years. Cp. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 137. 64 | Cp. Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, 176.

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Swenson asked the artists to explain their notions of their work and their ­style.65 Most of the respondents did so quite straightforwardly, apart from Warhol with his notoriously eccentric and deliberately simplistic statements.66 Robert ­Indiana, for example, maintained that “Pop is Instant Art ... Its comprehension can be as immediate as a Crucifixion. Its appeal may be as broad as its range; it is the wide-screen of the Late Show. It is not the Latin of the hierarchy, it is vulgar.”67 Indiana’s statement is an apt expression of how Pop Art separated itself from the values of art discourse and opened art up to consumer society. This opening took place, finally and most crucially, in the changing image of the artist. Already with Abstract Expressionism, visual art had received wide public attention in the media and e­ xperienced a boom in the art market. At the same time, artists started to rise to the status of celebrities, as we have seen in the example of Jackson Pollock. However, the way the Abstract Expressionists presented themselves and were presented still put forward the image of an original, solitary creator in his studio, which Pollock’s picture in Life illustrates. And while Minimalists used industrial materials and often even had their works manufactured outside of their studios, they still did not do much to undermine the discourse of the romantic, solitary artist. In contrast, in the early 1960s, a new image of the artist emerged. One of the period’s commentators, Allan Kaprow, o ­ bserved that the artist had now become “a man of the world” and that a new myth of the modern artist was emerging.68 In Kaprow’s view—which he admitted is “synthetic,” stemming from his personal observations, and “as much an interpretation of these observations as a characterization, simplified and purposefully drama­tized”— the image of the artist had changed throughout the centuries from intellectual (da Vinci) to genius (Baudelaire) to worker (1930s) to Beat (1950s). In the early 1960s, this image changed again, for while artists “were in hell in 1946,” now they “are in business.”69 The young artists of the early 1960s, Kaprow ­observes, come from a middle class background and are no longer distinguish­ able from members of this class in terms of education, private life, social life (which primarily serves to further one’s career), appearance, or values such as 65 | Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters. Interviews by Gene Swenson.” 66 | For example, answering Swenson’s question as to what Pop Art was all about, ­Warhol replied, “It’s liking things.” Ibid. 67 | Ibid. 68 | Allan Kaprow, “The Artist as a Man of the World,” in Essays in the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, expanded edition 2003). Originally published in Art News 63, no. 6 (October 1964): 34-37, 58. 69 | Ibid., 47.

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“­practicality, security, and self-advancement.”70 This makes artists similar to “the personnel in other specialized disciplines and industries in America.”71 In line with this image, they are now also completely and individually responsible for their professional success. Kaprow further observes that in turn, the attitude of society towards artists is also changing; artists are now pursued rather than exiled. They serve either as “societal representatives” or to provide “diversion and status.” Although they might now be “appreciated for naïve or wrong reasons,”72 Kaprow does not consider this only to be a negative development; being cast out for the same wrong reasons is not a better option, and artists have nowhere else to go apart from the society they live in. Thus, the idea that artistic success might coincide with non-conformism, the destruction of values, and social failure—with existence as an outsider in society and a lack of success in the market—is no longer valid. In the contemporary view, since society is willing to accept artists, the only thing that could keep them from succeeding in the marketplace is a lack of either talent or market-savviness. Economic success is no longer opposed to recognition as an artist; in fact, “the best of the vanguard artists today are famous, usually prolific, financially comfortable.”73 The artist moves from the margins to the center of society and starts to participate in its commercial logic. One of the most illustrious examples of this new type of artist was Andy Warhol. He played a crucial role in changing the image of the artist—from individual, original creator to entrepreneur and figurehead of his business. ­Warhol’s revamping of the artist’s role correlates closely with his self-fashioning as a celebrity. Tapping into the mechanisms of the star cult that had developed in Hollywood in the early 20th century, Warhol created and maintained a very particular artist persona. He gave ambiguous statements in interviews, which never made clear whether he was being serious or scathingly ironic; he presented himself in a very androgynous manner, dying his hair platinum blonde and later replacing it with white or silver wigs. In general, he cultivated a very specific persona that he himself described in detail, attesting to the high degree of consciousness involved in this production.74 70 | Ibid., 48. 71 | Ibid., 48. 72 | Ibid., 48. 73 | Ibid., 51. 74 | “Nothing is missing. It’s all there. The affectless gaze. The diffracted grace. … The bored languor, the wasted pallor. … the chic freakiness, the basically passive astonish­ ment. … The glamour rooted in despair, the self-admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura. … Nothing is missing. I’m everything my scrapbook says I am.” Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jonavich, 1975), 10.

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Warhol fashioned himself as an eccentric, ever-unapproachable and yet everpresent star, and he promoted this image at every public appearance he made and in every interview he gave. In this way, he turned his own name into a brand, thus increasing the demand for and value of any product associated with this name, including paintings, films, sculptures, photographs, music LPs, or books. In his later years, he even worked as a model and testimonial for various advertisements. Companies were able to book him through an agency, and he thus became the face of Levi’s jeans, TDK video-tapes, l.a. Eyeworks sunglasses, Amiga computers, and Vidal Sassoon hair care. Warhol artfully fabri­cated his brand and his star persona. He then used this stardom to gene­rate additional income and public exposure. Image 35: Andy Warhol in Vidal Sassoon advertisement

Advertisement (Andy Warhol for Vidal Sassoon), 1984-1986. Collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Printed ink on newsprint, 5.5 x 4.5 inches (14 x 11.4 cm). Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum.

Warhol adeptly combined the mechanisms of stardom and branding, using his name and star persona as a brand to sell his own and later other companies’ products.75 Techniques of self-presentation and marketing interlaced to pro75 | Such methods were also employed by other artists, for example, by Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein in 1966 produced a series of dinnerware that was nationally adverti-

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duce the image of an artist who makes a business out of himself, his name, and products that are more or less related to him. Harold Rosenberg discussed this development and the ensuing loss of importance of the traditional art object when he observed that “the uncollectible art object serves as an advertisement of the showman-artist, whose processes are indeed more interesting than his product and who markets his signature appended to commonplace relics.”76 This selling of the artist as brand by means of communicating a celebrity star image was essentially a marketing method of the new artist/entrepreneur. In turning his name into a brand, Warhol ensured that his work could be continued independently from his actual creative or productive participation— much like brands and businesses in fashion or technology, where the name of the original founder remains a sign of quality and style, even without his or her ongoing involvement. Analyzing this approach from the perspective of branding theory, Jonathan Schroeder observed that artists have for generations created brands and branded their products in order to compete in the marketplace and to differentiate and position themselves in the respective art markets of the time.77 According to Schroeder, “successful artists can be thought of as brand managers, actively engaged in developing, nurturing, and promoting themselves as recognizable ‘products’ in the competitive cultural sphere.”78 The methods of achieving this branding effect were primarily the following: develop­ing a recognizable style, producing work for a target audience, and the artist’s signature. While the use of such methods was not new, the conscious (self-)presentation of the artist as commercially minded and entrepreneurial was. Warhol championed the explicit self-fashioning and creation of a public image of the artist as head of business and commercial brand. With this emphasis on maximizing public exposure and profit, Warhol openly and emphatically portrayed himself as an entrepreneur with business interests rather than as a removed artist. Wolfgang Ullrich emphasizes that sed and could be purchased by mail order. See Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 132. 76 | Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art, 38. 77 | Schroeder summarizes his argument as follows: “Although often portrayed as transgressive tramps rallying against the oppressive system, many artists—­p articularly the famous ones—have for centuries participated in the persuasive mechanisms of the market, tapping sympathetic subjects, aggressive agents, and powerful patrons. The visual artist’s critical role emerged later, heavily embroidered with myth, and t­oday expres­s es itself in performance art, body art, and shock imagery.” Schroeder, “The ­A rtist and the Brand,” 16. Schroeder summarizes that “artists offer exemplary instances of image creation in the service of building a recognizable look, name, and style—a brand, in other words.” Ibid., 1. Cp. also Schroeder, “The Artist in Brand Culture.” 78 | Schroeder, “The Artist and the Brand,” 1.

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“ein markanterer Bruch mit der Vorstellung vom Künstler als Genie wäre kaum denkbar.”79 Warhol’s authority in selling his own and others’ products rested no longer on the image of the artist as genius but on the adept creation of the artist as a brand that could sell virtually anything. Warhol himself expressed this new image of the business artist, stating in his notoriously deadpan way that “Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I wanted to be an art businessman or a Business Artist.”80

The emphasis on Warhol’s public persona and the resulting brand rather than on his art had already proven beneficial to his career early on. For Warhol, as ­opposed to Pollock, the process of his recognition in the art scene did not p ­ re­date his public prominence, but rather was simultaneous with and even preceded by media attention. In January 1957, Warhol had a spread as a “commercial artist” in Life magazine featuring his shoe drawings, 81 probably not least because his shoe designs carried famous celebrities’ names. In a non-commercial art con­ text, he was mentioned as one of the up and coming young artists of the new art movement as much as five years later, in a Time Magazine article in May 1962.82 Warhols career started in the media rather than in the arts. Influenced by his experiences as a commercial illustrator, Warhol consciously created a consumer aesthetic that would appeal to the big middle-class market and therefore to the media, in both his imagery and the eccentricity of his appearance. He thus became a famous artist well before he received recognition within the arts.83 Earlier in his career, Warhol had exhibited works, mainly drawings, in small galleries; however, he received increased attention and recognition in the art scene only in late 1962, after his inclusion in the Time magazine article. Only after this publicity did Warhol present his work in a group exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, one of the first events to generate public attention for what came to be perceived as a new movement.84 In 1963, Warhol then moved on to participate in major group exhibitions at the Guggenheim 79 | “It is hard to think of a more clear-cut break from the idea of artist as genius.” (My translation) Wolfgang Ullrich, “Kunst als Arbeit? Aus der Geschichte eines ­a nderen Kunstbegriffs,” in Tiefer Hängen: Über den Umgang mit der Kunst (Berlin: Klaus ­Wagenbach, 2003), 147. 80 | Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 92. 81 | Life, “Crazy Golden Slippers: Famous People Inspire Fanciful Footwear,” Life, 21 January 1957. 82 | Time, “Art: The Slice-of Cake School,” Time, 11 May 1962. 83 | Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, 232f. 84 | Mahsun, ed., Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, 9.

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Museum, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, and the London Institute of Contemporary Art.85 In the course of these exhibitions, Pop Art was acknowl­ edged as the new American art movement. Warhol’s approach of insistently promoting himself and applying market criteria to his artistic career turned out to be successful. Jonathan Schroeder aptly summarizes this elaborate creation of a star persona and brand: “Warhol’s career was largely about producing the ultimate consumer good—oneself.” 86 Consequently, the artist became the main promoter of self, and as such, he also became an entrepreneur who sold his work and himself, generating a brand and animating a whole business behind it. The new image of the artist corresponded to a new attitude of art collectors, who now started to consider collecting art in similar terms to the acquisi­ tion of stock bonds. A much-noted 1965 article in Life portrayed “the country’s leading collectors,” the Sculls and Leon Kraushar, effectively legitimating Pop Art through their buying decisions. Significantly, these buying decisions were based on an investment logic at least as much as they were on aesthetic predilections. As Leon Kraushar put it: “These pictures are like IBM stock, don’t forget that, and this is the time to buy, because pop is never going to die. I’m not planning to sell my IBM stock either.”87 Similarly, Robert Scull commented on buying his first work of art, “I felt as though I had bought all of AT&T.”88 Their business-mindedness did not stand in the way of the important influence these collectors had on the cultural significance of Pop Art; rather, it shaped the movement. As contemporary observer John Rublowsky put it, “primarily the school was and is a collector’s movement. Collectors were the principal champions of the group, and they are responsible for the success of the school.”89 Market success, in terms of public attention and consumer demand, reflected back onto the aesthetic legitimacy of Pop Art. In turn, the buyers’ interest was not only met but also furthered by the aggressive promotion and sales strategy of Pop Art dealers, most im­­por­tantly that of Leo Castelli, who represented Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, ­Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and Warhol in his gallery. Castelli thus became the ­foremost authority of Pop Art on the dealers’ side. Purportedly, he used his contacts to make Rauschenberg win the 1964 Venice Biennale, which let the price of Rauschenberg’s works quintuple; Castelli also gave incorrect infor­mation about the actual sales price of Rosenquist’s F-III, supposedly to inflate the

85 | http://www.warholstars.org/art/artchron.html 86 | Schroeder, “The Artist in Brand Culture,” 20. 87 | “You Bought It Now Live With It,” Life 59, no. 3, 16 July 1965, 59. 88 | Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 149. 89 | John Rublowsky, Pop Art (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 159.

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­ rices of Rosenquist’s art.90 Castelli is yet another telling example of the overp all market thinking that entered the art world. And the new artist was at the center rather than on the periphery of this thinking. The artist was no longer only the creator of the product to be sold; he was now also chiefly responsible for creating and maintaining the market value of these ‘stocks.’ This resulted in an increasing importance and valuation of art celebrities rather than of artists who had received valuation through the mechanisms of aesthetic value generation that were internal to the art world. In turn, this also produced a need for the artist to provide the requested image. What can be conceived of as a democratization of the art world—an open­i ng towards a wider public and an audience beyond the circle of art spe­­cial­­i sts—went hand in hand with an increasing market ­orientation of both museums and artists, strongly contributing to a new type of artist who increasingly focused on operating according to market criteria. As we have seen, a crucial aspect of this operation was the ­s elf-presentation of the artist as star, and the creation of a brand name that extended beyond particular works of art to include all kinds of artistic media, as well as p ­ roducts and presentations that were not strictly art-related. With the boom of Pop Art, the image of the artist turned from an autonomous, individual creator of artworks into a combination of entrepreneur, art director, and brand manager.

F rom S tudio to F actory : R edefining the A rtist ’s W ork The shifting idea of what characterizes those who create art was influenced by larger social changes, most strongly by the rapid expansion of the middle class. Increasingly, artists had a middle-class background or aspired to such ideals, so that in the 1960s, many artists not only felt comfortable with, but were also socially part of this class.91 This was the case in regard to their education, which started to be institutionalized and formalized, leading to a rising

90 | Cp. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 145-146. We should note that an impor­tant factor in this changing role of the artist was also the increasing democratization of museums, which went along with budget cuts and the necessity to operate in more market-oriented ways. The main orientation of museums thus shifted from an audience of specialists—artists, collectors, curators, and critics—to the general public and governmental agency representatives. 91 | Buettner observes, “Artists were at home among the upper middle class ­b e­c ause they were members of the same class.” William Stewart Buettner, American Art Theory: 1940-1960 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 370.

