Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition 9781350102699, 9781350102729, 9781350102705

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Culture and the up-ending of tradition
Chapter 2: Hegel, art and adequation
Chapter 3: Adorno, the constriction of the aesthetic and difficult art
Chapter 4: Modern music and the pact with the devil
Chapter 5: At the precipice of pop culture: Wagner and Mahler
Chapter 6: Art beyond the horizon
Chapter 7: The culture industry and popular culture
Chapter 8: Light music and lazy listening
Chapter 9: Jazz and ‘jazz’
Chapter 10: Ugliness and kitsch
Chapter 11: Aesthetics of alienation
Chapter 12: ‘Fashion theory’: A philosophy of dress
Chapter 13: Lady Gaga’s gaga aesthetics
Chapter 14: Madonna to the power of X
Chapter 15: Fashion and the redeployment of kitsch
Chapter 16: Philosophy in fabric: Deconstruction in contemporary fashion
Conclusion: Jazzing it up
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Gaga Aesthetics

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art

Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing research that exemplifies cutting-edge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigour and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Comunication, Milano). Available in the Series: Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, by David Carrier Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili, by Paul Gladston The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World, by Richard Kalina The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi, edited by Tiziana Andina and Erica Onnis

Gaga Aesthetics Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, 2022 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Geczy, Adam, author. | Karaminas, Vicki, author. Title: Gaga aesthetics: art, fashion, popular culture, and the up-ending of tradition / Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Aesthetics and contemporary art | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021023553 (print) | LCCN 2021023554 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350102699 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350272385 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350102705 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350102712 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Arts and society–History–21st century. | Art and popular culture–History–21st century. | Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969–Aesthetics. Classification: LCC NX180.S6 G43 2021 (print) | LCC NX180.S6 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023553 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023554 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0269-9 PB: 978-1-3502-7238-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0270-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-0271-2 Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.



To Samuel Beckett Lady Gaga.

vi

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements

viii x

Introduction 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Culture and the up-ending of tradition 11 Hegel, art and adequation 19 Adorno, the constriction of the aesthetic and difficult art 29 Modern music and the pact with the devil 35 At the precipice of pop culture: Wagner and Mahler 41 Art beyond the horizon 47 The culture industry and popular culture 55 Light music and lazy listening 65 Jazz and ‘jazz’ 71 Ugliness and kitsch 81 Aesthetics of alienation 89 ‘Fashion theory’: A philosophy of dress 99 Lady Gaga’s gaga aesthetics 105 Madonna to the power of X 119 Fashion and the redeployment of kitsch 133 Philosophy in fabric: Deconstruction in contemporary fashion 155

Conclusion: Jazzing it up 167 Notes Bibliography Index

171 192 201

Figures 13.1 Singer Lady Gaga performs onstage during the 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards held at Staples Center 13.2 Lady Gaga performs on the Other stage on day 2 of Glastonbury Festival 13.3 Singer Lady Gaga performs a tribute to the late David Bowie onstage during the 58th GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center 13.4 Lady Gaga attends the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A 13.5 Singer Lady Gaga dressed as ‘Jo Calderone’ 13.6 Artist Marina Abramovic (L) performs during the ‘Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present’ exhibition opening night party 14.1 Madonna on stage for her 1985 ‘Virgin’ Tour 14.2 Madonna performs her Rebel Heart Tour at Allphones Arena 14.3 Mykki Blanco, ‘Dark Ballet’, Madame X. Madonna 14.4 Madonna, ‘Dark Ballet’, Madame X. Madonna 14.5 Madonna, ‘God Control’, Madame X. Madonna 14.6 Madonna, ‘God Control’, Madame X. Madonna 14.7 (L-R) Editor Bob Colacello, model Jerry Hall, artist/publisher Andy Warhol, singer Debbie Harry, writer Truman Capote and jewellery designer Paloma Picasso at a Studio 54 party 14.8 Manhattan’s renown disco and nightclub Studio 54 14.9 Outside the Globe discotheque from Madonna’s ‘Gun Control’ music video 15.1 Actresses Joanna Lumley (left) and Jennifer Saunders (on the right wearing Christian Lacroix) 15.2 A passer-by wears a white mesh studded, ruffled and pleated short dress, and a black Chanel quilted leather bag 15.3 A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2019–20 fashion show 15.4 A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2019–20 fashion show 15.5 A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2019–20 fashion show 15.6 A model walks the runway during the Chanel show

106 108 110 112 113 115 122 123 124 125 126 127

128 129 129 135 139 140 141 142 143

 Figures ix 15.7 The Graduate, lobby card, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, 1967 15.8 French film star Brigitte Bardot arrives in Los Angeles with boyfriend Bob Zaguri 15.9 Nine Jackies, Andy Warhol, 1964 15.10 A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2018–19 fashion show 15.11 A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2018–19 fashion show 15.12 A model presents a creation for Comme des Garçons during the 2018–19 Fall/Winter collection fashion show 15.13 A model walks the runway during the Bernhard Willhelm Menswear Spring/Summer 2012 show 15.14 Models are seen during the Walter van Beirendonck Menswear Fall/Winter 2020–21 show 15.15 Models kiss as they wear outfits during a fashion show by British designer Vivienne Westwood 16.1 Vetements and DHL Couriers collaboration, YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=HYF​​​69yiY​​pDE 16.2 Vetements Menswear Spring/Summer 2020 Paris Fashion Week, Mcdonalds, Paris, YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/ w​​atch?​​v​=Yjv​​​J3Q9y​​FX8 16.3 Vetements Spring/Summer 2017 Galeries Lafayette, Paris, YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=HYF​​​69yiY​​pDE 16.4 Vetements Paris Menswear Fashion Fall/Winter 2018, Paul Bert Serpette flea markets, Paris. YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​. you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=8tP​​​NgpFB​​iuE

144 145 146 147 148 150 151 152 154 160

161 163

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Acknowledgements Adam Geczy would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Sydney, Australia. Vicki Karaminas would like to acknowledge the support of Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

Introduction

On 13 October 2016, the Nobel Prize Committee announced the winner of the literature category for that year: Bob Dylan, ‘for creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’.1 After a bit of dithering, Dylan accepted the prize but did not travel to Stockholm, with Patti Smith appearing on his behalf. At the Nobel Banquet held on 10 December, she sang a cover of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ to the accompaniment of a full orchestra. In between these dates, on 8 November, fell the US presidential election, won by Donald Trump, despite a numerical minority of the popular vote of almost three million. These decisions and events, which were welcomed or spurned at turns, were symptomatic of much broader global trends that had been incubating for decades, perhaps more. The popular press cried ‘populism’, while others, Trump included, impugned the press for being imposters and plying ‘fake news’. In political terms, what had occurred was a crisis in democracy, one fermenting since at least the Reagan years, when celebrity had begun to encroach on statesmanship. In philosophical terms, what had transpired was a crisis of truth and more precisely the truth-claims with regard to the legal concept of right. It also spelled an aesthetic crisis, one that had already been predicted by Marxist scholars in the 1930s with the growth of Nazism, witnessing the manipulation of the media and the aestheticization of politics. But if at this time there had been any suggestion that a popular musician would join the ranks of the likes of Tagore, Yeats, Mann or Pirandello, the response would have been one of complete incredulity. Less so today. On the contrary, the award to Dylan was welcomed as a visionary rejuvenation of the Nobel Prize, with the recognition that literary (and musical) excellence, high literature, also has its place within popular culture. This is the central thesis of the book, based on the proposition that high and low art have fused, or at least thickly overlapped, and some of the most poignant artistic statements are to be found in media and approaches more germane to popular consumption. If modern art, once cleaved from religion, was traditionally a source of insight and revelation – either secular or spiritual in the most eclectic sense – against the dross of capitalist rationalization, commodification and the ‘culture industry’, what does it mean when artistic insight and revelation is imbricated within the culture industry and complicit with the commodity is supposed to critique? Is artistic critique doomed to be swallowed up by popular culture, or are there new approaches to interpretation and critique that can resist the taint of popular reductivism? What sort of claims can we make for artistic autonomy if this is at all a valid question? Then there are the sites of artistic production. Marxist philosophers and critics associated with the Frankfurt School had already in the 1930s begun to identify film as the technological Gesamtkunstwerk, as capable of aesthetic power and social commentary,

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although proving manipulable for unsavoury ends, as demonstrated by Leni Riefenstahl and the German National Socialists. Nonetheless, film studies is an established discipline and debates as to the status of film as art are no longer as contentious, or relevant, given that film is now an entrenched and respected form of cultural production, having like anything else, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms. The other is fashion, which we at length have already identified as having qualities of what in Hegelian-Marxist terms is ‘negation’, that is the capacity to undercut critically a concept or status quo for the sake of dialectical progression.2 (Negation is also an operation within logic that is used in linguistic and logical positivist philosophy.) Designers beginning with Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo until more recently Gareth Pugh and Iris van Herpen created garments that were rebarbative, dissonant, ambiguous in the intention and aesthetically oblique. The work of what we call ‘Critical Fashion Practice’ follows an aesthetic exigency that is compellingly more than a matter of flattery and conventional beauty, where fashion is a vehicle for making statements about the self and the world commensurate with the role of art since modernism. Much like modern art, fashion has offered a place for the critical collision of ideas, and many great collaborations were forged between artists and designers, take Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí or Roy Halston and Andy Warhol for instance. Similarly, the historical avant-garde would adopt dress design, gesture and pose and pose as a privileged field in which, in the words of Radu Stern, ‘the artist could overstep the limits of pure art and act directly on daily life’.3 As with any philosopher and cultural critic of his generation, Theodor Adorno was apt to be suspicious of fashion, and anyone with a cursory knowledge of his work can expect him to be. However, a closer look at a number of passages in Aesthetic Theory shows his position to be a little more conflicted than expected. For one, he recognized that fashion became a sharper form of expression once the modern artist identified himself or herself as split from society. (‘Once the aesthetic subject splits from society and its predominant spirit, art has communicated through fashion in certain if inauthentic objective spirit.’)4 With a mixture of reservation and admission he asserts that the ‘great artists since Baudelaire were in conspiracy with fashion; to denounce it would be to have the impulses of their own work punished with lies’.5 He goes on to aver that despite art’s resistance to fashion and its efforts to correct it or ‘level’ it, it is at the same time bound to fashion in the ‘instinct to be inclined to the present, in the aversion toward provincialism and the subaltern, an aversion that suggests the only humanly-worthy artistic position’.6 This is an important observation for it admits that both art and fashion, even if rivals or agonistic bedfellows, represent efforts to raise the subject from the more debasing values and forces of industrial (reifying) modernity. Adorno cites Richard Strauss and Claude Monet as examples of artists who have occasionally forfeited the quality of their work in the wager with being modern: ‘historical innervation and more advanced materials’.7 As Rimbaud states, ‘Il faut être absolumment moderne’ – ‘one must be absolutely modern’, the call to the absolute has a compelling ring here – which is to experience an excitement even if it is to forego a number of qualities or more long-term pleasures. To align oneself with the present is inexorably to align oneself with fashion, there is no way out. For not only did Baudelaire believe that fashion was one of the most important economic and aesthetic phenomena, but he considered fashion a direct expression of

 Introduction 3 the social upheavals of the nineteenth century, one that incorporated, as he put it, ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’.8 In Baudelaire’s wake, Georg Simmel related fashion to the fragmentation of modern life and associated fashion with the middle class and the urban and pointed the affiliation between fashion, art and consumer culture. Similarly, Thorstein Veblen pointed to fashion’s significance to modernity in its association to industrialization, capitalism, the rising upper class and the development of individualism. By the end of the nineteenth century, the role of fashion as a market-driven commodity spurred by consumer demand and as a mechanism for the fabrication of self was firmly established. The ways in which modern fashion has been produced, manufactured, consumed and disseminated have radically shifted since its inception in the nineteenth century. Almost a century later, the setting of styles by the aristocratic elite that trickled down and were imitated by the masses began to bubble-up, moving from the street to the catwalk. The breakdown of social class differentiations and the collapse of style distinctions via mediation and digitalization have meant that fashion is no longer about class distinction but represented representation itself. The demand for new fashion collections and the speed in which fashion travelled capturing trends and propelling forward new styles contain the essence of modernity. But what makes fashion of relevance to this book is that since the nineteenth century, fashion has been governed by an industry that regulates the production and consumption of clothing. Once the clothes have been designed and manufactured, the purpose of the fashion industry is to sell a garment with a dream of glamour and the promise of success. Boutiques, department stores and online retailers use promotional activities, fashion shows, advertising and magazine editorials to appeal to consumers’ desire to purchase the product. As Adorno and Horkheimer recognize, ‘the triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.’9 The same can be said of the fashion industry whose models, editors and influencers render fashion objects of immense desire. In Kuhnian terms, what we have experienced since at least the 1990s, but fomenting for well longer, is a paradigm shift which, if taken seriously, threatens many of the core presumptions on which modern art and its attendant critical theories are based. No doubt we are entering an era where Dylan and his contemporaries – Joan Baez (think of the poetry in ‘Diamonds and Rust’) or Leonard Cohen (who is a well-known inspiration to writers as well as musicians) – will be taught in university courses alongside Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett. What would a defender of the canon, an aesthetic gatekeeper such as F. R. Leavis, have made of this? It is a question that sits squarely within the crisis of art, which had been predicted, under different conditions by Hegel in his Aesthetics, but which resurfaces with the packaging of culture and the manipulation of art for invidious political purposes, and the weakening/widening of artistic boundaries after the Second World War. From the 1930s onward, under the light of both Fredrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, Adorno had already signalled the denigration of high culture through its manipulation by mass media to become an anodyne by-product of capitalism. Adorno also distrusted jazz, which in his copious writings on music would often fall into a metonymic byword for all popular, and degraded, music.

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The famous text about the depredations of popular culture, written with Max Horkheimer, is ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944). Perspicuous, rebarbative and with prophetic power, they meditate on the way that culture has fused with entertainment, such that today the term ‘culture industry’ is used broadly for all culture today that is within the public eye, which, with social media, is possibly close to all cultural production. Indeed, in our contemporary moment the complexity of the art-pop fusion is that it is immeasurably diverse and multiform. For now, not only are we dealing with the simple dialectic of an item of popular culture on an armature of high culture (oil paint and canvas), it is also the channels for display (Internet, Instagram) that reach towards mass consumption and mass appeal. Taking Adorno’s dislike of jazz as the adulteration of the formal qualities of the classical European traditions of music several further removes, what would he have made of the encounter of Marina Abramovic with James Franco and Lady Gaga? The dialectic of high and low forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics, including those in his wake, including Jean-François Lyotard (whose aesthetics of postmodernism rest on high modernist examples), Arthur Danto and Donald Kuspit. Their commentaries are now historic important base-points – they derive from the 1980s and 1990s – for what is now a growing literature on the dubious state of contemporary art and the loss of confidence in it. The attractiveness of the dismissals of postmodern (and now contemporary) art lies in the way in which they rest on a humanist armature. Contemporary art is dispatched by Kuspit with the rubric ‘postart’, a term as withering as it is ostensibly anodyne. Another phrase, used by James Gardner, is ‘art art’, which refers to contemporary art’s obsession with itself as a self-serving, self-referential game, playing at art: ‘Art Art is what occurs when artists see their medium as an end in itself.’10 With its blithe references and one-liners much of art today is comedic (often unintentionally), shorn the terror and heroism of great tragic art. If there is space to mourn for the paucity of the tragic, the drained well of humanism, then there is also time to pause on loaded word used in Adorno and Horkheimer’s tract, ‘Enlightenment’, and to the encyclopaedic treatise, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954–9), by the contemporary and friend from the Frankfurt School, Ernst Bloch. While less read today, it had a significant effect on the protest era of the 1960s, in which he saw in art, literature and philosophy after Marx the lineaments for a better, utopian future. In parallel, Adorno’s aesthetics offers the stimulating proposition that the nuance within art, and its ability to express contradictions within a unity (hence ‘the aesthetic’, with a ‘the’), is a demonstration that discord can be brought into union – the possible made possible in the impossibility that is art’s logic – but also an insistence on an uncompromising valuation of art based on its capacity to derail the false consciousness of the ‘mass deception’ propagated by the culture industry. But in the age of ‘end times’ and the ‘posthuman’, the criteria and values of the aesthetic need to be reformed. This may not necessarily be a matter of the baby out with the bathwater and jettisoning a thinker such as Adorno but of reintroducing him into the analysis precisely because his concept of art is so inimical to what prevails in contemporary art today.

 Introduction 5 For all Adorno’s mandarin high-mindedness, his elitism, his over-earnestness, his propensity towards scathing dismissal of anything that bears the whiff of speciousness and his suspicion of any art that was too enjoyable or fun, there is still an ineradicable element of ‘and yet’. Adorno’s writings about art and aesthetics culminate in the most forceful normative standards for evaluating modern art. If there are many claims in Adorno that remain unclear, unsubstantiated and out-of-date, there are as many that remain residual with us today. Writing in 2003, Andrew Bowie comments: ‘One of the reasons why attention has turned again to Adorno is, though, because he offers models of what a critical account of modern culture might look like that does not accept that mere diversity is necessarily a sign of cultural advance.’11 Any serious philosophical examination of contemporary art and aesthetics – which will inevitable run up against the mutated and manifold leviathan of popular culture – must take Adorno on to some degree, because some of the reservations within and of popular culture are essentially Adornian in nature. That is, what constitutes good and bad, authentic and inauthentic, enslaving as opposed to liberating. The struggle if even harder than Adorno’s original prognoses as the imaginary walls dividing ‘high’ art and the culture industry have collapsed. Even abstract invocations of a binary are inaccurate, outdated and maybe even curmudgeonly. But the curmudgeon, Adorno, lives on as an echo or ghost, offering moral corrective and conscience. What are the standards of trust that bind us to one form of art as against another, and how do we navigate such standards only equipped with secular tools? Long accused of being an elitist, Adorno’s thought – culminating in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory – is a compelling testament to abiding issues in our experience and judgement of art, namely that difficult, recondite art ought not be cast aside, and that it can be worth the effort. The difficulty in difficult art is to be read, as Adorno contends, as a condition particular to modernism and of modernity in general, that is, an expression of the alienation of the individual from society, but also more broadly, as the alienation of the modern secular subject who must face the dour predicament of the mortal coil. Art is tragic, yielding the baffling uncertainty of existing. In one of his typically aphoristic statements, in his Philosophy of Music, Adorno states that ‘Art is able to aid enlightenment only by relating the clarity of the world consciously to its own darkness’.12 That soft, ‘light’ art shields us from such darkness makes this darkness yet more visible, either when it appears or through the vacuum left from its absence. Adorno’s project is one that undertakes to redeem art and thus to redeem ourselves. This need for redemption, according to Lambert Zuidervaart, ‘arises from a sense that art is under attack and from a conviction that art is still needed’. One of the tasks of his Aesthetic Theory ‘is to understand art’s current lack of intelligibility’.13 Opaque art, unintelligible, difficult art, is rendered thus for two connected reasons. First, it appears opaque to us because the steady diet of light art inures us to anything that is not easy to digest. Second, it is a necessary precondition for art in order to combat, and serve as a foil to, the phantasmagoria of capitalist spectacle and consumption. For Adorno, art that does not shield us from the hard truth is worth savouring, while art and other mediated stimuli with a discernible and intentional form (these concepts will be unpacked in ensuing chapters) that entertains and diverts is to be treated with suspicion if not hostility, as such works collude with the alienating forces

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of capitalism. Put another way, art that is too enjoyable nourishes false consciousness, removing us from our real selves, which is potential, better self. In his lucubrations on Ludwig van Beethoven, Adorno announces that ‘artworks of the highest order differentiate themselves from others not for their success – what is success after all? – but through the means of their failure’.14 It is one of the many gnomic statements that litter his extensive writings and can stand as emblematic of his attitude to art. There are echoes here of Samuel Beckett – to whom Adorno wished to dedicate his Aesthetic Theory – and his line from ‘Westward Ho!’: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed, No matter. Fail again, fail better.’ It is the illusion of success, a completeness that is not humble, that exposes mediocre works for what they are. Kuspit describes Adorno’s vision of art with eloquence: In the last analysis, it is the ambiguous, uncanny integrity of the work of art that is Adorno’s model for individuality, unreconciled to its public yet dialectically integral, fetishizing its inherent inadequacy to the world, for it lacks any selfsufficiency – such as the falseness of classical art projects – to be perfect.15

Art holds the mirror to us as flawed human beings and in art’s enigma is enshrined the enigma of our existence. To be aware of this is to be initiated into a truth that is both terrifying and consoling in equal measure. In this picture we see the shadow of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, alzu Menschliches (‘human all too human’), in which only the few with the capacity to grasp the extent of life’s hard realities have dispelled the perniciously dense illusions erected by religion and ideology. For Adorno and his contemporaries of the Frankfurt School, the palliatives of religion have been replaced by commodity capitalism. Cast adrift from its earlier role as a lens into religious salvation, modern art is seen by Adorno, and other colleagues such as Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, as affording a corrective to the logic of capitalism. Not least, art purveyed a different logic and structure that could undermine capitalism, which had cunningly absorbed art, or some art, into its bosom. Capitalism had thus made a collaborator of art, which otherwise was equipped with the strategies to be inimical to it. This is all relatively easy to grasp, and it stands as one of the dialectical benchmarks for this book. One of the reasons that we continue to bother ourselves with art is precisely because it grants us a message, an experience of a stimulation and richness, that is less forthcoming in things not considered art. But in navigating this problem with respect to popular culture of the first decades of the twenty-first century, we are prodded back into the question that has preoccupied the twentieth century, of what art is, and where art could be found. The Duchampian revolution, as Thierry de Duve has cleverly characterized it, is tantamount to the Kantian revolution in modern philosophy towards the end of the eighteenth century.16 An upended urinal, or a suspended snow shovel, or two layers of bricks (as in Carl André’s Equivalent VIII, 1966) ushered in a new kind of art and an ongoing questioning into art’s ontology. Such works also ushered in a questioning of the spaces of art and the institutions that confer it status and meaning. ‘Institutional critique’ as it is now known – associated with artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher – comprised less of works

 Introduction 7 and more of strategies that exposed and deconstructed discursive systems within the power structures of art, be it the prestige of a museum to the monetary values assigned to privileged art objects. Now well into the new millennium, there is noticeable exhaustion in such techniques, with ‘relational aesthetics’ being an example of this, in which the antiinstitutional practices of performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s were collapsed cravenly, or interminably, back into the gallery structure. ‘Critique’ in art has become something of a formal structure, that is, historicized semiotic content: critique and the object of critique become one and the same (since critique must have an object), where the conceptual-political objective is stated as part of the game, but any further purchase is suspended. The tools and methods of contemporary art risk becoming a pantomime. Where once Minimal art was decried as solipsism, contemporary art’s solipsism exists as a far larger circuit of its own ritualization – art doing what art does – at the service of the market forces of entertainment and deregulated investment, where the Biennale and the Art Fair are just branches of the same tree. It is for these reasons that the work of Adorno is important and valid. It can begin in its attempt to lay out the relative certainties of what is good and what is bad art. Adorno’s interest is primarily modernist art, which had decisively shifted to be free of religion and myth, to have its own autonomy, along with that of the enlightened modernist subject. By the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Adorno, art equipped itself with the ability to resist the alienating forces of capitalism, which had also enlisted other kinds of art to its own ends. Transposed into the idiom of the historical forces of Adorno’s time, there is the form of art that is the Jew, cast out but with the instruments of truth, then there is the collaborator whose ignorance serves the instruments of terror, whose seductions mask a more devastating ostracism. What if the agents of truth were to be found within enemy lines? (If it is a matter of the Zeitgeist, we note a recent book on using Adorno in the critical evaluation of jazz.)17 Or it may be that art, although not all, is situated within the invidious circuits but relies on mass disavowal. It is to the advantage of the art industry, as we will call it, as a constituent of the culture industry, to ensure that other manifestations and practices are kept at bay. For the alternative, pseudo pop–related art forms, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro have coined the term ‘wild art’ for anything that is not regulated or sanctioned by the art world such as tattoo art, graffiti or skateboard performances. They argue that while art survives on demarcating borders, ‘there is no interesting difference in kind between art world art and wild art’.18 Apart from a problem of nominalism, ‘wild art’ is eminently comparable to what is more conventionally – they rightly contend judged by a combination of history and cultural gatekeeping – referred to as art. Perhaps the art at the penumbra of the border can be better. They contend: [i]n recent decades the boundaries of the art world have become even more porous. Previously ‘wild’ art objects have begun to move into galleries and museums and the mainstream art world has, over the past few decades, started to play lipservice to the multifarious forms of the alternative art worlds.19

Carrier and Pissarro elaborate on their notion of wild art in a later book,20 where they take an openly Kantian stance with regard to the subjectivity and freedom of taste:

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‘there can be no set, final and universal criteria defining art, this process has to be understood in historical terms’.21 Our position is a little more Hegelian and constricted, as we will see. For we are of the same mind except to argue that only some work in ‘wild art’ areas of activity can be deemed art, for to be too open is problematic and leads to the everything and nothing thesis of reasoning, a democracy where everyone can have a turn at being king for a day. One caveat: we are not entertaining any discussion here of so-called outsider art, a concept that is riven with problems that are too tedious to face here.22 Most of us are well used to the social critique in a show such as Southpark (for those who don’t want to start a debate about the metacommentaries in The Simpsons), and most know of Seinfeld and its ironic reflections on the postmodern urban subject. When Adorno died in 1969, Pop art was beginning to make itself felt, resting on the easy principle of the injection of the low into the high – comic books and rock stars were ennobled in museums. There was ‘light music’, as Adorno euphemistically called it, and there was serious music (‘music’ can be replaced with ‘art’). Such binary differentiations fail today, for not only is popular music everywhere but any form of culture can be popularized, that is marketed, broadcasted, as can people, whose identity is at the behest of social media. We are now living in an age when everything can be ranked and graded by the global democratic herd: from the latest recording of a Johannes Brahms symphony to a pair of sneakers. Writing in the early 1980s, Stuart Hall argued presciently that popular culture had to be taken seriously as a site where culture was waged.23 More recently Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that modernism’s mission ‘to act as a moral counterpoint to mass culture is no longer tenable. Art has been swallowed up by the insatiable appetite of global commodification’.24 This is so, but the faith in art is still within us. It is now a matter to ask where ‘art’ can be found. Mirzoeff makes the exhortation that in a world where art has been swallowed by commodity and spectacle, ‘[i]t is surely the task of those making art, writing about it and going to experience it to come up with a better way to rekindle the emancipatory potential of the work of art’.25 Perhaps there is a reason why this exhortation sounds more exasperated than rousing. There is a better way, we propose. Look at art, but also look closely elsewhere. For art can no longer always be found in art. To sound less like a riddle, the spirit in art, as Adorno would call it, is less evident in the carapace, the linguistic cipher, that parades itself as art today. The reason, then, that Adorno is retained within these reflections is that he believed that art, good art, has the capacity to deliver us from the dross of life, reminds us of our fragility as human beings and serves as an imperative for a better life, in terms of both subject and object, the world of people and the world of things. Adorno worked strenuously, and with all such efforts in which the outcome is undefined, unevenly, to seek out the criteria and values of what is deemed worthwhile over what is not. In a world gone gaga, the answer we seek now is: what are the loci of art and what are the means by which to locate and evaluate them. While the traditions of modernism continue to this day, they are cast within configurations – deployments, logics – that are anomalous to it. It is therefore important to define briefly the lineaments of what this tradition is. And since the ‘culture industry’ and ‘popular culture’ are terms used so freely, it is also worth embarking on the perilous terrain of a definition of culture.

 Introduction 9 This book, in dedication to Adorno, has something of a musical form. It begins with a sequence of themes starting with the notions of culture and tradition, and what it means to break or violate tradition, as this book proposes to do. It is followed by Hegel’s Aesthetics with a particular emphasis on artistic adequation, the argument that certain forms and approaches are more appropriate to one time as opposed to another. Then it traverses philosophical aesthetics developed by Adorno across his writings on music to his Aesthetic Theory. The chapter structure then progresses and unfolds into variations on the themes so established, faithful to a dialectical procedure. The diversity of new strains and manifestations of art and culture cannot be encyclopaedically detailed, which is why we have largely focused on fashion as the emerging complement to contemporary art. The final chapters are arguments for, and demonstrations of, philosophical aesthetics actively at work in unpacking and analysing objects of fashion. We would like to see this book as contributing to the growing chorus of voices who see ‘art’, the activity that art performs, as finding its place in practices and formats not previously recognized but whose validity can no longer be ignored. The book is not about Lady Gaga per se but the alternative aesthetic trajectories that her example poses.

10

1

Culture and the up-ending of tradition

‘Culture’ and ‘tradition’ are two terms that have circulated freely so far, largely with the presumption that we know what they consist in. But for given that so many assumptions rest on that understanding, they remain contentious. If art is a prerequisite of culture and yet, for Adorno at least, insists on its resistance to the culture industry through its withdrawal and autonomy, then it would seem important to establish what may be at stake here. Furthermore, if modern art is a break from tradition that establishes its own normative tradition, and to the extent that postmodernism and the time after that proposes a new angle if not up-ending of that tradition, then ‘tradition’ becomes another question-begging word. It is also a little easier to define than culture, which is why it is best to begin with it. ‘Tradition’ derives first from the Latin trader, ‘deliver, betray’, developing into traditio which becomes the Old French, tradicion. Tradition thus refers to what is transmitted and passed on, and are essential to the understanding of the unfolding of history with its continuities, variations and breaks from tradition, where ‘tradition’ can be seen as a formal standard of conduct and belief. Breaking from tradition, by all accounts a relative term, is a pre-eminently modernist concept. This has to do with industrial progress which is caught up with a secular society that is less ruled by principles that are believed transcendent and binding. Rather, knowledge is governed by what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigms’ which were frequently subject to alteration. Indeed the principle of change is imminent to the knowledge paradigm itself. The secular episteme of tradition converges with ideology, where in the realm of art styles and attitudes are apt to be debunked and reconfigured due to the pressures of history – here we may return to the Hegelian notion of adequation. From an Adornian perspective, modern art may also be understood as a unique form of ideology, all of whose laws are ungovernable and unknowable. Unlike other ideologies, its trajectory is indeterminate because of the aporia internal to it. In that regard art is a foil to the aporias within ideology which ideology labours to repress and constrain. The new tradition that Aesthetic Theory upholds is one against the universal ideal, cherished by Hegel, with this predilection for classical art. ‘Objective idealism’ is bound to the ‘objectivity of the Spirit’.1 In art as well as in culture more generally, modernity has been read as a continual cycle of changes that are more dramatically read as breaks and ruptures. Hence the military roots of the names ‘avant-garde’ and ‘vanguard’ which in turn signal a violence enacted on past structures. While a closer look will reveal that these putative

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breaks come at different rates and speeds, are a more evolutions of a style or idea, the concept of rupture is conducive to that of the ‘new’. Art’s susceptibility to the ‘new’ is a mirroring of the vicissitudes of commodity capitalism and fashion. ‘The category of the new’, Adorno announces, ‘engenders conflict. Not unlike the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in the seventeenth century, the conflict is between the new and with what endures.’2 The hazard of overstating enduring art is that it risks falling into myth, ignorant of its intrinsically historic character. As J. M. Bernstein demonstrates there is an inner conflict at play in art’s will for autonomy and difference as against the tradition that informs it, where ‘tradition’ acts as a bedrock or contextgiving background: Art’s will to autonomy, its forsaking of grounds (that, anyhow, have disappeared or have been withdrawn) and its normative rejection of them, forces art to negate not only previous artistic styles and practices, but equally tradition itself. This negation has a twofold structure. On the one hand, tradition is motivated by the search for what would make a work of art purely and just art and nothing else, without of course ceasing to be art (by becoming, say, pure decoration). In so far as tradition is a sedimentation of previous answers to the question ‘What is art?’, and in so far as those sedimentations include heteronomous determinations of art, then it is only through a critical engagement and reflection on tradition that art can achieve autonomy. On the other hand, since the very attempt to achieve autonomy presupposes that there is an essential nature proper to art, that what is inside and outside art can receive a determinate answer, then this project as a whole was doomed to failure.3

This statement has enormous repercussions for some claims that we have made so far and what is to follow, which relates to the shifting loci of art together with the shift in tradition. It also locates one of the difficulties that Adorno’s aesthetics finds it hard to see its way out of. It is an impasse that is not unique to Adorno but finds itself whenever art needs to set itself too conveniently apart. It is only the manner in which Adorno pursues his path with such determination that makes this fragility so apparent. Realizing that art cannot exist alone is all the more possible once art has reached its ‘end’. The multiple ends that have been experienced, or announced, or hypothesized upon, including the end, or ends, of history, are frequently confused with a jettisoning of history. This is certainly the central argument of Danto who bemoaned the crisis of tradition that accompanied the shattering of the historical arc of art history. The end of art described by Danto has since been interpreted as the end of a specific narrative of art and the expectations that govern them. The tradition of art that is ended is that of a set of narratives based on style, development, authenticity and where this is seen to lie. Seen in different terms, Danto’s end is that of a bewildered exhaustion where the artist-theorist no longer knows where to look. Jonathan Gilmore affirms that ‘even if there should be a development of some sort involving art, it will not be through the underlying principles that made art and its defining narratives possible throughout the past six hundred years’.4 The historical art of beginning, middle and end as written

 Culture and the Up-Ending of Tradition 13 into art history since at least Hegel if not earlier is fulfilled according to conditions and criteria internal to that narrative. Tradition is what keeps the narrative coherent and in check. The criteria and the narrative have shifted, perhaps in the vein of pulling the rug from underneath art history’s feet. Another and less unsettling way of understanding this change is that different discursive responses have merged in the need to look at art from a different angle – postmodernity after all is often configured as ‘modernity in parallax’. ‘Postmodernity is thus to be understood not’, writes David Roberts, ‘as the epoch of the “end of modernity” but as the epoch of the critical self-reflection of modernity after the demise of the grand but terminal narrative of progress.’5 Jameson draws attention to the postlife of art that is even present in Adrono and Hegel. That they go ‘on toe fantasize an art beyond the end of art, or even several, is intriguing enough: [ . . . ] artists may continue to invent and project models of art I a situation in which art-works can no-longer be concretely realized’.6 Given that this was written in 1990, we can easily update the statement, with the spirit preserved, namely that art’s end can be seen as a re-embarkation to new networks of delivery and reception. A little further, Jameson adds: ‘Adorno prophetically suggests a return to the tonal after the most implacable forms of atonality, under whose hegemony it once again becomes strangely new: something that seems in fact to be happening in postmodern music.’7 We may see this now as less a return but as a development that enshrines the possibility for new categories and experiences. Analogously, the category of the ‘posthuman’ is not to offer licence for inhuman deeds, but rather a widening of physical and ontic possibility. On the contrary, the overthrowing or reconfiguration of a paradigm owes a great responsibility to it. As Nietzsche refreshingly observes in his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, a balance needs to be kept between the past and the needs of the present: ‘the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of people and of a culture.’8 But it is also the burden of the past that is used to bury the needs of the present that threatens to outstrip it. No better place to turn than to art in which the power of opinion – hence opinions used for power – can call on one or another image of tested tradition to muffle ‘the strong artistic spirits’: ‘Their path will be barred, their air darkened, if a half-understood monument to some great era of the past is erected as an idol and zealously danced around, as though to say: “Behold, this is true art: Pay no heed to those who are evolving and want something new!”’9 The vulnerability of contemporary culture, art, the new, whatever the term used (they are all loaded), lies in them not (yet) belonging to tradition, for which Nietzsche uses the rhetorically provocative word ‘monumental’ which in his insinuation is false grandiosity. It is on the basis of trumped-up importance that the humble but true artist will be condemned: not in spite of the fact that his judges have solemnly proclaimed the canon of monumental art (that is to say, the art which, according to the given definition, has at all time ‘produced an effect’), but precisely because they have: while any art which, because contemporary, is not yet monumental, seems to them unnecessary, unattractive and lacking in the authority conferred by history. On the other hand, their instincts tell them that art can be slain by art: the monumental

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Gaga Aesthetics is never to be repeated, and to make sure it is not they invoke the authority which the monumental derives from the past.10