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number of formal degrees in art;92 it was also reflected in the changed attitude of many art­ists towards consumer culture and the marketplace. The crucial consequence of this change in social position was that the artist was no longer an ­avant­­gard­ist outcast at odds with mainstream society’s culture and values. The relation to mainstream society and in particular to the life and culture of the middle classes was less one of alienation than one of identification.93Art now became a profession rather than a rebellion. This change in the social status of the artist took place within the ­broader context of an emerging managerial and service economy, in which the ­emphasis changed from blue collar to white collar labor, and thus to intellectual rather than manual work. This development of a postindustrial economy, which started after World War II, has continued to intensify through to the present, as remaining manual labor is transferred into countries with inexpensive human resources. ­Helen M ­ olesworth observes that as a consequence of this development, “the labor of developed nations has increasingly become the management of information and the production of experience.”94 Western capitalist economies have come to rely on the generation of ideas and experiences more than on the p ­ roduction of objects. Artists responded to the beginning of this transformation of the American economy with various strategies, some by turning towards experiential and participatory methods, as we have seen in the previous chapter, and some by emphasizing their managerial function at the cost of traditional artisanal skills.95 Both strategies were important, and both were pursued not only by Pop Art but also by Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In fact, the shift from manual laborer to intellectual thinker was marked most strongly by Minimalism and Conceptual Art, where mental work was now valued more highly than actual manual involvement.96 Sol Le Witt, for example, understood the artist as a clerk who only distributed information to the viewer.97 However, it was particularly in Pop Art that this new self-understanding of the artist was accompanied by 92 | As Diana Crane shows in her analysis of the transformation of the avantgarde, the percentage of artists with at least a B.A. rose from 20 (Abstract Expressionism) to 37 (Minimalism) to 52 (Pop Art) to 68 (Photorealism). Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10. 93 | Cp. Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, 171 as well as Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde, 11. 94 | Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003), 18f. 95 | Cp. Ibid., 39. 96 | Ibid. 97 | Cp. Ibid., 31.

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a clear orientation towards the market, and thus by a transformation of the artist into not only a manager of information, but also an entrepreneur and businessman. If we want to understand this new, business-oriented image of the artist, our analysis has to go beyond the artist’s new celebrity status and methods of self-promotion. The ways in which pioneer Andy Warhol approached the status of an entrepreneur and businessman communicate a fundamentally new understanding not only of his image, but of his function and work as an ­artist. Over the years, Andy Warhol transitioned into an increasingly business-­ oriented artist, a development that can be observed quite well when we look at the changing function of his studio, the famous Factory. In her analysis of the cultural function of artists’ studios, Sharon Zukin observes that in the 1950s and 1960s, the studio became a place of interest in regard to the image of the ­artist: “the studio becomes the place—perhaps the only place in society—­ where the self is created.”98 While this was true for the Abstract Expressionist con­struction of self, the studio’s importance to Andy Warhol and its role in portraying a certain image of the artist was quite different. In 1963, Andy Warhol moved into his first Factory, an industrial loft on 47th Street. Naming the workspace a factory instead of a studio was a cru­ cial decision for the image Warhol conveyed of his work and of himself as an artist. On the one hand, this decision can be understood as an ironic gesture that referred to production mechanisms of the mass consumer industry.99 The gesture seems to imply that the paintings, photographs, and films, as well as the fashion, music, and advertisements produced in the Factory were nothing but consumer goods, and that Warhol himself was nothing but a manufacturer of these goods. Earlier that same year, Warhol had stated in an interview for Art News that he was not the type of artist the American public and the American art scene had so far been accustomed to: “I think everybody should be a ­machine. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.”100 He thus made clear that his work no longer resulted from solitary inspiration in a studio. It was a group enterprise. In this sense, the Factory approximated the methods of manufacturing in the early industrial age, as well as the later mass production of the automated age. This was particularly the case when Warhol started employing the method of silk-screening, which allowed for fast produc-

98 | Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 94. 99 | Cp. Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, 156. 100 | Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters. Interviews by Gene Swenson.”

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tion of serial works and could also be executed by Warhol’s assistants.101 In this sense, Warhol collectivized the creation of art: “The pop artist’s concern with social reality is most directly manifested in his willingness to share the creative process, to adopt a practice involving a division of labor, and to break up and split apart the production process in order to share it. The critical issue is not that machines and mechanical processes are replacing the handmade object but, instead, that the artist is able to take creativity and the conscious reception of reality that characterizes art and adapt them to life in an industrial society.”102

Warhol and his colleagues were not just craftsmen or even proletarian workers in a factory, and the Factory should not be mistaken for a collectivist, proletarian working space. Rather than in socialist terms, the Factory should be understood in capitalist terms, for, as Caroline Jones rightly stresses, “the postwar American context [of the factory] was dominated above all by managerial hierarchies rather than proletarian collectivity.”103 Warhol can therefore also be seen as a businessman managing his factory.104 This tapped into American culture’s postwar fascination with the manager, as both fictional and non-fictional works of the years suggest.105 Warhol’s contemporary, Claes Oldenburg, also identified with this zeitgeist; he stated (perhaps ironically) that it “pleases me to be uselessly … methodical and systematic … like the world of business science engineering sales.”106 For better or for worse, artists entered the middle-class: 101 | Warhol thought that “it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.” Ibid. Other Pop artists, too, had their works executed by others: for example, Tom Wesselmann gave his work away to be finished by a carpenter, and Claes Oldenburg’s wife, Coosje van Bruggen, sewed his sculptures. 102 | Mahsun, ed., Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, 73. 103 | Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 200. 104 | Even the environment in which Warhol’s first Factory was set, Jones observes, stressed the business-like quality of his Factory, rather than a closeness to manufacturing. The neighborhood “signified modern business and contemporary industry so strongly that an early assistant argued against Warhol’s taking the space, because the neighborhood ‘wasn’t Romantic enough. It was too business-like.’” Gerard Malanga in an interview with Jones. Quoted in Ibid., 192. 105 | See, for example, Sloan Wilson’s 1956 novel, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit; Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman; and William H. Whyte’s 1956 The ­O rganization Man. Cp. Ibid., 200. 106 | Claes Oldenburg, Store Days: Documents from the Store, 1961. Quoted in Ibid., 203.

Ar tist/Entrepreneur “In contrast to the original bohemians of nineteenth-century Paris, who had to live off parents, brothers, and lovers and whose financial insecurity at times resembled that of the factory proletariat, artists in the 1960s were brought into the white-collar labor force.”107

Identifying with the middle class did not just mean conforming to managerial ideas of the time. Andy Warhol’s function clearly went beyond that of a mere manager. He was the guiding, entrepreneurial force behind his business, the Factory: “Andy was the primum mobile. He was the spirit of it.”108 Warhol not only managed his business, he was also the creative mover, as well as an openly and aggressively entrepreneurial artist. This type of artist no longer appeared to be removed from business, and in fact would become one of the significant inspirations to the world of business in the decades to come. As Hilton Kramer observed regretfully at the time, “instead of being a source of disgrace, to be commercial these days is to be fashionable.”109 More than that, I would add that being commercially successful increasingly signified being successful as an artist. There is an observable difference between the two main stages in the history of the Factor: the early years, in which the Factory had operated more like a traditional artist’s studio and a creative meeting point, and the later years of Warhol’s career, in which the Factory became his business operation headquarters from which he sold his brand on virtually all available channels. An impor­ tant turning point between these two stages might have been Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt of Warhol in June 1968, after which his attitude towards art and the business of art purportedly became more cynical.110 While 1968 might have reinforced it, the general direction of this commercial orientation had already been set well before 1968. Instead of marketing his art by means of his name, Warhol increasingly came to market this very name itself, and also used his name to market products other than his own. Media coverage increasingly emphasized his persona rather than his art. 111 Warhol’s shift from artist to entrepreneurial businessman managing and promoting a brand was incremental rather than sudden. In its early years, the Factory had been a meeting point for New York artists, and can even be understood as an artwork in itself.112 In the mid-1960s, when Warhol moved away 107 | Zukin, Loft Living, 97. 108 | Emile de Antonio in an interview, quoted in Jones, Machine in the Studio, 198. 109 | Quoted in Benchley, “Special Report: The Story of Pop,” 169. 110 | Alison M Gingeras, “Lives of the Artists,” Tate Etc., no. 1 (Summer 2004). 111 | Cp. Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, 217. 112 | Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York, London, et. al.: Penguin, 2001), 51. Cp. Zahner, Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, 156.

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from painting, the function of the Factory shifted towards film production and the manufacture of silk-screens, primarily of commissioned portraits. In 1967, Warhol hired Fred Hughes as business manager for the Factory in order to convert it into a profitable business; and in 1968, the Factory moved to the Union building, turning into more of an office space than an artist’s studio. By naming what used to be the artist’s studio a factory in the first place, and by increasingly turning it into his business operations headquarters over the years, Warhol also turned himself into the head of a company. He was no longer an individual, subjective creator of ideas and works, but rather the creative force behind a bigger, collective enterprise. Warhol’s famous statement that he wanted to be a machine can therefore be understood not only in terms of negatively refusing the traditional art world’s ideas of originality, subjectivity, and inspiration, but also in terms of positively invoking a new idea(l) of the artist. Warhol the artist/entrepreneur was a constant and reliable generator of creative ideas that brought in business and work for others. Warhol’s emphasis on art as a group process and social endeavor rather than a solitary undertaking certainly carried political overtones, not least because similar attempts to reevaluate the artist’s role as creative originator were simultaneously taking place in avantgarde circles influenced by communist philosophy. A brief sketch of the development of this thought will demonstrate its importance for our present discussion. In his essay “Kunst als Arbeit?” (“Art as Work?”), Wolfgang Ullrich discusses how communist ideas and policies re-­ interpreted the image of the artist.113 No longer was the artist to be a solitary genius; instead, he or she was considered similar to the communist worker. This both integrated the artist into mainstream society and nobilitated the common worker. In the spirit of this communist work ethic, the most prominent member of the 1960s’ Fluxus movement, George Macunias, declared that art should be depersonalized and anonymized, meaning that artists should be perceived not as individuals but rather as members of a collective, and that no work should be signed and thus attributed to an individual creator.114 Comparable developments occurred in France, where Victor Vasarely set up teams that included perception psychologists and other scientists, thus treating the artist as more akin to an engineer than to a lonely creative genius. From his discussion of the 1960s, Ullrich moves on to the 1990s, arguing that with the increasing dominance of economic principles in most spheres of life, the iconic function of the engineer was replaced by that of the manager. Accord­ingly, instead of being anti-conformist or anti-bourgeois, the artist was now supposed to be a dynamic, enterprising communicator, much like the ideal businessman: “Der Künstler ist gleichsam vom Hersteller zum ­Kommunikator, 113 | Ullrich, “Kunst als Arbeit? Aus der Geschichte eines anderen Kunstbegriffs.” 114 | Ibid.

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vom materiellen Gestalter zum Vertreter von Ideen und Akteur von Prozessen geworden.”115 Art was no longer considered work, but instead became a business. An orientation towards process and product was replaced by organizational questions and a focus on generating work. Although I agree with Ullrich’s overall evaluation, it should be noted that Andy Warhol already epitomized this entrepreneurial and managerial type of artist in the 1960s, spearheading a development that would come to wider fruition in the 1990s.116 Ullrich further argues that today these new role­­models— the business manager and the entrepreneurial businessman—no longer intend primarily to free the artist of his or her societal exclusion, as Kaprow still believed. Rather, Ullrich holds that they are used playfully as modes of performance, becoming ironic postmodern instruments of self-presentation. Whereas earlier avantgarde artists wanted to change the social function of the artist—for example, from artist to engineer—the artist today, Ullrich argues, is not literally striving to be a businessman. He or she can, however, play ironi­ cally with these characteristics. From this position, we might conclude that Andy Warhol and later exemplars of business-minded artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami are not actually businessmen performing business, but rather artists engaged in postmodern identity play. Before I challenge this view, I would like to take a look Barbara Rose’s argu­ ment on the role of the artist in Pop Art, which starts out from a different angle yet reaches a similar conclusion as Ullrich’s. Rose’s core proposition is that although it might look otherwise, the Pop artist is not “the end of the artist as the gentleman scholar—the divinely inspired practitioner of art—and his lapse once again into the anonymous ranks of the craftsman.”117 Rose grants that Pop Art is compromised in the eyes of the art elite—an opinion expressed time and again, for example, by conservative art critic Hilton Kramer, but also most vocally by Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. The reason for this disaffirmation, Rose argues, lies in the character of those who support and patronize this art, “the nouveau riche collectors who buy it (often with as much an eye to its publicity potential as to its trading value), the dealers who sell it and the 115 | “It is as if the artist had changed from producer to communicator, from material designer to representative of ideas and agent of processes.” (My translation) Ibid., 145. 116 | Miwon Kwon also argues that “indexing a major shift in emphasis within the general economy, in progress over the past four decades, at least in the United States—from manufacturing to services—‘advanced’ artists today function more like specialized service providers and less as producers of specialized goods.” This change is a “paradigm shift in the nature of artistic labor.” Miwon Kwon, “Jorge Pardo’s Designs on Design,” in Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles (London; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 82. 117 | Barbara Rose, “Pop in Perspective,” in Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, ed. Carol A. Mahsun (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 192.

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mass media that publicize it,”118 as well as in Pop Art’s popularity with a wide audience. While Rose disagrees with the disaffirmation, she critically observes that the artist as individual no longer counts in Pop Art. She suggests that this is the young artists’ rebellion against individualistic values inherited since the Renaissance. Instead, they communicate “that they are uninterested in or against taste, feeling, and personal expression, and are content to celebrate the faceless banality of contemporary America.”119 In other words, Rose observes an undermining of traditional artistic values. She emphasizes, however, that rather than blaming the artists for this, we should recognize the role that the media, art institutions, critics, and collectors play in this process. For Rose, the apparent irreverence to the values of art and the strong commercial orientation that comes with it is a misrepresentation of the Pop artists, even if it is a misrepresentation propagated by these very artists themselves. The artists “allow themselves to be exploited as part of the personality-­packaging that goes into contemporary myth-making.”120 Rose does not see this as proof of their selling out. Pop Art is not “sell-out art made by artificially created personalities to legitimize the values of the commo­dity culture that makes them rich.”121 Rather, theses artists are “indulging in a masquerade in order to veil the subversive nature of their statement”122; they are the producers of a “hold-out art of a generation that has seen flag-wavers collapse both left and right.”123 What Rose effectively proposes is very similar to Ullrich’s argument: that Pop Art is a form of postmodern play, of ironic subversion in the age of emerging postmodernism, in which ideological convictions and grand pictures collapse against the daily reality of a mediatized consumer society. I agree with Rose’s view that Pop Art was the expression of a time of transition, in which artists questioned and re-envisioned the values, roles, and functions of art, and thus redefined their work. However, my take on this is slightly different from both Ullrich’s and Rose’s. The emerging postmodern practices of subversion and irony, which both Ullrich and Rose put forth as legitimations of Pop Art, in my opinion yield a significantly more ambivalent result. If we disregard essentialist assumptions about what an artist is, and what her or his artistic intentions are—a disregard that is certainly in line with postmodern theory—then how can we tell the difference between a business attitude that is skillfully but ironically performed, and an actual, serious business attitude? When artists play with the proposition that there are no values other than mar118 | Ibid., 193. 119 | Ibid., 196. 120 | Ibid., 196. 121 | Ibid., 199. 122 | Ibid., 198. 123 | Ibid., 199.