History is perpetually manipulated to service the needs of those who bring into their account to serve their own ideologies: ‘Monumental history is the masquerade costume in which their hatred of the great and powerful of their own age is disguised as satiated admiration for the great and powerful of past ages.’ It is a ruse that is perennial and something that is, conceivably, immanent, built into the upholding of tradition itself, ‘they act as though their motto were: let the dead bury the living.’11 Remarks like these can be said to apply to the wider Nietzschean project that would develop in subsequent writings, of discrediting forms of discourse that impede and obscure the possibilities of ‘real life’. Or they can easily be slotted into a modernist discourse of the avant-garde and the mythic struggle of independent artists with the academy. They are also highly apposite to the present project, especially regarding caution to invisible circumscriptions imposed over a discourse. Tradition sits in relation to qualitative standards of culture. As we have established at regular intervals so far, the mutation of parts of culture by the culture industry is one of the chief causes of art’s reorientation of itself with regard to tradition. Recognizing the changes of the culture industry necessitates the question, ‘What is culture?’ It is a question that has been asked repeatedly but deserves to be traversed again in order to lay the ground for the chapters that follow. Adorno’s grasp of ‘culture’ has to be seen against the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder, who reflected on the various and differentiated ways in which humans responded to their physical and historical circumstances. He understood humans to be flexible and thus adaptive to their environment, qualitative traits that flowed on to develop into systems that were linguistic and what would later be called ideological. The development of these systems towards improvement and perfectibility is the equivalent of Enlightenment. Like Hegel after him, he saw teleological potential in the capacity for responsiveness and shaping the surrounding world, he also believed in criteria that could remain universal against plurality. As opposed to universals such as ‘civilization’, Herder was the first to use the word ‘cultures’ which introduced a new division of social organization and the understanding of social groupings that were consequent upon demographics, geography and history. Put another way, Herder identified that cultures had distinctive traits that were expressed through language, custom and material factors such as dress and architecture and of course art. As we have briefly seen already, Winckelmann, whose thought also originated in the latter half of the eighteenth century, was influential in building an epistemic corollary between the quality of the art of a culture and the quality of the culture itself. Adorno, as a result of National Socialism, technology, America and so on, viewed the Enlightenment procession of culture as halted or retarded. Culture, he explained, must also retain some sense of its independence, by which he means resistance to forces that manipulate it. Culture is for Adorno something of an organism and by accounts one that is easily corruptible and traduced, that, although independent, cannot be autonomous. As he disquisitions in his fifteenth lecture on metaphysics: Culture in its great manifestations is not a kind of socio-educational institution, but rather has its truth – if there be one – only in itself. And what it can or could

 Culture and the Up-Ending of Tradition 15 possibly mean for human beings can only be fulfilled by not thinking about people, but instead by developing itself with purity and consistency – what after all, as far as the world is concerned, generally culture is lacking in love when it does not adapt in a certain sense what people want from it.12

This is a marvellously nuanced statement. In invoking ‘love’, Adorno shifts culture a little to the left of edifying power to that of nurturing and protecting. It is both part of society and conceived as a separate engine that serves and protects. Slowly emanating from these ideas that art was exemplary of culture eventuated into the second tier of the term, as found in ‘cultural’, ‘cultured’, ‘highly cultured’, ‘cultural activities’, ‘cultural awareness’ and the like. Here culture is accompanied with the expectation that it carries a more profound – or distilled or concentrated – expression of what is to be found in a culture. The latter is a social distribution with commonalities of language, history and ritualization (napping after lunch, fasting at a certain time of the year, greeting by one, two or three kisses on the cheek, etc.) which people have grown up with or with whom they have chosen to identify. The former revolves around a series of symbols, practices, stories, events, relics and people that have become synonymous with that culture and what it aspires to both maintain and achieve. Raymond Williams refers to the more overarching sense of culture as having ‘an emphasis on the “informing spirit” of a whole way of life, which is manifest over the whole range of social activities, but which is evident in “specifically cultural” activities – a language, styles of art, kinds of intellectual work’. These are qualities that apply to ‘a whole social order’.13 On the level of cultish spectatorship, the affirmation of what is cultural is, for example, carried out habitually in tourist activity where to experience a foreign culture is to visit a local museum and to ‘take in a show’, the presumption being that that culture is demonstrably on display and where the visiting spectator is acutely on the watch for differences between their culture and the one on display. Despite the auspicious usage of ‘culture’ in this sense, it must vie with the more blanket anthropological usage of what defines one social group against another. Cultural representation is therefore what can be marked out as specific, or when not specific, follows a pattern of identifiers that fit a consensus. German music is not confined to Germany but rather to Germanophone peoples, incorporating Austria. Franz Liszt has been embraced as quintessentially Hungarian, even though he spoke no Hungarian but French and German. It is natural for a culture not only to seek out what is thought to be unique to it, as in national dress, but to seek out certain symbols and signifiers that it osmotically adapts to have a universal significance, as China has done to the qipao and the chongsam which originated in Shanghai in the 1920s.14 Something similar occurs with the Korean hanbok which, although dating from much earlier, owes its familiar silhouette to variations of the late nineteenth century. Literally, hanbok means ‘Korean clothing’. Foreign participants may dress up in the appropriate cultural dress to show their polite allegiance, or as an affirmation of a celebration, as a man may wear Lederhosen while getting inebriated on beer in Munich during Oktoberfest. On a broader semantic level, culture is an organizing principle. It organizes social groups as well as their associated representations: ‘thus the social organization of culture’, states Williams, ‘as a realized signifying system, is embedded in a whole range

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of activities, relations and institutions, of which only some are manifestly “cultural.”’15 But it is not despite but because of this that the arts are among the most jealously guarded and vetted. The arts are the organizational systems of what is at stake in a particular culture: what it has achieved and to what it aspires. It is by breaking this down a little bit that we can begin to see the particular horror with which various cultural critics, aestheticians, curators, connoisseurs, and the like, have over the encroachment – infiltration, vitiation, embedding and now absorption – of the lower arts into the high. As porous and indefinite as the barriers may have always been, the separation of the high arts has been to safeguard a culture in question and, more universally, culture per se. The criticality of this for modernism is due precisely to art’s supposed autonomy, in its separation from church and state patronage which had controlled the rules of cultural organization. In a secular age, where religious writ and doxa have evaporated, the need to ensure that the most pre-eminent cultural expressions are retained and the codified reaches neurotic proportions. We might go so far as to say that Adorno is the ultimate cultural neurotic. It is the presence of such boundaries that accommodates the perverse glee of the artist who introduces something from the outside into the inside. Pop did this, but it is telling and a central tenet of this book that such acts are no longer achievable: that ‘it has all been done’ sits together with the absence of an inside or outside, like the dubious fight for primacy between chicken and egg. And yet, there remains some general if indistinct sense of the boundaries of art, but these are perhaps more in play for the benefit of the commodity market. It might be better to theorize that instead of there being, or having been, coherent distinctions between high and low, we might instead posit that only the effort at distinction-making has been consistent. We do not need to reach too far back to see that the novel, which is today becoming something of a relic, began as a debased form of literature, written by and circulated among women in the seventeenth century. Serious writing was committed to poetry and philosophy. It was not until the eighteenth century that the novel began to be taken seriously when men began to write them. Pierre Bourdieu explores this notion in several books, notably Les règles de l’art (The Rules of Art) where he argues that the acceptance of a certain form of artistic practice has to be accompanied with various authoritarian powers that lend it importance and prestige.16 This is also the insight from his most famous work La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Distinction: Social Critique of Judgment) that the main mobilizers of taste are those with a high degree of cultural capital, education being key.17 The recognition of the novel as a serious form, for example, is coterminous with the literary critique, the literary pastiche, serialization and its admission into the university, which gradually deemed it worthy of analysis and appraisal. No doubt, Adorno’s Philosophy of Music is a concerted effort to make clear differences in artistic value, but today even the educated non-specialist who turns on a radio station in search of ‘classical’ music will not balk at an aria from a Léhar operetta, a walz by Johann Strauss or noisy all-brass ensemble, nor will there be much difference in the aesthetic set of tools if a Mozart divertimento is programmed after one of Beethoven’s last quartets, let alone any feeling of misgiving if only one movement is excerpted from it. This is not the fault of the listener, but rather a symptom of popularization of culture, which includes the packaging of high culture as sign, that is, to hear a track from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of

 Culture and the Up-Ending of Tradition 17 the Moon (1973) on a classical station is most likely to elicit unease, maybe panic (to us triumph), although the album itself is a ‘classic’. The promiscuous amalgamation of classical music on this imaginary radio station is also a clear indicator that the rise of popular culture coincides with the rise of the middle class. High culture is a commodity that no longer exists for the aristocracy but as a plural category, one for the amusement of the bourgeoisie, the other for the arbitration and study of specialists, the intellectuals, who also belong to the bourgeoisie. The views of one do not necessarily match with the other, although the middle class lays some tacit faith in the intellectual that he or she is vigilant that high culture be preserved – or in our case, renegotiated and exploded. Writing forty years ago of the evolution of popular culture, Williams explains: [a]t one level, ‘popular culture’, in these later periods, is a very complex combination of residual, self-made and externally produced elements, with important internal conflicts between these. At another level, and increasingly, this ‘popular’ culture is the major area of bourgeois and ruling-class cultural production, moving towards an offered ‘universality’ in the modern communications institutions, with a ‘minority’ sector increasingly seen as residual and to be formally ‘preserved’ in those terms. Thus a relatively undisputed ‘high culture’ has been quite generally moved into the past tense, with some attendant and competing successor minorities of a discrete kind, while the active and effective ‘minority’, within a class-determined range of cultural production, has moved decisively into the general ‘majority’ area.18

Williams could hardly have foreseen the admission of Dylan onto the august Nobel list or for that matter the growing acceptance of the graphic novel as an object of study. Nor that ‘quality TV’ has replaced the serial novel, vying for it in its panoply of complex characterizations and for its many slippages from social norms. (Who can forget Kim Coates as the brutal biker Tig Trager falling in love with a transgender person in the cult TV series Sons of Anarchy.) One of the problems facing the study and appraisal of popular culture is that it is not monolithic, much less having a definable credo or set of rules. Further, and yet more subtle, the countervailing imaginary, that is, of a life without it, is hard to fathom without the neo-Rousseauist fantasy of noble savagery, which is its own moral and ideological quandary. As Stuart Hall emphasizes, ‘“transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active re-working, so that they come out in a different way’.19 He insists that popular culture is a relational, transactional activity whose common element is transformation. Popular culture is constantly building on itself, quoting itself, refashioning itself. One area of contention is within the word ‘popular’ itself, with all its attendant implications of what is pleasing over what is difficult, what caters to the lowest denominator of enjoyment and temporary wish-fulfilment. Yet, as Hall argues, such a position presumes a passive and uncritical audience.20 (Like Williams, he is writing pre-Internet in which the criticism is harsh and resounding, and where there are reviews not only of art and film but the very hardware and gadgets used to make and view it.) But as Hall argues there is no such thing as an authentic kind

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of popular culture nor an autonomous one. We would add that it is this very lack of autonomy which makes it an inimical challenge to the modernist paradigm of art. It is also a term that, if pried open, reveals a container of immeasurable proportions. Hall names ‘stamp-collecting, flying ducks on the wall and garden gnomes’.21 In our present parlance, these can hardly be matched by achievements in human relationships such as the TV series Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. These are citable because they were popular, but based on quite clear criteria. The main quandary about popular culture, as Hall observes, is that it ‘is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged’.22 In other words, yes, it is a site of mass deception, the dissemination of false hope and interminable dross, but it is also the purveyor of penetrating questions that form a continuous line with the high arts. Gaga aesthetics can be an acknowledgement of the latter while knowing that the former is not gated off, just somewhere in the distance.

2

Hegel, art and adequation

There are two key principles of Hegel’s Aesthetics (and his aesthetics, given that art features regularly in his thought and is not confined to the posthumously gathered lectures), namely that art must be examined according to a historical framework and that art represents a form of thinking, which, albeit different from philosophy, is not independent of it. Philosophy since antiquity was either hostile or sceptical of art (Plato), or ignored because it was simply a different domain of human activity. Kant, whose Critique of Judgment is not strictly aimed at art but on aesthetic judgement, believed that art did not offer anything that rigorous philosophical reflection could not provide. While Hegel makes a few unsympathetic swipes against early Romantic thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, what he does take seriously from him and his circle, as well as several progenitors of Romanticism such as Herder, Goethe and Rousseau, is that art had something substantial to offer thought and that philosophy might benefit from it. In the words of Jere Surber, the significance of Hegel’s ‘treatment of art was to open the way for art to become regarded as a vehicle for raising what were previously treated as distinctly “philosophical” issues and as providing an important means for expressing specifically “philosophical” viewpoints’.1 Similarly, as William Desmond contends, ‘[a]n understanding of art is indispensable to Hegel’s understanding of the Absolute, and so also to an understanding of the conception of philosophy itself ’.2 In the words of Robert Pippin: ‘According to Hegel, art is an affective-sensible modality of . . . self-knowledge, playing its role together with, but categorically distinct from, the “representational” vocabulary of religion and conceptual articulation, or “logic” of philosophy.’3 Although Hegel did not place art on par with philosophy, it did nonetheless have philosophical valency, if indecisive. This means that he gives it a duty and function within the field of human endeavour, thereby inserting it into the progressive passage of spirit’s realization: first art, then religion, then philosophy, each of which have an incrementally greater capacity for the embodiment (Darstellung) ‘of the free Spirit, the free Idea in itself ’.4 As Hegel remarks midway through his Lectures on Aesthetics, ‘the work of art is not merely sensorial (Sinnlichen), but rather Spirit comes into appearance through the sensorial (Geist ist im Sinnlichen erscheinend).’ Art is a matter of serious consideration, for despite being experienced subjectively, the experience is in ‘ways that are theoretical, intelligent, not practical, without the whole correspondence (Beziehung) to desire and will’.5 Raising the stakes, art is given a purpose that is no longer incidental but structural and causal. This means that art has a purpose. If more

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can be expected of it, then art is also allowed to make greater claims for itself. Yet it should also be noted that there is an ambivalence that runs through Hegel’s thought between art as an irreducible and irreplaceable facet of human endeavour while at the same time something that needs to be overcome, superseded and, in effect, replaced.6 The ‘sensuous appearance of the Idea’ is not enough. This said, as Jason Gaiger asserts, ‘Hegel’s claim that the study of art should concern itself with all aspects of culture rather than treating artworks in isolation retains its relevance and requires that we engage constructively with the distinctly social form of mindedness that he termed Geist’.7 Art was more than ‘artfulness’, entertainment or an activity of the élite, but a filter of human experience in relation to time and place. Annemarie GerthmannSiefert adds that the ‘cultural function of art consists in the historical tradition of world interpretations and in keeping them alive’.8 Reflecting on Kant’s philosophy in his earlier years in Jena, Hegel emphasized the subjective grasp of beauty in nature. It was something not inherent to nature but a constituent of our powers of judgement that orders nature and gives it purpose. The Beautiful is one sign of human need and power to render nature intelligible.9 From there Hegel decisively distinguishes art from nature (as we will find even more forcefully in Adorno), in that it is a translation from and above nature as an objective expression of Geist, or Spirit. (‘Spirit’ is the somewhat inadequate English translation of Geist, which is the force and energy of humanity; it is also translated loosely as ‘mind’.)10 Art embodies (Darstellung) Spirit in its individuality while, at the same time, purged from arbitrary existence with all the alterations of its external condition, and yet does not objectively for the sake of contemplation and representation (Vorstellung). Beauty in and for itself is the object of art, not the imitation of Nature, which is itself a mere temporal and unfree imitation of the idea. Aesthetics observes forms closer to such beauty in representation.11

In yet more rousing terms, Hegel would later state that ‘[t]he universal need for art [is] man’s rational need to raise the inner and outer world to spiritual consciousness as an object in which he again recognizes his own self ’.12 Art is therefore not something that encloses a truth, but rather its truth is gauged to the degree with which it can be a vehicle for interpreting self and world. As distinct from the appearance of nature, art’s mode of appearance has a critical function. The particular form of representation of art is not illustrative but moderated. In the words of Charles Taylor, ‘Art is a mode of consciousness of the Idea, but it is not a representation of it.’13 Art is a form of disclosure of the Spirit as are others such as laws and morality, but art expresses a form of consciousness of human beings in relation to their society and to nature. Art alerts, awakens, us to a higher state of being. It alerts us to the fact that it is there that there is a predestination of humanity with regard to the spirit. These idealist presumptions of morality, law, spirit and destiny are not to be cast aside, as they are key to the continuity implied with ‘tradition’ and the constituents imminent to it. They are among the ‘master narratives’, as Lyotard would have it, that are jettisoned or reconfigured in the legitimation crisis of knowledge of postmodernism, but they deserve to be revisited because they remain residual in the

 Hegel, Art and Adequation 21 present.14 (The ‘and yet’ we find ourselves saying about Adorno.) They are persistent, mourned or reoriented – but let us not get ahead of ourselves. Hegel began lecturing serious about art in around 1820 (the courses on aesthetics were in 1820–1, 1823, 1826 and 1828–9). The set of lectures devoted to art in 1826 (The Philosophy of Art), which were run in tandem with those devoted to the Encyclopaedia, as Gerthmann-Siefert points out, helped Hegel to give his theory of art its systematicity, and where historical conditions could be adduced to the characteristics and effectiveness of the various arts with regard to effective expression.15 Towards the beginning of the lectures on art Hegel offers a definition that is as sound for an enlightenment, humanitarian position as anyone would want. (It is also a coda for Adorno’s expectations of art.) We recognize the ultimate purpose of art in what it effects: the forms are different, the content the same. We experience in art what brings us closer in feeling or mind to the spirit of the high and the true or the essential, and arts’ representations all that is in us is brought to sensation or experience. Art always complements the experiences of our real life, and through such excitations we are also made capable of feeling particular states and situations more profoundly, or are made more capable of the external circumstances arousing these sensations, which were made possible through the medians of art’s vision of things (Kunstanschauung).16

This criteria for what art effects – what it does, what it should do – helps to explain the disenchantment of the likes of Danto and Kuspit while also allowing for speculation on whether the remit of the content is still the same and only the forms different. Hegel then glosses Kant and thinkers in his immediate wake: Schiller, Schelling and the Schlegel brothers. The last two fall under the heaviest attack, for the manner in which they translate the premium placed on the individual vision of the world lifted, as he points out the Fichtean primacy of the ‘I’. Fichte developed on Kant’s formal categories of the thinking subject to argue that it is through the subjective ego that the world is ordered and thus created (a notion out of which Freud developed the subjective phantasy.) Hegel takes exception to Schlegel’s reading of Fichtean subjectivity, in which all other than the I is ‘not-I’, which in extreme form can be used as a way of elevating individuality. It is a way of thinking, Hegel suggests, that is solipsistic, always returning to this individual, unique conception. (Hegel’s quip about Schelling and ‘the night where the cows are black’ comes to mind.) This is ultimately a negative conception, since art simply becomes a matter of how one person sees the world. In the words of Paul de Man: ‘to take you to your own experience, instead of presenting an argument. Thus the problem is to stay awake’.17 In other words, to dwell on the singular vision is limiting and for all tedious. For to say that art is a subjective vision is true but not to the fullest extent, as there must be more than that otherwise it is a standpoint that is ‘the vanity of everything substantive, objective’. It is jejune indulgence that leads to hollowness.18 Art is saved this fate, and from its ‘external or sensuous being’ when made consequential to history, which ‘brings us its true content’.19 The deliverance that art is capable of performing was something that Hegel admired in Schiller, who believed in the objectivity of beauty and that its contemplation has potential beyond

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enjoyment. For Schiller, art has a reparative and restorative power to mend humanity’s alienation from itself and from nature. The experience of art would in turn mend human experience, in aiding in its spiritual homecoming. Art is conceived as a vehicle for Spirit, where Spirit is given summary purpose within time, as Hegel would lay out much earlier in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Beauty is objective, it reveals the Spirit and the divine through its variously effective (adequate) modes of appearance. Art is not free from history and is at the behest of Spirit, and therefore teleological. In the Phenomenology art is discussed under the subheading ‘The Religion of Art’ (Die Kunstreligion). Already he maps out art’s passage according to three principal phases, which are called ‘the abstract work of art’, ‘the living work of art’ and ‘the spiritual work of art’. These phases, or ‘moments’ as Hegel liked to call them, would subsequently be given the more lapidary rubrics ‘symbolic’, ‘classic’ and ‘the romantic’, each of which will be dealt with in turn in a moment. These moments in the unfolding of art (and its imminent destitution) mark the means by which the Idea can make itself known and can make itself known to itself. It is not a separate entity being shot through by three different pea-shooters of incremental intensity, but rather through a process of symbiosis and osmosis, where progress in time is key. They reveal the movement of Sittlichkeit to greater and greater substance. Sittlichkeit is different from Moralität in that it represents ethical order and ethical life that he would later develop in terms of the ‘sphere of abstract right’ in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820). To use de Man’s words: ‘Art makes the transition from the objective spirit to the absolute spirit, the transition from the order of the political – the philosophy of right – to the discourse of philosophy and theology.’20 Where once humanity was confined to instincts and appetites in which the ethics of spirit had no means of self-reflection or development (they are mutually exclusive), art becomes a vehicle and a technique of self-realization. We use the word ‘technique’ in the attempt to bypass the sense that art is simply a passage. It is technique as language is technique in order to communicate at various levels from commands, exclamations and simple needs on one end to poetry on the other. But unlike language, immanent to art is its exhaustion, thus entrusting art to a higher purpose comes as the melancholy price of its demise. Later Spirit divests itself of art (Später ist der Geist über die Kunst hinaus), in order to gain its higher embodiment (Darstellung) – namely not only from the substance born from the self, but to be in its embodiment as the object of this self, not only birthed through its concept, rather to give shape to the concept so that the concept and the work of art know each other as one and the same.21

To put this in less cryptic, mystical terms: art will have done its proverbial duty once it reaches an awareness of what it was there for in the first place. In the ultimate realization of the Idea, art becomes drained, exhausted and made redundant, since it knows itself as having evolved into something else. Art’s three moments are hierarchically incremental in importance, judged according to their levels of adequate expression and coming-knowledge of the Idea. The Idea is defined as ‘nothing other than the complete unity of the concept and reality, the

 Hegel, Art and Adequation 23 concept is the soul and the reality is the body (Leiblichkeit)’.22 In the passage of the Idea to its realization, the ‘Idea first seeks out its shape (Gestaltung) and form’. Different artistic forms prove adequate to the progressive stages of the Idea’s realization. This movement to the absolute, as Desmond advises, ‘is not attained by a leap beyond experience, but by an emergence and unfolding from within experience itself of its own ultimate dimension’.23 The first manifestation of the Idea can be found in symbolic art, which is largely that of ancient architecture: ziggurats, temples, pyramids and the like. The sublime features in the symbolic order as it registers that is all that is beyond our knowing. Non-comprehension signals that there is something to be known, through the consciousness of the lack of understanding. In the symbolic, the Idea inheres as an enigma, as a secret yet to be deciphered. Content remains locked within symbolic art, never to be found, relentlessly hidden ‘without rest or peace’ (Rast und Ruhe zu finden).24 Egyptian temples overwhelm us with their magnitude which causes us to receive them as generalities. Sculpture is not yet given any autonomy but is a component of the greater mass.25 Before moving to the next stage, the classical, in the historical progression of the Idea, let us pause to review the legacy of Hegel’s theory of art, for already there are a number of issues that stand out as outdated or outlandish. For Hegel’s theory is invested with a number of metaphysical commitments that are no longer convincing or useful to contemporary thought. However, the attempt to make sense of art against history had seismic implications. In his earlier and later lectures, Hegel makes several respectful comments about Winckelmann, acknowledging his debt to him. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1767) was the first book to have both the words ‘art’ and ‘history’ together and to entertain seriously the connection between the two. In his own considerations of the classic phase of art, Hegel was to draw from Winckelmann’s argument that the quality of art was a reflection of the strength and integrity of a culture or civilization. Hegel, as with Schelling, drew from Winckelmann that art was the product of civilization, and as a manifestation of culture, the quality of a culture’s art was a reflection of the culture’s level of culture. Hegel asserts that ‘it cannot be denied that, since Winckelmann’s death, the acquaintance with antique sculpture has not only increased, but has also created a stronger position with regard style and the appreciation of their beauty’.26 Inspired after the beginning of excavation at Herculaneum and Pompeii, Winckelmann’s text and example were used as rallying points for Greek art and culture, which would inspire several generations of artists and thinkers in Germany and across Europe to the point of obsession. Ancient Greece, as fact and as idea, became the ideal of human civilization. Nietzsche would later comment that one way of understanding German Idealism and Romanticism was as homesickness en masse over ancient Greece.27 Hegel’s former classmate in Jena, Friedrich Hölderlin referred to ancient Greece as ‘An Empire of Art’. As if in echo, Hegel states that ‘the Greek religion is itself the religion of art’.28 Hölderlin did not think of the Greek gods as historical relics but as life-affirming forces. Hegel, as Desmond affirms, found the Greeks ‘devastating in the way an idealized exemplar shows up what was felt to be the aesthetic poverty of the present’.29 Hegel would compare the pell-mell disorder of his own world to what he wistfully regarded as the solemn unity of the ancient world.

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Towards the end of the Phenomenology, Hegel sounds a note of wistful remorse at the passing of such a world. It is a passage that has been cited for comment by a number of significant thinkers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, notable not only for its poetic tone but also that in its regret there is an implication that the historical march forward is not entirely triumphal but comes at a loss: In the condition of right or law, then, the ethical world and the religion of art are submerged and lost in the comic consciousness, and the Unhappy Consciousness is the knowledge of the total loss. It has lost both the worth it attached to its immediate personality and the worth attached to its personality as mediated, as thought. Trust in the eternal laws of the gods has vanished, and the Oracles, which pronounced on particular questions, are dumb. The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. The works of the Muse now lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and men. They have become what they are for us now – beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate has offered us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed, not constituted by their substance, not the climate which gave them their peculiar character, not the cycle of the changing seasons that governed the process of their growth. So Fate does not restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives us the spring and the summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actual world.30

There is a good deal to mine in this passage, and it is a useful forerunner for several themes to be canvassed in more detail later in this book, including the nostalgia for a more generous, abundant and authentic era of art, and the movement from one tradition to the next. It is also steeped in the historical specificity of art, wherein art loses its relevance and resonance upon the evaporation of its linguistic contexts, its ritual uses and all the other consensual belief systems that accorded art of the time importance as a vessel of complex, multivalent meaning. With all its holes, Hegel’s aesthetics would establish the discipline of art history as a study of culture and style, with justifications assigned to decadent styles of art against progressive ones. It would also prove essential to the analysis of modernism when it came to formalist criticism. ‘Form’, as we will find in Adorno, underpinned by Hegel’s ‘end of art’ thesis would be reinvoked by the critics of postmodernism with its absence of a discernible style, the chaotic proliferation of forms and with all of this the dissolution of critical standard for measuring good against bad art. While the rigidity of the system proposed by Hegel has ceased to be relevant, the residual standard of ‘spirit’ remains, as suggested in the outline of art’s benefits earlier: that the best art enriches our experiences of being in the world. Further, the chronology that Hegel lays out, however sweeping, supplies the rudiments of tradition, of which the classic era of art marked as the apogee. Unlike the symbolic, form for the classical is not

 Hegel, Art and Adequation 25 ‘superficial, indeterminate or impenetrable in its content, but rather the completion of art reaches its zenith (Gipfel), where the spiritual passes completely through into its outer appearance’. Nature rendered unto its most beautiful and the ‘reality of the mind in its substantial individuality’.31 The classic phase of art is where we find an ‘adequate imaging (Einbilding) of the Idea of the concept in as external, appearance, manifestation’.32 The fullness of the Idea is adequate to the form. As opposed to the inscrutability of symbolic art before it, classic art reveals a harmony between idea and its embodiment (as in Verkörperung), hence the ‘corporeality of being’ that Hegel discusses in the Phenomenology. ‘The Living Work of Art’ is one that maintains a fluid relation between itself and living beings. The sculptures of gods live among the people who worship them not as ‘the god of stone but the highest bodily representation of its being’.33 In the words of Richard Winfield, ‘the spatial self-repose of the plastic figure’ is a testament to sculpture being ‘a medium congruent with a stage in human development where rational agency takes its essential identity to reside in its bodily existence and in a universal substance’, before its withdrawal in self-conscious subjectivity’.34 Sculpture is at its best when capturing what is objective – inherent to palpable objects and thus the ‘substantial, imperishable dimension of rational agency’.35 While Hegel acknowledges that many sculptures were painted, the eyes are vacuous, lacking the inner qualities of subjective self-awareness. Thus the objectivity, harmony and beauty of Greek art, in which we find a unity between body and spirit, is also the harbinger of its downfall, for this very unity at the same time emphasizes that it is still too earth-bound: devoted to human flesh and insufficiently to human spirit. The effectiveness with which Greek art gives us bodily awareness prevents us from attending to the metaphysical realm. It is unable to express the element of the subjective that, as Stephen Houlgate clearly states, ‘the sculptor gives three-dimensional shape to human freedom and so only lets us encounter human freedom as a material bodily presence’.36(Later sculpture of the ‘romantic’ caste, if it rivals Greek classical art as we demonstrated by Michelangelo for example, is not a challenge to the great era of art but an affirmation of it, since it simply reappropriates ancient ideals.) If Greek art is the high point of art, it also reveals what is lacking in art, namely the inability to escape itself: ‘the content of classical art’s beauty is indeed just as lacking as the religion of art itself; but the lack lies less in the anthropological as such, for the contrary claim pertains, that classical art is indeed sufficiently anthropological, but insufficient for higher religion.’37 Hegel makes repeated distinction between craft and handiwork (Handwerk) and creation (Schöpfung), where art is the name for when the materials of nature are imbued with an extra, deeper force that in turn portends the secrets underlying and beyond such material. But it is precisely this successful mirroring of the Spirit within the material in classical art that reveals its weakness and, thereby, the weakness of art. It is a weakness that is reasserted in the final ‘romantic’ phase in which the form proves inadequate to the Idea. Hegel’s ‘romantic’ is not confined to the period from the end of the eighteenth century onward; it rather approximates what we today call art when referring to the tradition of art and artists since the Renaissance onward. That is, where artists were recognized according to their authorial autonomy and their works categorized according to styles ascribable to both themselves and their historical

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period. What sculpture was to the classical period, so painting and music were to the romantic. Poetry is also pertinent, although it belonged to all times and was the highest of the art because it was best able to convey the intricacies of the human spirit (Hegel’s readings of Antigone, Œdipus Rex and Hamlet are quite celebrated).38 Hegel believed it was a mistake for romantic art to want to return to the status of Greek, classical art. Humanity of his time had progressed to a higher form of self-awareness. Not only that, society had dispersed and complexified in a manner incommensurate with Greek culture, which was mythic, but also far more aesthetic. For Hegel his modern times were unaesthetic, and the art of his time expressed this through an incoherence, imbalance or a striving, which was not endemic to classical art. The modern subject was more out of joint with itself as it was in relation to society. Art of the romantic, more modern period must find itself in active correspondence with inner subjectivity. But the inner subjectivity of romantic art – which Hegel equates to Christian art – is the essence of subjectivity, not self-referential. Thus ‘infinite subjectivity, the absolute of romantic art, is not submerged in its appearing; it is in itself, and for that does not have its individuality for itself but for others, freed and exposed to the outer surface’.39 Painting was pre-eminent in this regard. For, as Houlgate puts it, painting ‘replaces the solidity and materiality of sculpture with the Schein of natural space, and so explicitly dissolves the idea that what we behold is irreducibly material’.40 Romantic art evinces a struggle with its content that must ultimately be resolved in Geist finding a better partner for its resolution, its entelechy as the Absolute. Romantic art announces, as Rudolphe Gasché remarks, ‘the moment of collision, and here the determinacy of the situation takes the form of essential difference, and produces a relation of opposition’.41 If classical sculpture reveals the inadequacy of art in the adequacy of the material, the formal stresses, the perceived frictions of romantic art suggest this even more, because of the expression of something inexpressible and therefore incommensurable. The end of art is when it can no longer cope with what it sets out to communicate. As Gaiger explains: Hegel’s claims that the transition to romantic art is brought about by the ‘progression of art beyond itself ’ and that the content that is to be expressed ‘demands more than the representational form of the artwork can achieve’ introduce a tension or conflict within the very concept of art, for he insists that what is lacking in classical art is something that is lacking in art itself.42

The arguments about the adequacy of a medium to its historical moment are as pertinent as ever. Speaking about his transition from fashion photography to fashion film in the new millennium, Nick Knight considers that photography ‘is no longer the Zeitgeist medium that it was’.43 By this he means the medium and its appurtenances to its time commensurate with the technologies at hand. It is the unfolding of the medium and the marking out of its particular parameters that define its tradition, and redefine past mediums, most famously as photography did to painting. The longevity of painting, its ability to redefine itself regularly, owes itself to a deep and broad history to which alternative, neighbouring approaches can dialectically define themselves. On a more bland and banal level, the endurance of painting is that it is a welcome and popular

 Hegel, Art and Adequation 27 commodity: as long as there is a market for painting, painting will persist. Painting will also persist within the Zeitgeist media of ‘media’ itself, meaning the different portals and variants of and within the Internet, Instagram for example. But it is also the promiscuity of a portal such as Instagram that encourages the protean, mobile redefinition of what art is and where it is to be found. To mimic the kind of provocative epigrammatic statement so beloved of both Hegel and Adorno, the presence of a means of representation such as Instagram forces us to question the status of art as ‘art’. Hegel, and other thinkers of aesthetics such as George Santayana, correlated individual arts to particular styles and moments in history, most noticeably in his praise of the classical. Sculpture continues to live on in many forms. If we confine the argument to figural sculpture, we only need to look at the contributions of hyperreal sculptures, which are only possible using specialist technology. At the same time, Hegel’s periodizing observations do help us to train our gaze critically on to what mediums and approaches are being used at one or another time for reasons that many of these are more appropriate, hence adequate to their time. The reasons can be nuanced and may vary, or they may have very simple explanations based on linguistic popularity. A Hegelian reading of the hyperrealist sculpture of Ron Mueck or others like him may also be more pertinent than first presumed. For in a ‘romantic’ vein, they do have the uneasiness between form and concept, indeed it is on uneasiness (simulation of life vs static presence; simulation of life vs implausible size and so on) that this kind of sculpture rests.44 It is also true that they might also be numbered among the Zeitgeist media of today because they are also uneasy as works of art. Or rather, they function just as well as waxwork curiosities or as film ‘fx’. Popular culture is no longer around the corner. It is at the epicentre.

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Adorno, the constriction of the aesthetic and difficult art

As Thucydides reports, Pericles proclaimed that the people of Athens should express dedication to their democratic city with erotic love. Such a pronouncement is hardly possible coming from Adorno, whose greater philosophical project is how to save society from the cultural depredations of technology and commodity capitalism. As a student of Alban Berg, he viewed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone schema as the apogee of music. It is for him an example of art that was able to channel those who experience it to a more elevated, correct course of ethical responsibility, enabling them to contemplate the troubling nature of the human condition, rather than fleeing from it in the narcotic boredom of inauthentic art’s entertainments, which only embed the subject into the interminable cycle of capitalist tyranny. For what is conspicuously absent in Adorno’s philosophy, and in particular his aesthetics, is an erotic sensibility. Erotic in this sense applies to gratuitous self-fulfilment, pleasure to its own ends, and sensory stimulation sometimes at boundaries of propriety. In effect, this is much (but not all) of what popular culture, and contemporary popular culture especially, affords: an extraordinarily versatile, always protean (and insidious) tools of auto-gratification. While he felt deep sympathy with Nietzsche’s notions of the slave mentality and the way religious morality is an ethical perversion that paralyses the subject for the maintenance of institutional power, there is little place in his thinking for spontaneous Dionysian convulsiveness or for the sensuous arbitrariness of art. There is no sex, no fun. Adorno’s miserabilism is in deference to the miserable state of world affairs. Buoyancy and seduction are used to service the culture industry, and they are mechanisms for keeping people torpid and inert. It is an attitude and philosophical topology that renders any engagement with popular culture difficult and challenging. The high–low dialectic is no simple binary. For the criteria of what defines high and low art are historical and therefore changing, and indeed the need for definition is a modern predicament. Other problems lie in the nature of the reception of art or interpretation and of what and who decides quality and authenticity – all with the least possible taint of ideology. Unfortunately, this imperative is itself already ideological. The first section navigates some of the central points in Adorno’s work leading up to Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory: his early book on Kierkegaard, some of his writings on modern music and the culture industry.

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Early Adorno, Kierkegaard and the ‘constriction of the aesthetic’ Adorno’s first serious publication was the somewhat neglected Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Adorno’s interest in aesthetics and ‘the aesthetic’ – the former an arm of philosophical thinking solidified since Hegel, the latter a descriptor of a condition applicable to both subject and object – was deeply entrenched since an early age. Born to an affluent Jewish Austro-German family with strong leanings to music and literature, Adorno was able to play and read music at an early age, familiarizing himself with the classical and Romantic repertoire. While studying at the University of Frankfurt, he continued to study piano and composition under the tutelage of Bernhard Sekles, the former teacher of Paul Hindemith. At Frankfurt he fell in with a number of HegelianMarxist intellectuals, most notably Ernst Bloch, who would have a formidable effect on his idea of art’s function and duty within society. He subsequently formed friendship with Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, both highly influential on his work with whom, albeit in different ways, he collaborated. The subject of his doctoral study was on Edmund Husserl, submitted and accepted in 1924 at the age of twenty-one, the same year as he became introduced to Alban Berg. The year after, Adorno moved to Vienna to take up studies with him, which lasted for three years. Staying in contact until the composer’s death in 1935, the effect of this relationship on Adorno was immeasurable. Indeed, Adorno was not an indifferent composer either, and his achievements seem to have met Berg’s approval.1 Although Adorno gave over his career to philosophy, the presence of music in all its forms, from performance to its philosophy, would continue to loom large throughout his life. His reflections and analyses of composers, high and low music and other music criticism form a predominate part of his collected works. This is also why Adorno was drawn immediately to aesthetics in philosophy, and why when he deals with art in his mature work, we must always consider music as somewhere in the wings, even when it is not mentioned. Following the recent translation of Kierkegaard’s work, Adorno wrote the first book-length study of him when still something of an obscurity in philosophical circles. Inauspiciously, but worth mentioning for its dark irony, the book’s publication coincided with the rise of the National Socialist government. The book is an intellectual tour de force that sets out to illuminate the status of theology in Kierkegaard’s thought, arguing that at every turn, theology collapses into mythological thinking and his attempts at dialectical thinking founder into irresolution. For this reason, the subtitle ‘Construction of the Aesthetic’ is a trifle misleading. That is not to say that aesthetics does not figure in the book. It does, but it is not the principal point of focus. Nonetheless, it is not insignificant that for one or another reason aesthetics are foregrounded at the beginning, if only to be dispersed into other, neighbouring concerns. The aesthetic in Kierkegaard is part of another tripartite topology, echoing Hegel to some extent, but rather extended to subjectivity. Adorno recognizes Kierkegaard as a subjective thinker and is most likely attracted to his thought not only because of the role that aesthetics plays but also because of his campaign to find a different if not obverse method from Hegel’s. In Either/Or

 Adorno, the Constriction of the Aesthetic and Difficult Art 31 Kierkegaard marks out the aesthetic of three stages of existential progression superseded by the ethical and finally the religious. The aesthetic stage is defined by recourse to sensuous experience: it is egotistical and hypothetical over actual. It is a sceptical stance that is ironic and is continually on the hunt for short-term solutions to combat boredom. The allegorical archetype is Don Juan and in particular the defiant godless figure dramatized in Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard’s own dialectical method – which Adorno finds to be wanting but in a different way from Hegel whom he would critique in Negative Dialectics – does not relinquish the aesthetic altogether once transitioned to the ethical and then the religious. Instead it lives on in a higher state of imagination and aspiration. As with Hegel, the aesthetic, left unto itself and to its own devices, is doomed by its own shortcomings. For Hegel it is that art is weighed by its materiality, for Kierkegaard it is that it can only be known as a material, wherein truth and the idea are abstracted. ‘The abstract’, writes Adorno, ‘is defined as the temporally invariant, the concrete as historically determined.’2 Art’s deficiency lies in its abstraction and its ‘concreteness’. This may also apply to music, although its lack of concreteness relative to tangible substances renders it superior to them. But however one theorizes it, Kierkegaard’s aesthetics is ‘nothing more than the schema’ of ‘transposition’ to the higher grades of awareness. It is a term reducible to the ‘subject-object relation itself ’, thereby forced to ‘the sombre background of a philosophy whose doctrine is educed in desultory showers’ (welche seine Kunstlehre nur in flüchtigen Schauern erreicht).3 Hence the ‘constriction’ in the ‘construction’ of the aesthetic. Looking retrospectively, it is as if Adorno is freeing himself of two forceful but what he sees as dangerously limiting readings of art. Art, in its very abstractness, is too easily cast aside in favour of a more forceful standard, whether aetiological, which is the Hegelian-Marxist framework for freedom, or rhetorical, which can be read through the guilty and fearful persuasions of religion. To some extent, Adorno would preserve both, believing that art can alter consciousness and that for the better it contains the seeds of betterment (Bloch’s ‘hope’). For Adorno, to disavow art comes at our peril, for in doing so as sensuous, living beings, we lose the most powerful tool at our disposal for combating forces inimical to our being. Unfortunately, it is also that very tool that can be manipulated to our detriment. Because of this, the conditions of modernism have transpired to make the good art, the art worth preserving and worth persevering with, antagonistic, hermetic, obscure to the point of aesthetically rebarbative, a hostility to the present that has the potential to brand it and its followers elitist and aloof. But it is this aloofness in its obdurate autonomy – its desire to refrain from trafficking in ideology – that gives art its power.

Difficult art Adorno’s lifetime (1903–69) straddles the most dramatic and effulgent of what is often known as high modernism, from the invention of Cubism to Abstract Expressionism and then to the early days of the dispersion of art into all manner of conceptual practices contemporaneous with the growth of the protest movement (the stresses from which are said to have caused his death).

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Given Adorno’s cultural background and his intimate professional contact with some of the most gifted artists, writers and composers of his age, his aesthetics can be viewed as a meditation as to the purpose of art, its fate and the form it should take. In many respects this is the trajectory of the modernist avant-garde as it had developed since the French Revolution. Even l’art pour l’art, ‘art for art’s sake’, of the decadent movement had a social function, using art as a means to eschew the vulgarities and hypocrisies of society, and as a repudiation of utilitarian rationalism. Although Adorno was in no great sympathy with this philosophy, it needed to be considered in his definition of autonomous art. One example of an avant-garde project in which the social aims were incongruous with its formal means is Constructivism, a movement established in 1913, and firmly associated with the Russian Revolution of 1917. However, despite its ideological underpinnings, its recourse to stringent, often radical formalism rendered anathema to the common people it sought to serve. The geometric abstraction of Malevich and the cryptic non-objective compositions of El Lissitsky’s Prouns were baffling to all but an educated minority. While some of the more legible graphic work of Rodchenko or Mayakovsky enjoyed some success, other ventures such as the Constructivist equivalent of the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS, were short-lived. Narrative cinema was favoured over radical montage, and the totalitarian regimes of both Stalin and Hitler that grew in the following decades unequivocally favoured realist painting and a degraded classicism in sculpture. The plight of Shostakovich and his fellow composers under the yoke of Stalin’s artistic policing is well known, and his string quartets are cited as metacommentaries, musical testimonials, to the dilemmas with which he and his music were faced. Hence Shostakovich’s often-repeated statement that he composed marches and works for ‘the draw’, meaning that his more difficult – meaningful, authentic – work had to be sequestered for his own good, and one presumes for the good of the work.4 It is a prejudice that persists unto today and one that lies at the heart of Adorno’s aesthetics. Art that is too immediately accessible speaks the prose of the cliché. The ease with which a work of art is apprehended is associated with its popularity, although they are not mutually exclusive. But popularity of an item (let us not yet call it art, since art that was not good or serious is not, for Adorno as for others, worth the name) can be harnessed to political agendas and to make them serve clandestine interests: totalitarianism and capitalism are the culprits. But the difficulty in and of art has also been the subject of as much satire as it has debate, with films such as The Square (2017) casting contemporary art as an obscene masquerade of obfuscation to advance the self-interest, laziness and vanity of the few, where narratives of social interest are staged through disingenuous strategies of illegible and generalist artistic form. ‘Difficulty’ as a strategy and a measure within art is not endemic to modernism, but it is a modernist problem. In his book Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, Malcolm Bowie cites various poets such as Lucretius, Dante, Milton and Blake as having an element of difficulty to their artistic approach.5 This may be because of the density of layers of meaning, the multivalence of their tropes or their allegorical subtlety. Yet as Bowie sees it, there is a new and different order of the concept of difficulty in modern poetry, citing the Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’: ‘For in the work of many modern poets, difficulty is the very life of the poem.’6 Here the processes of decipherment,

 Adorno, the Constriction of the Aesthetic and Difficult Art 33 discovery and failure are part of the poem’s experience that add to the reader’s triumph – and heighten the level of intrigue. ‘The sense of pattern to which we accede by our intellectual and imaginative efforts as readers of “the modern poem” seldom hardens into a fixed framework of ideas or images.’7 That the work does not harden or simplify is crucial here: from an Adornian perspective, its form disallows reification. (Although we will see the cunning of capitalism to do so with some artworks, such as the way that most esoteric and purist of artists, Piet Mondrian was made popular by Yves Saint Laurent, and Mondrainesque ‘inspirations’ have not abated in popularity since, but more of that later.) Thus, Mallarmé typifies the kind of artist who rewards attention – aesthetic labour – which is to be understood not as some pseudo-Christian residue of doing penance, but instead as one that presents a layer that transcends the world’s stupidity, which also very much includes readers who insist on being stupid. In Bowie’s words: In this view the poem is difficult because obscure and obscure because oracular utterances are traditionally so, being calculated to confound those who show themselves by their stupidity, flippancy or clay-footedness to be unworthy of initiation into the higher mysteries; the difficulty of the poem is the sort which is produced when a simple underlying message appears in a heavily disguised and ornamented form.8

But lest we think that reading the experience of the poem is merely a peeling away of symbology, Bowie later adds: ‘What at one moment can seem a compressed and richly interfused set of meanings can the next seem a frightening turmoil of disconnected scraps.’9 Thus ‘[f]or Mallarmé the best thought is that which most scrupulously acknowledges its own frailty; and the more scrupulous the thought becomes the thinner the partition which separates it from total vacuity’.10 In this regard, Mallarmé is a modernist avant la lettre akin to what Beckett and Schoenberg are for Adorno. In the intractability of their form the perils of expression and communication for modern humanity are revealed. The promise is nor delivered upon and the work itself promises its own fragility and dissolution. After we experience the some hermeneutical triumph as readers of the work, the work then announces like the covert message from HQ to the spy: ‘In five seconds this message will selfdestruct.’ Bowie states that ‘[d]ifficulty, it must be granted, may originate in a simple refusal to see the obvious and to come clean about it’. He goes on to cite Schoenberg’s atonal works and Finnegan’s Wake, in which the nub of communication is in bringing to the fore what cannot be communicated between two parties, instead of keeping to the myths of seamlessness and clarity.11 It is an aesthetic campaign that is necessarily negative, a negativity away from false hopes and promises, ‘and that in Mallarmé’s account the negative in human experience can be complete and irremovable’.12 The work of art is not a funeral dirge, it can be enjoyed, but the kinds and levels of enjoyment are contingent upon engagement and reflection. Art cannot dissemble that it is transparent. We might recall Hegel’s assessment of romantic art as having to cope with higher consciousness in a complicated world. Taking some steps beyond this, but developed out of it, Adorno contends that art’s autonomy and its negativity are

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casualties of an abundance of lowered consciousnesses and a corrupted world. (We will delve more into the nature and some of the contradictions faced with autonomous art in a later chapter.) George Steiner, in his own masterful analysis of ‘difficulty’, divides it into a set of subcategories, but admits that built into difficulty is the somewhat tautological logic of its own making, that is, that its reasons no less than its import are impossible to fathom. One justification is ‘ontological’, a kind of Orphic descent into the nature of language (in the case of poetry) itself. He too invokes Mallarmé, but also on Martin Heidegger’s commentaries on poetry: It is not so much the poet who speaks, but language itself, but language itself: die Sprache spricht. The authentic, immensely rare, poem is one in which the poet is not a persona, a subjectivity ‘ruling over language’, but an ‘openness to’, a supreme listener to, the genius of speech. The result of such openness is not so much a text, but an ‘act’, an eventuation of Being and literal ‘coming into Being’.13

This reflexivity is eminently formalist, which again brings us back to a modernist paradigm. The moral and critical crisis that is attributed to the periods after modernism – postmodernism and whatever one wishes to call what comes after that, in visual art, audaciously ‘the contemporary’ – is due to what are perceived as the trivialization of former goals. An abstract painting is no longer hermetic, it exists in the ambiguous realm of ‘post-painting’, in which it is reflective of the crisis of meaning, in a fairly circuitous and solipsistic manner. Where we may situate difficulty today is as a form of nostalgia, of the heyday of high culture when high culture was indubitably ‘high’.

4

Modern music and the pact with the devil

In terms of the debates around artistic adequation, the valorization of music is quintessentially modern. It entered seriously into philosophical debate with the Early Romantics, Kantians such as Friedrich Jacobi, and in the work of Schelling. Each in a more rhetorical than systematic way disinterred music from its abyss of abstraction, to argue that it was a higher form of consciousness, a link to the ineffable and therefore not the lowest but the highest of arts. The claim that music was the most accurate expression of the will became the cornerstone of Schopenhauer’s thought. In all cases it was music’s very ineffability that caused philosophy about it to find its own dead end, because it said what philosophy could not say. Adorno’s would avoid this problem through concentrating on musical forms, equating them to a hierarchy at which atonal music stood was of the highest order and popular music, jazz, at the lowest. This is the definition at its simplest: given that about a third of Adorno’s output consistent of writings on music, it was a lifelong preoccupation. His close examinations of Wagner and Mahler, for example, probe the ways in which light music can be infused in higher music or when higher music can become light, or in recent parlance, ‘lite’. Recent commentators have also shown that his stance towards jazz was not as dismissive or as short-sighted as some had originally believed. What Adorno’s priorities also help to place in sharp relief is criteria of what the best art should be. For, and to the consternation of his critics, it is in intellectualism that art’s cerebral characteristics be prioritized over the sensuous and the emotional. Music is apprehended by the ear, bypasses the heart and is evaluated by the brain. On this theme of intellectual art, a good place to begin is with Thomas Mann and his novel, Doctor Faustus, which owes a considerable debt to Adorno. The Faustus figure is the novel’s main protagonist, the troubled Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who is perhaps too intelligent to be an artist – as commentators are apt to state and something with no small regard to Adorno’s own artistic fate as a musical composer. A sprawling meditation on European culture and specifically German culture and the rise of Fascism. Mann and Adorno met in 1943 both as exiles in California, at a time when Mann had begun writing his novel (to be published in 1947) and Adorno was drafting the Philosophy of Modern Music (published in 1949). When he read the manuscript that Adorno confided in him, Mann reflected in his diary: ‘Here indeed was something important. The manuscript dealt with modern music both on an artistic and on a sociological plane.’1 Mann seized the opportunity of mining Adorno’s extensive knowledge of music as material for his knowledge and fell under the spell

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of Adorno’s theories on music, as Leverkühn would that of the devil in the novel. But Adorno’s influence on the novel was not incidental or anecdotal but borders on collaboration (Adorno ended up contributing to chapter 34). Mann had intended the book as an allegory of the descent of modern Germany, a sentiment that Adorno shared. Both were his disturbed figures in their Californian exile. James McFarland makes a strong argument for the strong ties that developed at this time and suggests that ‘the collaboration with Mann was more central to Adorno’s development, for both his expressive self-confidence and, just as certainly, his theoretical cogency in conceptualizing the postwar cultural landscape, than has been widely recognized’. His familiarity with Mann and the stimulation that the relationship brought were all significant spurs ‘at the invisible origin of Adorno’s astonishing productivity’.2 The ‘collaboration’ also allowed Adorno to immerse himself in an activity that was not work in isolation. With this in mind, if his presence is not palpable throughout, then his own avatar, a recognizable pastiche, the devil is generally assumed to appear around the middle of the novel in chapter 25 – most likely as a vision of Leverkühn’s syphillitically addled mind. He is called Herr Kretzschmar, a music professor. The ‘zsch’ combination draws a link to Nietzsche, who of course named himself the Antichrist. In one famous passage the devils asks, ‘What is art today? A quest for trifles (Eine Wallfahrt auf Erbsen, literally a “pilgrimage for peas”).3 It belongs more today to dance than a red pair of shoes.’ He proceeds to declaim that musical canon of tonality has become ‘tired cliché’ (verbrauchtes Cliché).4 He declares that the fate of art is when it ‘becomes criticism, something very honourable, who can deny it!’5 He calls for a music that has ‘a relentless imperative to tightness’ and that ‘smashes ornament’.6 He warns of an epochal change in art led by music’s shedding of the sureties and unities of the past, towards what resembles an agonistic Hegelian realization of art’s capabilities and duty in the modern age: For four hundred years, all great music has been satisfied in the pretence that unity is inviolable; it has sought to confuse the conventional general law that underlies it with its most intrinsic concerns. My dear friend, that no longer applies. The criticisms of ornament, convention, and abstract universality are one and the same.7

Once art was a mouthpiece for theological or sovereign authority. Freed of this bond, art’s autonomy comes at the grave price of combating many of the forces that granted this autonomy in the first place, that being free market forces and what ensues from that: popular culture. As Adorno writes in the introduction to Philosophy of Modern Music: ‘The negative aspect of progress is so visibly dominant in the current phase of development that art is summoned against it, even though they stand under the same sign.’8 As Jeremy Tambling attests, ‘Adorno and critical theory are, then, part of the diabolical in the text, as much as music is.’9 This is because Adorno has laid what are possible unsurpassable stakes for art, not only as form but by tethering it to philosophy and by insisting on the duties it must pay to the atrocities of the recent times. If Leverkühn is to abide by the devil’s dictum, he must forego tonal music as it is no longer sufficient for the contradictions and unrest of capitalism. The ‘abstract

 Modern Music and the Pact with the Devil 37 universality’ that the devil refers to is that of a sense of reconciliation enjoyed by the pre-industrial subject and which could find its parallel in tonal music. In the words of Evelyn Cobley, ‘social alienation has not yet reached the point at which human beings express what they really suffer; they let themselves be consoled by the myth of universal progress that Adorno targets in Hegel’s dialectic.’10 Pulsating behind this philosophical agenda is Mann’s allegory, still fresh at the time of publication, of the catastrophe of Hitler and National Socialism, and its aesthetic regression into retrograde figuration in visual art and tonality in music. Leverkühn embraces atonality and the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg for a liberated, revolutionary artistic form, divested of the constrictions of völkisch kitsch. But this is also where Mann departs from Adorno: the narrator, Zeitblom, becomes horrified at the intellectual straightjacket that he has imposed on musical composition. Programmatic, approached according to a strict doxology and scored as opposed to improvised it is thus everything antithetical to jazz. As Cobley astutely observes: ‘In the process of emancipating music from the sterile conventions of bourgeois tonality, he finds that his aesthetic innovations eventually fall victim to their own totalizing logic.’ But that does not mean the impositions on the music result in works that are deftly austere, more the opposite. Leverkühn’s monomaniacal pursuit of form – by this time his syphilis seems to be taking its toll – and his abandonment of the norms of totality result in musical chaos, which is its own aesthetic torment, a demonic cacophony. Adorno was able to see this as well, that efforts to curtail and control aesthetic form risk fragmentation from which more spontaneous and harmonic forms deliver us. What Mann and Adorno both point to is the tendency within modernism to exploit rational means for irrational ends. In their sights was Nazism and for us now there are any number of examples.

Philosophy and modern music Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music was in its time his best-known work and one that had a comparably great deal of influence for a specialist book. If we consider that Aesthetic Theory is an incomplete study, Philosophy of Modern Music has been characterized as the most coherent and most strident of Adorno’s writings on aesthetics.11 Anecdotal evidence suggests that young composers were learning German in order to read it in the original.12 While bringing together many of his thoughts on music and aesthetics to date, it did so through the lens of two composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. As Mann was quick to observe, Adorno situates music against a sociological and historical backdrop, in which musical form is gauged in accordance with its sufficiency to its time. He departs from Hegel in denying the Geist of art any form of release or end according to history’s unfolding. Max Paddison notes that when the book appeared, there were examples of serialism in contemporary music of the time that added legitimacy to what Adorno was espousing: ‘Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (also in 1949) [and] in the work of Boulez and Stockhausen in the early 1950s – even though, of course, the development of Adorno’s musical theory of musical material had antedated these events by over twenty years.’13

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Posterity’s assessment of Philosophy of Modern Music has mostly rested on the Schoenberg–Stravinsky binary. Reductively Schoenberg’s late phase represents what’s best in modern music and Stravinsky’s chromatic music a retrogression, and the topology has hardened. This is unfortunate, as Adorno arrives at a conclusion similar to that of Mann and his ill-fated protagonist. For Adorno admits that modern music finds itself at an end point, not the end point designated by Hegel of art’s overcoming and the reconciliation found in Absolute Spirit but the stalemate of its alienation, its forced self-mystification. As Adorno writes elliptically of the ‘Schoenberg’s school’, ‘it was unable permanently to break its primacy, for it was caught up in the actual survival of that which it challenged spiritually.’14 Adorno places an overabundant store in Schoenberg who oscillates between metonym for a favourable tendency and an artistic hero, an ideal benchmark. Modern contemporaries in music, such as Janacek and Bartok, are given begrudging acknowledgement, while Berg, as Adorno’s former teacher, is addressed reverentially, Schoenberg is the benchmark of progress to which art is supposed to aspire. The indeterminacy, however, between the generic and the specific – Schoenberg and an exemplar as opposed to Schoenberg sui generis – remains tantalizingly unresolved. Moreover, Schoenberg is not the point of resolution of music but the point at which music has reached – in Hegelian fashion – a new sense of its nature and purpose, is ‘emancipated music’, yet it is a limit that reveals that some kind of limit is yet to be reached. This is because Schoenberg and specifically his twelve-tone technique is a supreme form of indifference that is a negation, a negative dialectic that hearkens its own dissolution.15 As David Roberts astutely explains, high modernism, embodied in Schoenberg, necessitates philosophical evaluation. Since art no longer serves religion, it serves knowledge which is foremostly self-knowledge: This progress is nevertheless a process of enlightenment, a process of progressive illumination of the material. On the one hand the outcome of this dialectic is the coincidence of total illumination and total blindness: in the totally rationalized system of twelve-tone technique, which has become opaque to itself, the subject/ object dialectic is suspended. On the other hand, by this very process, through which progress destroys itself, progress become self-knowledge. The illumination of blindness defines the paradoxical truth of the new music, which comes to selfknowledge in philosophy.16

By distinction, Stravinsky abjures this kind of progress in its indeterminate attitude to musical time, something he shares with jazz. His is a ‘musical Bergsonism’ that has become oblivious to history and which is also become beholden to other forces, namely dance.17 Stravinsky’s music consisted of a proliferation of distractions that elided the pivotal importance of history in the work of art. Adorno would later review and revise his judgement of Stravinsky (as in an essay in 1962),18 the tendency to simplify his thesis is tempting, as his verdicts can be withering. Other critics, in deference to Adorno, have made efforts to recuperate Stravinsky as a complex figure and innovator. James Marsh, for instance, argues that while Stravinsky remained faithful to tonality, excepting his later years, his work can be

 Modern Music and the Pact with the Devil 39 comprehended as ‘a unity comparable with and emerging out of profound variety and individuality’.19 Forbiddingly, Adorno declares that Stravinsky’s musical ‘language is as close to the language of communication as it is to the language of the practical joke: non-seriousness itself, play – from which the subject remains aloof ’.20 Adorno is hostile to Stravinsky’s neoclassicism which arrogates to itself the authority and claims of tradition. Traditional art is defined as what sounds ‘as though it had been present since the beginning of time’. Tradition claims for itself the alibi of history, of art across the ages, hence authenticity. ‘Aesthetic authenticity is a socially necessary illusion: no work of art can thrive in a society founded upon power, without insisting on its own power.’21 But the perpetuation of this power is also that of ancient and perpetual injustice that the work of art will have to face, foregoing the language of authenticity, or else forego its horizon of better things, to find the promesse de bonheur finally made good. But for now, art is sequestered in its autonomy which safeguards its authenticity, before it can finally be sloughed and sorted. As later in Aesthetic Theory, in Philosophy of Modern Music, Adorno is tantalizingly, frustratingly, uncommitted to concrete examples or corollaries, which at times results in a theoretical free fall and contravening his recourse to ‘concrete particulars’ of works of art.22 Notwithstanding, his discussion of the role of modern music in society towards the middle of Philosophy of Modern Music is enlightening and helpful for understanding several positions in Aesthetic Theory, especially on artistic autonomy, a concept that would prove to be continually fraught on many levels, as we shall see. Autonomous art as he defines it here is not necessarily divested of ‘unequivocal objective content, but rather that the more clearly music defines its formal laws and entrusts itself to them, the more, for the moment, it closes itself off against the manifest portrayal of society in which it has its enclaves’. Not the inclusion of ‘for the moment’,23 where Adorno preserves in his argument art’s liberation from its defensive position when it is able to be in more open accord with a more open society. Music’s retreat and its isolation ‘is an ideology insofar as it asserts itself as an ideological being-in-itself beyond social tensions’. Adorno acknowledges that autonomy is endemic to bourgeois modernism while also a reaction to it. This is for the good of both art and bourgeois society, as art withdraws to purge itself from society’s dysfunctionality, which are symptoms of its deceptions and false consciousness that in turn enslave and perturb. The more withdrawn – encoded, difficult – the greater its efforts to do so, and it does so from a vantage point of being set apart: The basis of the isolation of classical modern music is not its asocial, but precisely its social substance. It expresses its concern through its pure quality, doing so all the more empathetically, the more purely this quality is revealed; it points out the ills of society.24

This ‘isolation’ is art’s autonomy that it has attained in modernism – coterminous with the rise of the middle classes – which gives it freedom while also a great burden of duty. Autonomy as a relatively fraught concept in Adorno’s writings, partly to its ambiguity and its fluidity – in fact Adorno is notorious for leaving terms on which his philosophical arguments are leveraged rather obtuse. One reason that can be adduced for the vagaries in the term can be found in what we have already shown

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in the ramifications of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, where autonomy tips into solipsism, calling for philosophy to come to the rescue. What we can see is that art, when pressed too heavily into the service of a function, founders and betrays itself, which is the nobler and utopian promise that remains encrypted. Not only does the political in art make for bad art and bad politics, but also when art offers itself up too easily, it gives a pretence of art, a travesty (Ai Wei Wei’s work for the 2018 Sydney Biennale springs immediately to mind). This travesty finds itself in kitsch whose popularity owes itself to no small degree to the easiness with which it, as an aesthetic phenomenon and the messages enshrined within it, offers itself to the viewer. This is what Jeff Koons would later call the ‘generosity’ of his work, the very antithesis of the difficulty of the best art in the Adornian, freed of irony and without any trace of the torment of the human condition. As Adorno would comment in his book on Mahler, kitsch’s capacity to please and seduce is what hides its inherent defect, as its ‘apes’ art.25 The danger, in the Adornian schema, is that the kitsch hides its inherent betrayal. Kitsch, which is more or less synonymous with the culture industry, reduces art to a series of objectifiable functions which reside in entertainment, gratification. In an inverse scale, it is because of the way art and the most important messages over which it presides are so traduced that art is forced into its modern condition: ‘The shocks of incomprehension. Emitted by artistic technique in the age of meaninglessness, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaninglessness of the world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this effort. It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world.’26 Kitsch was a perpetuation of this darkness masked as grandeur and celebration, which was in perpetuity of the propaganda of National Socialism, something that Benjamin was quick to point out.

5

At the precipice of pop culture Wagner and Mahler

Although written much later in his career, Adorno’s writings on Wagner and Mahler are of interest because both maintain a complex relationship to popular culture, primarily as forerunners to film music (Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Ravel, Shostakovich and Richard Strauss can also be counted). His commentaries are rich with enlightening aperçus, which tempt digressions, but we will try to confine the discussion to ways in which Adorno sees Wagner and Mahler grappling with cliché, popular folk music and mythology. Wagner and Mahler are important milestones in the history of the confluence and finally the confusion between art and popular culture, as they themselves both responded to popular culture in various ways and transfigured it in their work. It is also the ways in which popular culture, and particularly film, has responded repeatedly and with such relish to their legacy. Many average film-goers familiar with the high-budget blockbusters and their lush, awe-inspiring accompanying musical soundtracks may not be aware that they are a musical style that developed and flourished by composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wanting to test the expressive and formal limits of the orchestral form. These composers were also avid, master storytellers in their music. The Wagnerian leitmotif, for instance, is now a standard device used regularly in film: a sonic signature of a melodic phrase of tones of one key or another that are sounded at different points of the film to signal their affinity and narrative conjunction. What had once begun as a lofty mnemonic device for the purposes of psychological and narrative density has been emptied to become a repetitive riff as certification of continuity and unity. Wagner would become one of the most important (and infamous if we also take account of his virulent anti-Semitism) cultural figures of his day whose influence spread well beyond the confines of music. Wagner attempted to push music towards its outward limits and to encompass all arts. His operas were Gesamtkustwerke—the German is used as the English translation ‘total work of art’ is less than adequate – and were designed to be a seamless combination of all the arts: painting, dance, drama, poetry and of course music.1 But it was Mahler after him – Adorno observes that Mahler wrote operatic symphonies – who was the arch-Romantic cum post-Romantic who would stretch the Romanticism until it bent out of shape, preparing the path of Schoenberg and Berg. Curiously enough he did so not by turning his back on clichés and kitsch but by facing them head-on. Unlike his contemporary Richard Strauss who

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attempted to turn his back to the unmissable encroachment of popular culture, Mahler enlisted it in his work but, as many have agreed, came out of his pact with this other devil relatively unscathed while also suggesting that the symphonic form could not be taken any further. Wagner is the logical forerunner to Mahler, not only in the magnitude of the formal limits but in more intricate ways. Wagner extended the construction of harmonies and the possibilities of orchestration. He was not satisfied with the traditional capacities of instruments but experimented with formulating new sounds and combinations. Yet the formal advancements of the music are constricted if not undermined by the content which is regressive to the point of reactive. If the attempt to integrate all the arts into a single form was progressive, his appeal to feudal myth, laced as it was with the ideologies of Germanic exceptionalism that would be consumed aggressively by Nazism, was not. Wagner’s vision of king and heroism is rooted in his own bourgeois character, as the yearning for a caricature. Thus as Adorno bitingly states, ‘The putrefaction of the bourgeois character, in the sense of its own morality, presages its transformation in the age of totalitarianism.’2 It was Wagner’s arch-nationalism that so deplored Nietzsche and is announced in his later work as something of a given. This ‘givenness’ is what Adorno refers to as ‘nature’ which is the antithesis of history and would be a term that is used throughout his writings on aesthetics. The danger in Wagner’s art, according to Adorno, is that it parades as nature, as something fundamental, assumed and a priori, instead of being product of a subject of his time and therefore ultimately conditioned and conditional.3 Art that pretends to be nature also mutes, foregoes, ignores the inner antagonism of art which mirrors the anomie of the human condition.4 The presumptive ‘nature’ in any cultural production – and a powerful force when we come to the culture industry – is the same as concealed ideology, or ideology that purports to being a self-positing truth. It is one of the goals of Enlightenment, as Adorno and his contemporaries uphold, to name and deconstruct false nature, whose pretence of non-conditionality is one of unmitigated bad faith. In his lengthy analysis of the leitmotif in Wagner, Adorno is again unsparing. As is well known by musicologists and Wagnerians, the leitmotif is what helps to bind the lengthy structure of the operas, especially when one comes to the Ring Cycle, together. But it is also this function that for Adorno lends to expose Wagner’s longwindedness and his repetitiveness. Furthermore, given that it is one of the functions of the leitmotif to signal the motives (motif= ‘das Motiv’) of the author – the composer who doubles as Fate or the eternal puppet-master of God Himself – it tends to distance the action and the immediacy of expression, as if through an established framework or lens. As Adorno dextrously remarks, ‘Its expression is not directly posed but rather represented’ (Ihr Ausdruck stellt sich nicht dar, sondern wird dargestellt).5 It is therefore contrived and unconvincing, the ‘little pictures’ of the leitmotif ’s schema acting as ‘backlighting’.6 The other apparent weakness of the leitmotif is that their deeper allegorical and spiritual meaning was easily shifted and reduced to signals related to characters in the drama hence resulting in ‘bankrupting’ of the greater aims in the name of the ‘one’, the individual subject. The contemporary equivalent is where grater causes such as fundraisers and charities are confused and conflated with the celebrities that support them. With the ready misconstrual of the leitmotif, its fate, and perhaps by

 At the Precipice of Pop Culture 43 extension the fate of Wagner’s music and whole aesthetic effort is sealed: ‘The demise of the leitmotif is intrinsic to this: it moves via the smooth illustration technique of Richard Strauss straight to cinema music, where the leitmotif only announces heroes or events, to help the viewer navigate more freely.’7 Its simplification is indicative and of the systemic strategy of the culture industry to render simplistic so as not to alienate viewers-consumers with much ambiguity, hence in today’s terms, ‘dumbing-down’. Or as Paddison observes, Adorno ‘sees Wagner’s music as prefiguring the historical “disintegration” of musical material’. In its extremes and indulgences, it slides easily into sentimentality and dross, and with these, lax politics. Wagner’s love of mass and magnitude is for Adorno ‘phantasmagoria’, a word commonly used by Benjamin to describe the aesthetic saturation of modernity. But the offering of plenitude hides its opposite: nothingness. Wagner’s work is the ‘raising of nothing to something’.8 One gets the impression from Adorno’s concluding discussion that this may not be such a bad thing, except for the fact that it is not exposed but latent. As the creator of extravagant fantasies, Wagner believed himself to be a master allegorist and therefore prophet. Adorno enjoins that ‘only he can interpret dreams who is, without compunction, both weak and strong enough to surrender to them’. The strength of Wagner appears everywhere, and in many forms, as both genuine and rhetorical. But he found himself swallowed by his own grandiosity and in which the narrative and form have become too much ends in themselves. Again we may draw conclusions from this in Adornian critiques of popular culture in which the narrative portends only to its own self-gratification as product for profit and anticipates an habituation towards the same. By comparison, in Adorno’s analysis, Mahler fares a great deal better as an artist. To readers of this book unfamiliar with Mahler’s work, it is highly recommended to make a short acquaintance with him at least, in order to see how he layers and distributes different musical styles, some movements becoming a veritable bricolage of music in which the classical is interwoven by folk music, beer hall ditties and mimetic sounds. High and low are in dynamic collision, what Adorno sees as a form of ‘disintegration’, or shattering, of the classical form. In the works of Paddison: ‘Genres like march, landler and waltz are used in a way that “breaks open” their social content and, to use Adorno’s term, “characterizes” it.’ These genres are then intercalated, or combined, with the more orthodox forms within the classical repertoire: scherzo, Lied and so on. This ‘highlights the “joins” within these forms – that is to say, it emphasizes the fragmentary character which underlies the apparent unity of the traditional formal conventions’.9 Subgenres within popular culture are variously called ‘kitsch’ by Adorno. Mahler uses kitsch to deliver himself of blindly following the exhausted expression of late Romantic music, which in its blind disavowal of all the kitsch around it risks becoming kitsch itself10 – the derogatory remarks about Strauss and others attest to this. This is echoed by Anton Zijderveld who in his clever book On Clichés explains that as opposed to Strauss who attempted, with some modifications, to bring musical traditions since the eighteenth century into the twentieth century, ‘Mahler was a romantic who deliberately tried to end Romanticism, and one of the main techniques he used for the realization of this aim was the purely aesthetic sublimation of kitsch’.11 He was no revolutionary or anarchist but a thorough

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bourgeois who nonetheless ‘realized that romantic emotions and experiences were doomed to be clichés in a modern, increasingly abstract society’. He manages kitsch through compositing it into the higher musical form of the symphony. It is only if one were to dismantle the constituents that one would arrive at kitsch again, but as wholes, Mahler music ‘arrives at a level which has transcended kitsch’. To stay with a symphony is to be ‘guided through’ clichés such that their status as cliché is removed, overcome.12 Being a rare occasion of art triumphing over cliché, ‘[i]t is important to observe that Mahler did not launch a headstrong attack on clichés, but rather subdued them to his creative power by incorporating them into his work’.13 Incorporation and ‘remoulding’ afford them a different effect and within the texture of his own form, indeed a different ontology. This act of transformation, or transmutation, will be an important philosophical and aesthetic element when we consider more contemporary examples later in this book. Surmounting cliché and kitsch is achieved in a number of ways. In some instances, Mahler frees lower genres from kitsch by suggesting their inner potential, by using them to stimulate different senses, as in his use of children’s songs in the Fourth Symphony. Here he plays games with sounds similar to such songs, evoking the brightness of the ‘child’s sensorium’ whose ‘colour’ shines from the ‘quotidian grey’.14 In the same symphony, in a similar context, march music is there to acknowledge a lower grade of music that has persisted under the ‘higher’ forms. But why and the result of this transmutation comes at a heavy price. As Adorno argues in Mahler: eine musikalische Physiognomik (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy): ‘As would later occur with jazz, in around the nineteenth century a certain type of artistically unpretentious but skilled musician went into military music and there found a collective undercurrent of quite precise compositional formulas, to which Mahler pays homage.’15 But within the celebratory ring of children’s songs and marches is the shadow of death: ‘Mahler’s music is like Euridice kidnapped from the dead.’ In both the second and fourth movement of the Fourth ‘images of the child and death overlap’. The call to happiness, the ode to joy, is ‘chained to the loss of individuation’. In other words, Mahler manipulates, modifies and stimulates musical languages not among the ‘proud assets of culture’ to bring that culture to account, suggesting that in this ignorance is its decay.16 Mahler, then, seems to warn that to ignore popular culture is to do so at one’s peril. Another device used by Mahler is irony at a level where the listener is made uncertain whether it is directed to the inner form or to him or her. This can come unexpectedly through play or through banality. At times, as Adorno avers, his musical motifs play ‘the role of a joker in a card game’. But ‘one will easily slip over the variations of these motifs as if they were coincidental’.17 If the joke in the light motif appears evanescent, the banal is a noticeable category in Mahler. Expressions of banality are left ironically precarious: they are those that earnest banality would sharply disavow. Banality is expressed ‘through sentimentality, whose mask is torn in its howling misery; through expressions or outrage beyond musical purview’. These gestures within Mahler are the fold of exhausted Romantic music as well as frustrated bourgeois culture. His music ‘encapsulates’ a musical history, the good and the bad at once.18 It is perhaps in not absconding from the bad and the banality that is its honesty and therein, the overcoming.