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ket success, and that the artist is a businessman, even if they do so in ironic ways they run a high risk of generating an art that indeed has no values other than market success, and artists who behave like businessmen. This is, after all, the core of what the theory of performativity has taught us: speech acts, and acts in general, generate their own reality. Whether artists actually are businessmen or whether they only play with the image of a person driven primarily by success in the marketplace is effectively irrelevant, in the face of their actual market success and the integral role this success seems to play for their images as artists and for the value of their work. It is therefore crucial to understand that the success of Pop Art strongly relied on its close relation to American consumer culture: “Pop Art not only depicted and reflected this rampant consumption but also appropriated the mechanisms and strategies of corporate society.”124 This was the case not only with Pop Art’s subject matter and its closeness to advertising, but also with the extent to which artists, as a matter of course, acted like producers of consumer goods and participants in the marketplace, and thus projected an image of an enterprising individual in the business world, rather than one of a withdrawn, solitary creator. Just as “material possessions became the basis for the determination of success and self-worth”125 on the side of consumption, so too on the side of production did market success—or at least the illusion of it—become the basis for the value of the product in question. Sharon Zukin observes more generally for the period that “In all the publicity for Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and other approaches of the sixties, it was hard to tell whether the artistic vision was bidding up prices, or commercialism was transforming the artistic vision. Market value had become ­t hor­o ughly confused with aesthetic worth.”126

To be a good artist now increasingly meant to be a successful artist. Spear­ heading this development, Pop Art not only reflected consumer culture; it also “brought about a realignment of the cultural community so that it was more consistent with corporate models, and in so doing, it contributed to a validation of that very system.”127 By openly becoming part of the game, artists also perpetuated it. Pop Artists, and particularly Andy Warhol, left future generations of artists to mull over a thoroughly undermined notion of what characterized an artist in comparison to other professions. The artist was now no longer outside of 124 | Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 1. 125 | Ibid., 17. 126 | Zukin, Loft Living, 90. 127 | Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture, 14.

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the market, but instead an eager participant and competitor; this was exacerbated by the fact that the number of artists to compete with had indeed strongly risen.128 Artists of a younger generation, including Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami, engaged with Pop Art’s approach and realized what it had opened up for discussion with a degree of consistency and entrepreneurial deftness that arguably pushed postmodern irony to its breaking point. When Crane points out that these new types of artists “view their role more as popular-culture entertainers than as an avant-garde producing high cul­ ture,”129 this translates into a diminished seriousness of the cultural role of the artist. Paradoxically, it also reveals that the business of art is, in fact, taken quite seriously, both by the artist and by (the rest of) the business world. As Jonathan Schroeder observes: “Typical turns to art, artists, and aesthetics in management and marketing often in­v olve ill-defined groping for ‘innovation,’ ‘creativity’, or ‘play.’ But art is serious business. Successful artists—those that manage to have their work widely exhibited, bought, and collected—may be seen as twin engines of branding knowledge, both as consummate image managers, and as managers of their own brand—the artist.”130

This convergence of artist and economy has been facilitated by a complementary gesture on the side of business. Ullrich observes that particularly during the Internet boom at the end of the 1990s, managers and entrepreneurs started experimenting more boldly, developing ever-new ideas for services and skills, and thus suspending the strict orientation of business activities towards imme­ diate, certain marketability. In a time of lesser economic pressure and with a disposition more open to risk-taking, businesspeople were turning against the overarching dominance of instrumental reason.131 While the artist became more business-like, the entrepreneur turned towards creativity and experimentation, formerly the domains of the modern paradigm of art.

W here ’s the A rtist ? F rom A uctorial A rtist to E ntrepreneurial A rtist Before I go on to discuss the discursive turn of business to art and aesthetics in more d ­ etail, I want to offer some thoughts on the relation between the new role of the artist and the question of authorship. Minimalism and Conceptual 128 | Cp. Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde, 81. 129 | Ibid., 82. 130 | Schroeder, “The Artist and the Brand,” 5. 131 | Ullrich, “Kunst als Arbeit? Aus der Geschichte eines anderen Kunstbegriffs,” 148.

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Art questioned the nature of the artist’s work, suggesting that the artist was ­involved in its creation above all intellectually rather than manually. Pop Art pursued a similar strategy. However, in contrast to the other two art move­ ments, Pop Art situated the entrepreneurial artist in the space opened up by the deconstruction of the auctorial artist. This new type of artist can be understood as a paradoxical consequence of the deconstructivist work that heralded “the end of the author,” and thus more generally the end of artistic authority in the previously established categories. Most crucially, it deconstructed the nar­ rative of romantic individualism and opened up the space for different practices of legiti­mation. Of these practices, market behavior and market success came to be highly significant, and even defining. Charles Harrison claims that the ­death of the artist was followed by two types of reincarnation. “In the Duchampian tradition, the artist as author died only to be resurrected as dandy. … In the more degenerate continuations of Conceptual Art, the death of the artist as author was the birth of the artist as self-curator.” 132

I would like to add a third type of reincarnation, which I consider highly relevant for contemporary culture: in Pop Art, the artist as author died to be reincarnated as entrepreneur. How did this reincarnation come about? As we have seen earlier, in Abstract Expressionism the artist was the origi­ nator of inspiration and meaning. With Minimalism, the artist stepped back from the manual production of art, thus putting the function of the artist up for discussion. However, the Minimalists still held onto their role as authors of their works. They exerted this function primarily through their intellectual involvement in creating the work, which they expressed not least by publishing manifestos and theoretical texts that explained the intellectual context of their aesthetic products. Finally, with Conceptual Art, the artist stepped back even further from the object, and with it, from the idea that art was the subjective expression of the artist. Helen Molesworth’s argument can be applied to both Minimalism and Conceptual Art: “The desire on the part of the artist to remove any trace of his or her manual labor or artistic subjectivity from the work of art was motivated by a desire to avoid the fetishism of the art object—and to escape the myth of the artist, in particular, as a primary arbiter of meaning.”133

132 | Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 93f. 133 | Molesworth, Work Ethic, 152.

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Still, as I have argued earlier, Conceptual Art is not to be mistaken for a gesture of self-abrogation on the part of the artist. Rather, Conceptual Art established a tension between, on the one hand, the rejection of the romantic, individualist, subjectivist artist, and, on the other hand, the strong empowerment of the artist as aesthetic authority over his or her own works, and even over the definition of art in general. This tension between de-subjectification and self-­ empowerment can be read as an expression of the Conceptualists’ desire to break free from the power of both the art critic and the art market. Both Mini­ malism and Conceptual Art thus strongly questioned the role of the artist as (material) p ­ roducer and as author, while at the same time maintaining the crucial discursive impor­tance of the artist, even if removed from the production of art. Criticism of the authorial role of the artist is not new. Already in 1934, ­Walter Benjamin argued for reconsideration of the modernist idea of the writer as individual, autonomous author. Benjamin maintained that authors should not be autonomous in the sense of separating themselves from their function as producers, but should instead identify as producers and thus as members of the proletariat. This identification would simultaneously break the ideological conditioning of readers as consumers, and instead empower them as co-­ producers and thus holders of agency.134 There is an important parallel between this deconstruction of the myth of the author undertaken by Benjamin and the three major American post-war art movements we are discussing. They all have in common a fundamental critique of the author as creator and may, as Harrison suggests, “be allowed to converge as forms of critique of cultural hagiography and individualism.”135 Yet rather than identifying the artist as the proletarian producer, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop Art ultimately sep­arate the artist as author from the artist as producer, and render him or her independent from the manual execution of the work. The critique of the artist as individual author in post-war American visual culture thus takes a route that is significantly different from Benjamin’s Marxist view. Apart from the obvious differences in historical and geographical context, two aspects most clearly distinguish the post-war American take on the cultural and social function of the artist from the pre-war European critique: firstly, the different concepts of

134 | Benjamin strongly criticizes left-wing bourgeois intellectuals as only superficially anti-­c apitalist: “I want to show that however revolutionary this political tendency may a­ ppear, it actually functions in a counterrevolutionary manner as long as the writer experi­e nces his solidarity with the proletariat ideologically and not as a producer.” ­Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review 62 no.1, [1934] (July-­ August 1970): 83-96, 88. 135 | Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 92.

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authorship in literature and in visual art, and secondly, the distinct tradition of individualism in American culture. Firstly, we can consider the difference between authorship in literature and in visual art by taking a closer look at literary theory that is contemporary with the visual art movements discussed here. Roland Barthes was the first to proclaim the “death of the author” in literary theory. Notably, he did not mean the actual absence of an author. What Barthes called for was a change in perspective, away from any kind of biographical interest in the author, and away from the idea of individual originality in art. The close relation of Barthes’ argument with the thinking of his American contemporaries in visual art is obvious. Barthes further proposed that writing, rather than constituting the expression of a pre-existing author’s voice, is “the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”136 The author is not to be understood as a subjectivity that speaks, nor as an original creator of meaning, but rather as a “scriptor” who only exists in simultaneity with the text.137 “The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”138

The text is the performative moment that brings the scriptor into existence, and it does so only for the time being. This is what Barthes sees as the difference between inscription, which is performative and thus aligns with his theory, and expression, which relies on the older concept of authorship. The ultimate importance of abolishing the author and of recognizing only the performative existence of a scriptor lies in its freeing the text from the dominance of the governing norms of interpretation. For Barthes, these norms are upheld by literary critics:

136 | Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, [1968] 1977), 142. 137 | Julia Kristeva later also elaborates on these thoughts, similarly understanding the artist not as creator but as scriptor who is in constant dialogue with other texts; she thus links the idea of the scriptor to her concept of intertextuality. The most radical extension of this thought is proposed by Jean Baudrillard, who states pessimistically that artists may now remain “only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.” Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 2002), 133. 138 | Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 145 (Barthes’s italics).

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Ar t/Commerce: The Convergence of Ar t and Marketing in Contemporar y Culture “When the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author.”139

This freeing of the text from the interpretive power of the critic is quite similar to the liberation of the work of art, variously attempted by American artists more or less contemporaneously with Barthes’ 1968 essay. As we have seen, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop Art all turned against the discursive domi­nance of art criticism, art theory, and art history. Harrison puts these various attempts at deconstructing the idea of a unified, pre-existing speaking subject in perspective, pointing out that what is happening here is less the killing of the author than simply (but significantly) a questioning of the concept of the author and its historicity. Harrison suggests that for visual art, this questioning of the author can be understood as a logical next step after the questioning of the art object,140 which used to be the basis of the authorial importance of the artist. This is where both a major difference and a conceptual convergence between the visual arts and literature come into view. In literature, the function of the author in relation to the work was once pointed to by what Harrison calls an “existential authenticity,” which referred to the author primarily in terms of an actual subjectivity behind the work. In contrast, what was crucial in the visual arts was “‘orthographic’ authenticity”—in other words, the fact and idea of the artist signing the painting, which we can understand more generally in terms of the artist’s physical touch. This is the principle Marcel Duchamp famously used and undermined when sign­ ing a urinal (with a pseudonym) to mark it as a work of art. When the nature of the art object subsequently changed from a work (supposedly) created by an individual to a co-produced object or even just to an idea, the importance of this “‘orthographic’ authenticity” was diminished in favor of the existential authenticity known in literature.141 Authorial legitimation of the work now stemmed no longer from the trace of the artist’s hand, but rather from the fact that there was a thinking, creative artist involved in the process of the work’s creation. What Harrison does not elaborate upon is the extent to which this can be under­­stood as an approximation of the visual artist’s authorial function to that of the literary author. Jackson Pollock had inscribed his subjectivity onto the 139 | Ibid., 147. 140 | “To open to question those conventions according to which the work of art is categorized and individuated was thus inevitably also to question assumptions about the individual artist and about his or her position as the author of the work.” Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 91. 141 | Cp. Ibid., 92.

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canvas by leaving traces of his body’s movements (plus his signature). Minimal­ ist objects, in contrast, were smooth and clean surfaces that did not b ­ etray any bodily involvement of the artists, who, moreover, communicated f­ reely that they had produced their works partly or wholly with the help of others. How­ever, ­artists now also became authors (in the literary sense of the word), w ­ riting and theorizing about their work, as Judd and Morris most prominently did. ­A rtists now claimed authorship through their thought process and their ­w riting, rather than t­hrough leaving a trace of their hand.142 Conceptual Art took this even a step further, dispensing with the material object (or its relevance) altogether, and suggesting that only the artist’s idea determined a work of art. Looking at these three move­ments in sequence, we can thus see how the artist became an artist via his or her function as an author, first literally and then conceptually. Conceptual Art transformed the visual artist into first and foremost a generator of ideas, who may or may not come around to expressing these. We can understand the ensuing self-empowerment of the artist as one mani­festation of Foucault’s thoughts about the function of the author. One year ­after Barthes, Foucault posed the question, “What is an Author?” and concluded that the author is not a “genial creator of work”: “The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses: in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. … The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”143

In other words, the author is a discursive instrument, a figure of speech, which we hold up as a bulwark against the dangers of wild, unregulated discourse. Foucault here thinks about wild discourse as one in which the fictive would not be constrained but rather “would operate in an absolutely free state,” and 142 | A notable opposition to this was Anne Truitt. Although Truitt, too, had many of her sculptures prefabricated according to her specifications, what sets her apart from other Minimalist sculptors is her use of color. Still strongly connected to color field painting even in the coloring of her Minimalist sculptures, the versatile use of color and the slight visibility of brushstrokes keep her work closer to the orthographic than to the existential tradition of authorship. In relation to my argument about an increasing de-­s ubjectification of artworks presented in my previous chapter Art Objects/Brand Products, I would like to suggest that Truitt upholds a tradition of subjective expression that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries and successors. 143 | Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, [1969] 1984), 118-119.

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in which everyone could use the fictive as they see fit. If we think back for a moment to Lacan as well as to Iser’s elaborations on the fictive, the imaginary, and the real,144 the major danger that the deregulation of the fictive is that the boundaries between the fictive and the real might collapse. Everyone could produce stories at any time, and we would be at a loss for determining whether these were real of fictive. (We might ask whether postmodern culture is much different from this situation). From a different angle, this also reveals that the intended conse­quence of the subversion of the author is the radical empowerment of the r­ eader. W ­ olfgang Iser suggests that aesthetic experience can only come into being as an inter­ action between text and reader. Foucault understands the ­author as a function that keeps at bay the proliferation of meaning by everyone. And ­Barthes ­finishes his eulogy for the author by stating that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”145 Thus, in a late redemption, Benjamin gets what he wanted: the reader becomes co-producer rather than consumer. How­ ever, this happens in a different way than Benjamin had hoped. While production is partly resituated in the viewer, the role of the viewer is strengthened at the cost of the author. The viewer’s interpretation becomes more important than the author’s intention, such that the author becomes “a shifting absence… that can only ever be temporarily constituted in the viewer’s/reader’s mind.”146 This entails a democratization of art: the opening up of meaning creation to the audience carries the potential for greater accessibility and comprehensibility of cultural products to more people. Yet, this opening towards the audience also means an opening towards the market, which has an ambivalent consequence: the artist as a cultural authority looses importance, and with him, a notion of art based on values other than those of the market. To reiterate: while the Conceptualists manifested Foucault’s thoughts, they were by no means engaged in discursive self-effacement. They denied being original creators of works and subverted their authorship in relation to its former dominance in the visual arts, yet they simultaneously strengthened their authorial function by appropriating the discursive function of the author. They did not give up control over the meaning of a work; quite on the contrary, they maintained that this meaning was to be determined or at least contained by the artist rather than by art critics or the market.147 While orthographic authen144 | Wolfgang Iser, “Fictionalizing Acts,” Amerikastudien-American Studies 31, no. 1 (1986): 5-15; Fluck, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” 145 | Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148. 146 | Jones, Machine in the Studio, 198. 147 | This is exactly what Joseph Kosuth put into words here: “If my intention is denied at its inception, then my responsibility for the meaning I generate in the world as an

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ticity lost importance, existential authenticity became crucial. It was now the artist who determined what did or did not constitute art. Like Minimalism, Conceptual Art problematized the idea of the artist as author. Yet neither put the a­ uthor to rest. While the player changed from art critic to artist, the game ­stayed the same. The difference between visual art and literature can thus ­nea­t ly be summarized with the observation that in literature, the literary critics killed the author, while in the visual arts, the authorial artists killed the critics. This is why marking the authorial function is crucial. It marks the discur­ s­ive position of the artist. It also functions as an economic investment. This leads us to the second point in my argument here, namely the crucial impor­ tance of individualism in American culture. Harrison observes that the “signi­ fication of an individual authorial personality is [not] a necessary condition of works of visual art.”148 The explanation for the ongoing importance of an ­autho­r ial legitimation of a work (apart from the individual creative ego) could lie in the discourse of which it takes part. This is the case in both cultural and economic terms: the artist as author serves the functions of discursive visibility just as much as that of economic ambition. The need for authorial legitimation is related to the need for branding that Jonathan Schroeder notes with regard to artists. It is also a manifestation of a broader discursive formation. Harrison summarizes that “The individualism often represented as endemic to Modernism in not a necessary func­ tion in the production of (modern) art. Rather it is a value necessary to that economic system to which Modernist theory accommodates itself.”149

The importance of an authorial function stems from the socio-economic discourse within which modern art is situated, rather than from the discourse of art itself. Minimalism and Conceptual Art problematized the question of author­ ship, but it was Andy Warhol who most consequently followed the economic logic of this discourse. Warhol undermined the authorial function of the artist more strongly than his contemporaneous Minimalists and the later Conceptualists. At the same time, he produced a new kind of pseudo-authorial artist: the entrepreneurial artist. For the majority of his successful years as an artist, Andy Warhol did not work as an individual, but rather with teams of people who researched and produced many of his works. As discussed earlier, Warhol under­mined the traditional image of the artist as original, intentional c­ reator artist is also nullified. The artist becomes just another producer of goods for the market, where the work finds its meaning.” Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” 463. 148 | Harrison, Essays on Art & Language, 93. 149 | Ibid., 92.

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by using techniques like rubber stamping and silk-screening. This removed the artist’s manual work and the immediate impact of artistic intention, leaving the production to the hands of assistants and the artwork’s final shape largely up to chance. Henry Sayre points out that this self-removal of the artist not only applied to the methods but also to the content of Warhol’s work: “Since very early on, Warhol often, though not always, removed himself from the actual production of his art, relying on a silk-screen process which allowed him to leave most of the details of making his art to others. His Campbell’s Soup Cans not only suggested the commodity status of art but also denied Warhol’s prestige as creator—they remain as much Campbell’s as Warhol’s.”150

The same effect of co-authorship, or co-branding, applies to his celebrity prints: the stars are as much their own (and the public’s) as they are Warhol’s. Warhol thoroughly removed himself as author in the orthographic sense, even in the way in which he used his signature. While he sometimes signed his works, he also had a signature stamp that he or others used to imprint his signature on works. On this, he commented that “I don’t always use a rubber stamp for my signature; but I turned to the idea of using a rubber stamp signature because I wanted to get away from style. I feel an artist’s signature is part of the style, and I don’t believe in style.”151

How is this dismissal of orthographic authorship an economic strategy? We might conclude from Warhol’s denial of the importance of an artist’s authen­ ticating signature that rather than orthographical authorship, existential author­ship was important to him, just as it was for the Conceptualists dis­ cussed above.152 Yet, there is a significant difference between Warhol’s and the 150 | Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 31. 151 | Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews: 1962-1987 (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2004), 196. Warhol’s undermining of the authenticating function of the signature turns out to have worked all too well. In a lawsuit against the Andy Warhol Foundation and its Authenticating Board which cost them about $7m in defense costs, Joe Simon-Whelan, the owner of a silkscreen manufactured by a commercial printer yet signed by Warhol, contested the Authenticating Board’s evaluation of the print. In spite of the fact that Warhol had dated, signed, and dedicated the work, the board had deemed the print inauthentic on the grounds of its mode of production. The dispute was ended with a settlement. 152 | It should be mentioned at least in passing that the question of orthographical authorship is closely related to the general tendency of a lessening trace of the artist’s

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Conceptualists’ ways of implying authorship. While many Conceptualist artists ­claimed authorship by trying to secure their influence, even their control, over the “proliferation of meaning” through an abundance of theoretical texts and statements, Warhol refrained from giving elaborate theoretical explanations of his work. Where he voiced his opinions or intentions, they remained either vague and ambiguous or highly biographical,153 revealing not much more than his fundamentally ironic and even sarcastic approach to his work and to the culture of which it formed part. Instead of creating the impression of a unified artistic intention, Warhol created an artist persona, or more specifically, a persona hovering uneasily somewhere between the merited status of a star and the questionable glamour of a celebrity. Thomas Crow points out the direct connection between the withdrawal of personal expression and the increasing importance of the artist figure: “The less self-expression has been valued, the more the self of the artist—from Warhol to Kruger to Koons to Hirst—has come to loom over the work.”154 What is looming, however, is not the artist as existential author, the subjectivity behind the work. Again, rather than looking for an essentialist core of pre-existing artistic subjectivity that is reflected in artistic intention, we should consider Andy ­Warhol’s statements and public appearances as part of the performative crea­ tion of a particular artist persona—a persona that I would call the entrepreneurial artist. It is thus misleading to understand Warhol’s emphasis on his persona as an instance of authorship in terms of existential authenticity: his individual subjectivity was not important for the construction of his artist per­ sona in any kind of existential or essentialist sense. The whole public creation of Warhol’s persona relied on the display of its very artificiality. As Sayre observes, “Warhol’s ‘personality’ was a studied lack of personality, Warhol’s performance a calculated nonperformance…”155 Ultimately, economic interest appeared to be the guiding force behind the whole Warhol enterprise, unifying his work, public appearances, and his testimonial in various advertising campaigns. In creating a recognizable and widely applicable Warhol brand, diversifying his company’s business from painting to film, photography, fashion, and TV, and finally, in hiring Fred Hughes as business manager to turn the Factory into a lucrative enterprise, Warhol proposed ideas that were markedly different from hand in the work, and thus to Walter Benjamin’s thoughts about originality and aura. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. 153 | Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ‘60s (New York: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); Andy Warhol, A: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, [1968] 1998). 154 | Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 101. 155 | Sayre, The Object of Performance, 31.

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known notions of authorship. Warhol did not rely on orthographic or existential notions of artistic authorship. Instead, he was an entrepreneurial artist. While an artist persona geared towards market success diverges signifi­ cantly from classical modernist notions of the artist, it does not do away with individualism. As I discussed above, Barbara Rose observed in a contemporary essay about Pop Art that since the works looked like they could be done by any­ one, the artist as individual no longer counted.156 In contrast to this claim, I propose that rather than losing importance altogether, the role of the individual ­changed, along with a change in the very concept of individualism. The artist as individual was no longer either alienated from her- or himself or from s­ ociety, either a mindless worker or a romantic, solitary bohemian. Instead, the individual now came to be self-reliant and enterprising. We can speak of empower­ ment in terms of this concept of individualism, only the empowerment we are dealing with here is primarily economic. This development was closely related to the changing exigencies of the economy, which was in the midst of a transformation from industrial to post-industrial. What Pop Art marks is not the loss of the artist’s importance as an individual, but rather a significant ­change in his or her cultural function. Mahsun observed that it was at this point that the link of originality with “the private and personal encounter of the making process—with individualism—”157 is severed. Again, I suggest that this severance is to be understood as a fundamental change in the notion of individualism rather than its loss. In the earlier understanding of individualism (the one strongly furthered by Abstract Expressionism and its proponents), “the artist is thought to use the working process as a means of self-discovery, for finding a true identity—away of authenti­cating the autonomous self as it becomes manifest in the object.”158 This is what I have earlier referred to as romantic individualism. Starting with Andy Warhol, the artist’s work and self-presentation did no longer rely on perso­ nal introspection and subjective originality. Andy Warhol instead proposed an entrepreneurial individualism. Warhol remained important as an individual artist, yet not in terms of the modernist idea of the artist as autonomous, independent creator. Warhol was crucial, even indispensable for his art because he was the motor of his ­company. This included his appearance and his name—in short, his brand—as well as his creative input. And yet, the nature of Warhol’s input in individual pieces varied, and often remained questionable. Thus, rather than understanding Warhol’s artistic contribution in terms of the romantic, modernist ideal of the artist, we can see Warhol as the artistic director of a his company, whose ideas 156 | Barbara Rose, “Pop in Perspective.” 157 | Mahsun, ed., Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, 78. 158 | Ibid., 78.

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and visions guided the process, and whose input was then fed into a bigger machine. The result was not directly a product of this one person’s creativity, and even less was it attributable to this one person’s execution. Warhol carried important managerial functions, if not strictly in terms of business management and finances, very much so in terms of guiding the execution of production processes, the direction of the Warhol enterprise’s development, and the use of the Warhol brand. The ambivalence Jones observes between “Warhol as auteur and Warhol as absent manager”159 can be resolved, I would like to suggest, if we think of Warhol not as either authorial artist or business manager, but rather as the market-oriented artist that I have termed the entrepreneurial artist. It is this entrepreneurial type of artist that has stepped into the shoes of the authorial artist, offering a new unifying and structuring principle to the understanding of creative production in our culture. Foucault seems to have predicted a similar development, even though he might not have had in mind the foundation of the artist persona on economic principles: “I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another, but still with a system of constraint—one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined, or, perhaps, experienced.”160

I would like to suggest that a dominant system of constraint today is that of market success. Often, the stories we come to tell are stories of market success; often, only those who have market success get to tell their stories; and often, only the stories with potential market success get to be told. To summarize, it is not just Pop Art’s much discussed participation in the culture of consumption that is interesting in the present context; it is the ­changing role of the artist, from authorial to entrepreneurial artist, that results from this participation. If we situate this in a larger context, the rise of the entrepreneurial artist becomes a logical step in the development of Western consumer culture. When a society that is based on the assumption of con­stantly increasing consumption reaches a point at which neither the actual need for products, nor even the production of these products within respective national economies, increases—the stage of saturation of consumption (based on needs rather than desires), and globalization of production—then the major economic factor in this consumer economy has to change. This is where creativity, innovation, and aesthetic skills become crucial, in order to invent and present 159 | Jones, Machine in the Studio, 198. 160 | Foucault, “What is an Author?” 119.

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products to a saturated market so as to create new incentives for consumption. By taking up the images and products of this consumer society and using marketing methods familiar to consumers, the artist increasingly becomes part of this culture. And if market success increasingly comes to be the measure of artistic success (perhaps an understandable reverse conse­quence of an earlier, elitist understanding of art), thus displacing other modes of valuation, then it seems warranted for the artist to carve out and hold a position in this market. This is, in a nutshell, one explanation for the economic self-empowerment of the artist that leads him or her to become an entrepreneur and manager of a business. We should note that the rise of the entrepreneurial artist is ambivalent. It displaces earlier images of the artist that were based on the modernist assumption of autonomy; it also makes clear that the idea of withdrawn, individualist, ingenious creativity more often than not is a myth. This new view of the artist thus potentially gives deserved attention to the multitude of influences that feed into the creation of an artwork, and into creativity and innovation more generally. Pop Art thus “reminds us that very little of what we regard as creative lies within the realm of auto­ nomous individuality—of the solitary, subjective, self-centered world then imposed upon others. … We are reminded that much of what we think of as originality—that is, indications of spontaneity, freedom, and improvisation—is actually experience of a participatory style.”161

Pop Art also reminds us that the creativity of the individual, even if she or he is in some way a part of a team, is a prerequisite of capitalist modes of value ­gen­e­­­ration, in both cultural and economic terms. This prerequisite is b ­ ecoming more and more fundamental to Western economies and cultures the less any actual production of material goods takes place in these societies.

H ere ’s the A rtist : The C re ative I ndustries and the C re ative E conomy The need of contemporary capitalist economies for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism has today found expression in two particularly visible ways: firstly, in the prominence of the creative industries, which constitute an economic sector based on these qualities; and secondly, in the extent to which these qualities have become increasingly foundational for the economy as a whole. Let me elaborate on the first point. The most common label for the sector of the 161 | Mahsun, ed., Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue, 78-79.

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economy in question is ‘creative industries,’ and for this reason a good deal of the discussion that follows will focus on this term. However, the more general perspective that the term ‘creative economy’ suggests may be more useful for a broader discussion. As John Howkins observes, “creativity is not new and neither is economics, but what is new is the nature and extent of the relationship between them, and how they combine to create extraordinary value and wealth.”162 In order to express these overall changes in the economy and the crucial importance of the art/commerce link, in particular regarding the new artist/entrepreneur persona, in fact, I prefer the term ‘creative economy.’ There are three reasons for this preference. Firstly, the term expres­ses a more general principle that underlies not just one or several indus­trial ­sectors, but virtually the whole consumption-based, Western capitalist economy of ­today. Secondly, the term ‘creative industries’ appears inappropriate in a post-­ industrial era in which value generation takes place not in industrial produc­ tion but in the production of knowledge, ideas, and services. In contrast, the use of the term ‘creative economy’ does not connote industrial methods of production and value generation, and is therefore more suitable. Thirdly, the term has a more neutral tone than ‘creative industries,’ mainly because of the cultural theoretical evolution of the latter term, on which I will elaborate shortly. In order to understand the terms well, we need to trace their genesis. In short, the term ‘creative economy’ is an extension of the term ‘creative indus­ tries,’ which is itself an extension of the term ‘cultural industries,’ which comes from the critique developed in the Frankfurt School’s culture industry thesis. It is useful to trace each individual step. The term ‘creative industries’ ­emerged in a policy context and was first used officially in the UK during the late 1990s, when the Blair Labour Government established a Creative I­ndustries Task Force to analyze this area of economic value generation and to develop policies to further promote it. The Task Force was part of the ­Department of ­Culture, ­Media and Sport (DCMS), which in “The Creative Industries ­Mapping ­Document” (1998, revised 2001), defined the creative industries as “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploita­tion of intellectual property.”163 162 | John Howkins, The Creative Economy (New York, London, et al.: Penguin, 2001), viii. 163 | Media and Sport Department for Culture, “Creative Industries Mapping Document” (London: 2001). Foreword, 4. The Department’s 1998 Mapping Document subsumes the following under the term creative industries: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, fashion, film, leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio. The 2001 version displays only minor adjustments.