 At the Precipice of Pop Culture 45 It is this co-mingling of elements, the rhapsodic, the parodic, episodic and the pathetic, that makes him anathema to bourgeois ear, who is made to feel uncertain whether the music is in sympathy with his or her experience or whether the music is something of an ironic metatext. In an remark made well before the monograph of Mahler, Adorno asserts: Mahler is not for nothing the bugbear (Ärgernis) of all bourgeois (bürgerlich) musical aesthetics. They call him uncreative, because he suspends their concept of making. Everything he deals with is already there. He takes it in the form of his deprivation: his themes are expropriated. Nonetheless nothing sounds habituated: everything hangs as if from a magnet. . . . Just as a driver’s knowledge of his old, used car enables him to arrive punctually and unobtrusively to his destination, so the expression of a tired old melody, tense and high under the leverage of clarinet and oboe, arrives at places that the particular musical language could never have arrived at without risk.19

He adds that Mahler reassembles music detritus, fragments of from hackneyed music and its attendant ‘regressive listening’, to make them anew. He massages tired music into a new concept, anticipating the next generation of innovators, Schoenberg, Webern and the rest of the Viennese School.20 The above are but selective glimpses of Adorno’s monograph and other remarks on Mahler, which are cornerstones to our argument. There are many other curious and coruscating moments, such as when Mahler’s earlier music is compared to Fauvist painting,21 or notices a ‘convergence’ of his music to Nietzsche, or observes that his ‘affinity with Proust is one with the monologue intérieur’.22 Another service of this brief itinerary is to give taste of the extent and depth of Adorno’s philosophy of music and, more widely, on aesthetics. And as the short discussion on Mahler shows, the positioning of clichés, kitsch and banality, and their use and their possible overcoming, has an increasingly complex place in Adorno’s diagnoses and prognoses of art and the culture industry. From a sociological and historical standpoint, Wagner and Mahler are figures of music at the precipice. What is especially engaging for Adorno, and which finds itself at the heart of his philosophy of music, is the way in which music reflects, or is complicit, in schemata well outside itself. The Western classical tradition is never ‘just’ music to be appraised in a hermetically sealed formalist box, not are the narratives associated with musical works and their production just beneficial to explaining certain aspects within the music, or as coincidental. Adorno sees a certain, unmistakable rise and convergence that finally takes place in modern music (culminating in the Schoenberg vs Stravinsky dichotomy), a teleology that reaches an impasse with culture industry, but in which – as we have seen in Wagner and Mahler – music has been complicit. This is either done directly through facile simplification or through confrontation. If Wagner’s music is easily simplified and adapted, his grandiosity easily caricatured, the complex formations and citations in Mahler’s demonstrate a struggle with, and an acknowledgement of, what Adorno calls ‘light music’. What Adorno thinks are the depredations of light music need to be dealt with as well, but these come as constituents and symptoms of a much bigger order, the culture industry, his name for popular and mass culture, to which we now turn.

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Art beyond the horizon

Up until now we have purposely presented a picture of Adorno’s theory that highlights its antagonisms while signalling occasional fault-lines. It is a dialectical strategy that aims to confront the opposite point of view in order to chasten it. Unlike Adorno, we are saying that art is available in forms that, on the face of it, he would have abhorred – or at least have found unconvincing. Yet embedded within such forms are manifestations consistent with Adorno’s aesthetics. Within the now countless strata of the culture industry – when everything if not close to everything is governed by it – are seams of aesthetic approaches that are compellingly ambiguous, flout conventions of beauty, meditate on suffering and gesture to an uncertain yet not indifferent future. The first horizon, if it can be called that, was art after Auschwitz, which vitiated the integrity of beauty inasmuch as beauty could no longer be trusted to correspond to the good and the true. The second horizon is mutation of the first, where the ubiquity of the culture industry has precipitated a saturation of the beauty with a twofold, polarized effect: on one hand we have become inured (we won’t be so pessimistic to see desensitized) to kitsch because its prevalence has reached a normative state; on the other, because of this very saturation, many seek out aesthetic states and experiences that jar with this norm, something highly visible in fashion and its various related practices (film, music video, fashion film). It is not uncommon for critics over the last few decades to ask what Adorno would have made our present culture. It is not a facile question made with puerile arbitrariness but one that we are attempting to channel. What is most execrable about the system and what are criteria, the aesthetic and philosophical formulations, to be used to recuperate what is ‘good’ within the ‘system’. By now, we have entered into an era where most operative terms are so tendentiously loaded or compromised by cavil and misuse that it is hard to choose one able to do the best service. Earlier credentials for good art such as utopia and truth are otiose, while others, such as speaking adequately to our present historical moment in a manner resistant to reification, remain a worthy and persistent goal. Adorno hated forms of art that had been reduced to commodities. This needs to be nuanced now. Taking music, diversity has outstripped the nomenclature for it, which suggests that the widening of forms has outstripped the power to provide the kind of the philosophical tools, however powerful and influential they were in their day, that were provided in Philosophy of Modern Music. This had already been presaged by Cage in the 1970s, where he describes the proliferation as a stream that has entered a delta. In the words of his biographer David Revill:

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For today, this is very much an understatement. The flows of information are immeasurable, making it often impossible to differentiate between one item and the next. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that the profusion of information available would have met with Adorno’s approval. This is what Christian Fuchs argues when she states that he would receive YouTube favourably as a democratic and open environment for broadcasting media and data, although he would have deplored the continual intercalation of commodity culture through advertising.2 Fuchs goes on the emphasize that Adorno embraced the use of technology, as evidenced in the many radio lectures he did from 1955 to 1969, but he would not brook the manipulation of media according to commercial imperatives.3 Adorno was unopposed ‘to popular cultural forms of expression. To the contrary, he himself made an alternative use of radio and television and was an excellent example of mediated public intellectualism’. Amid the undifferentiating mire and nonsense available, his ambitions for the public dissemination of knowledge have been fulfilled with the culture of podcasts and blogs, which have an overwhelming reach and influence, meaning that information and opinion are no longer so tightly controlled by journalists under the reign of media network monopolies. Thus, culture as its evolved meaning has come to be is at best to be consumed and interpreted ‘as commons not as commodity. The Internet partly de-commodifies music and culture by file sharing and partly creates new strategies of commodification (iTunes, Spotify)’.4 Fuchs argues that Adorno’s aversion to certain art forms is not intrinsic to the form but rather whether or not the form participates in a cultural activity that devolves to the commodity.5 While this observation does not fully take stock of Adorno’s dissection of jazz as a form, it is still helpful in making valuejudgements. In contemporary art, for instance, there is a general consensus that much of the best and most dynamic activity is not to be seen in the big commercial museums, which are constrained by their sponsors, benefactors and stakeholders, but in smaller artist-run enclaves known as ARIs, or artist-run initiatives. Art that is not chosen and circumscribed by such vested interests is to follow an Adornian pattern of thinking, less sullied by ideology. But what we cannot shrink from is that the all-too-evident fact that it is commercial, dominant interests that drive prominence, pervasiveness and opinion, ensuring that margins remain as such. This is but one example of a conflict between different knowledge systems. Fuchs relates: There is a general conflict between ideological/dominant knowledge and emancipatory knowledge. Often dominant actors have structural advantages in the

 Art beyond the Horizon 49 definition of social knowledge. In class-based societies, it tends to be much harder to diffuse critical, emancipatory knowledge throughout society than ideological, dominative knowledge.6

But where this binary logic tends to get a little mixed up is if we start to ask whether ‘emancipatory knowledge’ can also be located within ideological, hegemonic knowledge. Let us ask this question in a different way. So far we have made a great deal of the very high standards set by Adorno, so high that they have been criticized as narrow and unfulfillable. There have also been critical attempts, unfortunately not thorough enough in their method, to recuperate jazz in the name of Adorno’s aesthetics. Adorno praised Wagner, it will be remembered, as the harbinger of Schoenberg’s atonality by expanding musical form, his chromaticism pushing tonal harmony in directions they had hitherto not gone. But Wagner inevitably fails in his repetition, his fetishization of selected motifs and his stagnation that finds its justification in nature as opposed to history. (‘Wagner’s philosophical theory, which is amazingly homogenous with his compositional theory, is really unfamiliar with history and recognizes only permanent revocation with nature.’)7 Its identification with nature, and its claim to the paramount, is what makes his work regressive and dangerous, consummated in the promiscuous approval of his work by Nazism which also pretended to be at one with the natural. But the example of Wagner can be used to ask the question whether one can still enjoy his music and take Adorno’s aesthetics seriously. ‘This question’, argues Calvin Thomas, which of course could be reworded to ask the same thing about Adorno and jazz, or about Adorno and mass culture – is based mainly in the reactive fear that Adorno, like some ogrish uncle who wants to take away our sweets, will tell us we no longer ‘love’ them. Adorno’s real concern, however, is the preemptive social constitution of desires and their bogus and shabby fulfillment within the dominant parameters of the culture industry.8

This helps us on the way to find tools of discrimination between various modes of culture. It is also the criterion for kitsch, if the concept is to be entertained. Thomas asks: ‘If lyric poetry after Auschwitz is a barbarity, what is it to produce videos for MTV?’9 The answer to the first part of the question calls for it not to be taken literally, while the second is that it not be blanketly dismissed. In the words of Songtao Luo, Adorno’s work is invaluable to express ‘the need to reclaim the autonomy and freedom of the individual and to pursue the reconciliation of the individual with society’.10 While this remains an Enlightenment claim, it is still relevant for justifying critical content over content is undeniably complicit. Adorno’s pessimistic characterization of the art after Auschwitz has been regularly interpreted as reprising Hegel’s end of art thesis. Art that persists, persists under negativity, which is also why it can only be relevant and of any value if working within a narrow set of possibilities. Modern art after 1945 in its form expresses while at the same time faces its own death. This, as Eva Geulen identifies, exposes a paradoxical and compulsive logic that is implicit in art’s always living-on. ‘For Adorno, the ambivalence

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which has characterized the end of art since the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, in the eighteenth century – between catastrophe and redemption, utopia and demise – remains, under the conditions of modernity after Auschwitz, strictly undecidable.’11 By extension, a condition of art’s life is that it always ends, or rather, always be in the threat of collapse. Adorno and Horkheimer’s anxiety over these ends is exacerbated, and made more exigent, over that of the culture industry, as if the culture industry has rendered a malignant screen over anything and everything that could be deemed redemptive, and that all that was left to the responsible cultural critic was to mourn the loss. Geulen argues, however, that their ‘fascination with abject mass culture is so strong that it results in an uncanny affinity, even a supplemental dependency between art and mass culture’.12 Read in the most extreme but still plausible way, the culture industry is the name of an apocalypse, and all the more dangerous because of its insidiousness, that its ruin is wrought by seduction, a seduction that precipitates a deeper, metaphysical pain. What is so galling for Adorno (and Horkheimer) about the culture industry is that it openly demonstrates the way capitalism willingly absorbs its adversaries and does so in the plain light of day. Geulen observes that ‘the culture industry thrives not only despite but because its mythical, deceptive, manipulative qualities are utterly transparent’.13 Rather than leading us back to the beginning (almost) of this book, this remark can also take us to the second horizon which is the climate in which everything is by degrees a commodity and infiltrated by mass-market systems. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have seen to that. Following in the wake of Danto, art is in its ‘posthistorical’ phase and many commentators have had to admit that contemporary art operates in tandem with the fashion system. That the question of the so-called internal merit of an artist has dwindled is a salutary development since the criteria for such a judgement are not internal but external, based on dominant knowledge, dominant taste and power – who controls that taste. Yet the absence of standards of value and taste has left a vacuum which is prevailed over by celebrity artists (Koons, Barney, Schnabel) and by curators jockeying for attention and financed by corporations and their associated benefactors. The vicissitudes of public taste are determined by roughly three precepts. The first is the presumption of undisputed historic masters, these enforce the illusion there is canonic knowledge and provide the assurance that intrinsic value exists. (No one would dream of questioning the greatness of, say, Picasso, Matisse or Monet, let alone would expect that any objection to their status as geniuses would ever be taken seriously.) This mythic-historical stratum is maintained as a universal benchmark which is backed and sustained by the art market which maintains a clear if vexing corollary between esteem and monetary value. The second develops out of the first, by posing as the revisionist, countervailing example to a dominant and possibly repressive mode of knowledge. This strand provides for artists speaking on behalf of marginal identities – related to society, gender, race or all of these – who under a previous system of aesthetic demarcation were not taken seriously. The third can involve the first two and is based on what is popularly envisioned as the needs of the present. In the age of climate change and refugeeism you can be sure to see artists chosen for Biennales and solo shows that deal with these particularly hot and

 Art beyond the Horizon 51 fashionable topics. What is overwhelming as far as contemporary art is concerned is the way in which the art seen in the prestigious museums and galleries is ratified by a system in compliance to one or all three of the above standards while always jealously hiding that the immanent driver is money. That an opera company may stage a production of a difficult work (e.g. Berg’s Lulu) that will not fill the house and risks not breaking even or that a museum chooses to mount a retrospective to a relatively obscure artist – these are exceptions that prove the rule. Their presence is also a calculated advantage to show all and sundry how committed the institutions to the purity of art over commercial interests, thereby adding prestige to the institutions, augmenting trust and admiration, that then results in healthy visitation numbers, which leads back to more money. ‘Beyond Adorno’s aesthetic law of form’, states Wilhelm Wurzer, ‘postmodernism marks the explosion of society as substance. Art and history, dialectic and genealogy, metaphysics and deconstruction belong to the open terrain of appearance, the “free play” of capital. A world without “exchange” is no longer possible, even in the realm of art.’14 This is an important observation that was made over a decade before the age of social media. Exchange is possibly the chief value of today: exchange not only of money or opinions but images themselves. Art is subject to this exchange, but is also caught up, blurred and ontologically undermined in its mixture with a numerous other manifestations, which alternately can, or could, be art. In Critical Fashion Practice we laid out a set of criteria for the coinage of the eponymous term. We began by citing some of the scholarship by art historians and critics that lamented the extent to which art since at the least 1990s had become to resemble fashion, which had occurred together with the diminution of its criticality and the conspicuousness of its weddedness to curatorial agendas tied to conveniently suppressed and mandarin commercial interests. It was our contention that a countermovement had come to form in fashion that was gaining visibility to the extent that it was hard to ignore. That is, that as art began to fall in its critical import and ambitions, at the same rate fashion had began to rise. But we stress, not all fashion. The rise of critical fashion practice – beginning with Vivienne Westwood in the 1970s and Rei Kawakubo in the 1980s – could be calibrated against a simple binary element of the ‘hermetic’ and the ‘obtrusive’. Hermetic fashion is not critical fashion as its ‘sealed’ nature means that it seeks to enact one ideal of clothing which is ‘just’ to clothe, and clothe well and to the satisfaction of the wearer (which inevitably entails pleasing the onlooker) only insofar as the clothing announces itself according to codes of clothing that, through consensus or default, are deemed proper to clothing and dress. T-shirts, slacks and suits and so on are examples of this. There are no doubt many blurred lines of demarcation, but there is no need to cavil about this. The key point is in the distinction itself, after which to choose examples worthy of consideration when it comes to fashion that is sufficiently obtrusive so as to prompt the need for a supplementary level of attention and analysis for it wanting to overreach the state of ‘just’ fashion or ‘mere’ fashion. This category and all of its equivalents are not in any way the subject of criticism or dismissal. Rather it is the extent to which critical, obtrusive fashion seeks a level of consideration that is both formal and conceptual: it provokes re-examination of the nature of dress, but doing so by offering a series of coders and gestures that are

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obviously not reducible to clothing and dress (where hermetic dress follows a language of reducibility, however specious the notion is in its essence). Examples of critical fashion practice include, in addition to Westwood and Kawakubo, Gareth Pugh, Aitor Throup, Miuccia Prada, Viktor & Rolf, Rad Hourani, Rick Owens, Walter van Beirendonck and Alexander McQueen. It is McQueen who sheds light on what all of these designers have in common, which is an affinity with tragedy and death. Much has been made of the morbidity of McQueen’s collections (which was only amplified by his suicide in 2010), and the brutality of Kawakubo’s early collections such as that of Autumn/Winter 1983, with its distressed fabrics and use of tears and holes, prompted comments about a ‘post-Hiroshima’ aesthetic, an analogy that the designer hotly denied. Nevertheless, the parallels with Adorno’s aesthetics in regard to the subsistence of art in the legacy of horror are compelling and easy to make. Even considering that commercialization is from the outset the motivation of fashion, this is a statement that can only exist as a generality. Obtrusive, critical designs are not made with commercialization in mind, but rather are produced as artworks are, with the premium set at the quality of the object, the message and the experience of that object, worn or seen. As with art, commercial intentions are secondary but admittedly necessary to keep the enterprise afloat. In Adorno’s sustained mediation on fashion in Aesthetic Theory, he maintains that what they share is the need for a relationship with time and the new. Yet modern art’s nemesis of the new is fashion, the ‘organ’ of ‘cultural conservatism’. Fashion, which has ‘an unconscious awareness of the temporal core of art’, is ‘manipulated by the administrative and culture industries’. Yet the antinomy, as Adorno freely acknowledges, cannot be freely drawn: ‘While art resists fashion, where it never wants parity with the heteronomous, it is in accord with fashion in its instinct to be of its time, its aversion against provincialism and slavishness, keeping at arm’s length anything that runs against standards of artistic dignity.’15 To this we might add that at the very core of the ontology of fashion is death, given that any fashion in announcing itself prevails upon its own imminent death when another fashion looms from the last. But it is also the essence that it has been in fashion’s best interests to deny. As we write in the conclusion of Critical Fashion Practice: ‘It is only recently . . . that death has become inscribed within the aesthetic and the phenomenality of fashion. From the rip to the robot, life is undeniably contingent and as indelibly fragile.’16 We do not wish to make too much about morbidity as the standard-bearer for art, but instead to resuscitate the notion that art’s truth or ‘truth’ hinges upon its inscrutability, its inner frailty and its reluctance to conceal the dimensions of the possibilities of its own loss and failure. To be too sure, too suggest wholeness, and unshakable approval is to reek of ideology and ulterior motives of the commodity. But it is now the case that the former can be persistent in the latter. Fashion can be a receptacle for this; in other media such as television, blockbuster series such as Game of Thrones involves a bevy of characters who are no longer insulated by the predictable arc of melodramatic plotlines but can perish at any time, as in real life. The proliferation and saturation of culture begs the counterfactual question as to the location of culture. To this end, in a conceptually transpositional mode, the work of Homi Bhabha proves again to be useful. While his important study The Location

 Art beyond the Horizon 53 of Culture is primarily about race, politics, society and the legacy of imperialism, it nonetheless has much to inform this debate, starting with the rather complex, if not vexed, relation that Adorno had to jazz and its association and Afro-American, Black music. However much he might like to have had it, the de facto cultural association is strong to the point of being emblematic. In attempting to resolve the binary bind of hegemonic as against subaltern groups, Bhabha theorizes upon hybridity: ‘Hybridity represents that ambivalent “turn” of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification – a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority.’17 He advises that hybridity as he defines it is not an attempt at resolving cultural tension, rather it is a zone of differentiation and doubt: ‘it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid.’18 While it would be tempting to delve into this subject in greater detail, the main focus is the discursive potential of teasing out, or shattering or even blasting, an accepted binary position to produce a new dialectical horizon altogether. Fashion, critical fashion, is one such insertion into the status quo of art. It is also quintessentially hybrid: existing between object and concept, between physical and virtual, while availing itself of different aesthetic and cultural domains. Fashion in the last thirty to forty years at least has been shown to be an effective tool of affirming alternative identities by actively interpellating them, to use Jacques Rancière’s term, into both everyday life and high culture – the Met Gala arguably being an example of the imbrication of both. While fashion may be a prime exemplar of art beyond the horizon, it can also be used as a model for the melding of the commercial and the critical that exists across so many fields of aesthetic endeavour, which may include, as Carrier and Pissarro do, graffiti and skateboarding – to which we would add not all. Heteronymous art has usurped autonomy. We may go so far as to argue that autonomy is no longer possible. But if the culture industry is everything that serious art is not, and if these distinctions are no longer valid, then we would need to either find a different set of distinctions or reorient them, as we have begun to do. This is what Robert Witkin seeks to achieve in his spirited analysis of Adorno and Jazz. He traverses the now well-established, and well-founded, criticisms of Adorno’s views on jazz, including its equivalence to all popular music. It is this blindness that discloses an important nuance which is the ultimate failure of jazz musicians to penetrate mainstream pop culture commensurate with pop musicians. This leads him to examine evolution of the Beatles and their image as first rocker, then mod then hippie. He observes: [t]he culture industry that commodifies such developments but does not create them, may, nevertheless, seek to manufacture ‘copies’ (the Monkees) by abstracting the formula. Sooner or later, however, the possibilities of the invention are exhausted and the culture industry must return to the sources of authentic aesthetic creation that lie beyond the compass of its design initiative.19

Witkin drives home that there is more to than a categoric or semantic distinctiveness ‘between cultural creation and cultural exploitation’. Even if the culture industry packages the expressions and experiences of particular social groups, ‘albeit in an

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abstracted and defused form’, they nonetheless ‘transmit new symbolic resources to a mass audience – new means of expression that would otherwise be accessible only to the social groups in which they originated’.20 What is curious to add is that the topologies of subcultural groups that Witkin uses as musical examples have an equally if not greater cultural presence as styles relating to fashion and identity. And the very same argument can be carried over to them, forcefully felt in the popularization and dissemination of anything from punk to hip-hop. And if the popularization of a radical style such as punk has been seen as an equally radical dilution, a counterargument runs that ‘commercialization and commodification serve to universalize the aesthetic codes that configure experience for specific social groups’.21 In Witkin’s schema, the culture industry does not diminish so much as complement and enhance the messages and groups from which it draws sustenance for the purposes of commercial profit. This can also be turned on its head with new social groups as they emerge feeding on the configurations of the old, which have been diverted beyond the local and the specific by the culture industry itself. By dint of its inexhaustible market-creation, the culture industry becomes an amenable vehicle for forms, identities, expressions that would otherwise have remained unto themselves. Blunting of the edges of the original is a necessary evil – or benefit as it rounds it from raw expression into marketable and digestible form. The culture industry, then, survives as a linguistic regime from which new forms of expression can profit. ‘The polished banalities of the culture industry may also be dynamically reconfigured in aesthetic practices of everyday life.’ He asks the audacious but still tenable question: ‘Is it possible that the draining of dialectical processes from works of art and popular culture that Adorno abhorred may actually be a prerequisite for the development of an aestheticized praxis in everyday life?’22 While postmodernism was heralded as a collapse of the distinctions of high and low, the status of art was keenly preserved: music videos, comics, graphic novels and fashion were all relegated to their respective corners. Witkin avers: ‘Both the work of so-called “serious” artists and those of culture industry professionals can be seen in terms of their mutual mediations.’ For him the ‘reconquest of everyday life . . . would have no chance of success without the work of the culture industry’.23 Similar exhortations have grown in volume over the last twenty years. The culture industry, or better, aspects thereof, cannot be seen monolithically, and it is the site of many forms of aesthetic investment, suggesting that the returns can be greater than within the traditional halls where art is housed.

7

The culture industry and popular culture

We must remember that Adorno was one of many exiles whose work is deeply tinctured by the horrors of the Second World War, many of them still being uncovered or repressed in the decades after it ended, as its end in 1945 notionally built on dates of the death of leaders (Hitler, Mussolini), capitulation, armistice, peace talks and so on. It does not account for the chaos and aftershock that lasted for Europe into at least the 1960s. Adorno’s generation of thinkers believed that something had been deeply amiss in language and thought that led, or abetted, the atrocities of the war, and they were also sensitive that these epistemic malfunctions continued to be embedded within the way culture comported itself. Hence the vehemence of many of his reactions to contemporary culture. So far, we have used a number of phrases interchangeably, largely ‘popular culture’ and ‘the culture industry’. This was in part due to use of common parlance before a more thorough explanation could be fleshed out. It is one of the mainstays of this book to point to the instability of any such terms in the new millennium, especially when subjected to close scrutiny. For they are terms that imply, and require, an opposite. While this exists – there are people who still play and appreciate Webern or who read Proust and understand most of its subtleties – such activities are no longer the same critical foils as they had presumed to be, and the penumbra between the two nebulous domains had grown far wider. ‘Popular culture’ is so omnipresent, so ubiquitous, that the term is best used as a touchstone more than anything, because its imprecision and multifariousness preclude anything else. It is still worth persisting with Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) assaults on popular culture because so many of its observations are presciently valid to its most fraudulent and unsparing aspects. Where Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’ differs from ‘popular culture’ is that it is more provocatively ironic. Implicit within ‘culture’ and what is thereby ‘cultural’ is not a product of industry in the sense of capitalist industrialization, which is inimical to it. Modern culture may use and comment on modern industry but sets itself apart: industrial production is a matter of efficiency, replication and profitability, while cultural production comes from individual or collective subjective effort for purposes of edification and human fulfilment. As Fredric Jameson aptly puts it, ‘the “Culture Industry” is not a theory of culture but the theory of an industry, of a branch of the interlocking monopolies of late capitalism that makes money out of what used to be called culture.’1 So hijacked, culture is placed in the invidious position of being morally bankrupt through its systematic mendacity, in being pressed into the service of profit.

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In short, Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase darkly suggests the adulteration of the means of the production of culture and what it sets out to achieve. Adorno explains the adoption of the term in a later essay, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ (1963): The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of ‘mass culture’. We replaced that expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and the familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by the masses, and to which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan.2

And ‘the expression “industry” is not to be taken literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself . . . and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, not strictly to the production process’.3 All of this is no doubt highly resonant. With regard to ‘manufactured more or less according to plan’ we may think of all the programmatic non-spontaneous productions in the film industry, from films rewritten according to pilot audience responses, songs composed with the aid of algorithms based on other successful tracks or bands formed by production companies (the Monkees would make their first appearance just three years after the earlier passage was written). Thus, culture is produced with the selfconscious and conspicuous aim of generating the new or else as we see now packaged into convenient decade-long brackets such as ‘music from the ‘80s’. The emphasis on the new and the now in culture is particularly noxious and aimed towards profit as opposed to the generation of quality forms. As Christopher Dennis adds in his study of Adorno’s theories of music, ‘the consumer is able to feel that he is much more up-todate, and maintain the illusion that he is growing, progressing and changing, that he has individuality in short, by expressing contempt for old styles as quaint or passé.’4 Or alternatively, old styles from recent memory are repackaged in various ways – from visual appropriation, musical sampling, retros-styling or just ‘inspiration’ – to be conveniently redeployed in the present. As his thought and his antipathies gained in breadth and momentum, Adorno would become more and more impatient of the culture industry, and more scathing in his condemnation of it. His literary locutions against them can be startlingly scathing, but also amusing, and most often accurate. There are many startling aspects to Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) observations about the culture industry: the trenchancy, the wit and the courageous attempt to unmask and expose. It is also an uncanny template of what has come to us in full force – uncanny because in many ways at the time of their writing, cultural and financial demographics, the flows of information and methods of exchange were vastly different from their make-up today. Mutatis mutandis: there are the occasional variations and discrepant details, but the essay still speaks today with what may be called terrifying

 The Culture Industry and Popular Culture 57 force, especially given that it was written so relatively long ago. Heaping example upon example, the verdict is devastating. But where Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique does run aground is precisely in the multifariousness of the culture industry, the ways in which it has branched and mutated. Just as Adorno is fixated on the Germanic tradition in music, so is his conception of the culture industry as something bordering on the monolithic, as opposed to a porous and multiform, whose complexity is analogous to language itself inasmuch it ought not to be treated as a thing but more as a tool in and of thought. Some of these nuances and inconsistencies can be seen early on in other writings, such as Adorno’s commentaries on jazz, which form the discussion in the second part of this chapter. Adorno and Horkheimer conceived the notion of the culture industry in what is now a famous chapter in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. However, the concept had already been germinating in earlier studies of music such as ‘Über das Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’ (‘On the Fetishistic Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’), 1938, which had been in part a response to observations made in Benjamin’s so-called artwork essay, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility) from two years before. Beyond all this, a decisive factor in Adorno’s intellectual development was his exile in the United States and when he settled in California. As mentioned in the previous chapter, he lived in the same neighbourhood as Thomas Mann, the Pacific Palisades, northwest of Los Angeles, where Horkheimer, Brecht and Schoenberg also lived. He had minimal contact with the latter, but given his stringent model of art with Schoenberg as one of its chief paragons, one wonders what he may have thought of that fact that his frequent tennis competition included George Gershwin and the Marx Brothers.5 (Although at a similar time Adorno became acquainted with Charlie Chaplin.) In Los Angeles Adorno was profoundly struck by the insouciant proliferation of consumerism in contemporary American life, which had advanced well beyond that of Europe. He was disturbed by the arbitrariness and rootlessness of American culture, and its indifference to mores and codes cherished and guarded in pre-Nazi Germany. The subtitle of the chapter on the culture industry, ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, helps to outline the critical trajectory. Adorno and Horkheimer deplore the way in which the tools of Enlightenment – art and related cultural activities and products – are drained of any other effect except that of being consumable. Further, one sinister facet of the ‘industry’ in the culture industry is that even if people believe in their free will, their consumption of culture is curated and controlled: ‘any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals.’6 What is all the more disconcerting is that individuals are heedless of the extent to which they have been pre-programed: ‘performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in.’7 Music is modified and adapted for the sake of insertion into an untroubling consumable system. The self-serving pattern ensures a regular pattern of material and a habituation to it. This extends to more activities that one can care to name but more critically than we are consciously aware of, as our aspirations and desires are channelled according to careful, surreptitiously intricate communicative frameworks. Today, the truth of this insight is

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evidenced by the Internet and the slow demise of the print media, free-to-air television and radio, and the shopping mall. While the Internet is still regulated by algorithms based on search data or by the vested interests of investors, it has nevertheless resulted in a much broader market for the music industry. The principal international platform for visual art is no longer policed by arts editors but is now distributed by Instagram, which is its own mixed blessing. What has only deteriorated in our age is the hold that corporations have over the regulation of taste and content. As Adorno and Horkheimer argue, there is an uncanny sameness between Chrysler and General Motors automobiles, Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer films, masked behind superficial and pernickety differences, where these details keep alive the satisfaction of offering variety, such as to quell any interest in digging deeper into the facts. ‘Not only are hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content itself is derived from them and only appears to change.’8 It is a torpor that spreads to a world of fabricated phenomena that whose definition, justification and ordering have all been done prior to the encounter. ‘There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him.’9 The uniformity is in form and content, and rigorously adhered to: the requisite length of pop songs and movies reciprocally tailor attention spans as much as cater to them. It is a rigidity that makes the consumer feel rewarded and safe in knowledge that everything works in the comfort zones of predictability. ‘In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come.’10 Staring down the barrel of time we can see the culture of narcissism carefully cultivated by culture industry’s ‘mass deception’ and how it has gained momentum in the present era to fever pitch. The issue of attention span continues to be a vexed one. In contemporary society, it is tied to smart phones and access to memes and bite-size media, which also means the decline in the reading of actual literature, or the patience for lengthy musical works, or the ability to look at an art object (or anything else) for a protracted period while not under the influence. (Yet already in the 1960s Minimalist artists were responding to statistics that the average time a viewer spent with a work of art was only a couple of seconds.) Remarkably, writing in their own time which is nearing a hundred years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer were already seeing how aesthetic experience was being experienced through what in today’s language is the ‘bite’; for them it is the ‘technical detail’.11 Whereas with Romanticism and modernist art, music and literature the emphasis on a single or a number of details over the whole precipitated a destabilization of form, with the culture industry destabilization is used as mere effect that ‘is liquidated together with the idea’.12 One of Jean Baudrillard’s more lapidary statements was that America has Disneyland to distract people from noticing that the whole country is Disneyland. It is an observation that is spawned by Adorno and Horkheimer who state that ‘The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry’.13 The extent and stakes of this have become immeasurably higher in our time, especially when the public is constantly encountering zones of impossibility such as digitally modified models, such that consumers are asked to desire things that do not actually exist. With some sense of Benjamin’s ‘dreamscapes’ lurking in the wind, Adorno and Horkheimer

 The Culture Industry and Popular Culture 59 announce gnomically that ‘real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies’. Once contributing factor is the then relatively recent introduction of sound cinema, which ‘forces its victims to equate it directly to reality’.14 We are presently in several further steps in this direction, with VR (virtual reality), the projection of self and the constructed narrative on life on social media platforms, and with the enactment of imaginary life from comics and animation in cosplay. In all of these recent phenomena the viewer becomes a participant in more than one way, expected to insert himself or herself into an imaginary schema, and it is implied that they are insufficient if they do not do so. What they also foretell is the flattening and ‘caricature’ of style. Although related, we do not have to justify the approach to style now with the benefit of a postmodern lens and its justification of the appropriation and reflexivity of style. Rather, what they mean is the forced emancipation of style, the making-bland, from the content and, importantly for Adorno, the historical contexts that gave them life. By the earlymiddle of the twentieth century when they were conceiving their argument, stealing of primitive styles within art was a common practice and had it would be some fifty years later when this practice would come up for ethical review. The caricature of style can be seen everywhere today in all forms of design, where especially in fashion, it is sanitized by the word ‘inspiration’ – but not always with negative effects as we will see later on. What most concerns Adorno and Horkheimer is the ways in which the tension in a style is drained of it when it becomes hardened and fixed. An obvious example is the Mona Lisa, which, although like any great work of art is still made by a flawed human being, is elevated to having emblematic status, immune to criticism, visually metonymic of art itself. The displacement of style into an album of all-sorts hardens style when it was once a mobile site of contestation, for ‘the great artists have retained a mistrust of style’, inasmuch as it is never treated as apodictic, but instead as something invented and always more perfectible. It is a system that rewards secondrate art: ‘Instead of exposing itself to failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.’15 For Adorno and Horkheimer this sclerosis of styles is the cost of way the culture industry has rendered culture endlessly reiterative. By ensuring that culture is shorn of its more ambiguous and contestable qualities – by in effect killing it and reincarnating it as an historical zombie – the culture industry reduces art to obedience, just as it reciprocally feeds and satisfies its audiences who are made to believe in rightness and applicability of what is offered them: the award for best picture of best director, the number one song this week, the top five restaurants in this town. The culture industry is the uncanny of mass approval and the smoothness of art’s insertion into life. As an example of this, in her own clever rendition of the critique of the culture industry, Marianna Papastephanou writes: E Luceven le Stelle disconnected from Tosca and Puccini becomes incidental music and brings strong recollections of the detergent advertisement it once coated. Last Year in Marienbad has caused some of deepest yawn relief to the hopefuls for the title of the sophisticated who wished to cash out the film’s cultural and social