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While it remains a question of classification and interpretation which specific sectors of economic production are subsumed under the term ‘creative industries,’ it is clear that it is an extension of the term ‘cultural industries.’ ‘Creative industries’ refer to all kinds of products generally based on creative or artistic input. The ‘cultural industries,’ in turn, are closely related to more traditional areas of artistic production, such as books, film, and television, as well as all kinds of performative arts and various types of information-based media, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and the Internet. The term ­‘cultural ­industries’ criticizes and expands upon Adorno and Horkheimer’s seminal analysis of the culture industry. David Hesmondhalgh traces back the plurali­­ zation of ‘­culture industry’ into ‘cultural industries’ to the left-wing and student protests, and to thinkers associated with these movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. During this time, French sociologists picked up and productively criticized Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept, in particular its assumption of a unified field of production.164 In contrast to the theories of the Frankfurt School, they asserted that “there were different logics at work in different ­t ypes of cultural production.”165 Further, the sociologists of the Industries ­Culturelles also maintained that the convergence of culture and capital was ­contested, ambi­ valent, and complex, rather than smooth and total, as the Frankfurt School had suggested.166 Contemporaneously with this re-evaluation of the culture industry in ­France, political economist Nicholas Garnham argued in the UK against an “idealist” approach to cultural policymaking, essentially meaning an approach that was in line with the critical tradition of the Frankfurt School and of moder­ nism in general. In his opinion, this approach ignored that “most peo­ple’s cultural needs and aspirations are being, for better or worse, supplied by the market as goods and services,”167 a view that had been elaborated on theoretically by the left-wing British Cultural Studies movement some ten years earlier. Thus, the term ‘cultural industries’ was chosen in place of ‘culture industry,’ 164 | Edgar Morin, La Culture de Masse et la Vedettisation de la Politique (Dijon: ­A ssociation française de science politique, 1962); Armel Huet et al., Capitalisme et Industries Culturelles (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, [1978] 1984); ­B ernard Miège, “The Cultural Commodity,” Media, Culture, and Society 1 (1979); ———, “The Logics at Work in the New Cultural Industries,” Media, Culture, and ­S ociety 9 (1987); ———, The Capitalization of Cultural Production (New York; Bagnolet: I­nternational, 1989); Janet Wasko, Graham Murdock, and Helena Sousa, The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 165 | David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007), 16. 166 | Cp. Ibid.,17. 167 | Nicholas Garnham, “Concepts of Culture: Public policy and the cultural industries,” Cultural Studies 1 (1987): 23-37, 25.

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as a critical tool for grasping the complexity of the dynamics between art and commerce, or more generally between culture and commerce, in contrast to the categorically pessimistic perspective of the Frankfurt School. In accordance with this interpretation by French academia, French political scientist and cultural policy administrator Augustin Girard made significant use of the term in cultural policy, arguing for the inclusion of the cultural indus­tries in cultural policy making. This argument was notably featured in his papers for UNESCO.168 The pluralization of Horkheimer and Adorno’s term ‘culture industry’ to the new term ‘cultural industries’ was thus guided, on the one hand, by the desire to find a more nuanced term for a critical yet not wholly pessimistic evaluation of the convergence of culture and commerce, and, on the other hand, by the motivation to have the field recognized as an economic sector, thus opening up to policymaking and public funding a broader field than the one traditionally included in discussions about public funding of the arts. The contemporary term creative industries started to gain currency in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The naming and simultaneous creation (qua classification) of the creative industries as a crucial sector of the economy can be traced back to the UK. However, the adoption of the more general term that extends beyond the core cultural industries, as well as the implications of this extension, ultimately reach much wider into all capitalist economies. Since the turn of the century, the term has entered international discourse. Both ­UNESCO and UNCTAD (United Nations Committee on Trade, Aid, and ­Development) have offered definitions of the creative industries. While it has been adapted and used differently in various national and international con­texts, the importance of the creative industries as an economic force that extends well beyond the scope of the cultural industries—or the traditional arts—has been recognized internationally. In developing a “Framework for Cultural Statistics in 2007,” UNESCO attempted to carve out an international consensus on the various subcategories included in the cultural industries. The report identifies some core areas as well as areas that remain contested.169 UNCTAD, in turn, chose a more abstract 168 | For Girard’s position on the cultural industries, see Augustin Girard, “Cultural ­I ndustries,” in French Cultural Policy Debates: A Reader, ed. Jeremy Ahearne (New York: Routledge, 2002). For a discussion of Girard’s significance, see Ruth Towse, “­ Cultural Economics, Copyright and the Cultural Industries,” in Society and Economy in ­Central and Eastern Europe: Journal of the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public ­Administration, 2000: 107-134, 108-109. 169 | UNESCO has recognized the crucial importance of the cultural industries and the creative industries for both economic growth and cultural identity. The core sectors identified in the “Framework for Cultural Statistics” are: publishing and literature; the performing arts; music; film, video, and photography; broadcasting (television and

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approach and accordingly preferred the more general term ‘creative economy.’ Their 2008 “Creative Economy Report” understands the creative economy as “cycles of creation, production, and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs,” and as “a set of knowledge-­ based activities” that include, but extend beyond, the arts. According to this definition, the creative economy includes products as well as services and is oriented towards the market, “generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights.”170

­r adio); visual arts and crafts; advertising; design, including fashion; museums, galleries, and libraries; interactive media like the Internet and computer games. Sectors that are still open to debate are architecture, software, and hardware (including all ­t ypes of electronic goods); festivals; intangible cultural heritage; leisure activities, i­ncluding sports. In the “Framework for Cultural Statistics,” the difficulty of distinguishing ­b e­t ween the creative industries and the cultural industries is even referred to expressly as the “Creative-Cultural Debate.” “2009 UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics,” 2009. http://www.uis.unesco.org/culture/Pages/framework-cultural-statistics.aspx. Another UNESCO report, which distinguishes in more general terms between the cul­ tural industries and the creative industries, betrays the difficulties of precisely fixing an evolving and highly abstract concept beyond concrete examples and classifications: “The term cultural industries refers to industries which combine the creation, production and commercialization of creative contents which are intangible and cultural in nature. The contents are typically protected by copyright and they can take the form of a good or a service. Cultural industries generally include printing, publishing and multi­ media, audiovisual, phonographic and cinematographic productions as well as crafts and design. The term creative industries encompasses a broader range of activities which include the cultural industries plus all cultural or artistic production, whether live or produced as an individual unit. The creative industries are those in which the product or service contains a substantial element of artistic or creative endeavor and include activities such as architecture and advertising.” “Understanding Creative Industries: Cultural Statistics for Public-Policy Making.” http://portal.unesco.org/culture/es/­ files/30297/11942616973cultural_stat_EN.pdf/cultural_stat_EN.pdf, 3. For further discussions about the term’s definition, see Towse, “Cultural Economics, Copyright and the Cultural Industries”; Terry Flew, “Beyond ad hocery: Defining Creative ­Industries” (paper presented at “Cultural Sites, Cultural Theory, Cultural Policy: The Second ­International Conference on Cultural Policy” in Te Papa, Wellington, New Zealand, 2326 January 2002); Justin O’Connor, “The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Review of the Literature,” in Creative Partnership Series (London: Arts Council England, 2007). 170  |  “Creative Economy Report 2008. The Challenge of Assessing the Creative E­ conomy: Towards Informed Policy-making,” 2008. http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/ditc20082 cer_en.pdf, 13.

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Beyond the differences in both the classification and the politics of the terms, what becomes apparent here is that the growing importance of the principle that underlies the creative industries is internationally recognized. Creativity and innovation are crucial factors of economic growth. UNCTAD holds that “creativity is increasingly being recognized as a key strategic asset driving economic growth as well as determining successful integration into a rapidly changing global economy.”171 The creative industries account for an estimated 7 percent of the world’s GDP and have a growth forecast much stronger than that of the overall economies.172 The importance of the creative economy is fueled both by changes in the capitalist economy and by related cultural and discursive changes, and we need to situate the creative industries and the creative economy in these contexts in order to grasp their relevance and complexity. On the economic side, the term creative industries emerged from the context of the new economy, flexibilization, the rise of a knowledge- and information-based economy, globalization, and the increasing importance of services and the service sector.173 I will briefly sketch some of the important points of interrelation between these large economic developments and the creative industries. In regard to the dynamics and structure of the new economy, the creative indus­tries share the important function of fostering individual entrepreneur­ ship and startup businesses. This, in turn, is related to the flexibilization of production processes that results from the vertical disintegration of indus­tries (such as, for example, the US film industry), as well as the establishment of rela­ tively new industries, such as ICT and software. Flexibilization, here, m ­ eans that rather than one company realizing a whole chain of production from inception to finished product, parts of the process are developed and imple­mented by smaller firms. This leads to a production system in which large companies col171 | “Creative Industries and Development,” 2004. http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/ tdxibpd13_en.pdf, 3. 172 | 2003 Worldbank and PricewaterhouseCoopers data quoted ibid., 3. 173 | See Flew, “Beyond ad hocery: Defining Creative Industries”; Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, [1996] 2010); M anuel Castells and Yuko Aoyama, “Paths towards the Informational Society: ­ ­E mployment ­S tructure in G-7 Countries. 1920-1990,” International Labour Review 133, no. 1 (1994); Yuko Aoyama and Manuel Castells, “The Informational Society, An Empirical Assessment: Employment and Occupational Structures of G-7 Countries in the 1990s,” International Labour Review 141, no. 1-2 (2002); Manuel Castells, “­Information Technology, G ­ lobalization and Social Development,” UNRISD Discussion Paper No. 114, September 1999. http://www.unrisd.org/unrisd/website/document. nsf/ab82a6805797760f80256b4f005da1ab/f270e0c066f3de7780256b67005b728c/$FILE/dp114.pdf.

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laborate with small and medium enterprises (SMEs), with the former buffering the entrepreneurial risk and the latter supplying creativity and innovation.174 The flexibilization of production also finds expression in the outsourcing of industrial production processes, and even of services, such as customer service centers and call centers, to countries with lower paid labor forces. This is made possible by the geo-temporal proximity brought about by technology and globa­lization. As a consequence, it is mainly the inception and development of ideas for products and services, as well as the provision of place-bound services, ­which remain physically based in the Western capitalist economies. The terms ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative economy’ are extensions of what is commonly labeled the knowledge and information society, criticizing an excessive reliance on information and communication technology at the cost of recognizing the crucial importance of human creativity.175 In view of the more extended discussions of the culture of consumption throughout this book, let it suffice to point out here that in regard to this culture, the impor­ tance of the creative industries stems from what Scott Lash and John Urry have called the ”semiotisation of consumption” and the increasing importance of “reflexive goods,” or more generally from the processes we have come to know as the aestheticization of everyday life, referred to by Mike Featherstone, among others.176 The gist of these arguments is that consumer products are increasingly impor­tant for processes of creating individual and cultural meaning, which puts t­ hose who produce the goods and services that enable such processes in a crucial economic and cultural position.

174 | “In creative industries, large organizations provide access to the market, through retailing and distribution, but the creativity comes from a pool of independent content producers.” Charles Leadbeater, Living On Thin Air: The New Economy (London: Penguin, 2000), 49. It should be noted, however, that this flexibilization in production through vertical disintegration on the national scale of production is counterbalanced by a simultaneous horizontal integration taking place on the global scale of distribution, in which various media outlets are owned, managed, and marketed by the same owners, for example by media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch. 175 | See William J. Mitchell, Alan S. Inouye, and Marjory S. Blumenthal, Beyond ­P roductivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (Washington, D.C.: National Academies, 2003); John Hartley, “Introduction,” in Creative Industries, ed. John Hartley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Stuart Cunningham, “Trojan Horse or Rorschach Blot? Creative Industries Discourse around the World,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 4, November (2009). 176  |  Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London; Thousand Oaks, et. al: Sage, 1994), 61; Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Los Angeles; London: Sage, 2007); Flew, “Beyond ad hocery: Defining Creative Industries.”

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So far, I have discussed definitional and more general aspects of the creative industries and the overarching concept of the creative economy. How are these terms used in US-American discourse? The term ‘creative industries’ is less commonly used in the United States than it is in the UK. How­ever, it has recently gained currency in two major contexts. On the regional and mun­i­cipal levels, art, the cultural industries, and the creative industries are ana­lyzed and increasingly recognized as motors of urban and regional (re-) development.177 They are considered as significant factors that contribute to the ­deve­l­­­­­­opment of cities into ‘creative hubs,’ which in turn can foster their ­emer­­gence as global players or strengthen their positions as such.178 Secondly, the term has also been used to emphasize the importance of the arts, most notably by the non-profit interest group Americans for the Arts.179 They define the creative industries narrowly “as both for-profit and nonprofit businesses involved in the creation or distribution of the arts,” and thus exclude the wider field of creative businesses.180 Here, the concept of the creative industries is introduced into the discourse from the sphere of art, rather than from the political or economic spheres with their specific perspectives and interests. 177 | In comparison with the European context, American national cultural politics are rela­ tively weak, which is why the regional and municipal levels are crucial for this discussion. 178 | See also Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), as well as Elizabeth Currid, “Bohemia as ­S ubculture; ‘’Bohemia’’ as Industry: Art, Culture, and Economic Development,” Journal of Planning Literature 23 (2009); ———, “New York as a Global Creative Hub: A Competitive Analysis of Four Theories on World Cities,” Economic Development Quarterly 20 (2006); Stuart Cunningham, “Trojan Horse or Rorschach Blot? Creative Industries Discourse around the World” and Margaret Wyszominski, “The local creative economy in the ­U nited ­S tates,” in Cultural Economy, ed. Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (London: Sage, 2008). In this context, Richard Florida’s work on the “creative class” is also important: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Perseus, 2002); ———, Cities and the Creative Class (New York; Abingdon, OX: Routledge, 2005). 179 | “Americans for the Arts,” http://www.artsusa.org. 180 | “We have taken a conservative approach to defining the Creative Industries by focusing solely on businesses involved in the production or distribution of the arts. For the purposes of this study, the Creative Industries are composed of arts-centric busi­n esses that range from nonprofit museums, symphonies, and theaters to for-profit film, architecture, and advertising companies. We have guarded against o­ verstatement of the sector by excluding industries such as computer programming and scientific ­r e­s earch—both creative, but not focused on the arts.” Ibid. http://www.AmericansFor TheAr ts.org/information_ser vices/research/ser vices/creative_industries/default. asp.

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Accordingly, the concept builds an argument for the importance of creativity for the whole economy, a creativity that is lived, trained, and can be taught in the arts. The Americans for the Arts website quotes former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who states that “the arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new economy of ideas.”181 In this example of US-American discourse, the idea of creativity is used in order to strengthen the cultural position of the arts. This is obviously achieved, how­ ever, by linking the discourse of creativity in the arts to the political and economic discourse of the new economy. What might at first sight seem like a narrow and therefore less relevant definition of the creative industries as arts-related businesses thus turns out to be an even stronger manifestation of the blurring of boundaries between art and commerce. The cultural importance of art here is not based on its being an independent, autonomous sphere, or even on its having economic significance in itself, but rather on its instrumental usefulness for the economic sphere. In the US, despite the fact that the term is used differently than it is in the UK and in international political bodies, creativity is important not only as an abstract quality, but as a hard financial factor in the economy.182 This is an expression of the pronounced dualism in the American dis­course between the arts and culture, on the one hand, and the entertainment and copyright industries, on the other.183 In spite of the growing currency of the term ‘creative industries,’ the term ‘copyright industries’ is more widely used in US-American discourse. The copyright industries include a wide range of creativity-based products and services. While these are not limited to the arts, they include such core artistic fields as literature, film, and music.184 The line 181 | Ibid. http://www.artsusa.org/information_services/toolkit/007.asp. 182 | The very term creativity is admittedly difficult to define. For a summary of different definitions, see Carl R. Hausman, “Creativity: Conceptual and Historical Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For the present discussion, the crucial point is not to define what creativity is or how it works, but rather to point out its crucial discursive position in the contemporary economy—a position that should be conceived of as a discursive trope but just as much as a performative action. This performative action takes place within the discourse that describes or recognizes as creative those cultural and economic processes that appear increasingly central. This effectively makes ‘creative’ a central term. 183 | Cp. Wyszominski, “The local creative economy in the United States.” 184 | The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), “a coalition of associations representing the United States copyright-based industries,” lists the following sectors: “computer software, including business applications software and entertainment software (such as videogame discs and cartridges, personal computer CD-ROMs, and multimedia products); theatrical films, television programs, DVDs and home video and

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of division between what is and what is not included in the copyright industries is established less according to the importance of creativity than in terms of the economic importance of the respective sector. In 1997, copyright became the United States’ leading export: books, films, music, TV programs and other copyright products worth more than $414 billion in total were produced that ­year.185 In 2010, the copyright industries accounted for a significant 11.1 percent of the US gross domestic product, and its foreign sales/exports were significantly larger than the exports of any other major industrial sector.186 Relative to the GDP, the copyright industries in the United States are a stronger factor than in any other economy worldwide, including the UK and the EU. Creativity is a serious economic factor, and the wide use of the term ‘copyright industries’ rather than ‘creative industries’ should not be understood only as a different way to label the same phenomenon. More than this, it ­betrays the pragmatic and financial reality of an economic interest in the strict enforcement of copyrights in the context of an economy in which intellectual rights (in the form of copyrights, patents, or trademark rights) are a crucial form of capital.187 digital representations of audiovisual works; music, records, CDs, and audio­c assettes; and fiction and non-fiction books, education instructional and assessment materials, and professional and scholarly journals, databases and software in all formats.” ­“ International Intellectual Property Alliance.” http://www.iipa.com/aboutiipa.html. 185 | Howkins, The Creative Economy, vii. 186 | Stephen E. Siwek, “Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 2011 Report,” prepared for the International Intellectual Property Alliance, 2011. http://www.iipa. com/pdf/2011CopyrightIndustriesReport.PDF. As the 2004 UNCTAD report on ­“Crea­t ive Industries and Development” observes, “cultural industries make up a subset of the creative industries, while the even broader cluster copyright industries consist of both creative industries and distribution-based industries,” 4. Accordingly, we should note that when considering the strong economic impact of the copyright industries, the share of the distribution should also be taken into account. 187 | Howkins suggests a classification of the creative industries into four subsectors, according to the structure of the final products: copyrights, patents, trademarks or ­d esign. Howkins, The Creative Economy. Only the crucial economic importance of intellectual ownership rights can explain the intense political discussion and publicity surrounding them. This includes efforts to strengthen these rights and thus to commodify intellectual property, as put forward most vocally by the IIPA, but also opposing activism to support the status of intellectual property as a public good, and thus to (partly) decommodify it in the interest of a more democratic access to information and culture. The latter position has been voiced, among others, by Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons organization: Laurence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses ­Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: The Penguin Press,

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This importance of intellectual rights as the primary means of generating capital in the creative economy, the artist turns into a crucial player in this economy. Before I move on to discuss this economic and discursive importance of the artist, it is worth pausing to address the criticism of the terms ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative economy.’ While the terms have gained international currency and have been recognized as labels for important developments in contemporary capitalist economies, they have also been the target of some criticism. This criticism can be divided into two groups: the first features criticism regarding the accuracy of the definition; the second points to the political and discursive background of these terms as well as their future implications. The first line of criticism revolves around questions of definition and terminology, including questions about which term should be used—creative industries, creative economy, or cultural industries—and in which context.188 Certainly, the use of the term depends on the content of the discussion. If a discussion focuses on the fact that the arts and market thinking are no longer opposed to one another, then the term ‘cultural industries’ is preferred. If the more gen­­eral importance of creativity for the economy is at stake, the term ‘creative economy’ is most appropriate. John Howkins, for example, uses this latter term and is often criticized on account of its broadness. Finally, as we have seen above, the definition of what exactly gets categorized as creative industries ­remains somewhat frayed at the edges. The second line of criticism, less about terminology than it is about ideology, charges the term with being above all a tool of neoliberal policies, geared towards commodifying and instrumentalizing the arts and other spheres of creativity that previously had been unimpaired by the mandates of instrumen2004); http://creativecommons.org/. As O’Connor summarizes: “Strengthened IP regu­ lations help keep cultural goods as commodities, just as new rounds of mergers and convergence allows the new media companies to keep a control over distribution.” O’Connor, “The Cultural and Creative Industries,” 43. 188 | Again, O’Connor formulates the problem succinctly when he assesses that “the price paid for the re-branding of the creative industries was a lack of clarity as to their specificity and distinctiveness. What did they do differently to science, or business services, or indeed the service sector generally; were they part of economic or cultural ­p olicy, and how did those two dimensions relate? Did their distinctiveness consist in them having a unique and perhaps difficult business model, or were their inputs and outputs something that went beyond economic measurement and indicators?” ­O ’Connor, “The Cultural and Creative Industries,” 44-45. Further questions open for discussion are whether creativity is a concept too wide, as Pratt suggests, or whether it circumnavigates the question of cultural meaning production, as Hesmondhalgh holds. Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries. Andy C. Pratt, “Cultural Industries and Public Policy: An oxymoron?,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 1 (2005): 31-44.

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tal and economic reason. This criticism sometimes points back to the origins of the term ‘creative industries’ in UK New Labour policy; several accounts suggest that the adoption of the term was a pragmatic decision to loosen up governmental money to support the growing creative sector while avoiding a close associations with culture and the arts. The new term thus severed the two strains of funding—the arts from other areas of creative production—and put the creative industries in close relation to the new economy, “positioning the creative industries at the forefront of economic competitiveness” at the cost of established lines of funding for culture and the arts.189 What could be criticized as excessive roadness in this light appears instead as a risk for the traditional arts to be either left out or else subsumed by and subordinated to more lucrative genres and markets, such as pop music, television, and Internet entertainment. While core elements of the discourse of art were appropriated by the discourse of the creative economy, the funding associated with the arts was not. In short, the second line of criticism suspects that the term ‘creative industries’ expresses a dominance of market principles and market reason over areas formerly shielded from these exigencies. This ideological critique is certainly appropriate and more consequential than the terminological and classificatory discussions. Yet—notwithstanding the discursive power of a new term that rearranges a set of cultural practices accor­ding to the economic instrumentality of the creativity involved, rather than according to their creative freedom—my discussion at present is not about the ideological implications of the term. Rather, the discussions and definitions I have surveyed ultimately point to the same economic and c­ ultural r­ea­l­­­­ity: how­ever we name it or use it, creativity—the human capacity for innova­tion and for the novel treatment of existing material—has become a crucial skill in the contemporary capitalist economy. The difficulties of defining the term and the concept, as well as the intense discussions surrounding it in both the academic and political fields, demon­ strate two things. Firstly, creativity is a relevant, evolving and current concept; and secondly, it is one that is particularly hard to pin down, a difficulty that is likely due to its very currency. Particularly interesting for my discussion is the discursive shift that Hartley points to in this regard, from creative output to creative input, and from cultural products to the economic importance of creativity more generally.190 This focus on creativity, along with the focus on intel­ lectual property rights discussed above, lead us directly into our discussion of the new cultural role of the artist/entrepreneur. 189 | Cp. O’Connor, “The Cultural and Creative Industries,” 43-44. 190 | John Hartley, “From the Consciousness Industry to Creative Industries: Consumer-­C reated Content, Social Network Markets and the Growth of Knowledge,” Cultural Science 1, no. 1, Creative Destruction (2008): 1-26, 12.

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L e ad A ctor in the C re ative E conomy : The A rtist/E ntrepreneur Intellectual rights have come to be of central importance as the capital of the creative economy and creativity— as an economic asset that extends well beyond the arts—has come to occupy a core function in this economy. Both of these developments bring a new type of artist persona center stage in contemporary culture. The way an artist presents himself or herself can now openly include an ambition for market success and the marketing of his or her work. Such self-promotion can reach beyond established art circles to include wider segments of society, facilitated by media and cooperations with both art institutions and commercial companies, most commonly in the fashion industry. Andy Warhol was the first artist to consistently move in this direction, even going so far as to provide celebrity testimonial in advertisements for consumer products as diverse as sunglasses and VCR recorders. In recent years, this coupling of art and the commercial sphere has been propelled in various ways, most notably by such internationally successful artists as Takashi Murakami, Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons. As Damien Hirst cogently stated: “Warhol really brought money into the equation. He made it acceptable for artists to think about money. In the world we live in today, money is a big issue. It’s as big as love, maybe even bigger.”191

Hirst has taken up this subject of money in much of his art, gaining notoriety for such works as his 2007 For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull covered with more than 8,000 diamonds, the production of which cost £14 million. As is the case with many of his works, the aspect of the work that was most intensely discussed was its purported or actual sale and price. Hirst’s approach to his work has thus prompted commentaries such as the following: “Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings—the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative—­revolutionary even.”192

191 | Sean O’Hagan, “The art of selling out,” The Guardian, 6 September 2009. 192 | Germaine Greer, “Germaine Greer Note to Robert Hughes: Bob, dear, Damien Hirst is just one of many artists you don’t get,” The Guardian, 22 September 2008.

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In short, the most important part of Hirst’s art seems to be its marketing and market success. Other artists have moved into the commercial realm by cooperating with well-known brands. To name a few prominent examples: Takashi ­Murakami and Olafur Eliasson worked with the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton. Murakami designed a pattern for Vuitton bags, and when he had a show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporaty Art in 2007/2008, a Vuitton shop was included as part of the exhibition. Eliasson created the Eye See You object(s) that went on display in all Vuitton boutiques worldwide. Both Eliasson and Jeff Koons participated in the BMW Art Car series, treading the narrow line between commissioned art and brand endorsement. Takashi Murakami sells merchandise for his work, including T-shirts, bags, pens, and mouse pads that bear his designs and are similar to the offerings of a museum gift shops, yet produced and sold under his own aegis. They are art world celebrities whose market success is a fundamental, constitutive part of their image as artists. Image 36: Jeff Koons and his BMW art car

Jeff Koons Art Car Paris, Jeff Koons with his BMW M3 GT2 in front of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 2010. © BMW Group. Courtesy of BMW Group.

Moreover, all of these artists do not work solitarily in traditional artists’ studios; rather, they operate their own little companies or factories, effectively act­ ing as entrepreneurs and managers of SMEs (Small to Medium Enterprises). ­According to his website, Murakami operates the company Kaikai Kiki, with

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about 50 employees in Tokyo and an overseas office with about 20 employees in New York.193 In an article for The Guardian, O’Hagan specifies, “[Murakami’s] empire includes studios in Japan and America employing around 100 people; a biannual art fair, Geisai, in Tokyo which promotes the work of young, cutting-edge Japanese artists, and his global merchandising business, KaiKai Kiki, selling everything from videos, T-shirts and mouse pads to mobile-phone pouches and limi­t ededition Louis Vuitton leather bags.”194

Similarly, Jeff Koons employs around 120 people in his New York studio, and he describes his own work expressly in the terms of a manager and art director, who needs to keep a distance from the actual production of the work: “‘It’s a hub, really,’ he says. ‘A lot of different information comes together here from a lot of different areas. At a certain point, I realized I needed to have other people work with me because I wanted to control the production. At the end of the day, it’s exactly the same responsibility. As long as you are making the gesture that you want to make, it’s the same. Plus, sometimes, if you are involved in making a work from start to finish, sitting and painting or whatever, the material can seduce you and you can just get lost in the journey. You can set out to make a turkey and end up making a bear. When you have more distance, you can make clearer decisions.’”195

Koons states that he prefers the position of distanced, cool-headed mana­ger of production processes to direct involvement. Similarly, the other artists mentioned here are creative heads of production who supply the ideas, while the production is executed by mostly anonymous assistants.196 The artists who front the brand are not immediately engaged in the process of creating the product. As O’Connor observes in regard to Damien Hirst: “Like the two main contenders for his throne, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, Hirst is essentially an ideas man. The ideas he hatches in his head are converted into artworks by a team of assistants that, until recently, numbered 150.”197

193 | “What is Kaikai Kiki?,” Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/ whatskaikaikiki. 194 | O’Hagan, “The art of selling out.” 195 | O’Hagan, “The art of selling out.” 196 | Some 45 people work in Eliasson’s studio in Berlin. Additionally, he cooper­a tes with specialists and scientists on specific projects. “Studio Olafur Eliasson team,” http://www.olafureliasson.net/studio.html. 197 | O’Hagan, “The art of selling out.”

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These successful artists are also successful entrepreneurs, who founded and expan­ded a company that can now scale, producing and selling works on the basis of the ideas they provide. They are the figureheads of these companies and the brand names under which their companies’ products are sold. This orientation towards the market can be observed not just in the work and personalities of the artists mentioned above—the critiques of the Neo-Expressionist movement of the late 1970s come to mind.198 These artists of the 1990s and 2000s most strikingly represent an image that brings the logic initiated by Andy Warhol to its contemporary manifestation. When Laurence Alloway observed in 1974 that Pop Art had been “an authen­ tic response to an historical situation,”199 the historical situation in question was the increasing presence of media and media images, as well as the transformation of the American economy from an industrial economy to a service and knowledge economy. Similarly, we should ask ourselves what historical situ­ation artists like Koons and Murakami are responding to, following a similar logic of production and self-presentation three decades later. I would like to argue that this situation can best be grasped with the term creative economy. Intellectual rights represent the main capital of the creative economy, and artists are both the creative producers and holders of this capital. From a wider perspective, their function not only as entrepreneurs and creative directors of their companies but also as brands can be explained with the necessity for the reproduction of this capital. In 1994, Lash and Urry had already observed that if intellectual rights are the primary capital in the contemporary capitalist economy, then this capital needs to be brought into the market reliably and continuously. The established artist guarantees the supply of this capital: “What we are referring to is not intellectual property as a one-off. Rather what we are pointing to is iterated intellectual property. Repeated or iterated successful production of intellectual property place the emphasis no longer on the object produced but on the artist.”200

198 | For a critique of this art’s marketability, see, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting, “ October 16, (Spring 1981): 39-68; Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” Art in America 71, (January 1983): 80-83, 137; Craig Owens, “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women,” Art in America 71, (January 1983): 7-13. 199 | Alloway, American Pop Art, 16. 200 | Lash and Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, 137. This is, for example, the case when contracts are made and advances paid for the production of multiple albums, books, or films.

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This mechanism of supplanting the product with the artist has today become a common and effective way of producing capital in the creative industries. This ­applies both to bigger industries like pop music and to smaller industries like the visual arts. It is this very mechanism that we have already encountered in the art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular in Pop Art and the figure of Andy Warhol. It is also a mechanism that contemporary artists such as Murakami, Koons, Hirst, and Eliasson use. Although their works are produced by numerous employees, they remain the ones who are visible, both as originators and as promoters of the works. In this regard, they become comparable to the art directors of advertising agencies or the entrepreneurs of the creative economy—entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, who, with his creativity, vision, and willingness to take risks and follow his ideas, started his business in a California garage and developed it into the Apple brand empire. Another example of this type of entrepreneur is Richard Branson, who opened the Virgin record store chain in 1972, founded Virgin Atlantic Airlines in 1984, and has since expanded his corporation into a conglomerate with more than 400 businesses, all under the Virgin brand, and all held together by Branson: “Interestingly enough, the chief enigma of the Virgin brand still rests with the personality of its founder. It is Branson’s persona that keeps the Virgin Brand alive with his non-conformist values and personal pursuits...”201 Not even the most commercially successful artists could compete with the size and economic performance of companies like Apple and Virgin. ­However, these companies also grew from the inspiration of one person, developed into SMEs, grew into large companies, and finally became commercial empires. Or at least, this is the narrative told and the image conveyed by the media about such companies. The focus remains on Jobs and Branson as the visionaries and motors of these enterprises.202 Their qualities as creative minds, innovators, outsiders, and visionaries—as people who follow and realize their ideas, how­­ ever unconventional they may be—bring them into close proximity of the artist. Conversely, the artist’s remoteness from the market is no longer a prerequisite for his artistic authenticity; what used to be the reference to an existential authenticity may now be replaced by market ambition and even a cynical atti­ tude towards the making and marketing of art. Indeed, market success is often suspected to be a major source of motivation for artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. And while this is not the only type of artist persona common 201 | Klingmann, “Eyes Which Do Not See: Liners, Automobiles, Airplanes,” 11. 202 | Apple’s much-cited statement in regard to Steve Job’s passing in 2011 reads as follows: “Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.” See, for example, Brandon Griggs, “Steve Jobs praised as Apple’s visionary, creative genius,” CNN US, 6 October 2011.