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It paints a pretty bleak picture, of how deeply entrenched our value systems are within complex forms of reproduction and consumption. More disconcerting still, the pattern of life is supposed to be shaped by freedom of choice, hence ‘the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style’.17 However, if a product of the culture industry is not conducive to consumption and therefore to profit, then it is quickly brushed to the side, as any set of irrational and contrarian reasons can be marshalled for the sake of discrediting any work of art, regardless of how meritorious it is. Adorno and Horkheimer fear this, that the culture industry will discourage, drown out and eradicate qualities that, for Adorno especially, bear the hallmarkings of good if not great art, namely negativity and difficulty. Unmoored from the principles that make art endurable and interesting, popular art is consumable and comprehensible, a quick fix, whereas good art is slippery and runs the risk of challenging the viewer to uneasiness. Owing to the easy gratification of the former, the experience of the latter is made to equate to displeasure and by extension to something undesirable because it is elitist and self-indulgent. One can only be glad that Adorno did not live to see the state of orchestras today that are experiencing an attrition due to falling audiences or made to make film music a large part of its repertoire, where John Williams is finally the victor over Mahler – which fate is worse? In the name of liberalism and with the repeated invocation of the flimsy notion of ‘the democratization of taste’, it is deemed a good thing to cater for the majority, whose experience of orchestral music orbits around the Rocky theme or Star Wars. With acerbity Horkheimer and Adorno comment on the promiscuous entry of vulgar styles, ‘the eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel’. ‘And so, the jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapest string quartet, more pedantic rhythmically than any philharmonic clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is as uniform and as sugary as that of Guy Lombardo. But what is significant is not vulgarity, stupidity, and lack of polish.’18 What is significant is the forced marriage, as if the addition of chalk to cheese will result in a new and improved musical combination. When they turn to cartoons, we may pause to reflect the extent to which cartoon characters have invaded film and all regions of popular culture, and how the Marvel and DC characters are now the basis for a multi-billion-dollar industry. ‘All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth.’ In cartoons is a world where ‘[t]he quantity of organised amusement changes into the quality of organised cruelty’.19 (Tellingly, the German word for cartoon is Trickfilm, the role of deception explicit.) Now, the benefit of CGI what was once only realizable in animation (that was once

 The Culture Industry and Popular Culture 61 painstakingly made frame by frame, picture by picture) is now able to be recreated with striking verisimilitude, bringing any level of outlandish fantasy into the realms of ‘reality’. As we see in the Avengers series of films, for instance, several franchises are brought together, but the allegorical content – the myths that have been lifted and perverted – has been reduced to a simplistic, hackneyed plot, so as to allow for the episodic entry of all number of strange and wonderful characters. The films lurch from scene to scene which is usually from conflict to conflict of indescribable violence and destruction, where the pain of the heroes is usually minimal. The world of real things and real people has been foregone for superheroes and CGI. But the outlandishness of these films, for which there is an inexhaustible appetite, that also exposes them as promises impossible to be fulfilled. Again prophetically, Adorno and Horkheimer decry the way the culture industry ‘cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises . . . the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point can never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu’. It is the promissory character of culture that makes it align so adeptly with advertising. ‘Advertising is its elixir of life. But as its product fails to reduce to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity.’20 Advertising replaces market research, advising consumers as to the best and most efficient way to spend time and money. Even their concluding statement has a contemporary ring: The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.21

There still remains more work for us to do, in finding the mechanisms of redemptive from and within the system, a system that, while homogenized to an alarming extent with massive corporate monopolies (Microsoft, Facebook), there are as many subgenres and independent forms of distribution. The overriding availability of information in the era of the Internet engenders a culture of entitlement and auto-didacticism that has convinced itself of the easy availability of truth. In Negative Dialectics Adorno reminds us that the availability and comprehensibility of truth are, contrary to what we might believe, not readily available or easily comprehensible: The criterion of truth is not its unmediated communicability to everyone. This is in contradistinction to the almost universal compulsion to confuse and at the same time possibly to raise the register of communication of what is known, while every step toward communication sells out and falsifies truth.22

Hence today the culture of conviction bred by fake news. In ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’, Adorno considers the ways in which the culture industry plays and manipulates subjectivity, under the false impression of

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nurturing individualism within safely circumscribed parameters, giving the impression that these limits offer sanctuary and safety from the chaos of life. The moral direction that the culture industry seems to follow and propagate is only ideology that ‘above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation’.23 It is in its best interests for the culture industry to dissociate itself from its motivations and its inner apparatus, its ‘technique’. Technique is considered here as the ‘inner logic’ of products but one that is never going to stretch itself too far to unearth anything radical or subversive.24 Another consequence of the packaging of culture is the large demarcation drawn between work and play. In one of a set of essays written in 1952–3, upon a return trip to the United States from Germany, Adorno comments on the rationalization of existence and its parcelling into discrete forms of activity, severing play into its own department that then is prone to consumption. As he relates: It would be erroneous, however, to assume that the bi-phasic division of work and pleasure puts both work and pleasure on an equal footing. Since the approach itself, the ‘division’ of life into various functions which are supposed to be more productive if kept apart, is chosen under the auspices of psychological rationalization, the priority of the rational over indulgence, to put it crudely of the ego over the id, is strictly maintained.25

Blessed with a taxonomy, pleasures range from taboo to those encouraged. But ultimately it is in this call to order that pleasure ‘has to be predigested and somehow castrated. Pleasure has become its own hollow cause, the break from routine so as to get back to the routine and be useful, and “it has to be assured that this outbreak [from routine to pleasure] will lead him finally into some repetition of the self-same routine he wants to get away from”’.26 Relevant to, and in confrontation with, the arguments of this book, Adorno pours scorn on ‘those intellectuals anxious to reconcile themselves with the phenomenon’ of the culture industry. Trash such as ‘pocket novels, films off the rack, family television shows rolled out in serials and hit parades’ is given moderated judgement, deemed ‘harmless, and, according to them, even democratic’.27 These defenders of popular culture suggest that the anodyne effects of entertainment are beneficial ‘and stress reducing patterns of behaviour’. But Adorno warns that conformity is the result, as well as inculcating incuriousness. An unfortunate by-product is to discourage and quell any mention of alternatives: witness today online mainstream critiques of B-movie blockbusters, which detail the acting and directing but in no way delve into whether such movies should be made at all or in the way they are. ‘The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended.’28 In one of his commentaries on television from around 1953, Adorno writes of the infiltration of the culture industry into private space, where ‘[t]he boundary of awareness between reality and creation is eroded’.29 No one can deny or underestimate the power that film has had in shaping public consciousness of history and the dominance of certain national histories over other. Hollywood film ensures that US heroes remain dominant, and historical figures

 The Culture Industry and Popular Culture 63 (e.g. Lincoln) get mixed up with fictional ones, such as superheroes. The march of simulacra is so strong that today children are now more inclined to debate who the best superhero is as opposed to their most upstanding person in history. Hence, to extrapolate Adorno, the ideology of culture in its ordering and control of material is a meta-ideology insofar as it ensures that the most pressing and exigent issues are skirted over, disavowed, and the stresses of the world are quelled with false assurances, created by ‘dreamscapes’, to use Benjamin’s word, but whose purpose is to lead only to the next hollowed-out ideological phenomenon. ‘In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom.’30 The lowest common denominator in which films are pitched to ‘eleven year-olds’ means ‘they would very much like to make adults into eleven year-olds.’31 The overriding concern for Adorno is that the culture industry quashes criticality and independence, forcing its spectators and the public into a spiritual straightjacket. ‘It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.’ In this little has changed, for we live in a society where for adolescents to be uncool is not to be abreast of the latest superhero movie so saturated with CGI that reality is a distant memory, or where adult online networks heat up with discussion of the season finale of Game of Thrones. Adorno concludes the essay by remarking that if the ‘masses’ have been treated as such, as inferior and worthy of contempt, it is because the culture industry has rendered them as such and is contemptuous of them. The cracks in this uniformity, however, are to be found within the system itself.

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Light music and lazy listening

If jazz enjoys a special place in the litany of Adorno’s dislikes, it needs to be set against the bigger and fertile landscape of popular culture’s powerful campaign of simplification and standardization. Although Adorno concentrates on music, we can nonetheless apply the paradigms of light music and lazy listening to the experience of art, to demands for easy understanding and to diminished attention spans. In addition to mentions in other essays and in Aesthetic Theory, the principal sources for Adorno’s views on these themes are to be found in a series of lectures assembled under the title Introduction to a Sociology of Music (1962) and in the essay ‘On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’ in the collection of essays on music from 1956, assembled under the appropriately Adornian title, Dissonanzen. While they repackage many ideas aired in the essays on the culture industry and in jazz, they also give a deeper perspective on the evolution of modern art that occurs together with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the decisive splitting of art into separate spheres. The dialectical struggle that art has to deal with, to Adorno’s eyes, is this split, where new modern music cannot be viewed in isolation but as concomitant with the music’s degradation. This poses some serious problems of attributing a progressive solution for pure, and it is this problem that manifests in modern art’s inner turbulence. In contrast, the selfevident problem of light music is that the innate turbulence of (good) art has been disavowed or tamed into a packaged and ritualized form, in which the inner urgency of the work of art has been emptied. The main factor with which Adorno has to contend, and which is firmly grounded in his Aesthetic Theory, is that modern music has enjoyed an evolution into a higher form. Its development is alongside the rise of the middle classes and hence this evolution occurs alongside the entrenchment of popular and trivial musical forms. The implication is a profound but subtle one, namely, that the more complex forms of music as exemplified by Schoenberg and the so-called Second Viennese School is partly as result of the proliferation of cheaper, popular forms. But it would also follow that popular forms are popular because the purported higher forms are so hard to grasp. A further conclusion that Adorno does recognize with some hesitation is that both are the consequence of the other. Lighter forms of music as evolved into the mainstream are a casualty and a consequence of the evolution of superior musical forms. The loaded notion of evolution within music is seen against other forms that are in an evident state of stagnation. An example of the ossification, or ‘petrification’ of musical form, and the simplification of genre, is evident in the operatic repertoire,

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which has been reduced ‘to barely more than fifteen titles’.1 This obdurate preference for a small number of titles – Adorno references Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, but we could hardly fail also to mention Puccini’s La Bohème or Madame Butterfly – breeds hostility to any further development. Adorno cites Strauss as being a threshold of this sensibility, for whom Der Rosenkavelier granted him success, but where his greatest stage works, Salome and Elektra, were received lukewarmly. Baroque music began to split between sacred and profane content, and the opera form, which had grown out of popular carnival and masque, was in the nineteenth century diluted to become the operetta. ‘The ontology of the operetta would be that of confection.’2 The operetta evolved into a yet more infantilized form, the musical, which is another degenerate form together with popular ditties and jazz. Degenerate forms stand in dialectical opposition to higher music, which developed as a response to it. To designate this superior music, Adorno largely uses the word Kunstmusik, ‘art music’, and more sparingly ‘great music’ (grosse Musik). He claims: ‘The history of music for the last two-hundred years has essentially been critical of those very moments which, in complementarity to it, claim full validity for light music.’3 Christopher Dennis also comments how ‘great music’ can be drained of its greatness through sampling and its repetition. ‘The frequency or recording of a given work depends more conspicuously on its habituation to the mass audience than on its novelty, or degree of merit: if this is doubted, compare the frequency of appearance of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven’s Fifth to that of Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano.’4 We are back to the way that endless iterations rob a work of its aura, rendering it invisible or inaudible. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is another cardinal case. Once a radical piece of composition in conception and musicianship, thanks to torturous over-repetition over decades, it is a work that is more like, to use today’s terminology, a meme. It is all decoration, plucked from history and placed in the desert of dross. Light music is by nature drained of antagonism, homogenized and endemic of the homogenizing organization of the culture industry. While there have always been ditties in the form of casual, folk and vernacular music, the culture industry has shaped light music into something with its own formal autonomy, with its own momentum in the economy of taste and commodity. Here a passage from Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry essay needs to be quoted at length: Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its obtrusive naïvetes and improving the type of commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and became more refined and elevated – until it ended up as a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within. ‘Light’ art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised

 Light Music and Lazy Listening 67 itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts.5

The danger of light music, light art, is that it captures its vernacular Volkisch dimension and subverts it into virtue. This had dire consequences with Nazism, but it is a precept that remains tenacious to this day, such as when Jess Koons labels his works ‘generous’ because they are so aesthetically overdetermined and make minimal demands on the viewer. In addition to light music and jazz, the other term that Adorno uses is Schlager, literally ‘hit’ as in ‘hit song’. But to the German ear, the semantic transposition is more idiosyncratic than straightforward. Schlager not only means ‘hit’ but ‘something that hits’, ‘hitter’ or ‘bat’. It is both singular and plural. Schläge is an older word for sledgehammer.6 This makes the cognate forms such as Schlagersänger, ‘crooner’, even more amusing as it conflates comfort with violence. The monosyllabic English ‘hit’ is far more innocuous. In Adorno’s hands, the word is allowed its full heavy-handedness, given that he prefers not to use Schlagermusik ‘hit music’ but the more ambiguous shorter version, which is why we’ll use it too. Schlager was a relatively new word when Adorno used it, which would eventually adapt to refer also to other products of popular culture, including best-sellers and their authors. Schlager has something of the same straw-man quality as jazz (discussed in the next chapter) in Adorno’s lexicon, for what is wrong with popular music and culture. Unlike Kunstmusik which emanates from formal, subjective and indeed philosophical principles, Schlager, in their containment, is not strictly music but the standardization of the technologized culture dressed in a serviceable, duplicable and pleasingly comprehensible, digestible form. ‘Advanced industrial countries are defined by standardization: their prototype is the Schlager.’7 The Schlager is confined to strictly confined characteristics, ‘relentlessly strict schemas’ to which their ‘composers’ need to comply. ‘The authors of the handbook do not hesitate to grant popular music, the Schlagern, the status of “custom built”’ (the latter term in English).8 Within these abbreviated and heavily controlled formats, the songs tell of human relationships in equally attenuated and therefore corrupted language. The simplistic reduction ad absurdum of communication is mirrored in the musical structure itself. ‘Complications remain without consequence; the Schlager returns back to a few basic perceptual categories that are dizzyingly familiar, nothing really new is allowed to subvert it, only calculated effects that salt up the sameness but without violating it, in conformity

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back to the basic schemata.’9 Schlager also breed a new kind of hysterical spectatorship which is akin to sports.10 The new form of listening and attending has profound consequences. For Schlager are both symptom and cause of a regression of listening which is uncritical and impatient, again sadly resembling the response-mechanisms of children. We have already touched on poor attention spans in the previous chapter, but it is worth revisiting this in his essay devoted to it, in which the role of infantilization is writ large. Adorno has a number concerns for the packaged and programmatic nature of popular music, including that it forsakes the necessary autonomy of art through obeisance to rules that are at the service of industry. But the sheer quantity of energy and attention devoted to delivering amusement prompts one to ask what this amusement consists in, if not achieving a semi-vegetative state. Similarly, one is apt to ask with whom ‘the music of conversation converses’.11 The position that the new democratic music, the Schlager, communicates to a broad audience is unquestioned, accepted out of hand, which, argues Adorno, shields the fact that communication is bankrupt and reciprocally so is the capacity to listen, let alone listen critically. In an uncritical aesthetic landscape in which all forms of degraded aesthetic responses are able to run amok, sentimentality is allowed full sway. As an alibi, Adorno marks back to Plato for whom music be proscribed except that which avoids the trivial and incidental, and which imitates to ‘the voice and expression of people’. The Platonic state, Adorno reminds us, is not a utopia set out by a philosophical agenda, rather it ‘disciplines its citizens for the sake of their existence, and the existential will to be found in music’.12 Musical, that is, aesthetic, phenomena were ascribed value according to their perceived strengths or weaknesses, which also entailed the ability to resist deceit and superstition. The happiness in music is not to be confused with foreshadowing happiness between people, as so often happens. The cult of gratification is programmed into listeners who instinctively favour instantaneity and a ‘colourful façade’, blocking them from thinking according to larger frameworks or questioning structure and intention. ‘The isolated moments of seduction (Reizmomente) prove incompatible with an artwork’s immanent make-up.’ The programming of aesthetic response is against some of the most desirable – that is, authentic – qualities of art, which is to register the inherent dissonance of experience and expression, thereby to signal an inner urgency. In a later summation of ‘authentic music’, anathema to Schlager, Adorno offers what stands in many ways as Adorno’s theory of art in miniature: Authentic music, as for any authentic art, is also the cryptogram of the irreconcilable opposition between the fate of the individual and human destiny, and the representation of the ever-questionable connection of antagonistic individual interests to the collective, and finally the hope of real reconciliation.13

The culture industry’s great atrocity to art is to overturn the fact that its meliorist message, its offer of better things, is expressed in uncomfortable and striated form. Light music is but a lie.14 With this in mind, Adorno takes exception to the emphasis on pleasure as it rolled out by the mass aesthetic. This pleasure, however, is experienced

 Light Music and Lazy Listening 69 almost always collectively, physically or symbolically (and now virtually, with numbers of likes and hits). In the face of the culture industry, the individual has largely become symbolic as ‘the particular signature of the new musical situation’ is to ‘liquidate’ the individual.15 Even when it comes to higher music, in radio and in the concert repertoire, the selection is strategically slim, bringing classical music down to ‘standard works’. Within these, certain motifs are fetishized, a process that generates a false and forced equivalence between them: Adorno cites the beginning of Beethoven’s seventh symphony and the horn melody from the slow movement out of Tchaikovsky’s seventh. These ‘incidents’ derived from greater musical texts amount to the equivalent of the composer’s greatest hits. Ultimately these deracinated musical elements are chosen because of their catchiness and their ability to be transposed into myriad other formats. In today’s language, music is made ‘bite-sized’. The historical and structural dislocation of music are symptoms that it is pressed into the service of pleasure, hollow, but pleasurable all the same. It is because of this hollowness that anything can come before it or after it – we are entirely inured these days to drive-time classical music which are a kind of hit-parade of charm unmoored from their contexts.16 Adorno returns to one of his preoccupations about sound recording, that its relative perfection in comparison to live performance removes a human element, as does the disembodiment that occurs with the singer of the player. The lived element is made two-dimensional. With singular perspicacity, Adorno states that where the material element returns can be seen in the obsession with precious instruments, especially ‘the cult of the master-violins’. We are made aware of the presence of a Stradivarius or an Amati, despite that only experienced listeners can tell the difference, and in such cases the music is but a prop for the fetishized instrument, which is a platform for technical pyrotechnics.17 In other words, the attention is that of an artefact being played and that of the performance of virtuosic playing – music is reduced to a cipher for these components to discharge themselves. ‘An active experience of music does not consist in clicking or fiddling but in the imagination proper, a form of listening that allows the works, to which it passively surrenders, to be thus activated by devotion.’18 There are occasional moments of mysticism in Adorno’s writing, but it also gives us a key to the elements that diminish the numinous experience of art, namely what offers the world up as if eminently comprehensible. Easy use, easy understanding and the like are blindly accepted as benignly democratic. What the popularization of music – with its simplifications, abridgments and systematizations – has precipitated, to Adorno’s eyes, is a condition that, when looked at from a certain angle, is comedic. To be hypnotized by the skilled playing of an instrument without much regard for the music itself is another example of this, in which the audience is reduced to an infantile state of absorptive wonder. When it comes to the earnestness of the industry in its products in proportion to what is actually delivered upon, Adorno is less than sparing: ‘The comical nature of music in its present state is based on the presumptive of reasoning that something so completely useless has been carried out with all the signs of the most concerted labour.’19 Yet content in music and art is critical, content is ‘how society appears in music’.20 There is a moral structure and stupid music makes fools of us all. The comedic character

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stems in part from being derived from rites that have been lost. Thus music suffers from multiple rupturings, from history and in its disembodiment through technology, whose alienating power is mirrored in its unrootedness, which also disingenuously absolves it of social responsibility. ‘Regressive listening’ is one of the symptoms of the pressures exerted by the call of freedom, that is, a notion of freedom freed of the need for challenge, excellence or effort. One of its many dangers is to render Kunstmusik, and by extension any difficult art, unhearable because unreachable, and to quarantine it as an historical relic, and worse – an attitude that Adorno dangerously skirts – to relegate it nostalgically to a time when more people listened better to music that was better made. The better past is a flipside of the better time to come, both of them a lyric paradigm based on hope, faith or a dream, depending on the point of view. For Adorno, the individualism in art is driven by and towards a collective aim. His horror is that the individual has become celebrity and the idea of collectivity is consensual torpor. Adorno’s miserabilism informs the seemingly unforgiving attitude he has to the delivery, tenor and content, or absent content, of contemporary music and art. Against the backdrop of the horrors of the Second World War, he regards with both contempt and anxiety the false goodwill and the culture industry’s relentless devolution to an evergreen ‘happy ending’. (‘ein Happy Ending’ is used both blithely and sometimes ironically in the German.) Towards the end of an essay on his beloved Viennese school of composers, Adorno makes one of his mandarin statements that calls for acute attention: ‘As much as art has and must have a guilty conscience, unless it wants to make itself stupid, it would be wrong for it to be abolished in a world in what reigns are what otherwise need to be art’s correctives: in the contradiction between what is and what is true, between the establishment of life and of humanity.’21 The inner agonism in art is that it delivers, in an aesthetically resolved form, an existential schism, a wound. Popular culture, by glossing over this schism, makes it all the more evident and in art the more exigent.

9

Jazz and ‘jazz’

Jazz features prominently in the derogatory comments about the culture industry. While we have already signalled at several points Adorno’s dislike of jazz, his position on it is more complicated than mere blanket dismissal, as he does devote considerable attention to it. It is through considering his thoughts on jazz that we can begin to see some cracks in what he would have wanted to have been a tight definition on what good art is. One curious aspect of Adorno’s ostensibly undying antipathy to jazz is the regularity with which he returns to it and to related themes. In addition to the jibes in the essay with Horkheimer, the first dedicated essay ‘On Jazz’ appeared in 1936 and ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’ in 1953. Jazz was high in Adorno’s mind because its claims to being a serious music genre posed a serious threat to the models of what constituted good music within his own philosophy. His overriding concern is that jazz is musical fool’s gold. The promesse de bonheur of art, the taste of the greater thing to come in art, is offered up in a trumped-up and debased form, typical to the way the culture industry brings its audience into the ambit of falsehood for the sake of an endless cycle of consumption. Adorno emphasizes jazz’s simplicity, the riffs and embellishments are mere distractions from the purported fact that ‘its aesthetic articulation is sparing and can be understood at a glance’.1 Elsewhere Adorno quips that the ‘seemingly risky dissonance of some jazz lines are but utter blemishes that are layered over language that is rigidly traditional’.2 In other words, don’t be fooled at any level, formally or morally: to view jazz as an advancement of music that speaks to energy and goodwill is to succumb ‘to the latest form of Romanticism which, because of its anxiety of the fatal characteristics of capitalism, seeks a despairing way out, in order to affirm the feared thing itself as a sort of ghastly allegory of the coming liberation’.3 Jazz does not portend anything, it is all a false prophecy indicative of the desperation and spiritual impoverishment of capitalism. So far we are ventriloquizing Adorno, to savour the aspects that still hold true, that are not confined to ‘jazz’. ‘Jazz’ and jazz – seen overall, in Adorno’s writings, jazz has a dual status. There is jazz per se and then there is ‘jazz’ which is used metonymically as what is lazy and undesirable in popular culture, hence ‘jazz’ and jazz. Lyotard would later, but more knowingly, make a similar distinction in his deployment of the term ‘jews’ as distinct from Jews, where the ‘jew’ is traditionally ‘the object of dismissal with which Jews, in particular, are afflicted in reality’.4 Similarly, as Theodore Gracyk affirms in his essay on Adorno, jazz and popular music, ‘Adorno critiques jazz on two distinct levels, one

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local (criticism generated by specific cases) and one global (criticisms arising from his general aesthetic theory). Both are required to support his contention that jazz is always “bad”, even if some of it is “good bad music”’.5 Jazz is also used as a hypothetical, or metaphorical, straw-man when the culture industry is brought mercilessly into account. In addition to the remarks we have already quoted, around the middle of the culture industry essay Adorno and Horkheimer point to ‘A jazz musician who plays a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and smiles superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat’.6 This echoed in the ‘Jazz’ essay of roughly the same time: jazz syncopation is not what may be found in Beethoven as ‘the expression of an accumulated subjective force which is directed against authority until it had produced a new law out of itself ’, rather there is no purpose, and ‘it leads nowhere’. Then comes an astonishing comparison to premature ejaculation: jazz beat ‘is plainly a “coming-too-early”, just as anxiety leads to premature orgasm, just as impotence expresses itself through premature and incomplete orgasm’.7 Jazz is thus the adulteration of the music at an institutional, mass scale and the jazz musician is the equivalent of an artistic rapist. On a related level, we may reflect on the extent to which we today have become inured to the potted adaptations of familiar classical riffs, or where on YouTube, music is accompanied with saccharinely absurd images fading in and out. (Slavoj Žižek on several occasions comments on how the second, adagio movement from Mozart’s 21st piano concerto is popularly known better as the theme for the cheesy film, Elvira Madigan from 1967.) Adorno’s intense dislike of jazz is perhaps the most frequently used thumbnail response to his blinkered attitude to the trends of his time, to the changes in music and the changes to the social fabric in general. Just as people like to cite the Proust’s madeleine without reading him, Adorno, too, is conveniently dispatched due to his jaundiced view of a musical form that is now a serious subject option in a major musical conservatory. Yet the glibness with which Adorno’s attitude to the music of his time and, by extension, to art in general, can be discounted seldom takes into account the roots and meaning of jazz in the opening decades of the twentieth century. While origins of the word are contested, it was related to musical ‘pep’ or liveliness in general. In the words of Sarah Churchwell, ‘[j]azz soon became so semantically mercurial that by 1915 it denoted volatility per se; before long it stood for misrule. Unpredictability was jazz, as they would have put it: when Einstein overthrew Newtonian laws of gravity, he was said to have discovered the “jazz-molecule.”’8 Jazz was quickly made synonymous with the ‘Roaring Twenties’ which, before denoting the 1920s, referred to men in their twenties sowing their wild oats before entering into respectabilities. It was the state of agitation that characterized the cathartic spirit of the years after the devastations of the First World War. Churchwell describes how jazz was likened to the influenza epidemic of 1919, a virus of the cultural kind that gripped the youth of the day, driving them to state of uncontrolled frenzy. ‘Conservative white America found jazz deeply threatening, not least for its racially coded implications of wildness, violence, and permissiveness: “jungle jazz,” they called it.’9 The racial associations with African-Americans made jazz an easy target for discredit, and while Adorno does not subscribe to that level of vilification, he must also take responsibility for maintaining the links of jazz to primitive states of consciousness. It could be called de facto racism,

 Jazz and ‘Jazz’ 73 but racism is racism. Yet to place all the hysteria about jazz at the foot of Adorno’s writings is just as misplaced. Just as with his contemporaries, his misgivings were not limited to the music as such but to a more encompassing unruliness: unbridled instincts that were threatening to dismantle hundreds of years of (European) artistic endeavour, ravaging culture as the First World War had ravaged the social fabric. Although they are already pregnant in his earlier writings on music, Adorno began in earnest sketching out his thoughts on jazz around 1936, around the same time when those on the culture industry were taking shape. To be sure, and as with the earlier passages, jazz and the culture industry are close bedfellows in Adorno’s aesthetic universe and are often used interchangeably – one denotes the other – however the significance of jazz per se lies in the scrutiny paid to a particular object as opposed to a generality. Jazz is a means by which a particularity of the culture industry in all its incoherence, magnitude and mendacity can be placed under a microscope. For even if jazz is a cultural condition symptomatic of capitalism, it is also a form developed out of light and folk music, which has reached systemic proportions in all its facets: form, delivery and reception. In his own reflections in a letter to Benjamin, Adorno’s comments are highly enlightening, especially when he states that ‘the idea of the clown is its focal point’,10 something that he, alas, does not go on to qualify. He suggests there is a fealty of its content with Benjamin’s own writings, by which we can be led to believe the artwork essay, although the essay on jazz is far more modest and arguably less nuanced. Adorno announces that the essay ‘arrives at a complete verdict on jazz, in particular by revealing its “progressive” elements (semblance of montage, collective work, primacy of reproduction over production) as façades of something that is in truth quite reactionary’.11 He claims to have succeeded in decoding jazz and defining its social function.12 In the first essay Adorno is openly suspicious of the way the upper classes avail themselves of jazz as a means of ceremonial access to something authentic. ‘But the fact that jazz, because of its rigidity as well as its appeal to individualizing taste, is supposedly “not kitsch” allows those to consider themselves disciplined to come away from it with a good conscience.’13 The confidence in social diagnosis belies a blindness in the Frankfurt School methodology, that of the intellectual performing to the higher order as guardian of the truth, but it does allow for a level of enthusiasm and trenchancy without which many penetrating insights could not occur. Adorno’s essays on jazz are both intentionally provocative and divisive, and many commentators remain torn by some of its better offerings against less sustainable prejudices. One of these is that jazz has not developed since its inception in the years of the twentieth century, to the extent that jazz ‘in its essence remained static’.14 This implies that jazz is less of an art form and more an ideological tool that threatens to overturn culture that it sees as elitist and out of date, for ‘there is a tendency, especially among those devotees who have adopted it as a Weltanschauung, to regard it falsely as a break-through of original, untrammelled nature, as a triumph over the musty museum-culture’. The appeal of art and ideology to a state of nature is a dangerous sign that lurks constantly in Adorno’s writings on art, music and aesthetics. In his hands nature is mostly to be treated with utmost suspicion as it masks the constructed and historical character of something, granting itself an authority that it does not have, since it is impossible or invalid to legislate against or judge ‘nature’. One can alter it

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but not impugn it, and for that any cultural agent that assumes the role of nature can become a dangerous tool – in light of Adorno’s time, Nazi nationalism is an obvious example. In jazz, Adorno is contemptuous of what he believes to be its meretricious spontaneity, and its primitivism, and with this we need only see the prejudice assigned to primitive art in the twentieth century and well in the twenty-first century, with the valorization of the cultural productions of Indigenous and first Nations’ People, which is greeted with guilt, sentimentality and the conviction that it is more authentic and more worthy of our attention than its more ‘civilized’ counterparts. Just as the art market of today continues to be hot for works from Indigenous artists, Adorno expresses how the upper classes turn to jazz to imbue their own social authority with ‘something original and primitive, into “nature”’.15 It is a popular art form that is pressed into service of the dominant classes to couch for their own precarious legitimacy. Thus while Adorno may be seen to fall prey to the common prejudices of his time – with its sundry noxious biases about African culture which includes the homogenization of a whole content into a set of pat generalizations – he is rightfully sceptical of the equally prejudicial notions that bind ‘primitive’ to natural and thence to truth. For Adorno equations such as these are a sham, easy ideologies that mask much larger and corrosive misconceptions. Art that is more certifiably natural is, as the powerful prejudice dictates, also more likely to save us. Adorno argues that the African roots of jazz have been mitigated and ossified, reduced to empty metaphors: However little doubt there can be regarding the African elements of jazz, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology, the person who chafes against the father-figure while secretly admiring him, who seeks to emulate him and in turn derives enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests.16

This is a slightly more tempered version of what Adorno contends in the first essay in which he takes exception to the ‘archaic forces’ of primitivism that jazz is meant to express. He states that jazz’s link to ‘genuine black music is highly questionable’, and although jazz is ‘frequently performed by blacks and that the public clamours for “black jazz” as a sort of brand-name doesn’t say much about it, even if folkloric research should confirm the African origin of many practices’.17 Jazz’s practices, motifs and styles are too ‘abstracted’ to adduce in any accurate way its African roots. When taken too swiftly and without pause to reflect, such comments can today be rather inflammatory. African is different from African-American, and the development styles that disenfranchised and Indigenous peoples have sought identification despite origin is now an established sociological fact – country music and Australian Aboriginal musical culture is one such case. One of the things that Adorno suggests is that the origins of the music are denatured through its filtration by a set of stock forms, a musical template without which everything would fall apart. The musician must bow to this and seems to love this authority. If we remove the racial element, we

 Jazz and ‘Jazz’ 75 may think of the formulaic methods of commercial music where expressions of love are transmitted via a melody that was driven by a computer algorithm based on what was previously popular. The formulaic system of jazz Adorno associates with fashion, whose semblance of change masks that change itself, is the main principle as opposed to what and why something changes. ‘For almost fifty years the productions of jazz have remained as ephemeral as seasonal styles. Jazz is a form of manneristic interpretation. As with fashions what is important is show, not the thing in itself; instead of jazz itself being composed, “light” music, the most dismal products of the popular-song industry, is dressed up.’18 Where this is true is when Jazz Standards – what is familiar and habitual within the repertoire – are subjected to interpretations that are meant to make them ‘smooth’ and able to be played at dinner parties and social functions. Adorno also dreaded the way that the ‘classics’ would be subjected to the same adulteration. Referring to what we today call ‘Standards’, Adorno bemoans what he sees as jazz’s limited range, which is more perhaps the limitations made available to the public over the radio, in terms of what is acceptable and consumable: ‘The range of the permissible in jazz is as narrowly circumscribed as in any particular cut of clothes.’19 Another factor is that jazz, unlike classical music, is largely confined to a single beat. ‘The ban on changing the basic beat during the course of the music is itself sufficient to constrict composition to the point where what it demands is not aesthetic awareness of style but rather psychological regression.’ That so many of the great jazz musicians were also classically trained is lost on Adorno whose aesthetic theories are often tantalizingly abstracted from the particulars. Nonetheless, it bears mention that artists such as Charles Mingus was first bassist at the New York Philharmonic; Miles Davis was trained at Julliard; Oscar Peterson was a student of classical piano under Paul de Marky who himself studied under a former student of Franz Liszt. Looking at a generation of musicians after Adorno’s time, a major figure such as Keith Jarrett has Shostakovich and Bach in addition to his jazz repertoire. All in all, jazz bears all the hallmarks of the impoverishing effects of the culture industry. Whose forms appeal to a lower consciousness and encourage a false consciousness. And what jazz lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in bombast, where musicians and music compete with each other (‘competition on the culture market’) in the efficiency and display of effects. ‘These techniques are then sorted out and kaleidoscopically mixed into ever-new combinations without there taking place even the slightest interaction between the total scheme and the no less schematic details.’20 In a climate in which large variations from formulas are discouraged, Adorno concedes that the ‘new’ can find itself a place. It is this ‘new’ that sneaks in as a produce to unconscious forces. Occasionally ‘the element of the “new” brings the greatest success, as in the case of the first “six-eight” pieces, the Valencia or the first rumba’.21 By and large anything original is cheapened, so that ‘a successful jazz hit must unite an individual, characteristic element with utter banality on every other level’.22 What we will have to address later in the book is that today different forms of music have splintered out to a dizzying degree, where there are a multitude of names and epithets (hip-hop, acid jazz, R&B, etc.) that are scarcely adequate. This is foretold in the unquestioned contradiction of ‘Indie’, implying ‘independent’, being nonetheless a

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recognized subgroup of ‘pop’. We must remember that when Adorno was formulating these theories, jazz was part of the ‘hit parade’ and the bifurcation between popular and classical music blissfully clearer in comparison to now. Adorno still perspicuously marked out popular music, jazz, for the different structure of support from that of historical patronage. Music is placed for nothing more than consumption, based on regulated rules and structures in which the interests of music proper are secondary. The investments made in ‘name bands’, whose fame is assured by scientifically engineered propaganda; and even more important, the money used to promote musical bestseller programmes like ‘The Hit Parade’ by the firms that buy radio advertising time, make every divergence a risk. Standardization, moreover, means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want only that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer’s inalienable right, is denied. And even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be doomed from the start by virtue of economic concentration.23

One of the many merits of a passage like this is that it can be applied to any sector of the contemporary culture, unconfined to the culture industry. One immediate example is that of art. Blockbuster shows are of name artists that will bring in audiences – Monet, Picasso, the usual suspects – and to whom corporate sponsors will want to be affiliated, it often being the case that the ones with a questionable environmental care record will cynically graft themselves to artists who paint landscapes and evoke a misty yesteryear. In contemporary art, galleries with the requisite capital place large advertisements in magazines and websites that in turn prioritize reviews and coverage for their artists. Galleries and collectors that donate to state museums will have artists they collect or represent given favour by collectors for group exhibitions. Commercial galleries will decide whom they represent based not only on the amount of interest the artist has received both commercially and curatorially but also on the need to reflect diversity among their ‘stable’. ‘Stable’ is the usual jargon for artists under a commercial gallery’s roof and in light of this, ironically could not be more apt: a racially appropriate stable must have a dapple grey, a roan, a chestnut, a palomino and so on. Such measures are universalizing. In the case of contemporary art, they give a false picture of a racially tolerant global economy at work. Adorno much earlier observed the way the culture industry militates against traces of history, which he deems so important to art’s integrity and its effective reception. He maintains that jazz is an active example of this: it is ahistorical in that there is no discernible progression, which makes it a standard-bearer for technologized society and the culture industry that works sedulously to hide all its most corrosive effects. ‘The image of the technical world possesses an ahistorical aspect that enables it to serve as a mythical mirage of eternity.’24 This does not mean that history is blanked out, on the contrary, it runs amok; historical information abounds to the point of saturation. The wheels of technology are ‘driven forward by its inner tensions, which persists in its irrationality and which

 Jazz and ‘Jazz’ 77 grants men far more history than they wish’.25 The culture industry confers on itself the ubiquity of timelessness. This comment is presaged earlier when he proposes: ‘Fashion enthrones itself as something lasting and thus sacrifices the dignity of fashion, its transience.’26 The syncopation of jazz is a form of hypnotic withdrawal that is used for ‘the musical dictatorship over the masses’,27 and is an example of the ways in which techniques are pressed into service for purposes of subjugation and control. ‘Mechanisms which in reality are part and parcel of the entire present-day ideology, of the culture industry, are left easily visible in jazz because in the absence of technical knowledge they cannot be as easily identified as, for example, in films.’28 Adorno derides the way that jazz is offered up as an art for the masses, where people are ‘told that jazz is “consumer art”’, meaning that it is its own virtue from the start. This gives us another angle to consider the conundrum of aesthetic difficulty that we looked at earlier, in that ‘difficulty’ does not succumb to the rhetoric of seduction, particularly in the unquestioning dissemination of terms such as ‘democratic’, inclusive’ and ‘accessible.’ In Adorno’s as to our day, these words are generally applied to aesthetic modalities whose deviations are cosmetic and which follow a relatively fixed formula. If we were to articulate this through an Adornian filter we could say that the noble notion of Kant’s sensus communis pregnant in the sublime has been relegated to the poor caricature of ‘accessibility’ which is another way of saying it appeals to denominators of habit and quantitative use. What is to be distrusted in jazz’s rhetorical universalism is its appeal to democracy. As an early form of pop music, it is ipso facto for the people and any people. Yet ‘its attitude of immediacy, which can be defined in terms of a rigid set of tricks, is deceptive when it comes down to class differences’. For in its universal appeal occludes the differences that fester beneath. One can be a complete racist but still listen to R&B. Hence ‘[t]he more democratic jazz is, the worse it becomes’.29 Its apparent overcoming of class and racial differences is the real scourge because then people are given a medium of entertainment for which they need not feel any accountability to the material and frequently unwelcome details of history. The obverse, what is not accessible, is immediately condemned as ‘elitist’, a term that Adorno has foisted in him regularly and which we will revisit. In disparaging what he sees as the specious deviations of jazz, Adorno argues that they ‘are just as standardized as the standards and in effect revoke themselves the instant they appear. Jazz, like everything else in the culture industry, gratifies desires only to frustrate them at the same time’.30 And like many statements like these, they tend to work better as general statements and perhaps less limited to jazz. Frustratingly, Adorno is prey to a regular proclivity not to back his criticisms with concrete examples, let along comparative analysis of them. In the first essay, however, Adorno offers a withering analogy of jazz with selected members of the artistic avant-garde. With jazz, ‘the only melodies that find their way into the public memory are the most easily understood and the most rhythmically trivial’. This he compares with the ‘pseudo-modern painters like van Dongen, Foujita, Marie Laurencin, or, even better, of cubist advertisements’.31 If not familiar with Laurencin, we encourage the reader to do search to see what Adorno means, as she is an artist from whom the main response is as to why she is still cited and reproduced.