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or acceptable for contemporary artists, it is a dominant and very visible one. If the artist as romantic individualist is thus replaced by the artist as individualist entrepreneur, then once again, we witness a strong blurring of what used to be considered distinct spheres. In his analysis of the creative industries, Stefano Harney observes this bi-­ directional development from the perspective of management theory. H ­ arney suggests that the development of the creative industries can be understood by combining two complementary views, namely “on the one hand, the arts as the object of management and, on the other hand, the arts as the objective of management.”203 In this dual development, the creative industries are m ­ arked by both the increasing economization and management of the arts and, at the same time, by the goal of business management to generate creative out­comes. It is not just the creative input, but also the creative output that is crucial, primarily in the form of “new levels of property rights in all commodities,” specifically the intellectual property rights discussed above.204 This output is generated by artist-type entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial artists. Management moves into art and art (understood on the basis of such principles as open-minded and open-ended creativity, risk-taking, and innovation) moves into management. While the artist becomes an entrepreneurial businessman and crucial economic agent, the entrepreneur takes on qualities traditionally ascribed to the artist. Artists thus become role models for the wider economy: “Cultural workers were no longer to be characterised as creatives crushed by the wheels of a corporate sector whose values they resisted as best they could; it was precisely these people who were in possession of the means to operate most effectively.”205

The cultural sphere (understood here in its narrow sense as art and its related set of institutions and activities) functions as a template for the creative industries and, by extension, for the wider creative economy. Efficacy and economic deftness have become important prerequisites for artistic success, and the image of the artist as romantic individualist is overturned. Yet, if this is the case, how can the artist provide a role model and template for other creative entrepreneurs? The answer is that the new cultural and economic function of the artist in the creative economy is based on a new type of mythologization. Although both in the arts and in the creative economy, creative work o ­ ften takes place in teams rather than in the solitude of a lonely creator’s mind, indi­ 203 | Stefano Harney, “Creative Industries Debate. Unfinished Business: Labour, ­M anagement, and the Creative Industries,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 3 (May 2010): 431444, 434. 204 | Ibid., 435. 205 | O’Connor, “The Cultural and Creative Industries,” 31.

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vidual creativity still remains crucial in the discourse. According to media narratives, it was the creative genius of Steve Jobs that brought the A ­ pple brand into being and turned it into the world’s largest technology corpora­tion. Even though other people, such as Steve Wozniak, played significant roles in A ­ pple’s development over the years, the public perception focused on Jobs as the brand’s visionary figurehead—just as Warhol remained the face of his ­Factory, and just as Jeff Koons remains the artist, in spite of the 120 people who work for him to make his art happen. In Management and Creativity, Chris Bilton points out that the individualist model of creativity, which was dominant when the discourse of creativity gained ground in the 1960s, has today been superseded by an understanding of creativity rooted more in processes and systems, and thus in teamwork: “while apparently rooted in individual skill, creative processes in the crea­tive industries are essentially collective.”206 And yet, the dominant discourse in ­media cover­ age and in self-branding activities of both artists and entrepreneurs ­remains focused on the individual. As Bilton argues, the myth of the creative genius has made its way from modernist art into business, projecting images that used to be characteristic of the modernist artist—the individual creator, the solitary genius—onto the business world. This projection seems to respond to the interests of all those involved. The focus on individuals rather than teams makes it easier for policymakers to identify and target areas for support and development; it offers economically inter­ ested companies easier methods of branding; and it offers the artists better ­methods of self-presentation, as Jonathan Schroeder has also suggested.207 In this sense, we can observe not simply a convergence but almost a reversal of ­roles. The artist can present him- or herself as a representative of entrepreneurial individualism, while the entrepreneur can appear like a romantic individualist for whom market success is almost a side effect of his or her intrinsic drive and creative vision. While the traditional image of the modernist artist is undermined in the realm of art, it finds re­newed currency in the creative economy, where it functions as a creative label. However, the reality of collective production threatens to undermine the mytho­logization of the individualist artist/entrepreneur. This r­ eality emerges, for example, in the important question of who holds the rights of intellectual owner­ship—the copyright, patent, or trademark—for the work produced under the name of the artist/entrepreneur. If intellectual ownership is the crucial capital of the creative economy, then it becomes essential for the artist/entre206 | Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity: From Creative Industries to Creative Management (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 27. 207 | Cp. Ibid., 15; Schroeder, “The Artist and the Brand”; ———, “The Artist in Brand Culture.”

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preneur not only to represent a figurehead or brand name for the products his or her business produces, but also to hold the rights to the publication and distribution of these products, whether produced by the artist alone or by a team. Bilton suggests that “the generation of intellectual property is consistently less lucrative than the exploitation of intellectual property rights. Individual artists, writers, and performers are the sweatshop workers of the creative economy; the real ‘value added’ comes in the manipulation and development of that content into marketable commodities.”208

This profitability of the exploitation of intellectual ownership rights is particularly true on the large scale, as with pop music or film. However, this logic also applies on a smaller scale to the field of art production itself, as in visual or performance art. In the case of artists/entrepreneurs who are successful in the market, the modernist myth of individual creativity becomes problematically interlaced with the artists’ development into business entrepreneurs who must retain ownership of intellectual rights. While this endeavor is crucial for any artist’s economic survival and recognition, its flip side is the exploitation of the creative labor of others. Low income and difficult working conditions have been socially accepted as the price of working in the arts for generations. However, it may now be the hiring artist rather than the producer who enforces these conditions. Such modes of production evoke the manufacturing environments not only of Andy Warhol’s Factory but also of pre-modern artisanal workshops, in which all work produced was claimed by the leading artist. This effectively undermines the established modernist norm of art and brings us back to an era before the philosophical and aesthetic concept of autonomous art had emerged. What is particular about this post-modern version of the artist/entrepreneur is that it turns market success of a few and precarious working conditions of many into an economic role model for the (creative) economy as a whole. Discussions of the nature of employment in the creative industries have shown that the arts are strongly characterized by precarious conditions of work and income. Using the arts as a model for the creative economy at large is therefore no only an expansion of the positive aspects of artists’ work, such as creativity, innovation and vision. It is also a risky—and arguably policitally intended—extension of precarious work models from the field of the arts to the economy in general.209 Along with creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit,

208 | Bilton, Management and Creativity, 19-20. 209 | See Greig de Peuter, “Creative Economy and Labor Precarity: A Contested ­C on­ver­­g ence,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35, no. 4 (October 2011): 417-425; Gerald

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economic insecurity and forced risk-taking become more and more acceptable (or less and less avoidable) in the economy at large. A particularly outspoken example of the contemporary situation is “An Open Letter From a Dancer Who Refused to Participate in Marina ­Abramovic’s MOCA Performance” (2011), in which the dancer and choreographer Sara ­Wookey explains her refusal “to participate in perpetuating unethical, exploitative and discriminatory labor practices.” Wookey criticizes “the current social, cultural, and economic conditions that have rendered the exploitation of cultural workers commonplace, natural, and even horrifically banal, whether it is perpetrated by entities such as MOCA and Abramovic or self-imposed by the artists themselves.”210

The exploitation Wookey points is nominally justified by the idea of the artist as individual creator and generator of ideas that others merely execute. ­Wookey’s outspoken criticism of the exploitation of artists’ work by other artists and insti­ tutions shows that in the course of the economization of art, the modernist myth of the artist is being attacked from an unexpected direction: by the artists and creative workers themselves. What drives this criticism of the image of the artist is no longer an avantgardist gesture to subvert earlier artistic traditions, but rather a social and economic motivation. The image of utopian creativity and individual freedom is thus rendered complex by the reality of precarious working conditions. Claims are made to a more equal distribution of financial capital, based on the recognition of the cultural value of the work as well as on the insight that the creative capital generated often emerges in group processes rather than in a creative genius’s solitude. The modernist myth of the artist that forms the basis of the contemporary artist/entrepreneur paradigm is thus undermined by the social reality of creative production. In light of these contemporary developments, Andy Warhol might have been much more subversive than we commonly give him credit for, not only with regard to artistic traditions but also in terms of the mechanisms of consumer culture. Warhol repeatedly undercut the image of the solitary genius, and visibly put the brand in place of what used to be considered the authentic artist. He did not hide or mask the collective nature of his business. Yet Warhol, too, was suspected of exploiting his fellow artists. The most notorious expression of Raunig, Gene Ray, and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Critique of Creativity: Precarity, S ­ ubjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ (London: MayFly Books, 2011). 210 | Sarah Wookey, “An Open Letter From a Dancer Who Refused to Participate in ­M arina Abramovic’s MOCA Performance,” Blouin Art Info, 23 November 2011. http:// www.artinfo.com/news/story/751666/an-open-letter-from-a-dancer-who-refused-to -participate-in-marina-abramovic’s-moca-performance.

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this suspicion was Valerie Solanas’s attack on Warhol. After shooting and critically wounding him, the struggling artist claimed that one reason for her act was Warhol’s failure to return a manuscript she had sent him for feedback, supposedly because he wanted to exploit her work. Irrespective of the accuracy of Solanas’s accusation or the appropriateness of her response, the violent ­attack illustrates the fundamental importance of intellectual ownership, not just on a larger economic scale, but importantly also on the individual scale of art­is­ tic pride, social visibility and economic stability. We can conceive of Valerie Solanas’s act as an attempt to destabilize the rules of visibility in a discourse dominated by the artist/entrepreneur. On this discursive level, such violence may be an indicator of the normative power Warhol displayed; he acted as an avantgardist destabilizer of the art discourse, while at the same time stabilizing a new discursive constellation—one in which the artist and the entrepreneur converge into what is becoming a dominant cultural and economic role model. As this chapter has shown, this convergence does not simply originate in the expansion of the market into the sphere of art. To criticize the market’s encroachment on the freedom of art or on an ideal sphere of non-instrumental creativity would be an oversimplification. Rather, this convergence appears to be fueled from both ends. Put most simply, on one side stands the evolving logic of the art world, its iterative gestures of separation from earlier forms and ideas, its recurrent search for newness, and the contemporary possibility for artists to make market success an intrinsic, presentable part of their image and endeavors. On the other side stands the development of a capitalist economy in which human creativity is an important, and perhaps even the primary, re­source. What to the Frankfurt School appeared as a takeover of culture by economic principles now equally seems to be an influx of the modes and principles of art and culture into the economy. The contemporary importance of the hybrid figure of the artist/entrepreneur in both art and business may be an indication that identity and image have irresolvably blurred.

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Art/Commerce: The Question of Autonomy The three thematic chapters of this book have framed the convergence of art and commerce from three different perspectives, and in regard to three major definitions of art. I discussed first, the definition of art based on a work’s context of presentation; second, the definition of art based on the aesthetic object that is the product of art and our experience of it; and third, the definition of art as an artist’s creation. In the course of these discussions, it has become clear that the categories once used to define and even delimit art have become insuf­fi cient as criteria of distinction between autonomous artistic endeavors and instrumentally commercial ones. This is the case not just because commerce has adapted and exploited art’s mechanisms of self-definition—for example, by using commercial spaces that look like art spaces—but also, crucially, because art, both intentionally and unintentionally, undermined its own set of definitions. It has done so by challenging the formal (in aesthetic terms) and theoretical practice and discourse that had for some two hundred years upheld the claim of art’s autonomy from other spheres. All of these discussions ultimately lead to the fundamental question of the autonomy of art. It is this question that taps right into the core of both form and function of art in contemporary culture. Where art and commerce blur, there are two simultaneous processes at work: the use of methods of aesthetic formation for commercial ends, but also the opening of the discourse and practice of art to commercial methods and goals. Commercial spaces have come to look and function more and more like art spaces. Spaces of art, in turn, have been unmasked by theoretical discourse as spaces that only scantily hide their commercial character, and moreover are infused with commercial interest through their participation in various kinds of market behavior. Thus, the distance from commercial spaces that art spaces maintained by emphasizing their aesthetic function has become difficult to uphold. Further, we have seen how the art object has become secondary and even irrelevant in its materiality. In its stead, de-objectified aesthetic experi­ ence has become crucial. Accordingly, efforts to uphold the difference between such experiences and their more commercial counterparts— which­­similarly feature removal from the commercial object and an emphasis on aesthetic expe­ rience—have become highly questionable. Finally, looking at artists—both

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at the type of work they do and at their strategies of self-fashioning and self-­ presentation—we have seen how they have come to behave like entrepreneurs and exemplary participants in the marketplace. It has become all but moot to establish a categorical difference between such market-oriented artistic entrepreneurship and market entrepreneurs who engage their creativity, commitment, and vision to design, create, and innovate. On all these levels, we can observe the blurring and even the inversion of art and commerce. We should keep in mind that transitions between art and commerce are not new, as I have pointed out at various moments in this book. Artists and their art always had to reach their audiences; companies have employed artists and used methods of aesthetic formation in product design and presentation at the very least since the beginning of mass production and consumption. Yet, it is also the case that the autonomization of art, along with the positing of this autonomy in philosophical and later in aesthetic terms, came to be defining for the cultural role of art. This occurred with the emergence of the concept of aesthetics as a philosophical category in the 18th century, as well as with art’s development into a realm of production and reception that became relatively independent from politics and religion in the course of the democratic revolutions of the time. It was Kant who most emphatically postulated that art is to be understood as having no purpose outside of itself. We can understand this philosophical assumption also as a proactive way of coming to terms with art’s actual loss of societal importance as a consequence of its separation from gentry and clergy. In this situation, the social and philosophical autonomization of art put the legitimation of art on its own turf: art itself came to bear both the freedom and the burden of its own legitimation and valuation. When we think about art in American culture in particular, we can see that there has been a consistently close interaction between art and commerce. This was particularly the case in the 19th century, as various historical studies have shown. However, we can also observe a moment of profound distancing of art from commerce, in which art as an autonomous sphere becomes culturally institutionalized. This moment—the establishment of the idea of modern art in American culture—takes place with the coming of age of the modernist avantgarde of Abstract Expressionism, the institutionalization of the Museum of Modern Art from the 1940s onwards, and the development of highly influential art criticism. The coming of age of American Art as modern art on the international scale is coextensive with the adoption of modernist ideals of art, and these ideals create an opposition between art and commerce, and between aesthetic and economic valuation. Where modern philosophy brought about the philosophical postulate of art as an autonomous sphere, modernism in art can be understood as the ­aesthetic autonomization of art. With this development, art turns towards its own categories. In Arthur Danto’s words, “with modernism, the conditions of repre-