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In the final section of ‘Perennial Fashion’, section 3, Adorno contemplates the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, a division that he believes is already ‘questionable’ yet lamentably ‘neither critically reflected nor even noticed any more’. What follows is Adorno’s fulmination over the partitioning of art. It is critical to the argument of this book and our defence of Gaga aesthetics, and it deserves to be quoted at: And now that certain culturally defeatist intellectuals have pitted the latter against the former, the philistine champions of the culture industry can even take pride in the conviction that they are marching in the vanguard of the Zeitgeist. The organization of culture into ‘levels’ such as first, second and third programmes, patterned after low, middle and highbrow, is reprehensible. But it cannot be overcome simply by the lowbrow sects declaring themselves to be highbrow. The legitimate discontent with culture provides a pretext but not the slightest justification for the glorification of a highly rationalized section of mass production, one which debases and betrays culture without at all transcending it, as the dawn of a new world-sensibility, or for confusing it with cubism, Eliot’s poetry and Joyce’s prose. Regression is not origin, but origin is the ideology of regression. Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with ‘dirty notes’ for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows.32

One does however wonder, as reprehensible as the generic hierarchy imposed on art may be, to what extent it is tacitly followed by Adorno if not only to make sense of what is the source of this reprehensibility itself. Rationalized mass production is a source of what ‘betrays’ culture. It is what pollutes ‘enlightenment’ and turns its highest aims into a vaudeville act, in which hope and goodwill are handed around like candy. (Where he is correct is the tawdry addition of modernist motifs to salt-up what is at base the same old product.) The binary of high and low is no less evident in his corrective that the products of the culture industry can vie with Eliot and Joyce. It is good that Adorno states this so explicitly here, and it is an accusation that needs to be revised in some ways, although not entirely, as we will see. What one suspects is that his aversion to the classes of art is that it mirrors the Marxist class divisions of proletariat, bourgeoisie and upper classes in an insidious way, as the low in art is seen to be emancipated like the proletariat, yet it is precisely in this baseless presumption that the ‘masses’ are prevented from gaining access to the ‘real’ freedoms. Thus he concludes in ‘Perennial Fashion’ that ‘instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture’.33 Even if jazz syncopation is like inadequate orgasm, to use Adorno’s metaphor, its culture abounds in countless reference to sex. Adorno points to the overt connotations of much of jazz: ‘the more absurd the nonsense, the more immediate its sex appeal’. (Gangsta rap is an apotheosis of the sexual strain.) The gyrating movements of jazz players leave little to the imagination, and the ‘new dances have demystified the erotic magic of the old ones, they have also . . . replaced it with the drastic innuendo of sexual

 Jazz and ‘Jazz’ 79 consummation’.34 Invoking psychoanalytic terminology, Adorno suggests that sex is the ‘manifest dream content of jazz’, but instead of being latent it is ‘intensified’. It is a sex that is ‘crude and easily transparent’.35 In all but mention to it, Adorno maintains that jazz is a form of musical pornography, where everything is enlisted for the quick gratification and unambiguous satisfaction. It rewards uniformity and acquiescence. ‘The “sex appeal” of jazz is command: obey, and then you will be allowed to take part’.36 Under the thin layer of musical celebration, the audience is degraded to an animality that it is led to believe is natural and authentic. The biggest worry, for Adorno, is that jazz reaches ‘classical status’, which it now has. It is looked on with a historicizing attitude by followers of rap and hip-hop, and something of a continuing relic of bourgeois modernism. Fumi Okiji has sought to recuperate Adorno and jazz, despite, or perhaps because of, the antagonism that Adorno has about it. Contending, contra Adorno, that jazz is fundamentally Black music, his main point of argument lies in the understanding of individualism. Adorno attacks jazz for its open individualism, where individualism is an affront to the collective good. However, he sees the interest and practice of jazz as participating in the ‘genuine communion’ of art and social theory as espoused by Adorno. It is yet another example of resistance to ‘the dehumanizing infrastructure of capitalism and acute rationalization’, occupying ‘underground spaces that have been rejected or ignored by the social mainstream.’37 Okiji states that his study is spurred by this ‘interest in jazz as representative of this subterranean space, where alternative forms of subjectivity are able to flourish’.38 While he does give many arguments for this, it is at the expense of a fairly cursory use of Adorno’s thought, although his case that there are pockets of redemption within the morass of the culture industry, and the importance of the need to locate and theorize them, chimes with our own thesis. What makes Adorno’s remarks and writings on jazz more than just diatribes is the extent of attention devoted to it, due to his concerns with the manifestations of popular culture. For despite the impression that an unsympathetic reading of his denunciations of culture industry and jazz may glean, Adorno does not see these as infections on some ideal core of beauty and ethics. Rather, the noxious aspects of culture industry and its artistic by-products (jazz) are an indication of the fabric of society. In his famous letter to Benjamin he states that ‘Les extremes se touchent’ [Gide], just as they touch you – but only if the dialectic of the lowest has the same value as the highest, rather than the latter simply decaying. Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change’.39 Andreas Huyssen affirms that following Benjamin, Adorno understood that ‘ever since their simultaneous emergence in the mid-19th century, modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas-de-deux’.40 The extent of this ‘touching’, to use Adorno’s word, and the premonition that there is no absolute retreat from adulterated culture is a bracing idea in that it also allows for the view to be up-ended, inverted. That is, what if the ‘high’ is now to be found, selectively, in the ‘low’ itself. We should be looking in the right places. Holding a similar view, Gracyk shows how Adorno’s critique of jazz is jaundiced by a misappropriated approach, in which he subjects it to criteria based on his own training in the Western classical tradition. His dismissal of African musical traditions and its centrality to jazz is a palpable case of his fixed criteria.41 Adorno is also not open to

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what at the end of his life would emerge as media theory, which stresses the reciprocal relation between media and reception (McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’), where the manner in which information is disseminated effects cognition. Benjamin had begun to bring such understandings to light, as did Adorno himself, but he applies such frameworks selectively, if not idiosyncratically. Gracyk states: ‘Complaining that a mass audience hears everything as “radio music,” Adorno acknowledges the degree to which listening conventions are socially and historically conditioned.’42 He contends: ‘Good jazz requires both autonomy and cooperative production from its players, a combination that Adorno does not admit as possible within the culture industry.’ Gracyk goes so far as to assert that Adorno’s entrenchment in the German-Viennese musical doxa brings a short-sightedness that renders him ‘unqualified to criticize it’. Further, to see jazz as a musical arm of the culture industry, as one of its many tentacles, is to deprive a more just and appropriate view of it.43 Despite such legitimate reservations, and the myopia that Adorno evinces, the reason that Adorno continues to be relevant is that his most trenchant and merciless views hold true for large sectors of mass culture. The uniformity that he sees as at the essence of jazz – its stasis, its dogged syncopation – is related to his most compelling argument about the culture industry, namely that it breeds conformism. It is best then to taking his writings on jazz as writings on ‘jazz’, which is to try to unpack the mechanisms by which a culture of manipulation expresses itself, moulds its market and indoctrinates its audiences. Before we celebrate aspects of popular culture we must identify the paradoxical nature of doing so: of locating potentially liberating (we are conscious that some words reek of anachronism) aspects within a system that uses signs of liberation speciously, to profit manipulation and suppression.

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Ugliness and kitsch

Towards the end of his Musiksoziologie Adorno announces: ‘Current analysis of what is called kitsch, the musical equivalent of mendacity is still to come, no less than what constitutes the truth-character of authentic work.’1 In many ways, it is the task of his last and uncompleted work, Aesthetic Theory, to address what he then saw as yet receiving insufficient attention. However, as we survey aesthetics and criticism since the 1930s, it remains that both categories remain hotly contested, and along different terms, with different objectives, this book being yet another instance. Because kitsch is synonymous with the culture industry, it tends to eclipse the notion of the ugly, although they are closely related. Kitsch is a more modern concept related to cheap copies and to bad taste. But even if ugliness is a more universal concept, albeit subjective, it is also the case that bad taste is a form of ugliness seen in the dual sense of the not-beautiful and of false or fake beautiful – all tenuous categories, admittedly. Kitsch as a condition of aesthetic bad faith, a corruption of the morality that ‘true’ beauty is expected to portend. As such, a closer analysis of both is essential and furthermore given both the prominent role that kitsch has had in art since the 1980s and the role of the ugly in fashion in particular since roughly the same period. One reason why the ugly tends to be underplayed in Adorno’s aesthetics is in his effort to draw together Kant and Hegel, both of whom give greater primacy to beauty, laying the ground for the cult of das Naturschöne, the beauty of nature and natural beauty, that persisted into the nineteenth century. As is probably to be expected, interest in the ugly flourished with the Early Romantics, particularly in Friedrich Schlegel, and with other contemporaries such as Schiller. The most detailed study of the ugly is the detailed treatise from 1853, The Aesthetics of Ugliness (Ästhetik des Hässlichen), by Karl Rosenkranz, which Adorno acknowledges. As the Aesthetic Theory tries to unite classical aesthetics with the modernism, the ugly looms significantly, given that the historical avant-garde drew from all sources of life, in the effort to challenge what was traditionally beautiful and viable as art. Yet Adorno finds himself in something of an epistemic straightjacket in this encounter, since the classical aesthetics downplays the ugly as a threat to artistic autonomy, a value that Adorno holds dear. To wriggle out of this conundrum, he argues that the ugly can be a viable component in art and is no threat to its autonomy. Indeed, it is one of the key features by which the avant-garde since the late nineteenth century freed itself from the traditions established since the Renaissance. At the same time, Adorno does not allow full concession to the ugly, which is where his assessment with it and kitsch begin to overlap, for instance in his judgement of Art Nouveau (or Jugendstil). Taking his

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cue from Adolf Loos, whom he cites at several points, Adorno takes Art Nouveau as an incidence of the descent of bourgeois culture into its own kind of barbarism, a corrupted aesthetic symptomatic of a much deeper socio-ethical crisis. The most tenuous zone of all is the role and status of the ugly in the perception of the difficult and the dissonant, which are by nature not beautiful by convention, where the feeling of Heiterkeit, serenity, is surrendered to an expression of disquiet and turbulence, expressions which Adorno holds to be universally valid since the Holocaust. His lapidary statement in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, that ‘[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’,2 is followed more caustically in Negative Dialectics: ‘All culture after Auschwitz, together with the concerted (dringlichen) criticism of it, is rubbish.’3 Softening some of the hyperbolic force, we might still extrapolate that all art after the Holocaust is counterfeit, or, art that does not fulfil certain essential conditions is kitsch, where here kitsch falls under the category of moral ugliness. Before looking more closely at the ugly and kitsch, let us first digress towards the counterfeit, which holds a far more subtle, if not perplexing, place in art. After all, as Plato famously opined, all artists are copyists, counterfeiters of what are already only representations based on some deeper reality. Yet since at least the Renaissance, artists were trained through copying, and in their maturity, engaged in all manner of cryptic quotation and reference in their work. Derivation was used a medium for reinvention, but also dialogue, if only with the initiated few. By the middle of the nineteenth century, intertextuality was a way of life, from graphic caricature to literary pastiche. A famous one is the ‘Goncourt pastiche’ towards the end of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; writing at a time when to be a skilled pasticheur carried much esteem. This brings us back to the dichotomy in Adorno’s philosophy of music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. From the opening of The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss meditates on the nature of counterfeiting in art, quickly turning to André Gide’s Counterfeiters and shortly after to Adorno’s reading of the two composers, as encapsulating two basic positions within Kunstmusik. Krauss astutely observes that in setting up ‘this opposition, the issues are not just abstraction versus “naturalism” but what siding with the one or the other implies for the fate of the individual subject within technologized, and regimented, industrial culture’.4 Schoenberg avails himself of a controlled compositional logic, the twelve-tone system, which is ‘freed from the limits of prescribed musical convention or conceptions of harmonic “naturalness” and freed, thus, into abstraction’.5 This abstraction is its opacity that amounts to resistance to cliché and repetition of tired style. Krauss points out that the counterargument to this strategy in defence of Stravinsky is that with the combination of the composer’s will together with a programmatic approach of the twelve-tone row ‘exposes the very subject it is supposed to serve to his or her emptiness’.6 For Stravinsky’s part, in keeping with tonality, he is condemned to be under the weight of ‘the exhaustion of musical possibility’, where he must refer inexorably to the past, but always, by implication, as a counterfeiter.7 If pastiche becomes his medium, with its constant parody at the melodic and rhythmic level – of fairground music, jingles, ragtime, tango, waltz – as well as at the level of the instrument – the hand organ, the toy horn – this is his response,

 Ugliness and Kitsch 83 Adorno says, to late-nineteenth-century composers’ recourse to making music about music, as in Wagner’s Meistersingers or Strauss’s pastiches. Pastiche as an artistic practice thus expresses the subjective experience of the intolerable narrowing of the scope of invention due to the limitations inherent in an art’s organizing structure, in this case the system of tonality all that flows from it.8

Pastiche is the marker of Stravinsky’s ‘fraudulence – his fake modernism which is nothing but a betrayal of real modernist procedures’. Although he does not say it, but as many of his definitions of kitsch more than suggest, Stravinsky skirts the boundaries of kitsch. The bland mutation of his music is the result of its ethics of retreat and recapitulation. His music is sheer externality that takes history as an endless source of ‘style’, wherein style is used in its most pejorative sense as hieroglyph or cipher that is an echo of a lost unity. Stravinsky the composer is ‘the artist-composer as a kind of consumer browsing among compositional options’.9 Anyone schooled the history of art since the 1980s, with its catchcry of ‘appropriation’ and related phrases (that mean the same thing) of ‘appropriational strategies’ and the like, will shrug at this. And it is now something of its own historical relic. The critical outrage that appropriation prompted caused artists and defenders to turn to one of the strands of modernism as an alibi, namely where artists introduced material facets of everyday life into their work, such as with collage. Collage theoretically begins with Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1913), but actually enters earlier than that in incipient form through quotation and illusion, when Picasso and Braque lifted and truncated newsfont and various other quotational and pastiche-like devices. Conventional art history – which is influenced by pundits at the time – has the ‘heroic’, that is the authentic phase, as dead after 1914. How Picasso evolved Cubism after this point was considered a betrayal of what other artists by then had begun to defend as the purity of the form – more specifically Cubism can be seen as a technique or technology of representation. It was the erstwhile inventor (or co-inventor with Braque) and his divergence from the most credible approach to Cubism that caused an outcry among a group of artists for a rappel à l’ordre, a return to order. Already in 1918 Amedée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later Le Corbusier) crafted their main concepts of the direction of Cubism in their Après Cubisme, which was something of a manifesto piece for their own movement, Purism. As the heavily loaded epithet implied, the eschewal of decoration and decorative fragmentation came in favour of a more severe and disciplined approach to the language of forms, but one that also accounted for the beauty of the machine. To return to Picasso and Stravinsky, Picasso’s first painterly approach to collage – mimicking wallpaper and chintz cloth and the like – and a generally more sensuous aesthetic as opposed to ascetic sensibility, then from 1918 in turning to naturalism and classicism, amounted to a ‘fraudulence’ on par with Stravinsky. Far from the astonishing invention of the heroic Cubist phase, Picasso’s purported (as the views and justifications are somewhat fraught) stylistic retreat is art that, in Krauss’s words, becomes the representational content of art, whether by means of a sluggishly bloated nude imitating the look of an archaic sculpture or the sleekly fashionable

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Gaga Aesthetics Olga restaging a portrait by Ingres. ‘Art’ enters the work as an image rather than as what Adorno would call the ‘self-realization’ of a historical process, which could only be registered structurally.10

We cannot forget either that Picasso’s greatest rival (and friend), Matisse, had similarly ‘lapsed’ in the years after the First World War into conservative, quasi-Orientalizing odalisques. The emphasis on these about-faces is not to discredit Picasso (or Matisse), as this has already been done in parallel with his worshipers and lionizers. Rather, it is to offer a positive typology of understanding Picasso as ‘deploying what can be seen as the earliest visual system of freely circulating signs’. Picasso cannot simply be seen as having fallen prey to the counterfeit but rather as embodying ‘the interdependence of the two phenomena, as suggested by Adorno’s model in which Stravinsky’s recourse to parody is the dialectically necessary obverse of Schoenberg’s interiorized process’.11 This dynamic is also the peril of the fate of good art, Kunstmusik and the like: that it is defined and elevated by bad art, bad music and kitsch – and the bind of which Adorno was only too acutely aware. Artistic autonomy comes out of bourgeois culture, bourgeois culture heralds the beginning of mass culture, which cultivates kitsch and at the same time necessitates that the autonomy of art is jealously guarded. In addition to what has already been offered, Adorno theorizes: One of the moments of kitsch, which can be offered as a definition, could be that of the pretence of sham feeling and thereby their neutering, just as much as with the aesthetic phenomenon. Kitsch can be seen as the art that cannot or does not want to be taken seriously and yet however in its appearance pretends to aesthetic seriousness.12

Kitsch is much like a parasite to autonomous art, but equally art is prone to kitsch’s vices: ‘What once was art can become kitsch. Maybe this history of the fall is the history of correction, art’s true progress.’ Kitsch therefore becomes a dialectical module for history’s critical winnowing process, an aesthetic-historical dustbin for art that has become irrelevant and tired. Yet elsewhere Adorno warns that the definition of kitsch is far from limited to this, that is not the ‘mere waste product of art’ because ‘lurking within it are recurrent and emergent possibilities to find the value in art. While kitsch chimerically (koboldhaft) eludes definition, including the historical one, one of its most tenacious character plots is its neutering of all emotion not worn on its sleeve (und damit neutralisierung nicht forhandener Gefühle)’.13 Moreover, all works of art have the germ of kitsch within them, which is easy to see in the way in which the commodity market has done in its repetitive ‘sampling’ of master paintings, but it is also imperceptibly present in the origin of the work of art which is in distraction and childish play on behalf of both artist and viewer. As J. M. Berstein expresses it, with ‘Adorno this pre-artistic moment clings to art, hence explicating both the childish expectation that attaches to our anticipation of engaging with art works, and art’s exposure to the moment of silliness, fatuity, kitsch’.14 The difficulty in the concept is because it is akin to the inability to give art any neat definition. ‘Kitsch is an idiosyncratic concept, as bound to it as its impossibility of being defined.’15 Kitsch’s chimerical status is less agreeable than

 Ugliness and Kitsch 85 art, granted. Art has traditionally enshrined religious and existential mystery. Kitsch is by extension the false consciousness of art’s inexorable indirectness. Yet it is this nebulous status that courts distrust in kitsch, whose very looseness as a concept is grounds for discredit, suggesting that it is an ersatz term for everything that happens to be undesirable (and unfashionable) at any particular time. This is very much the thrust of Carrier and Pissarro’s dismissal of the term, which they emphatically label a ‘nonconcept’, devoting an entire chapter to their rebuttal: ‘Kitsch, a Nonconcept: A Genealogy of the Indesignatable’.16 Their qualification is one that is uncannily reminiscent of Adorno, if only from another direction, for they suggest that kitsch is a designation that is ‘convenient, and somewhat lazy’ for ‘art of the spectacle’, in other words, the by-products of the culture industry.17 They take variance in not only the generality of kitsch being all art that is not good but also the moral opprobrium associated with it: ‘Kitsch is often subsumed under a whole umbrella of pejorative adjectives: garish, vulgar, facile, tacky, lowbrow, crowd-pleasing, commercial, overthe-top.’18 Regulated, or coloured by these stigmas, kitsch, they contend, is therefore pernicious, toxic. They contend that one of the most tenacious ‘conceits of the Art World’, attributable to ‘Frankfurt-style Marxist critique’, is that art, as opposed to kitsch, ‘properly understood and properly sublimated, is endowed with emancipatory powers’. Carrier and Pissarro cite a truncated roll-call of the ‘“liberal Marxist” tradition, from Adorno to Buchloh via Peter Bürger, Marcuse, Greenberg, and others’ who have ‘magnificently enabled aesthetic thinkers of the “Left” to remain in good faith while continuing along with their daily jobs, deciphering the coded messages of the work of art’.19 A little later they cite Adorno, exhorting people not to succumb to the fun of pop music.20 But, they warn, the ‘trash aesthetics’21 that is kitsch has been harnessed, harvested and mined in myriad ways by the establishment since at least the 1970s. And poststructuralism in philosophy that grew out of that time and linguistics breathed new life into kitsch as an alternative aesthetic model – after all one way of defining postmodernism was modernism seen in parallax. Carrier and Pissarro move towards a sociocultural definition of kitsch as the aesthetics of abominable and of those who would remain foreign, the barbaroi of the Ancient Greeks. The soiled other is needed in order to keep the mighty keep their delusion of importance. With this we might begin to add to their analysis Ernesto Laclau’s breakdown of the historic prejudices that grew out of social and psychoanalytic theories following the French Revolution, in which the reasonable isolated individual was pitted against the irrationality and lawlessness of the crowd.22 Unlike these more venerable ideas, kitsch is a modern concept which, to use Adorno’s terms (not theirs), threatens to undermine the autonomy of art through its popular appeal, through fun and easy consumption. It is a shifting signifier that designates the enemy to keep the sanctity of the art world intact, with all its rhetoric and superior morality. The gatekeeping art world is righteous whereas kitsch, manna for the masses, lends itself at its extreme to totalitarianism. There is yet another strand to their topology which is at the core of their defence of kitsch, or its summary relegation as relevant, and that is that it signifies what is not allowed to enter into the art world, or ‘Art System’.23 It is this last note that we wish to alight upon, in our own evaluation and justification of the use of kitsch. There are now too many enclaves of activity that

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have been denied entry – or, like much ‘high’ fashion care not to rap on the door – into the art world, and yet the mounting number and its profusion require urgent attention and techniques of appraisal. Although we feel in strong sympathy and fealty with Carrier and Pissarro’s thesis, we would also like to retain use of the word ‘kitsch’ and to acknowledge its presence and relevance, together with the reproaches that harry it, as irksome as this may be. For it is our contention that there is ‘art’ in ‘not-art’ as designated by mainstream art discourse as inherited from modernist art history and criticism, but there is still a lot of not-art that is not-art. Some of this is simply entertainment, some of it is, we regret to say, pernicious drivel, hence kitsch. For we would prefer to understand kitsch with another binary that rose historically at about the same time: nature and culture. ‘Nature’ and ‘culture’ are always relative terms. This is why polemicists like to astonish audiences with saying that ‘nature does not exist’. Nature and culture are foundationless concepts that whose meaning is drained without the presence of the other – they are like floating semantic spheres. If art does not have kitsch, then it needs to devise another concept in its stead, or just to use adjectives associated with it: ‘lurid’, ‘debased’, ‘dumbed-down’. Where we find commonality with Carrier and Pissarro is that the reservoir of interest needs to be widened considerably, although we do not wholly subscribe to their Kantian position about the variability of taste. That is, as a principle to cancel out the presence of the invidious, the suffocating and the stupid. Later chapters will demonstrate this in more detail, where we show how practices, pre-eminently fashion but also music video and other mainstream practices, can lend themselves to nuanced reading because there are select incidences – not all – that warrant it and which disclose for us meaning and experience commensurate with, if not better than, contemporary art considered ‘high’ and ‘good’. An important sign of this higher quality in art is when it does not identify with the ubiquitous and the paramount. For Adorno, as for other philosophers and critics, aesthetic completeness must nevertheless retain incompleteness and hence communicate within its wholeness the imperfect and irresolute nature of human beings. Thus, as Adorno puts it: ‘In art, ideal eternity expresses itself as kitsch, in adherence to inalienable categories.’24 This is one of the prevalent and compelling properties of kitsch, the betrayal of the otherwise inalienable property of the fragility of life, echoed in the fragility of beauty, of matter and so on. This is why we may find more artistic value in Rei Kawakubo’s ‘Lumps and Bumps’ collection (1997) than an immaculately crafted ballgown.25 Pure beauty, then, beauty held as absolute and unvanquishable, is kitsch and teeters into ugliness. ‘Contrary to the truly hopelessly outdated principles of art-for-art’s sake (l’art pour l’art), art does not apply roles learned by rote (an die ihr auswendigen Zwecke) to itself, but rather by divesting itself to illusions of a realm of pure beauty, which quickly devolves into kitsch.’26 To draw the overlapping connection between the ugly and kitsch closer: In the history of art, the dialectic of the ugly is also drawn into the category of the beautiful. From this perspective, kitsch is the beautiful as the ugly, tabooed in the name of the vestigial beauty it once had and which it now contradicts because of the absence of the absurd component.27

 Ugliness and Kitsch 87 ‘The absurd component’ refers to Camus and Kierkegaard, and the state of existential despair, and the desperate need to compensate for it or to elide it. ‘Kitsch is the beautiful as the ugly’ is wonderful semantic double helix for their interrelationship. In another statement, Adorno asserts that ‘[f]idelity to the image of beauty devolves as countervailing idiosyncrasy (bewirkt ideosyncrasie gegen es). It calls for tension that in the end goes against the general model, for the loss of tension is the deepest objection we can level at most contemporary art.’28 This loss of tension – Spannungsverlust – is the ‘promesse de bonheur’ offered up as easy pickings. It is an ugly transaction at best. At the beginning of his discussion of the ugly, which occurs relatively early in Aesthetic Theory, he mentions Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of the Ugliness. Adorno follows with the palliative statement: ‘The archaic and then also traditional art since fauns and silenuses, especially of the Hellenic era, abounded in representations of ugly things.’29 ‘Of the Hegelian school’,30 Rosenkranz’s opus is the first attempt to give a rounded perspective of ugliness in both art and nature, arguing that any thoroughgoing attempt to understand the beautiful must also take stock of the ugly.31 ‘Beauty is the idea’, states Rosenkranz, ‘as enacted in the element of the sensuous as the free-form of an harmonious totality.’ This is pure Kant, in the perception of beauty facilitating the freedom of the senses. By contrast, the ugly for Rosenkranz is the negation of beauty in an experience that is constricting and unfree.32 Beauty is the sensuous equivalent of freedom, ‘freedom in the general sense, not only that of the ethical will, but also spontaneity of intelligence and the free movement of nature’.33 This is all still very much on a Kantian-Hegelian footing, but to revisit it helps to discern the kind of philosophical anxiety entertained over the ugly and by extension kitsch. As fool’s gold, kitsch is inimical to freedom, as it is beauty passed through the hands of the culture industry. In Adornian terms, for the culture industry to contain ‘true’ beauty is to have it allow the measures that would expose and potentially overcome it – and it is this traditional dynamic that we will need to address. Meanwhile, as Rosenkranz maintains: ‘True freedom is in all ways the mother of beauty, bondage (Unfreiheit) that of ugliness.’ Ugliness is the ‘negative Doppelgänger’ of beauty.34 However, the representation of non-freedom and of evil, if signified in ugliness, quickly gives itself over to caricature, and ‘caricature dissolves adversity into ridiculousness, insofar as it is able to absorb all manner of the ugly as much as beauty’.35 To give this observation a more modern application, ugliness can be said to be found in the copy and in the bathos of melodrama. While many of the moral assumptions regarding ugliness and kitsch can be carried over into modern art, as Adorno warns, modernity necessitates a different assessment of beauty and ugliness (Rosenkranz, for example, equates dissonance in music as in the realm of the ugly).36 Adorno argues that it would be misguided to compare the ‘somatic abominations’ (Anatomiegreuel) of Rimbaud and Gottfried Benn or the ‘disgusting and abhorrent’ in Beckett with the grotesqueries of, say, seventeenth-century Dutch painting. This difference is fundamental to modern art, as we have seen already, for its stake in ugliness is also that of dialectical negativity. The ugly is also the modern expression of anomie against a predetermined status quo. Ugliness and all that it stands for becomes a necessary tool to fight off the culture industry’s manipulation of the beauty into a commodity. As a way of combating ideological totalization, art must embrace the ugly in order to ‘denounce the ugly in the world’.37 In the ugly is the

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horrible which is germ of unease within the work of art whose authenticity lies in its lack of complicity to false absolutes. ‘The purer the form, the higher a work’s autonomy, then all the more horrible.’38 ‘Horror’ manifests in a variety of ways. In ‘happier times’ as of the period of Impressionism, it finds itself in technique, while the subject matter was ‘rarely those of peaceful nature, but rather offset by civilizing impulses that are incorporated into the painting in a harmonious way’.39 Put another way, there is a deeper tension driving the landscapes, the abstracting approach signalling an ulterior motive that extends beyond the landscape itself. Otherwise, without this approach, to have an overly earnest belief that nature can simply be reproduced as is, without an ‘esoteric reaction’ to it, the result is kitsch.40 There are therefore several categories and uses of ugliness that equate both to beauty and to false beauty, kitsch. Kitsch is beauty as masquerade, while the ugliness inherent in beauty is a corrective to the misuses of beauty, and to beauty wrought as ideology, that is inviolably correct and true. The identification of art with the beautiful is inadequate, and not just on the formal level. Inasmuch as what art has become, the category of beauty is but one category and one that has changed to the core: through the absorption of the ugly, the concept of beauty has changed, without aesthetics being able to escape it. It is through the absorption of the ugly that beauty, through this contradiction, has had the power to expand.41

Modernity enlists the ugly to a new level that places strain on form and material. The dialectic in Hegel suffers through the ‘static definition of beauty as sensible appearance of the Idea’. Beauty can only persist in the renunciation of this concept, through ‘a strict antinomy’.42 To preserve beauty, in its traditional sense, would be like identifying with a corpse. Upon quoting Schiller – ‘Beauty must also die’ – Adorno rejoinds, ‘that is a lot truer than Schiller meant’.43 Yet Adorno distinguishes between different forms of ugliness, which is to be found in the Stravinsky–Schoenberg binary. Whereas Schoenberg ‘presses’ the musical form, causing it to ‘expand’ away from harmony, Stravinsky’s pastiche betrays the same lack of discipline that regresses into a kind of barbaric laziness. His willy-nilly adoption of musical forms undermines their qualitative differences. In his essay on ugliness in Adorno’s aesthetics, Peter Hohendahl remarks that Adorno was anxious about ‘Stravinsky’s ambivalence toward the idea of culture, especially the interest in folklore and the primitive. Stravinsky’s rebellion against tradition invokes the barbaric and suspends the rules of musical culture’.44 ‘This means that Adorno rejects a form of the ugly that is incompatible with the concept of artistic progress.’45 ‘Progress’, which is now a widely outdated and discredited term, may be revised towards that of development. Art’s ‘absorption’ is now that of a broader variety of stimuli, processes, modalities and approaches. Kitsch, too, needs to be revised. If it is a nonconcept, we must still provide for parameters of evaluation and judgement that allow for constriction and manipulation. We must be able to look for and into ‘kitsch’ genres such as music video and argue for the possibilities within some of them. We must begin to recognize that many fashion films avail themselves of languages of kitsch but transcend the category in full measure.

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Aesthetics of alienation

The negativity that has so many faces in Adorno’s work can be quite dizzying and overwhelming. Yet as we have suggested at various turns in these analyses so far, it is a negativity that is far from pessimistic. Rather, Adorno sees it as a necessary perspective that must be maintained to unmask and erode the negativity around us that uses the duplicitous mask of democracy, fun, pleasure – all assurances that we as a society are living under a benign umbrella of truth and fulfilment. If it is to be called a pessimism at all, it would have to be that in the same vein as Nietzsche, whose transvaluation of values was necessitated by a callow culture blinded by religious deceit. Now, most of us believe that the state of affairs are not so simple, and yet we must also admit that the superficial distractions of the culture industry – prevalent in social media or in endless proliferating branches into subject links based on algorithms designed to keep the searcher in the terrain of like-mindedness – are so incalculably abundant that it is hard to imagine a life without at least a glimpse of them. In the morass of information, when we are occasionally disabused on a fact, we are astonished about our gullibility. The truth-character of art can be isolated in its enactment of, or subscribing to, negative dialectics. That is, it does not arrive at a solution (identity) but another problem (nonidentity), only that the new problem is a more refined one than the last. The individual is bound to the historical and the social, to the extent that not only is the individual constitutive of the social but the social the individual – as Adorno would stipulate in one of his studies on Hegel.1 This means that the position, conduct and methodology of the individual must be aware of the social legacy and effect of what he or she does. For Adorno the moral depredations wrought by the culture industry called for a method that contravened its glib call to happiness and fun. Hegelian dialectic of resolution after the negation of the negation was no longer sufficient or appropriate. Another reason for a different approach to the critical method of dialectic was ‘Auschwitz’: before Lyotard, Adorno uses Auschwitz not only as metonym for the Holocaust but yet more openly and tragically as the betrayal of Enlightenment principles of dignity and hope, and a basic undermining of basic humanity. ‘Auschwitz confirms the philosophy of pure identity to be that of death.’2 The only recourse is that of negative dialectics – where he invokes Kafka, one of the heroes of Aesthetic Theory – where the only way to truth is to ‘think against oneself (gegen sich selbst zu denken)’. The need for negative dialectics is for Adorno not just necessary but historically inevitable, given the turn of events. Whether the Holocaust was inscribed within historical humanity or a horrendous aberration is difficult if not impossible to gauge, but it does

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suggest that the older strategies – philosophical, aesthetic, political – are otiose and bankrupt. Negative dialectics is recognition of this and the necessary process before the entry of a viable alternative position or process – and the best still if there is no further horizon of possibility. Gerhard Richter (not the painter) outlines the difference between Adorno’s negative dialectics and Hegelian dialectic succinctly as follows: While Adorno’s touchstone is Hegel, his own dialectic, as a negative dialectic, differs from Hegel’s in that it refuses to yield the mediation of subject and object, or the identical and the non-identical, to a final moment of identity, a synthetic sublation within totality itself. His thought refuses to assimilate, into the Absolute of identity, the irreducible difference that traverses even the concept of difference. While Hegel’s dialectical model, in Adorno’s reading, works to co-opt into its system even those moments of difference and objects of otherness that remain absolutely other to it. Adorno’s thinking remains responsible to what cannot be subsumed, even dialectically, under the Concept, the System, the Absolute, or Totality itself.3

Negative dialectics is an admission, in a Kantian vein, of our formal limitations, inserted into a Hegelian dialectical order. It is through aesthetics that the confrontation, or conflation, of Kant and Hegel are best resolved. Negative dialectics, as written into the name itself, is to face an impasse from the very beginning, as it instates an infinite regress. It uses concepts against the concept while placing a terrific burden upon the ‘principle of hope’, to invoke Bloch, as it is the positive principle that helps the maintenance of the dialectical motion into negativity, lest it collapse into self-defeating nihilism. In many ways aesthetic theory is a logical conclusion of the dilemmas that negative dialectics pre-empts (and works hard to stave off). As Richard Wolin aptly observes of this evolution in Adorno’s thought, aesthetics is a necessary limit for philosophy when faced with its epistemic aporias. Philosophy thus becomes ‘a handmaiden to the arts as their faithful interpreter. Its new mission is to give voice to the speechless particularity of aesthetic objectivations, which, as art, are nonconceptual and thus devoid of the capacity for theoretical expression’.4 And: ‘Art is the utopian re-enchantment of radically disenchanted social totality. It serves as irrefutable proof of the fact that the existing universe of facts is not all there is.’5 As Lyotard would explore later in Adorno’s wake, art’s capacity to occupy two spheres at once – positive and negative, material and immaterial – makes it a model for the ontic condition of the metaphysical and physical. Shierry Weber Nicholson also points to the way Adorno searched for art’s ‘attempting the impossible in attempting to achieve a pacified unity of conflicting elements, an impossibility which is openly displayed in the risk, daring, and exertion inherent in virtuoso pieces; this impossibility reveals the falseness of the idea that art should be simple (and spontaneous)’.6 Art is also the measure and means of the unfathomable and the unrepresentable, which in light of history is for Adorno radically tipped against the wondrous to the terrible. Art must face the catastrophic facts of history in order for the prospect of something better – an unreachable limit. It is a utopianism of permanent deferral. Seen from a different angle, as William Melaney puts it, ‘the negativity of art does not make it capable of

 Aesthetics of Alienation 91 “redeeming” reality, but testifies to a new experience of the world’. ‘Negative dialectics allows art to function as a counter to the reality of static categories.’7 Utopianism in art is configured as the opening of new possibility. The question of a need for a dramatic reconfiguration of ethical values as a result of the Holocaust is a theme that has since been revisited many times by philosophers and social commentators, but we need to return to it yet again for a reason unanticipated by Adorno and his generation. There have arguably – and always arguably given the politicization of the Holocaust and its socio-pathologizing in extremist (Israeli-) Jewish ideology – been commensurate atrocities (the Gulags, Cambodia, Somalia, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo) since then, which have not led to an entrenchment of Adorno’s theoretical values with respect to aesthetics, in fact the aesthetic order has been that of free fall into distraction. Yet the ethos of distraction is far from universal, as many contemporary artists continue to struggle over the most satisfactory means of expressing political concerns, and the very nature and viability of political art at all. Unmoored from dominant ideology, artists ask in whose name are they speaking and for what cause. The diffusion of identity in today’s globalized identity politics is mirrored in the diffusion of a political coherence (as opposed to ‘the good old days’ when it was Marxism against the establishment). The contemporary predicament is an exacerbation of secularization: ‘Unmistakably, pure metaphysical experience pales and becomes more desultory in the course of the process of secularization, which weakens the substance of others. The condition maintains itself in the negative, “is this it?” which first actualizes itself in pointless waiting.’8 The unmentioned reference is of course to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949, first performed 1953), Beckett being the tacit dedicatee of the Aesthetic Theory. A year before his death he would go so far as to say that Beckett’s dramatic work ‘is the single, truly relevant metaphysical creation to have appeared after the period of the War’.9 One of the many affinities of Beckett for Adorno was his extreme aesthetic stringency, which is not only to be found in the works themselves but was reflected in the strict and jealous policing of how his dramatic work be performed and by whom. For Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Beckett epitomizes what they call the ‘arts of impoverishment’. ‘There is an indigence that, far from being simply a thematic component, however important, of Beckett’s work, is inherent in the very writing of the work.’10 That is, his work is at essence riven by lacunae and silences, afforded not only in the plotlines and style but also on how he imposed on himself the further encumbrance of writing in another language, French. Indeed it could hardly have been lost on Adorno that this was also so for another member of his own artistic pantheon, Kafka, who is an example of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a ‘minor literature’.11 Beckett’s stuttering style, in its emphasis on the spaces between words and its endless sense of impasse and nihilism, is an aesthetic that, for Bersani and Dutoit, ‘is wholly at odds with a formalistic emphasis on the autotelic nature of the work of art’.12 While we quickly see that the works end in nothing, we naggingly suspect that they have also come from nothing, a kind of hollowed or absent imagination. Another way of looking at Beckett’s world, his aesthetic, is as pervaded by death. He expresses the limits of ‘absolute negativity’ which, like death, is in itself unrepresentable.13 Beckett’s is a prime exemplar of art that, in the words of Albrecht

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Wellmer, ‘has taken upon itself the darkness and guilt of the world’. It is also art that exposes the combination of truth and untruth (semblance) from which art can never escape.14 Art about death is another example of this failure since it cannot succeed except to will its own abolition. ‘In all these death-dealings’, exclaims Christopher Ricks, ‘Beckett’s ambition is – famously – to fail as no other dare fail. Which is validated by the imagination’s inevitable failure to imagine its own death.’15 From this vantage point, to presume the contrary, which is to portray existence as replete and full where there is evidence only of emptiness, is to traduce the mission of art once it reached its state of independence and autonomy, and to slide backwards into a theodicy or, better, idiocy. But the perennial problem of faith in the absence of institutional faith is a venerable one. Adorno’s commitment to particular standards of what art should be, its manner of expression and aesthetic configuration, points to a ‘negative theology’. Several commentators of Adorno have remarked on the underlying principle in his aesthetics of Bildverbot, the prohibition of graven images as advanced in medieval philosophy and theology.16 Idit Dobbs-Wesinstein rightly observes that Adorno’s devotion to graven images is first informed by Benjamin’s concept of history,17 while steers away from the historical teleologies of Kant and Hegel. Further, in the shadow cast by Auschwitz, the Bildverbot in a world exhausted and degraded by destruction ‘must be read together with the prohibition against preparation for the messianic age, in other words, against a future orientation of either theory or praxis and must be given a stringent secular turn, stripped of any association with divine sanction, in fact belying it’.18 Signs of the Bildverbot of modern art commence in earnest with an artist such as Baudelaire who uses abstraction as a reaction to an increasingly ‘abstracted world’.19 The humanist claims of art call for a radical restructuring in how they are to be conveyed and received, which, as we know by now, is typified in the later work of Schoenberg which ‘denies the listener everything to which she has been accustomed, in other words, a link to the traditional, to image and consolation, or to the possibility of reconciliation’. Art is the standard against historical atrocity and to the falsifications and errant passages of mythology.20 Thus for Adorno, ‘[a]rt cannot leave aporia voluntarily.’21 The redemption within art is in its avowed recognition of a world that has suffered, both in an immediate historical sense for Adorno and against the bewilderment of absurd human condition. The aporia of modern art is that utopia and horror are locked in the same room. This aporia, this anomie, the dead end and the sense of being either locked in or out, is something that we can revisit at various intervals, as it can be used to highlight the tension of art of the present, art that does not pretend towards an easily solution or facile communication. This does not mean that art cannot elicit pleasure but rather that, like Schopenhauer, art is interpreted, as Wellmer observes, ‘in ecstatic terms rather than as a real utopia; the happiness that it promises is not of this world’.22 Hence: ‘Art, as much as theory is at a loss to make utopia concrete, not even in the negative sense. The New as cryptogram is the image of the Fall; it is only through its absolute negativity that art expresses the unspeakable, utopia.’23 The facticity of art is embedded within its cryptogrammic nature. Its laws are de facto facts but undecipherable. ‘Modernist art calls forth philosophical reflection’, writes Bernstein, ‘because it concerns the categories of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, of meaningfulness. The

 Aesthetics of Alienation 93 truth content of modernist works is a critique of rationalized truth’.24 The alternative is bathos: ‘literalism is barbarism’ (Das Barbarische ist das Buchstäbliche). Literalism and rationalism are falsifications that are dangerous at their core, as witnessed in the simplistic rule-bound ideology of National Socialism. And for art to be asked to be spelt out is to embark on a crisis to change it from its status as art.25 This signals Adorno’s debt to Kant, while it also justifies art’s status alongside philosophy and why art needs to be philosophized. ‘Thus art needs philosophy, which interprets it, in order to say what cannot be said, at the same time as what only art can say inasmuch as it does not say it.’26 Aesthetics faces the problem of not being limited to aesthesis, for ‘as something essential spiritual, art cannot be purely appearance. It must also always be thought: it thinks itself ’.27 Art’s weddedness to thought, and its relationship to philosophy, is an important component to its gaining of autonomy. Modern art is autonomous art, which means that it has taken on the burden of truth. What Adorno must grapple with is that autonomy is a modern phenomenon, which means it is also a bourgeois phenomenon, which means it is both a product and at the behest of the forces that also seek to contain and suppress it. This paradox finds its historical embodiment in Beethoven: Let us reflect on Beethoven. If he is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped its social paternalism, and is wholly autonomous aesthetically, no longer servile. His work shatters the schema of the compliant adequacy of music to society. In him, with all idealism of tone and attitude, the essence of society which speaks as what governs the entire subject, becomes the essence of music itself.28

Beethoven is the prime example of a symptom of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the emergency of ‘society’, with the means and mechanisms to give that society the qualities of revolutionary individuality without lassitude. But even if the conflicts of society and state are abstractly resolved in music, Beethoven is no unalloyed paragon, instead exposes a contradiction in Adorno’s position. Paddison notes that the ‘commercial influences’ affecting art and social interaction precipitate a potentially positive force on an artist’s inventiveness and productivity. And yet, the same forces influences are what helped to shape the culture industry and all the attendant scourges.29 Nonetheless, Beethoven can be held up as a cornerstone in the historical appearance and moulding of autonomous art, in Paddison’s words, as art ‘screened off as a separate sphere within society, but a sphere created and maintained as such by the organizing principles underlying bourgeois society itself – e.g. the division of labour’.30 Art’s redeeming principle is its autonomy. It must hold to it jealously or otherwise become assimilated to what made it autonomous in the first place, namely market forces and social subjugation at the service of profit. Beethoven is not an isolated case but the paragon of the redirection of tradition since antiquity, where art is based on religion and then feudal power, towards independence. Driven to a deeper and deeper state of autonomy and alienation, these paragons are Schoenberg and Beckett. Just as Stravinsky stands as a compromised approach in relation to Schoenberg, so does Brecht to Beckett, with Brecht exemplifying an

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ultimately failed attempt at the need to reconcile art with ideology. As Martin Lüdke emphasizes, Beckett’s plays a cardinal role in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Beckett’s work epitomizes a condition of and against advanced capitalism, which represents the advance of history and the history of art. For knowledge of the historic process, authentic modern art must divulge the critical essence of advanced capitalism.31 But rather than dwell on Waiting for Godot, Adorno’s main point of reflection is Endgame, to which he devotes a discrete essay,32 a work which in the title itself signals the impasse that he had also seen in the development after Schoenberg. With Beckett, and with Endgame in particular, art is faced with a kind of precipice, a limit that also reveals the need for the philosophical interpretation of art. It is also an aesthetic marker for the impasse of the progress that Adorno had to face in music after Schoenberg, while also the paragon of persistence – Beckett’s mantra of ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ Just as the endgame of art urges its continuation, the need for philosophy is sounded as a result of, or in spite of, a work of art in which philosophy is hollowed out. Beckett ‘shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today, or theory in general’.33 The entire play is a theoretical in the extreme, but without recourse to the tools of interpretation, because they have not been lost but are redundant. Beckett’s play looks resignedly over the corpse middle-class society, reflecting on the limbo of its decay. But society itself is permanently elsewhere. It is precisely because of the play’s abstraction from society that Endgame does not provide a legible template of critique or ideological anchor – in contrast to Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Artoro Ui (1941) for example – but instead demonstrates and performs the pressure exerted by contemporary capitalist society, in rendering the explicit and the didactic no longer viable. In the words of Zuidervaart, ‘Endgame is an enigmatic organon for a philosophy that has transformed Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit and Marx’s Capital into a critical phenomenology of culture after Auschwitz.’34 He is a kind of standard-bearer for what Adorno sees as artistic duty. For ‘because the world has survived its own demise, it certainly requires art as its unconscious historiography. The authentic artists of the present are those whose works echo the greatest horror’.35 For art to persist as true, its promise of happiness can only be contained in terms of suffering. And its formal containment must be abstract and restrained. This configuration, if it is not a predicament of the aesthetic, is also a prime example of the Bildverbot at play, which is a direct symptom of advanced capitalism. Adorno avers: ‘The Bildverbot of the Old Testament has an aesthetic side to its religious one. The fact that you should not render images, that is, nothing from something, is the same as saying that no such image is possible.’36 And: ‘Through their autonomy, works of art forego the embodiment of truth, as do symbols. Aesthetic images are subject to the Bildverbot. In such a way the truth is precisely appearance and its ultimate consequence in the hermetic work.’37 The obscurity and encoded nature of authentic modern art is the consequence of the taboo engendered by historic atrocity and as a consequence of rationalized society. ‘Beckett reacts to the singular situation of the concentration camps, although unnamed, as if a Bildverbot lay over them.’38 Beckett’s Endgame conveys itself from the start as encrypted, in its stylization and in its recourse to parody. He is the logical climax of Kafka, Joyce and Proust, in the words of Zuidervaart, ‘to wed reflection to pure presentation. The harder it becomes to find real events meaningful,

 Aesthetics of Alienation 95 the more illusory becomes the idea of an aesthetic configuration binding the artist’s intention with the artwork’s meaning’.39 With Beckett, Adorno states, ‘the world of images of nothingness comes forth as something (tritt die Bilderwelt des Nichts als Etwas hervor)’.40 However: ‘This kind of nihilism implies the opposite of identification with Nothingness.’ With Beckett, as for the Gnostics, the created world is radically evil, and in its negation is the possibility of another, not yet existing, world. As long as the world is as it is, all images of conciliation, peace and calm are similar to death. The slightest difference between nothingness and what has come to rest would be the haven of hope, a no-man’s-land between the border posts of being and nothingness.41

But if Adorno’s model for hope is anywhere near Beckett’s, it is a hope that is hard to coax into the open air and one that is nowhere but remote. The promesse de bonheur is very much a promise uttered faintly. Susan Buck-Morss observes that Adorno’s ‘Jewish Bildverbot’ reflects his unwillingness ‘to delineate the nature of utopia’.42 Instead, what we are left with is a form of masochism in which we are made to enjoy the ability to stare into the void. As Nietzsche warns, for those who do, the void stares back.43 We need to change tack here slightly towards how some commentators responded to the aesthetic reticences of Adorno’s theory of authentic modern art. For one of the many things that his aesthetics teaches us, that the rigorous search for authenticity, if the criteria are too refined and uncompromising, runs the risk of finding itself in an impasse. The fatigue with life expressed in art can easily wind up as aesthetic fatigue, world-weariness (Weltschmerz) that winds up in art of which one eventually wearies. One important turning point came with Peter Bürger’s ‘Decline of the Modern Age’, a paper that was delivered at a conference on Adorno’s work in Frankfurt in 1983. Bürger was and still is best known for his Theory of the Avant-Garde which suggests that it was role of the avant-garde to divest art from ideology and to bring art into the public realm. The most controversial contention of this book is the distinction that Bürger draws between the avant-garde and modernism. Bürger is hostile to modernism’s autonomy and to such values as ‘high art’. Unlike Adorno, Bürger turns to Dada as an instance of the flattening of high art and the aim to open art into wider range of practices and protocols.44 In what can be read as one of a set of foundational theoretical accounts of postmodernism, Bürger rejects Adorno’s assumption that modernism presents itself as the most advanced art of historical progress and instead argues that postmodernism is modernism’s dialectical next step. Drawing on his own vision of the ontology of the avant-garde, Bürger criticizes Adorno’s narrow circumscription of art, and what it rejects, including Surrealism. (Surrealism draws a number of acerbic asides in Aesthetic Theory.) Indeed, Bürger paints Adorno as dismissive of the avant-garde as a whole in favour of a dogmatic philosophical agenda. Bürger, however, fails to grasp the subtlety in Adorno’s position with regard to negative dialectics, which is also to be understood as a form of affirmation. Instead, Bürger vouches for progress in the name of postavant-garde work, which in its very designation is a negation of the avant-garde. As David Roberts explains, Bürger proceeds along Hegelian lines, only taking up the ‘end of art’ thesis in a negative way, in tandem with Adorno. Bürger does not fully grasp

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that he is heading into a theory of postmodern art. ‘The free disposition of forms and techniques, over the material of tradition, and not the criterion of the most advanced material, is the crucial aspect of the condition of art since the historical avant-garde.’45 Further, Bürger’s position does not succeed in overcoming that of Adorno, because, despite the many specifications that vitiate his Aesthetic Theory, the bifurcation ‘authentic’ and ‘historicist’ seeded in Philosophy of Modern Music can be paralleled to the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Roberts continues: ‘This division, however, is artificial in that both positions are arguing about the same thing – art since the end of tradition, art after the ‘end of art’ – and both are themselves reflections of the postmodern situation.’46 In another reading of Bürger’s criticisms of Adorno’s aesthetics, Zuidervaart notes that the truth does not enter into Bürger’s discussion, whereas for Adorno the ‘critique of the culture industry makes little sense apart from the criterion of truth’.47 Zuidervaart introduces the concept of ‘heteronomous art’, which is what autonomous art is not. ‘Examples of heteronomous art include everything from liturgical dance to tribal masks. From advertising jingles to commercial movies’48 – in other words, generic examples of culture that have or could variously also be designated as art (if someone be so inclined) and objects that have more than one kind of use. Heteronomous art is therefore an inferior vessel of truth than autonomous art and is what brings autonomous art into being. Indeed Adorno ‘regards autonomy as a precondition for truth in art, and truth as the ultimate criterion for the social significance of any work of art’.49 Bürger seems unconcerned with truth and also varies with Adorno as to the insertion of art into ‘heteronomous fields’ – this being in his view one of the chief goals of the avant-garde. However, Zuidervaart acknowledges that the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy ‘seems to be fading’, with one exception, namely that the former is pre-eminently self-referential, whereas heteronomy deploys a wider field of expression and exposure. Another crack in Adorno’s system is his demand that art, as historical, must use the most up-to-the-present techniques available to it. As Wolin notes, for Adorno, ‘the imperatives of aesthetic modernity dictate that only those works of art which rely on the most advanced techniques historically available become worthy of serious consideration.’50 Where technology enters into this is rather a moot point, as his writings on television and film suggest. But that technology cannot be separated from art is a truism. As venerable as they seem to us, the violin and oil paint are both technological configurations. And we cannot step back from the valency of the filmic, that most heteronomous of forms, in the present era.51 To return to the Second Chapter on Hegel, film is the medium most adequate to our time, although we might add that film has brought us to the selfsame state of adequation. Yet filmic verisimilitude also poses something of a problem since, according to Wolin again, ‘Adorno, following Benjamin, is primarily concerned with de-auraticized (or postauratic) art’.52 The loosening of loss of the aura is often the aim of heteronomous art or is built into its mimetic structure which, in Adorno’s system, has the deleterious effect, quoting Wolin, of ‘slackening the critical tension between art and life’.53 It is in the chasm between art and life that we can also be assured of possibilities of non-complicity with capitalist manipulation. At the same time,

 Aesthetics of Alienation 97 however, this is an argument that is based on too many monolithic abstractions, of both the kinds of heteronomous art and of capitalism itself. It is also Adorno’s aversion to pleasure, which heteronomous art is apt to provide as implied in the word itself of embodying the many and the more, that is also at stake here. In an entertaining essay on the spartan ethos of Adorno’s aesthetics, which we have touched on already, Erica Weizman announces that ‘Adorno’s aesthetic theory is castration pure and simple: the unavailability of present pleasure and its corollaries in favour of a permanently frustrated future anterior of satisfaction’.54 She lists Adorno’s many statements about the perils of easy pleasure, the warning of art lapsing into kitsch and the consequences into be lulled into a false sense of satisfaction. ‘Fun’ is the culture industry and ‘only serves to reinforce the status quo’.55 Weizman quotes from Minima Moralia passages dismissive of the contrived pastimes of modern life, ‘the freedom of creative action channelled into standardized, socially acceptable, and setrile forms of activity’.56 This is in part because the culture industry monopolizes play and made it a source of brainwashing. But elsewhere Adorno does observe that art-making is comparable to child’s play and their behaviour comparable to children. In artists, according to Adorno, we see a ‘rather hysterically excessive lack of inhibition over every conceivable fear; narcissism taken to its paranoic limit’.57 Weizman concedes that fun ‘does indeed threaten art’s autonomy’58 inasmuch as one can enjoy a work of art for the sake of enjoyment alone, yet to remove the factor of pleasure from art is to draw some far-fetched conclusions. ‘If art must preserve an absolute freedom of form in order to maintain itself as art, “fun” – as well as play, pleasure, and affects of all kinds – must, however paradoxically, be allowed to be included in the repertoire.’59 We may add to this with the reminder that there are many kinds of pleasure, and pleasure can be derived from many, indeed, opposing experiences – masochism is one. It might also be said that it is through pleasure that art is given its driving force. Pleasure is not necessarily harnessed to nefarious forces.60 For our purposes in this book, the claims of autonomous art against heteronomous art would seem to sever the relevance of Adorno to some degree, but Zuidervaart offers some salutary concessions that retain his relevance: Perhaps the best way to honor his intentions without accepting his formulations would be to loosen the connections between autonomy, truth, and significance. This move can employ two counterclaims: (1) that autonomy is not a precondition for truth in art; and (2) that truth in art is not the ultimate criterion for the social significance of art, even though the criterion of truth does apply to art, both autonomous and heteronomous. These counterclaims allow one to argue for the truth and social significance of heteronomous art.61

Zuidervaart goes on to affirm ‘that there are holes in Adorno’s theory, but the ship is still afloat’.62 For while Bürger is right to have reproached Adorno for too rigid an aesthetic topology, he is less accurate when asserting that ‘it has become impossible to posit aesthetic norms’. He posits the notion of ‘complex normativity’ which are norms

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that not only apply to ‘art as an institution’ but also ‘works within other institutions. Still others apply to what Adorno calls the import of the work’.63 This hits at the nub of what we are arguing here: to insert norms of value and appreciation outside of the new ‘tradition’ of art as established by (Adornian) modernism. It is precisely the strict definition of what art should be and undertake that, paradoxically, allows for some other, more heterodox readaptation. It is because of the overturning, or recalibration, of tradition that we can alter it again and afresh.

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‘Fashion theory’ A philosophy of dress

When used in an everyday sense, ‘fashion’ usually denotes something that is desirable now. When it comes to the phrase ‘in fashion’ it tends to have a slightly different resonance to ‘fashionable’ which is less compelling to the moment and is more redolent of sheepish obedience, slavish taste, unchecked appetite. It is a given that when ‘fashionable’ is used, it is accompanied by vague – or overt – connotations of worldly vanity, in the reckless willingness to sacrifice the longer term for the sake of the evanescent present, residual esteem for the sake of spontaneous approbation, slow consideration for the sake of caprice. The problem with all of this is that these are prejudices that are residual from modernism, that distinguishes between the transience of the everyday from the detached universals that art can capture. If art cannot capture ‘truth’ in the same way, and the faith in its dialectical processes has dwindled, then it would mean that the traditional distinctions between it and other forms of aesthetic practice have begun to break down as well. If Adorno argues that art and philosophy require one another, making ‘aesthetic theory’ the site of this contestation and encounter, then there is also need for ‘fashion theory’ (a common term already but meant to hear as an echo of ‘aesthetic theory’ as Adorno shaped the term), but beyond the sense in which it is currently used. Presently, the term ‘fashion theory’ carries with it intellectual mechanisms supplied by such disciplines as cultural studies, anthropology and sociology. While attempts have been made to apply standing philosophical theories to fashion,1 or a semiosis of fashion as established by Roland Barthes,2 there is as yet no concerted set of assertions that aligns fashion to philosophy in the way that Hegel, Lukács and Adorno did with art and philosophy. Sandra Nissan and Anne Brydon aver that ‘[f]ashion and clothing have for a long while remained scholarly unmentionables’3 and that fashion has repeatedly sought justification in its intellectual endeavours. And as Elizabeth Wilson points out, ‘all serious books about fashion seem invariably to need to return to first principles and argue anew for the importance of dress.’4 The reason why fashion and dress studies has not been taken seriously by scholars, argues Yuniya Kawamura, is there is no clearly defined theoretical framework (and methodologies) that are specific to the study of fashion and dress,5 such as a theory of fashion. If fashion contributes to our understanding of ourselves and our being in the world and how our identities are

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shaped by the clothes that we wear and our manner of appearance, then fashion should be taken seriously as an object of philosophical attention and investigation. Most recently, Stefano Marino argues that although the aesthetics of fashion has extraordinary power and significance in shaping our sense of being in the world, there has always been a ‘problematic and intriguing relationship between fashion and philosophy’.6 Philosophers have virtually ignored fashion, possibly because it was deemed frivolous, regulated to the feminine as opposed to philosophy (or art) which is considered a more serious concern. Even though as Lars Svensden notes in his much-cited tome, Fashion. A Philosophy (2006 [2004]), the importance of fashion can be traced as far as back as the fifteenth century when Charles VII of France was asked to establish a separate ministry of fashion.7 Quentin Bell eloquently sums up this point while highlighting what Gilles Lipovetsky has called the ‘highly problematic institution’8 of fashion. Bell argues that because fashion ‘implies change and mutability [it] suggests something frivolous and inconsiderable. A judgement based upon fashion is felt to be less reputable than one based upon those eternal values, those enduring truths which, as we like to suppose, we can all recognise and in the light that we can regulate fashionable opinions to their proper and inferior place.’9 In a lesser-known essay, ‘Intellectual Fashions’, Lyotard dismisses what is taken too often as a given, that fashions obscure us from what is really at stake. He admits that fashions, intellectual fashions, are what caused people to rally to ideas and act hastily against another cause that is considered otiose or detrimental. ‘But the rivalry only takes place on the basis of a common culture in which difference is valued. There is agreement that this discordance, if not discord, is desirable.’10 Fashion pits one form, as thing and idea, against another, and in this regard, it is an aesthetics of encounter. Here Lyotard uses an important term for him in the aesthetic judgement of the sublime, the ‘event’, and deploys it in a different way: ‘The event is an absolute performative: it happens. Fashion is affirmed by the desire to be the event.’ He tacitly returns to Simmel’s paradox of fashion that it is about separation and belonging at once. That is, fashions are a grouping of sorts that are also a demarcation. Its allure is that it is the event of being special and of one’s time, implying those not in fashion are behind the time. Of the time, until that time passes in the next moment. Lyotard implies that fashion has the capacity for reflexivity and critique: A modern painter is a painter from whom the nature of painting is at stake in the picture he or she is making. Philosophy, at least as critique, has probably always been modern. This work of testing limits also bears the name of the avant-garde. In the contemporary epoch, fashions often shield themselves with the title of the avant-garde. This is not always accurate. Sometimes it is.11

‘Sometimes it is’ – this is where we might find the zone for a legitimate philosophical aesthetics of fashion, in those regions when fashion strains the limits of credulity. This is where the assertion of what is fashionable is made at the expense of any limitation or boundary of garment, image, body and self. Although Adorno was (as one would expect) quite critical of fashion because of its ‘obvious dependency [ . . . ] on the profit motive and its embeddedness in the capitalist

 ‘Fashion Theory’ 101 industry’, he considered fashion to be ‘arts permanent confession that is not what it claims to be’. Referring to Hegel, who defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien, Adorno claims that fashion appropriates alienation itself. ‘For fashion, alienation becomes the living model of a social being-thus-and-not-otherwise [so-und-nichtanders-Sein], to which it surrenders as if in ecstasy.’ Adorno warns art not to betray itself and succumb to fashion, but at the same time he believes that art ‘must also innervate fashion in order not to make itself blind to the world’. Fashion cannot be separated from art, for fashion is arts Other, it ‘reminds art of what it never fully succeeded in sublimating’. ‘If art, as semblance, is the clothing of an invisible body, fashion is clothing as the absolute.’ Writers as varied and versatile as Veblen, Baudelaire, Simmel, and Benjamin also made searching commentaries on fashion and were able to show how it was one of the principal means by which modernity manifests itself. As we wrote in Fashion and Art (2013), fashion is a crystal in which aesthetics, consumption, class, industry and personal identity all meet.12 Important work has emerged within the study of fashion in establishing the importance of approaching the body as a ‘fleshy’, ‘situated practice’. It has advanced theoretical engagement in this area and provided secure ground from which to extend exploration of the embodiment and disembodiment of dress. In the introduction to their edited volume Thinking through Fashion (2015), Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik give an overview of the theoretical frameworks and disciplines that have contributed to the study of fashion, including history, sociology, gender studies, women’s studies and philosophy. Feminist philosophy in particular has challenged the modernist notion of the superiority of the mind over the body, arguing that corporeality is central to the way we experience and produce knowledge in and about the world. Rocamora and Smelik write that while the study of dress, appearance and style was dominated up until the early 1980s by art and costume historians as well as museum curators, cultural studies in particular (of note are linguistics and anthropology) has had a central impact in the way in which fashion constructs identities. Rocamora and Smelik identify largely two theoretical strands that have been used to theorize the ways in which fashion has been understood, either from an object-based approach that focuses on the materiality of fashion or through critical and textual framework via theories of language in which meaning is derived through signification and representation. The problem with placing too much emphasis on language, they argue, is that it displaces the idea of embodiment and agency which is central to the individual experience and neglects the matter and materiality of objects and the world.13 Then there is the sociological approach to fashion which ties the theoretical study of fashion to social structure yet finds its expression not only as a signifying system but as a form of materiality that concerns the way that a body is dressed, how it performs and what messages it contains and represents.14 In this way, the study of fashion, or a theory of fashion, can be a vehicle for a discipline and methodologies that are more historically and socially substantive. Using clothing and dress to shed light on anthropological organizations and belief systems can fall under the banner of fashion studies. Art historians who specialize in a particular period will examine a subject using clothes as a lens for interpretation and discovery, where clothing and dress are used largely as examples of material culture.

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Such approaches to not fall in with the kind of are of inquiry we are attempting to delimit. Rather, to this end, we urge a movement away from material culture and the attendant principle, which is now a basic tenet of fashion studies, that fashion is an embodied practice. This is not to argue that fashion is best seen and understood without the body, rather that it is to shift the set of expectations and points of reference away from notions rooted in matter, living or dead. It is an argument that we have begun to explore in the book Fashion Installation. Body, Space and Performance (2019), a concise history of the way in which fashion is given scenic life through crafted settings that began as theatrical and which are now discrete films. This evolution saw the increasing retreat of the physical body and where the body has become more of a cipher for operations and interventions that have less and less to do with actual, everyday life. Paradoxically, where fashion was first theorized as enmeshed within the fabric of life, the way that fashion is now displayed and consumed (and purchased) is becoming more virtual. In the new genre of the new millennium, fashion film, fashion is represented as inhabiting a technologically radiant and sumptuous multiverse many light years from hard reality.15 Rather than suggest a break, a better argument may be that this change exposes something that in fashion that was there all along. For the ‘fashion system’, which developed out of the eighteenth century, is, as the term states a system, a series of organizational co-ordinates whose logic is based outside of the utility of clothing. As opposed to the meaning of clothing, which is linked to the function of covering the body, fashion is related to the growing complexities of socialization in modernity. It is a nexus between economics, aesthetics and ideology – and all of them considered according to perception. To be fashionable, in fashion, is to give the impression of disposable wealth in participating in conspicuous consumption along with conspicuous leisure, to use the now lapidary phrases of social economist Thorstein Veblen. So, with fashion one could convey the appearance of prosperity, or in adopting alternatives to the mainstream if you were exhibiting dissent or asserting your freedom to be different or eccentric. At the end of the eighteenth century, with the French Revolution, dress was highly ideological which meant that belief was materially reducible to the garments worn. But it is one of the conditions of postmodernity (and post-postmodernity but let’s not cavil) to show that none of this is real. A woman wearing pants is no longer threatening as a suffragette wearing bloomers may have been, while a youth wearing a nose-ring is not anti-establishment in the way that a punk had set out to be. This kind of agency and upset is passed. Postmodern fashion’s tendency to trope once inflammatory signifiers to abstract them from their original motivations reveals their historical specificity. Fashion, then, is the study of ciphers relating to subjective and social interaction. To inspect the intricacies of craftsmanship of a garment – the fine hand-stitching, the lacework – is one thing and more on a par with the appreciation of any beautiful made object. It is another to appraise a garment, or fashion object, in terms of the kind of arguments it seeks to mount, what intentions are inscribed into the design and the kinds of commentary it is venturing. Let us return then to dress and the body and the fundamental role that fashion plays in our experience of world-making. In Adorned in Dreams, Elizabeth Wilson remarks

 ‘Fashion Theory’ 103 that the body is more than just a biological entity, it is a cultural artefact that marks us as social beings. ‘If the body with its open orifices is itself dangerously ambiguous’, notes Wilson, ‘then dress which is an extension of the body yet not quiet part of it, not only links that body to the social world, but also more clearly separates the two.’16 Dress acts like a second skin, ‘the frontier between self and not-self ’,17 it communicates who we are and who we are not. ‘In all societies the body is “dressed”, and everywhere dress and adornment play symbolic, communicative and aesthetic roles.’18 In this point of view, the body is an ontological focal point from which we construct our sense of being in the world. The body is never naked, it is always dressed be it through clothing or other forms of bodily markings that render us as social beings in our experience and perception of the world.19 Given, but where does fashion fit into this body/ dress equation? Fashion, states Wilson, ‘is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion in a sense is change and in modern Western societies no clothes are outside of fashion’.20 Clothing and dress are connected to bodily transactions in everyday life, dress ‘does not simply reflect a natural body, or for that matter a given identity; it embellishes the body . . . adding a whole array of meanings to the body that would otherwise not be there’.21 Beginning with the idea that dress is a situated bodily practice, Joanne Entwistle uses a philosophical framework that posits dress as an active component in the construction of an individual’s lived experience of and in the social world. Entwistle draws on three philosophical traditions to develop the concept that dress is an embodied practice: a structuralist and Poststructuralist approach (Mary Douglas, Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault) in the ways in which the body is rendered meaningful in culture through language; phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty posits the idea of the body as the ‘existential ground of culture’; and sociologists Irvin Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu explore the ways in which social structures are reproduced at the level of body. She writes that if the social and personal experience of dress is a discursive and practical phenomenon,22 then the study of the dressed body thus requires [an] understanding of the socially processed body that discourses on dress and fashion shape, as well as of the experiential dimensions of embodiment wherein dress is translated into actual bodily presentation.23

A phenomenology of fashion In his ‘Philosophical Accounts of Fashion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century’, Stephano Marino builds on Eugen Fink’s philosophical account of fashion, Mode . . . ein verfuhrerisches Spiel (Fashion . . . A Condescending Game, 1969), to construct a philosophy of fashion. Like Adorno who acknowledged play as an intrinsic aspect of human existence, Fink argues that the playful character of fashion transpires through play because of its encounter with the body-in-the-world. Dress plays a central role played by dress in its relationship with the body. Clothing and fashion, like play, Is an embodied experience that belongs to the realm of sociability because it is always a confrontation with beings. Marino writes that in claiming that our existence is embodied,

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we are world-open in an embodied way (leibhaft), that reality is bodily (leiblich) disclosed to us and that the human body (Menschenleib) is not a thing but rather the human being’s effective reality (Wirklichkeit), Fink clearly relies on insights into the dual dimensions of our bodily life . . . as Körper (an objective body) and as Leib (a lived body).24

As Marino claims, the phenomenological conception of Körper and Leib opens up a space for rethinking the dress–body relationship. Clothes serve a protective cover but also as a ‘close-to-the-body’ means of expression and as a second sort of ‘second body’ (zweiter Leib).25 Fashion as lived gives it an undeniable level of engagement as opposed to the detachment that Adorno expects of autonomous art. However, fashion is never reducible to the body, as its critics, who give primacy to art, suggest. Rather it foregrounds the extent to which the human body is bound by narratives, not only of desire but of basic ontology. What art and fashion have in common is that they are driven and disposed to excess which leads to play. Put another way, this ‘play’ has been interpreted as the will-to-art. It is also the will to the multifarious sign values oriented towards body and action that we call fashion.