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sentation themselves become central, so that art in a way becomes its own subject.”1 In the terms put forth by Jacques Rancière, this is the emergence of the aesthetic regime of art, which “strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres.”2 Modernism can thus be conceived of as establishing a particular, contingent historical relationship between art and aesthetics. Art is established as a singular phenomenon, which follows only its own aesthetic logic and thus strives for autonomy in the generation of its own rules of operation. Yet, there is a tension built into this general autonomizing tendency of ­moder­­nism, and this tension is generated by the avantgarde movements that form part of modernism. These avantgardes can be understood as repeated attempts to undermine the formal, aesthetic, and institutional categories that ­demar­­cate and secure the purported autonomy of modern art. Successive avantgarde move­ments increasingly liken the forms of art to those of non-art. This is a process endemic to modernism itself, or as Rancière puts it, the aesthetic regime of art “simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms … with the forms that life uses to shape itself.”3 We can clarify Rancière’s thought by breaking it into two parts. If with ­modernism art turned to its own terms and methods in the search for and stabilization of its autonomy, then recurring avantgarde movements can be understood more radically as ways of subverting these very terms and methods of art. If modernism is the formal, institutional and aesthetic establishment of the autonomy of art, then the avantgardes continuously work at radicalizing this claim to autonomy, breaking with the established styles and postulates of art. In the course of this undermining, avantgardes paradoxically end up subverting the very autonomy of art. By destabilizing the aesthetic and institutional factors that helped to establish and uphold the social and aesthetic autonomy of modern art, avantgarde art movements undermine and open art towards life. The criteria of distinction between art and life are destabilized. Pierre Bourdieu has also considered this relation of the avantgardes and modernism.4 He suggests a circular process, in which a new artistic movement comes up in contrast or opposition to the established art field. This new move­ ment then accumulates symbolic capital through an initial phase of austerity and renunciation, and, significantly, through the projection of a strong autonomy both from economic factors and from established methods and forms 1 | Danto, After the End of Art, 7. 2 | Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 23. 3 | Ibid. 4 | Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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of art. In a second phase, the avantgarde movement becomes more recognized in the field and can, so to speak, cash in on its image as an avantgarde. This increase in economic capital goes along with a loss of symbolic capital. Once an avantgarde has established itself in the artistic field, another one comes up to challenge what is now the establishment. Understanding the relation of ­modernism and avantgarde in these terms yields yet another perspective on the dynamic process that is at work in art: the undermining of established categories of art in the name of art. This perspective reveals within the avantgardist movements a particular logic of finding a cultural niche, or, we could say, a market position. And yet, Bourdieu makes clear that this logic relies on the avantgarde’s (initial) renunciation of conformity and marketability—in other words, on a strong claim to autonomy. This claim to autonomy finds one of its strongest expressions in the ­assumed separation of art from commerce—of aesthetic, purposeful purpose­ lessness from instrumental rationality. As this book suggests, the complex ­r­elation between art and commerce has today entered a particularly interesting cultural and historical moment. We can observe a strong convergence between aesthetic and commercial methods and goals, and it is insufficient to explain this convergence simply as a commercial appropriation of aesthetic strategies used in art, or as a one-directional expansion of economic thinking into the ‘autonomous’ sphere of art. Rather, this convergence is a consequence of the subversion of fundamental categories of art that results from the avantgardist logic of modern art—a logic that can be observed very well in the American postwar avantgardes discussed in the preceding chapters. We thus have a convergence of, on the one hand, increasingly holistic aesthetic work in marketing (particularly in brand marketing), which extends aesthetic methods and effects into more and more spheres of life, and, on the other hand, avantgardist art practices that increasingly question the categories and boundaries of art, and thus also its very autonomy. The strategies employed by the American postwar avantgarde movements extend and undermine crucial categories that had ­helped to secure the idea of an autonomous art: the context of exhibition, the art object and the experience of art, and the creator of art. This leaves us with the need to rethink the idea of autonomy. I will briefly revisit the core points of this book before addressing the question of whether and how we can think of the autonomy of art today. The chapter Art Spaces/Commercial Spaces starts out from the observation that in many cases the aesthetics and pragmatics of commercial spaces and art spaces have become hardly distinguishable. This effectively subverts the modernist assump­tion of the autonomy of art spaces and institutions. On the basis of this spatial and institutional framing, I have asked what happens when a boutique looks like a gallery and a gallery looks like a boutique, or even when an artwork looks like a boutique that looks like an art space. In an extensive analysis of the

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Prada Marfa installation by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, I traced the artistic practices of Minimalism and site specificity that come to bear on the work, the history and theory of the white cube as the still-dominant mode of exhibition in art, and the use of these aesthetic strategies in the context of commercial spaces. The consequences of choosing the white cube and Minimalist elements for commercial display go decisively beyond a mere stylistic or high-to-low appropriation. Just as the white cube and Minimalism deal with the presence of the commercial, while also continuously negotiating and even negating this presence, the inverse is also true for commercial spaces that take over these spatial strategies. While the paradigmatic art space becomes a commercial s­ pace, the commercial space becomes an aesthetic space; the dynamic goes both ways. This has the ambiguous consequence of a simultaneous democratization and economization. On the one hand, by fostering an active role of the consumer/ spectator, the white cube in its postmodern continuation as the white cube boutique suggests that it is the consumer rather than the producer who creates cultural meaning. The consumer/spectator is thus empowered. On the other hand, the white cube retail space also transposes a modernist aesthetic of autonomy into a commercial context, thus merging it with the instrumental goals of a commercial environment. The chapter Art Objects/Brand Products presents a second perspective by focusing on the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience and discussing how these two core categories of art undergo a fundamental change, particularly through Conceptual Art and contemporary brand marketing. Like no other artistic movement, Conceptual Art subverted the aesthetic object by virtually doing away with it. Moreover, Conceptual Art also undermined the duality of sensory and rational experience that had long been considered the basis of aes­ thetic experience. Conceptual approaches thus not only sought to autonomize art from the emerging experience culture; they also aimed at an autonomization of art from the aesthetic object and aesthetic experience. This led to the undermining of two fundamental categories which had until then helped to demarcate the autonomy of art. This subversion effectively leads to a convergence of art and life, and, more particularly, of art and commerce. The de-objectification and dematerialization of art that was proposed by Conceptual Art as a move away from the market­ place—away from material, circulable, sellable art products—has today become a promising marketing approach. This is because such an approach actually increases turnover time by focusing on ephemeral experiences. Further­­more, Conceptual Art’s move away from a notion of aesthetic experience based primarily on the phenomenal experience of objects shifted the perception of art towards an ideational and conceptual realm. This generated an experiential deficit that was subsequently taken up by commercial culture, again with both democratizing and commodifying effects. Today, experiential value can be

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conceived of as a core value of the oft-mentioned experience economy. Here, customers are offered fulfillment, not through ownership of an object, but by living through experiences that are ideally designed to engage them on both the sensual and rational levels. Although their goal had been to separate art from market logic, the conceptual developments in the discourse and practice of art have led to a contemporary situation in which we are surrounded by objects and experiences that continuously shift between a seemingly autonomous aesthetic and an instrumental commercial function, and which willingly carry this indecision in their structure. The emphatic notion of aesthetic experience can no longer be separated from the experiences we have every day in our aestheticized and commercialized environment. This makes necessary a rethinking of the concepts of aesthetic experience and aesthetic autonomy. The third major conceptualization of art presented here is based on the notion of the artist as the creator of art. The chapter Artist/Entrepreneur suggests that the cultural position of the artist is fundamentally changing from bohemian outsider to economic role model. This change can be observed most clearly when contrasting the image of the artist that Abstract Expressionism projected with that of Andy Warhol, the Pop artist who most radically revolutionized this image. Abstract Expressionism adhered to a modernist idea(l) of the autonomous artist: an individual creator bringing artworks into being in his secluded studio. This notion of the artist followed the modernist prerogative of art’s autonomy. Pop Art was groundbreaking as a cultural development because it rejected the central importance of the autonomous individual in the creation of art. With the emergence of Pop Art, romantic individualism in art made way for entrepreneurial individualism, and the artist as author died to be reincarnated in the artist as entrepreneur. Andy Warhol spearheaded this development, which would come to full fruition in the 1990s and 2000s. Warhol reacted to the increasing presence of media and media images, as well as to the transformation of the American economy from an industrial to a service and knowledge economy in the 1960s. Artists today are interacting with the development of the economy into one relying more and more on creativity and innovation. The economic and cultural importance that has recently been given to creativity has found particular expression in the term creative economy. This importance of creativity as an economic asset that extends beyond the arts brings both a new type of artist persona and a new type of businessman or businesswoman center stage in contemporary culture. The image of the successful, creative entrepreneur has become one of a free-spirited, even bohemian individual. This is an inverse development to the increasing closeness of the artist to commercial culture, which can be observed in contemporary artists like Hirst, Koons, ­Murakami, and Eliasson. These artists are successful entrepreneurs, who started and

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e­ xpanded companies that produce and sell works based on their ideas. They are the figureheads of these companies and the brand names under which the prod­ucts of their companies are sold. This is what I have discussed as the emergence of the artist/entrepreneur. Here, again we find an ambiguous tension. On the one hand, we can ­observe a democratization of art in the form of the deconstruction of the myth of the authorial artist and the coextensive empowerment of the reader/spectator. The flip side of this development, on the other hand, is the simultaneous loss of the artist’s cultural authority based on values other than those governed by capitalist market logic. This goes along with a resurgence of the modernist myth of the artist in the postmodern form of the artist/entrepreneur, which brings with it new processes of mythologization, hierarchization, and exploitation. This book has thus framed the convergence of art and commerce, and the overarching question of the autonomy of art, from three different perspec­tives. In the course of these discussions, it has become clear that the categories of art no longer work as criteria of distinction between autonomous aesthetic activi­­ties and instrumental, commercial endeavors. This is the case not only ­because commerce has adapted aesthetics as a primary domain, but c­ rucially also b ­ ecause art has undermined its own aesthetic practice and theoretical ­discourse. In this situation, upholding a fundamental difference between the spheres of art and commerce based on the assumption of autonomy becomes untenable. We can observe a deconstruction of modernist myths by avantgarde move­ ments in regard to spaces of presentation, to the objects and experience of art, and to the artist persona. When Minimalism turned the white cube from a neutral backdrop into part of the experience of the work, and when Land Art and various site-specific practices later moved out of the white cube and into public space, the white cube was undermined as a neutral, self-effacing, auto­nomous space, and thus turned into a specific, situated place. And yet, the aesthetics of the white cube—its temporal and spatial separation from the outside ­world as well as its concentrated, aestheticized atmosphere—still carry an ­affec­­­t­ive ­power that has transcended these deconstructions. This affective power is ­evoked in primarily aesthetic contexts such as museums and galleries, as well as in primarily commercial contexts, in particular in the case of what I have termed the white cube boutique. Similarly, we have seen that Conceptual Art deconstructed the impor­tance of the aesthetic object and fundamentally changed the concept of aesthetic expe­r ience. However, while Conceptual Art turned away from experience that would both sensorily and conceptually address the viewer, and towards a primarily intellectual dimension, both artistic and commercial productions have shifted back to a holistic conception of aesthetic experience which this as the end of art, I would suggest that this is the point at which we have to rethink the

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question of autonomy in art. Adorno and Horkheimer proposed that there is an inherent contradiction in art between autonomy and commercial orientation. Moreover, they suggested that in spite of this inner tension, art at least has to claim autonomy in order to legitimize itself as art. However, this no longer seems to be the case. This is underscored by the fact that many contemporary aesthetic phenomena play with the idea of autonomy in specific ways—ways that we can read as attempts to autonomize art, not just from the fundamental categories of art, but also from the idea of autonomy itself.5 The examples I have discussed suggest that (the claim to) emphatic autonomy might no longer be a primary characteristic of art. This also means that art can no longer be understood as a realm of freedom from the dominant instrumental logic of society. Instead, we can see it as an arena in which tensions and incoherencies are allowed to play out, without ­having to be resolved, and without having to adhere to notions of efficiency, clarity, and measurable success. Autonomy could then be thought of as the auto­ nomy to set agendas and choose themes, as well as to decide on the ­means of doing so. Such autonomy is not absolute; rather, it plays out as a choice regard­ ing the area and level of heteronomy. Art is no longer coextensive with freedom from or opposition to something. We would then also no longer consider art as radically autonomous from other spheres, such as the political or the economic, but as a means of choosing how to engage with these spheres. This does not mean that anything can be art. But it does mean that art can be about anything; and it can be so by whatever means it chooses. This type of aesthetic practice faces the particular challenge that it can no longer claim legitimacy based on the categories and institutions of art, or with reference to institutional structures, cultural authorities, or aesthetic norms. What then, are the new forms of cultural legitimation? Winfried Fluck has suggested that as art searches for new forms of legitimation, the category of “seriousness”—particularly in political terms—has emerged in combination with formal experimentation. In the frame of thinking I have just suggested, this approach can be understood as a partial heteronomy with respect to the political.6 My work suggests yet another option for new cultural legitimation, namely market success. This extends the reach of the market into yet another sphere of our lives. Where the self-legitimation of art is subverted, autonomy is supplan-

5 | Michael Lingner, “Krise, Kritik und Transformation des Autonomiekonzepts moderner Kunst: Zwischen Kunstbetrachtung und ästhetischem Dasein,” in Ästhetisches Dasein: Perspektiven einer performativen und pragmatischen Kultur im öffentlichen Raum, ed. Michael Lingner, Pier A. Maset, and Hubert Sola (Hamburg: Materialverlag, Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Hamburg, 1999). 6 | Winfried Fluck, “Radical Aesthetics,” 34.

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ted by degrees of heteronomy, and this can indeed translate into the influ­ence of market mechanisms on the valuation and even on the creation of art. On the other hand, however, this reconceptualization of art—from an auto­ nomous realm to a wider realm of aesthetic function—is coextensive with the overcoming of the separation of art from other spheres of life. It ­t herefore ­offers art the opportunity to reach a higher degree of societal engagement and relevance. One positive way to look at this relevance is to understand the expan­ sion of art into wider aesthetics as part of more general individualizing and ­demo­cratizing tendencies in American culture. According to this view, the ­drive towards the artlessness of art in American culture, which is “an often irritating challenge to traditional aesthetic theory and established aesthetic criteria,” can be explained by the important function of the aesthetic for the articulation of subjectivity and for claims to cultural recognition.7 These cultural functions are crucial far beyond the traditional scope of art, and other discus­­sions will reveal further aspects and functions of that non-autonomous art plays and can play in contemporary culture. The fundamental questioning of art’s autonomy radically renegotiates the role art plays in our culture, and it remains to be seen how what we have come to know as ‘art’ will stand up to this challenge. Yet, we must recognize the poten­­tial that this delimited art carries. This art has the potential to be a central and dynamic part of contemporary culture, along with all of the risks and possibilities that come with engaging in dialogue at the center of cultural discourse. The undermining of the autonomy of art is therefore not only a challenge, but also an important opportunity for art to claim new functions within the commercial culture it has in many cases become part of. It is also a starting point from which we can begin to fundamentally rethink the role of art and aesthetics in contemporary capitalist consumer culture.

7 | Fluck, “The Search for an ‘Artless Art’,” 29.

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