13

Lady Gaga’s gaga aesthetics

For one of the first staged events of Lady Gaga’s career was a public ritual selfbirthing—“[l]ike a [wo]man without origins.” This occurred at the 2011 Grammys where she appeared for the performance of ‘Born This Way’ (2009) encased in a giant egg from which she ‘hatched’ wearing a sheath-like dress that augmented her breasts and buttocks (Figure 13.1).1 In her own testimony at the time she repeatedly stated that she was inspired by humanoids, aliens, hybrids and cyborgs. Since then her rise as a significant figure in popular culture has made her an unmistakable celebrity but achieved not what has in large part been her own terms. She has enlisted major designers for her costumes – Hussein Chalayan, Christian Lacroix, Terry Mugler, Alexander McQueen, Viktor & Rolf – while also designing her own. In addition to serving the basic intent as commercial conduits, her videos – such as ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Telephone’ – contain subversive elements, and visual tableaux with novel objects that vie not only in imagination and intensity but in critical appeal, with contemporary art. It is the sum of these parts that make her an inestimably important figure in the evolving debates around femininity and gender, while demonstrating how popular culture can resonate with these themes in ways that extend well beyond entertainment. Or rather, it is precisely because of being original, edgy, entertaining and fun that messages about dissonant themes hit their proverbial target. Before delving into the subject in more detail it is best to begin with an analysis of the work of the artist Cindy Sherman that draws its main methodology from Adorno. In her essay, ‘Unmarked and Unrehearsed’, Mary Caputi makes a series of illuminating observations that have uncanny relevance to the critical appraisal of Lady Gaga. Caputi claims that ‘Sherman’s art overwhelmingly proclaims that the female body, deeply inscribed in the text of femininity, stands capable of disrupting that text thanks precisely to its own inscription’.2 The chief theoretical support for Caputi’s argument is Adorno’s admission that autonomous modern art is also perforce synonymous with bourgeois art, and that its autonomy derives from the very system that it wilfully critiques. It is an impasse that we discussed in detail in Chapter 9 in relation to Adorno’s reflections on Beethoven. In Caputi’s words:

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Figure 13.1 Singer Lady Gaga performs onstage during the 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards held at Staples Center on 13 February 2011 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Lester Cohen/WireImage (Getty Images).

For even as such art highlights its autonomy from cultural forces, it nevertheless displays the degree to which it remains enmeshed within the very system that it critiques. The same can be said of anti-fashion while claiming to critique fashion become fashion itself. Its ability to be autonomous thus remains blunted, and it is ‘culpable’ in that it always, to some degree, reaffirms given social relations.3

Thus autonomous art is only ever a relative term, and it is forever ideological vulnerable in the manner and trajectory of its critique, a condition that the cultural critic Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak would later cast as the ‘double-bind’, wherein her critique of Western culture was made possible and effective in the very discursive circles she was critiquing.4 As another example of this condition, Caputi cites the film Pollock (2000) (and arguably one of the few films about artists that is not bad) in which the eponymous artist (played by Ed Harris) is regularly frustrated by his lack of independence and autonomy, being forced to befriend members of the establishment – represented in the figures of Clement Greenberg and Peggy Guggenheim whom he also beds – that his work and that of his contemporaries ostensibly set out to rebel against. Hence ‘if Greenberg and Guggenheim stood for the establishment, the Pollock was confronted with the troubling paradox of desiring what he opposed, of striving to embrace and find approval from precisely what he shunned’.5 This outlines the predicament of the independent modern artist. (Contemporary art has resolved this by absorbing ‘successful’ artists into celebrityhood.)

 Lady Gaga’s Gaga Aesthetics 107 Drawing on Sherman’s early but extraordinarily influential Film Stills, Caputi explains the artist’s strategy of playing off the viewers’ – male and female alike – habitual expectations of femininity ingrained by countless renditions in the media, from commercial film to advertising, over countless years. Depicted in black and white, the works hearken to an only barely distant past, to a recently bygone era, which makes the viewer lower his or her guard, as if not implicating the image in the tribulations of the present. The photographs are of no particular film but are staged as if taken from one that exists, depicting a woman, Sherman herself, in poses of transition, as if prized from a larger narrative. Her hypothetical protagonists observe themselves, pause pensively or look demure – in every case the viewer is made acutely aware of the act of viewing, and only an insensitive viewer would not be sensitive to being made aware of the kind of viewing that is being done, that is, active and thereby in a position of greater power. It is upon this realization that Sherman then, conceptually if not physically, turns the gaze back on them, with an ‘ah-ha’ moment of realization that they have literally been caught in the act of assuming a particular form of judgement that is freighted with a set of deep-seated presumptions about femininity. Using the very syntax put in place by the culture industry, inscribing herself within it which can only have been done without sizeable foreknowledge, Sherman stages an inversion that exposes the visual syntax for what it really is, narrow and disempowering. Caputi places emphasis on Sherman as a performer and the ways in which she uses performance art to highlight the performative nature of gender. Drawing on the pioneering work of Judith Butler on gender performativity, but also other scholars such as Penny Phelan and Amelia Jones, Caputi states that Sherman’s work amplifies the constructs of gender through the ruse of overstatement and the complex interplay of affirmation and irony. With performance we are made aware of role-play and masking. By performing her femininity, a femininity that is not strictly her own, Sherman disturbs the notion through its self-conscious confirmation, thereby opening divide between sex and gender which is in the best interests of normative powers to keep hidden. Caputi continues: ‘Disaggregating biology and gender brings into focus the weight of culture’s text, highlighting how pervasively its influence shapes our desiring imaginations.’6 We are drawn again to Butler’s famous insight that the best evidence that gender is performed is most conspicuous in the drag queen, for whom all the signifiers of the opposite sex are writ large.7 Sherman is also dragging, and it is through her contrivances that she willingly sets to incite the viewer’s unease. In line with Adorno’s expectations of art worth its while, Sherman’s work ‘shares in the hopeful dimension of Adorno’s aesthetic theory inasmuch as it, too, displays a refractory quality vis-àvis the reigning cultural paradigm’. Where she departs, according to Caputi, is that Sherman ‘does not share Adorno’s anxieties about the dark irony of emancipatory art’. As opposed to the muted, retracted character of Adorno’s vision of art, atoning for the sins of history, Sherman is comfortable with the way in which she slides into, re-enacts and obfuscates ‘the established lexicon of femininity’s meanings’. In doing so she has to engage in some degree of complicity. Yet: ‘Unrepentant, she sets in motion a staid rebellion, eager to demonstrate that within the thematics of gender, things are not what they seem.’8

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Figure 13.2  Lady Gaga performs on the Other stage on day 2 of Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm on 26 June 2009 in Glastonbury, England. Photo by Tabatha Fireman/ Redferns (Getty Images).

Hopefully a reader who is aware of some of musician and performance artist Lady Gaga’s works and appearances will see the close parallels to her and her works with this analysis. While she may be said to affirm traits of (normative) femininity, it is regularly done in an exaggerated way or such that the signs of the strategic manipulation of the self-image are beyond doubt to the point of surfeit. From the very outset, Lady Gaga, as identified by her sobriquet, posed herself as an extravagant object for display, an extraterrestrial, a foundling from another world, with a persona that scrambled signifiers of gender and breaking the mould of citational capability. She embodies what Jackie Stacy calls ‘off-gender flux’,9 to characterize the ability to move across gender and temporal registers. For instance, on the cover of her album ‘Born This Way’ she has a body of a chopper motorcycle at the Glastonbury Festival (Figure 13.2). Gaga appeared as a wall of glass. Gaga is a construct before all else: object, woman, wo-man, human and alien combine and morph into each other. Then, quite suddenly, as if overnight and out of nowhere, Gaga the exaggerated performance artist disappeared and Gaga the ‘serious’ performer made her appearance in Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star Is Born (2018), earning her Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Best Original Song. In many respects, Gaga can be seen as a carrier, or cipher for her own transmedia celebrity, much as art had been to Andy Warhol or music to David Bowie and Madonna (who we will discuss in the following chapter) all of whom have influenced Gaga’s creative trajectory. Andy Warhol is a good place to start when considering Lady Gaga’s persona, as he was the artist par excellence who played the artist. In fact, his own enigmatic

 Lady Gaga’s Gaga Aesthetics 109 self was his greatest masterpiece. In many ways Warhol completed the Duchampian project by turning away from inanimate objects in calling them art and designating himself as an artist, much in the manner of Baron von Munchhausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair – all variants of the double-helixes of self-birth. Throughout his life, friends and hangers-on were devout on experiencing the ‘real’ Andy, the Andy divested of mechanicity, and ironic detachment, the Andy behind the mask. They wanted to find an Andy more like them, to find that moment when he let down his guard, as if at the end of a long day’s work playing Andy, revealing the ‘real’ vulnerable sentient human hidden for the sake of the performance of the Warhol brand – a moment of vulnerability comparable to, say, Oscar Wilde’s private moments with Bosie or Robbie Ross as opposed to his public self. But the real Andy was the mask. This profounder, humanist self, proved to be chimera. It was never uncovered, and the opacity of his character has kept the legend of the enigma of Warhol alive. Like Warhol’s Factory, Gaga created the Haus of Gaga comprised of a collective of stylists, fashion designers, dancers as so forth. And like Warhol, Gaga has always had an unconventional attitude to her own gender. J. Jack Halberstam writes that Gaga is Warholesque in her ‘use of celebrity, fashion and gender ambiguity to craft and transmit multiple messages about new matrices of race, class, gender and sexuality, and even about the meaning of human’.10 ‘I strive to be a female Warhol’, Gaga said. I want to make films and music, do photography and paint one day, maybe make fashion. Make big museum installations. I would be a bit more mixed media than him [Warhol] probably – combining mixed media and imagery and doing more of a kind of weird pop-art piece.11

Warhol is not alone in the construction of Gaga’s persona as a gender outsider, her excessive and freakish bodily performances that she self-consciously cultivates can also be attributed to David Bowie. Bowie, like Warhol (and Gaga), was sold on the idea of public image as never-ending performance and self-promotion as the highest art form. Just as Warhol played at playing the artist, Bowie played at playing the rock star, or rock god. Bowie cultivated an androgynous image by curating a number of camp identities or what Camille Paglia refers to as ‘unsettling crossdressing scenarios’12 – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane (a lad insane), Thomas Newton the alien and the Thin White Duke who was void of all emotions. As Michael Dery writes, Bowie was the ‘cum laude of The Warhol School of the Fabricated Self ’,13 whose artificial, stilted doll-like affectations mirrored that of Warhol’s. Bowie’s chameleonic ability to shift across multiple registers is what Gina Misiloglou calls ‘camp, self-transformation, trashy cultural references, megalomania, space aliens and intergalactic travels’. This concept of camp transgression is also what informs Lady Gaga’s personae, namechecking Warhol and Bowie while taking other-wordliness to the extreme. ‘My whole career is a tribute to David Bowie’, said Gaga in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, ‘You meet or see a musician that has something that is of another planet, of another time, and it changes you forever.’14 Gaga has often been compared to Bowie in the many ways that she reimagines herself and tests the boundaries of presentation and representation.

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Figure. 13.3  Singer Lady Gaga performs a tribute to the late David Bowie onstage during the 58th GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on 15 February 2016 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for NARAS.

Two months after his death from cancer, Gaga paid tribute to Bowie at the 2016 Grammy Awards music ceremony in a transformative performance that channelled his aura. Filled with computer graphics visual effects and numerous costume changes, Gaga impersonated Bowie’s frantic dance moves in a series of songs that paid tribute to his career. Beginning with ‘Space Oddity’, Gaga appeared on-screen with Bowie’s signature thunderbolt drawn on her face as her head mutated with psychedelic colours (Figure 13.3). Her choreographed performance included the songs ‘Fashion’, ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘Rebel Rebel’ as she played on a hydraulic keyboard. Gaga’s transgression had been subsumed into the hyperreal. Hours before her scheduled performance, Gaga appeared at the Staples Center dressed as Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s alter ego. She wore a celestial satin blue suit with matching sparkly blue eyeshadow and her hair was styled in an orange mullet. All in all, she looked like what David Bowie would have worn and looked like if he were performing at the Grammy’s – except it would be 1973, instead of 2016. What is important to note here is that Gaga was impersonating Bowie as a tribute to his musical virtuoso while highlighting the tragedy of his loss. Bowie, like Warhol, haunts Gaga like spectres channelling her music and her performances. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine Gaga credited Bowie’s music for introducing her to ‘a lifestyle of total immersion in music, fashion, art and technology. You meet or see a musician that has something that is of another planet, of another time and it

 Lady Gaga’s Gaga Aesthetics 111 changes you forever’.15 Gaga’s music is critical, encouraging action to socially inscribed experiences. When she wrote (with Diane Warren) the song ‘Til it Happens to You’ for The Hunting Ground (dir. Kirby Dick, 2015), a documentary about the incidence of sexual assaults on college campuses in the United States, Gaga was drawing on her own personal experience of rape. Attributing her approach to trauma through her artwork, Gaga said that ‘all of the things [that] I went through were on my own quest for an artistic journey to fuck myself up like Warhol and Bowie . . . and just go for it’.16 When Adorno wrote about music in the 1930s he differentiated between ‘serious’ music such as Jazz that would not submit to market laws and ‘light’, or commercial, music. Later in the 1960s, Adorno applied his approach to popular music which he denounced as ‘entertainment’ music and that despite its political themes was tied up with consumption. Had Adorno been alive today, he probably would not be a fan of Gaga and would argue that she was a mass-manufactured commodity manipulated for our consumption rather than an artist whose work evokes an emotional response. But what makes Gaga stand out from her contemporaries is that the image (or the Haus of Gaga brand) she carefully curates across a diversity of media forms, including fashion, film and television, clashes with the music that she produces. In this case, Adorno (and Horkheimer) would argue that although her music and style deviates from established norms, Gaga fits neatly into the social hierarchy defined by the large corporations that dominate the music industry. However, we would argue that Gaga defies these regulations enforced by the industry by exploiting capitalism’s force on art and music to draw attention to her work as a form of protest that brings awareness to the public. One such example is the Meat Dress constructed entirely of flank steak designed by Franc Fernandez and styled by Nicola Formichetti that Gaga wore at the 2010 MTV Music Video Awards to draw public attention to the American military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DADT) policy regarding the service of gays, lesbians and bisexuals (Figure 13.4). Or, the white pantsuit and hat that Gaga wore to the 2016 American Music Awards (AMA) in homage to the women’s suffragette movement and to show her support for Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Or, when she performed as Jo Calderone at the 2011 VMA’s accepting the award for best female performer on behalf of Gaga for the single ‘Born This Way’, saying that Gaga was not here. Gaga’s performance dressed as the cursing, chain-smoking Calderone drew attention to the instability of gender as artifice (Figure 13.5). As Theresa L. Geller notes, that ‘while the meat slabs and the Kermit the Frog [jacket] point to the fragility of boundaries, Calderone teetered on the brink of destroying them all together’.17 Worn in 2009 during an interview on a German Television show, the Kermit Jacket designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac was made up of numerous Kermit puppets sewn together and was intended to draw attention to the inhumane use of animal fur. It is during these moments that Gaga’s performance art and image as an artist is used to serve significant social ends and highlight the need for political change. In his book No Respect, Andrew Ross writes that categories of intellectual (and creative) taste such as ‘hip’ and ‘camp’ (among others such as ‘bad,’ ‘sick’ or ‘fun’ taste) are strategies that justify popular culture’s value as ‘art’. These strategies serve as powerful conduits for the expression of social desire that would otherwise be considered illegitimate.18 Camp addresses the relationship between artifice and nature

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Figure. 13.4  Lady Gaga attends the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on 12 September 2010 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage (Getty Images).

in the construction of gender identity which lies at the heart of Gaga’s aesthetics. Her fashion, persona and other markers of feminine masquerade are deployed in the virtuoso skill that she manoeuvres between alternate visions of herself as a camp diva, Mother Monster, Jo Calderone or as Ally in A Star Is Born (2018). Ally is a shy and introspective singer on the rise who is in an ill-fated relationship with an alcoholic country-and-Western singer, Jackson ‘Jack’ Maine (Bradley Cooper), on the decline. Jack first meets Ally in a drag bar where he first hears her sing. Unlike the drag queens in her midst, Ally is wild and fresh, the antithesis of Lady Gaga herself, with her studied appearance and labour-intensive hairstyles. In a word, Ally is ‘natural’, she plays the ‘real’ Lady Gaga, the woman shorn of pretences and prostheses. But this was not the real Lady Gaga, only Lady Gaga playing at the real her, imitating a ‘natural woman’, the woman freed of stylistic encumbrances. (In interviews after the film’s release, Gaga stipulates that Ally is the antithesis of her.) Put yet another way, Lady Gaga played a persona of her hypothetical, because non-existent, authentic self. It is a masquerade in reverse, where the everyday is placed before the staged, where the latter is closer to the truth of the everyday. What, then, does this tell us about Gaga aesthetics? Within the performative mode, we can again separate autonomy from heteronomy. Performance art as it developed out of the 1960s was a reaction to the commercial types of theatricalizations, the film and media that Adorno and Horkheimer were also writing savagely about. Performance art

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Figure.13.5  Singer Lady Gaga dressed as ‘Jo Calderone’, winner of Best Female Video Award and Best Video with a Message Award for ‘Born This Way’, poses in the press room during the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE on 28 August 2011 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images.

as it developed in the digital age became noticeably more diverse and heterogeneous, commenting on commercial mass media, often indistinguishable from it. The moving image is available to anyone with access to digital technology. It has turned the present culture into a culture of performing. This means that people are alternately performing themselves or as an alias or number of aliases. It seems, then, that authenticity that Adorno claims to be so intrinsic to art seems no longer plausible, if not misguided. If in Adorno’s view mass-produced culture is homogenous which deprives art of its aesthetic essence and political commitment, what can be said of virtual technologies when everything, including art, is reproduced into millions of images making it difficult even to challenge or even shock people? In other words, virtual reality normalizes and makes everything palatable, including the Other, be they gay, lesbian, trans or otherwise. Instead, Gaga’s claims for authenticity, what José M. Yebra calls ‘inauthentic camp’, lies in her ability to re-appropriate and normalize the queer/freak/geek Other.19 Yebra writes that Gaga ‘does not exclusively impersonate females and femininity, she opens up the scope of impersonation beyond gender differences into posthumanism and monstrousness, which typifies transgressive camp sites distinct from the broader camp/pop environment’.20 The lineage of the artist dressing up that begins arguably with Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy is now a mainstream activity far from limited to the artworld, such as it is.

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Type in ‘Miranda’ into your YouTube menu and chances are you will find ‘Miranda Sings’ at the top of the algorithmic link, the alter ego of Colleen Ballinger, an online character parodying the entitlement of millennial youth. As with the evaluation of Sherman earlier, her character sits squarely within a subjective and discursive system. Her physical performance as a stand-up comedian only occurs after the virtual online presence. Internet culture has given birth to the ‘YouTuber’ which, together with the indomitable presence of podcasting, is now seen as a legitimate and burgeoning freelance career. By extension, the Internet has also witnessed a diversification of performance culture, such that the former delineation between performance art and mainstream theatre that could have been made in the 1960s and 1970s is next to impossible and something of a pursuit that follows a redundant question. It is on the Internet that we can also see the meeting of Lady Gaga and the famous performance artist Marina Abramovic, an encounter that we might, with all goodwill, call the ‘Gaga-ization’ of Abramovic. Artists like Jeff Koons have not hesitated to pair with high-end corporate brands such as Louis Vuitton, but with Abramovic the tenor of the collaboration is different. This has to do with performance art itself which, in its earliest incarnation with Dada in 1917, was already a means of protest against the war and of burgeoning commercial culture. Its roots in protest means that it naturally evolved in the protest era of the 1960s. Its history is laced with connotations of rebellion against government and corporate power, claims to equal rights for women, Blacks and other racial minorities and so on. Built into the meaning and the method is the resistance to the commodity, since time past is hard to sell or buy. Except of course in reproduction, which was initially a contest area for performance art, but which has evolved to being more than the reproduction of an event but to a genre unto itself, where performances are made not for live audiences but to be filmed or photographed, or both. This has also meant the slow infiltration of performance art onto the commercial market. Sherman herself can easily be seen as a proponent as a performance artist whose work is exclusively for the purpose of being photographed. The ease with which anything can be filmed and photographed has made such debates anachronistic, and arguably the live performance becomes the artefact of subsequent film. Although it was still nascent at the time of Adorno’s death, the evolution of performance art, then, can be read as experiencing a natural osmosis from autonomy to heteronomy on a number of levels, including most importantly its absorption in popular culture, and the radical (and perverse) confusion of categories that this generates. It is not surprising that to hardcore artists, especially belonging to an earlier generation, Abramovic’s step into mainstream popular culture is viewed as a betrayal, and adulteration of her art, and what she had hitherto stood for. The early days of Abramovic’s career feed into the now universal of the penurious artist sacrificing everything for her art. In her own words in an interview with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, she recounts the rigours endured at the beginning of her career: When doing performances, especially in the 70s, it was hardly a paid job. But I was a radical, I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t want to work in a restaurant or any other job, and afterwards go and be an artist. I just wanted to be an artist. So,

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Figure. 13.6  Artist Marina Abramovic (L) performs during the ‘Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present’ exhibition opening night party at the Museum of Modern Art on 9 March 2010 in New York City. Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.

to minimize expenses I lived in a car, together with my partner, Ulay. A French Citroën, like a sardine can, not that kind of luxury thing, like the trailers with bathrooms and stuff, just nothing: literally just a box. We lived like that for five years.21

Although real, Abramovic’s beginnings read like the de riguer right of passage of the serious artist. On the surface of it, the ‘pure’ apostolic (apostle to art) origins seem to run aground when she oversees a series of exercises for Lady Gaga: The Abramovic Method Practiced by Lady Gaga (2013).22 Lady Gaga has proclaimed that Abramovic ‘is such an incredible piece of art in herself ’.23 She refers specifically to Abramovic’s retrospective at MoMA and her performance, The Artist Is Present (Figure 13.6), a work that directly engages with the celebrity of the artist. (She spent the entire time of the exhibition, March–May, in the exhibition space.) There is currently no space to discuss this work in detail, suffice for now to ask the question, when James Franco comes to sit across from Abramovic24 – and not forgetting to a rapt audience in no less than an auspicious venue as MoMA – does this not create a closed reciprocal circuit between art and celebrity? And we look at the amount of views that the meeting has received on YouTube we might also seriously ask about the strength of the afterlife of the performance on free, mainstream media as opposed to the ‘real thing’. The lack of distinction that media platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube make between mainstream and independent content also means that what can be said to constitute an autonomous artwork and one that is not is harder and harder to tell. That work that can be said to be autonomous is subjected to comment and therefore

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to interaction shows that the distinctions are radically eroding. That commercially packaged and curated content shares the same space as domesticated and independent content suggests a democratization but also a slippage of the norms governing who and how adjudicates on what is consumed. It is a rearticulation of aesthetics that gives ground for the argument that an artist can engage in more than one kind or genre of activity at one time. A music video can be a music video tout court and can be seen as such, but it can also be seen with other lenses, as gender commentary, as short film or as fashion film. A good example of this is Lady Gaga’s (unconventionally long) cinematically inspired music videos for ‘Paparrazzi’ (2009) and ‘Telephone’ (2010) co-written and directed by Jonas Åkerlund, costumed by Beu Åkerlund and choregraphed by Laurian Gibson. 25 The music videos are thematically linked and deal with the collateral damage associated with modern celebrity culture and the extent to which artists will go to maintain stardom, even murder. Simply put, ‘Telephone’ picks up where ‘Paparazzi’ left off – Gaga is incarcerated for murdering her lover who ‘did her wrong’. Gaga’s boyfriend (played by Alexander Skarsgård) attempts to murder her by pushing her over the edge of the balcony. Gaga survives (although literally and figuratively broken) rising from the dead as the Maschinemensch in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to plot revenge and poison him. The florid Rococo architecture and extravagantly gaudy interiors of the mansion where the attempted murder takes place – crystal chandeliers, designer bijoux, furs, diamonds and currency (printed with Gaga’s head – a metatext to the hubris of celebrity) strewn haphazardly across the bedroom floor (an indication of wild lovemaking) contains all the hallmarks of a camp tragedy – ‘the bizarre, the unnatural, the artificial and the blatantly outrageous’.26 ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Telephone’’s plot is a familiar one that appeals to a gay male audience who identify with the protagonists suffering and rejection and strength and perseverance for revenge and justice. In this Gagain script, the fragility of humanity is exposed through the devices of artifice and exaggeration. Conceived as short films in the style of Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino, the videos contain cultural references to popular culture that link the two videos together. As Lorie Burns and Mike La France note, the mugshot of Gaga taken at the end of ‘Paparazzi’ is used by police to locate and imprison Gaga in ‘Telephone’. In addition, the dead fashion models in ‘Paparazzi’ are likened to the dead diners whom Gaga poisons in ‘Telephone’. Similarly, Gaga wears a ‘Micky Mouse’ yellow catsuit (designed by Jeremy Scott) and glasses when poisoning her boyfriend in ‘Paparazzi’, the same glasses (and yellow pencil dress) are worn by Beyoncé in ‘Telephone’ when she poisons the diner (whom we assume is her boyfriend). Gaga and Beyoncé have the same blank Warholian expression when they poison their lovers. ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Telephone’ are an ‘orgy of signification’27 that draw on product placement and popular culture to shape meanings of gender and race: cigarette sunglasses, Diet Coke hair rollers, a telephone hat, Miracle Whip cream, Wonder White sliced bread and Mickey Mouse sunglasses, to name a few. Much like Warhol, who fed into mass consumer culture as much as made statements against it, Gaga challenges gender stereotypes of the Hollywood starlet and ‘perfect’ housewife by using products as artistic devices and fashion discourse to construct character identities.

 Lady Gaga’s Gaga Aesthetics 117 While the video clips act as short films, they can also be viewed as fashion films and are saturated with designer garments. Styled by Nicola Formichetti, the videos include garments designed by Thierry Mugler, Jeremy Scott as well as Victor & Rolf and shoes by Christian Louboutin. Clothing is a form of signification that constructs discourses of class, age, sexuality and gender. When placed in the context of fashion, clothes go beyond the material objects and act as a code, message or symbol that speaks of who we are and who we are not. The designers used in ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Telephone’ are known for their sexually aggressive aesthetics, in particular Thierry Mugler whose designs draw on Helmut Newton’s sexually provocative models whose towering heights recall phallic women and sadomasochistic mistresses. Newtons’ photography, like the mutilated bodies models of Guy Boudin that appear in ‘Paparazzi’ ‘artfully lost and damaged’,28 is suggestive of violence, sex and power and poses the question of living as an object of public desire. Boudin’s gritty photography ‘channels cinéphilic references to Hollywood glamour through the codes of b-movies, noirs and crime thrillers’.29 As Paul Hegarty notes, ‘Gaga does not represent these things, but operates them, trying to act on them as she cites.’30 Much like the stilettoed heel that has become a symbolic weapon and a trope of sex and power, Gaga wears Christian Louboutin stilettoes to complete her image as a seductive murderer, a Hollywood femme female and a camp diva. ‘One of the greatest things an artist has ever done’, commented Gaga in reference to Bowie’s last album Blackstar, ‘[is] making a masterpiece that is their own eulogy. Can you imagine? To go to the studio every day and put your heart in that place, where you are just saying goodbye to life? I mean, his art made him strong.’31 If the mechanisms and strategies of artists have changed, as they operate inside the potentially alienating system of the culture industry, there are core values, which Adorno highlighted, that have not. That is, that the art that can most ably speak to the qualities of living an authentic life never foregoes the shadow of its own immanence.

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Madonna to the power of X

Madonna Louise Ciccone, better known as Madonna, is a musical artist whose political activism comes directly from within the culture industry and provides disenfranchised groups with empowering identifications. Madonna maintains control over the production of her image (much like Lady Gaga) by making her own meanings out of the symbolic systems available to her, which is then passed onto to the audience who comprehend, interpret and respond to a set of meanings that are connected to social and political power. Her shifting constructions of identity in the commodification of self are in fact driven by her constant search for new audiences and markets. As Douglas Kellner notes, Madonna has ‘deployed some of the most proficient production and marketing teams in the history of media culture’. In his often-sighted early study of what has become known in as the Madonna phenomenon, John Fiske writes that in the mid-1980s, Madonna resisted patriarchal femininity by offering her fans alternative female subjectivities that they experienced as empowering. Analysing videos such as ‘Like a Virgin’ (1984) and ‘Material Girl’ (1985), Fiske notes that Madonna uses various devices such as parody and irony to subvert hegemonic systems of representation. In other words, the perception that Madonna fans were ‘cultural dopes . . . manipulated at will and against their own interests by the moguls of the culture industry’ needs to be rethought. To a large extent, the Frankfurt School’s early analysis of the intersections between capitalist economies, technologies and the culture industries laid the foundations for the enterprise of cultural studies. Scholars such as John Fiske adopted the concept of ‘resistance’ as a way of arguing that the masses are not duped by the culture industry but instead possess the critical abilities to ‘resist domination. Using Fiske’s textual analysis of Madonna fans as a starting point, this chapter examines the music videos of Madonna’s fourteenth album Madame X released in 2019 to argue that Madonna deploys the culture industry itself as a tool of resistance against hegemonic power. Like Lady Gaga, Madonna has always been a queer icon and a voice for the disenfranchised: trans, gay, lesbian, Black, coloured and Other. Her music speaks to a generation that grew up during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Sex Wars when lesbian feminists became engaged in debates relating to pornography, prostitution, transsexualism and sexual practices such as sadomasochism and butch-femme identities. It was an important turning point, because discourses of desire began to challenge critiques of gender identity and sexual politics and Madonna played a critical role in its dissemination and media reception. The 1980s and 1990s were

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vehemently political and anti-commercial, and Madonna represented the glamourous sexual outcastes who were fighting for public acknowledgement. But as E. Anne Kaplan argued back in 1993, ‘there is no real Madonna, for she is the site of a whole series of discourses, many that contradict each other, but that together produce the divergent images in circulations.’1 Right from the very beginning Madonna courted trouble by challenging the prevailing hegemony, pushing the limits of the socially acceptable. Twenty years later in February 2020, Madonna accused the London Palladium of trying to censor her live Madame X show by lowering the metal fire curtain midway through her performance, because it was running over time. Venting her anger on Instagram, Madonna wrote that ‘everybody’s hurt, what is important, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect with everyone else alive. Artists are here to disturb the peace’,2 she says, borrowing the words of American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. She then shared a video which showed her swearing from behind the curtain, the crowd chanting for more, then Madonna emerging with her dancers and backup singers to perform ‘I Rise’ with the lights turned on and her microphone switched off. The song, much like the entire album, is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit rising above adversity. ‘Freedom’, sings Madonna, ‘is what you choose to do with what’s been done to you.’3 The video, directed by Peter Matkowsky, is a montage of media footage depicting social justice movements, the Parkland shooting in Florida where a gunman opened fire in a high school killing seventeen people and injuring seventeen others, Olympic gymnast Aly Raismen’s testimony about sexual abuse and supporters of LGBTQ equality. Towards the end of the song one of Madonna’s dancers reaches towards the audience and grabs a rainbow flag emblazoned with MX in bold black ink. What is interesting here is that Madonna likens the struggle and role of the artist as a voice of the people who suffers and sacrifices for their art so that they too may be liberated. Much like Baldwin whose complex narratives of race, sexuality and class contained in his novels and plays agitated for social and political change, so too does Madonna’s lyrics. In the song ‘Killers Who Are Partying’ she says, ‘I will be gay if the gay are burnt / I will be Africa if Africa is shot down. . . . I’ll be Islam if Islam is hated. . . . I’ll be Native Indian if the Indian has been taken.’ Art in this sense becomes a kind of confession that sheds light on the illusion of safety that society creates, except it doesn’t quite work like that. Madonna is not gay, African, Islamic, nor is she indigenous, but nor does she claim to be, instead her music is intended ‘to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos’.4 The artwork for the single features Madonna wearing a bandana wrapped tightly around her head, like the type of bandana worn by freedom fighters and revolutionaries. In early 2019, the introductory video to the album Welcome to the World of Madame X was released as a teeser on Twitter and Instagram and set the pace of what was to follow. Madame X is a secret agent travelling around the world changing identities, fighting for freedom, bringing light to dark places. Madame X is a dancer: a professor, a head of state, a housekeeper, an equestrian, a prisoner, a student, a mother, a child, a teacher, a nun, a cabaret singer, a saint, a prostitute.

 Madonna to the Power of X 121 Where once Madonna’s image strategically embodied masculine fantasies of submission to appeal to young female fans who identified with the experience of subordination, now she appeals to her fans sense empowerment regardless of age, class, race or sexuality by offering them means of escaping ideological control through her music. As Fiske effectively argues, Madonna’s fans are not ‘cultural dopes’, but actively choose to listen, watch and imitate her and make meanings that connect with their social experiences. Her image becomes a site of ideological struggle between the ‘forces of patriarchal control and feminine resistance, of capitalism and the subordinate, of the adult and the young’.5And so as Madame X travels around the world, she comes to represent multifarious identities rather than embodying a single subject position at all. In fact, Cathy Schwichtenberg writes that Madonna’s array of identities represents ‘the conditions for the coalescence and mobilization of identities yet to be pacified by commodity culture’.6 If any song on Madonna’s album is intended as a reminder of the power of music to heal wounds and the strength and resilience in overcoming adversity it must be ‘Batuka’. Directed by Emanuele Adjai, the song brings together the multigenerational all-female Portuguese Orchestra Batukadeiras, who gather to perform the Cape Verdean musical tradition of Batuque. The Black revelry with its polyrhythmic structure, its call-andresponse vocal style and its accompanying dance rhythms finds its origins in the African slave trade to the Americas during the nineteenth century and represents the cultural manifestation of homelands that were left behind by transported slaves and as a means of expressing Black resistance.7 João José Reis suggests that the Batuka was a source of concern for the authorities (slave masters, police and the Catholic church) who, on the one hand, viewed the Batuka as ‘immoral, barbarous, bad for labour productivity and as a rehearsal for rebellion’ or, on the other hand, as a healthy distraction in placating tensions between master and slaves.8 Filmed overlooking the Atlantic Ocean near Lisbon, the video begins with the sound of the wind billowing against simple drawstring cotton shirts hanging on a clothes line. The white-washed shirts act as tropes of imperialism, displacing the black body and cultivating a fetishistic image of empire. In Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, Ann McClintock cites the commodification and advertising of soap products as a means of cleansing the black body of its darkness and degeneracy as part of the colonizing process. McClintock analyses an advertisement where three small African boys, one of whose skin is bleached white, are sailing in a soapbox on the colonial seas under a sign that reads, ‘We are going to use Clorinal and be like de white nigger.’9 It is through the analysis of commodities such as soap and mirrors that McClintock develops the concept of consumer spectacle, which exemplifies the shift from scientific racism to commodity racism. As McClintock writes, ‘these images represent evolutionary time as time without women’.10 In the context of the ‘Batuka’ video, the shirts come to represent the sexual exploitation and the domestication of women’s labour. The camera pans to a stone cross perched on a stone bench by the cliffside, an intertextual reference and a stark reminder of the Catholic church’s involvement in the conquest of the America’s, the systematic massacre of its Indigenous people and the churches’ role in the transatlantic slave trade. At the end of the video the women stand on the beach watching the spectre of the slave galleons sail off to sea.

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Throughout her musical career Madonna has Used the tropes of Catholicism as a style aesthetic and consistently refers to contradictory meanings and images of women (as virgin or whore) present in the church’s patriarchal structure. Madonna revels in defiling the Catholic church with her overtly sexualized costumes and performances. In her music video ‘Like a Virgin’, released in 1984, Madonna wore white lace and transparent fabrics that exposed her corset, pantyhose and garters, in what was intended to be a wedding dress. Pairing a crucifix and rosary beads with a bra, mesh top, rubber bracelets and a Boy Toy belt buckle, Madonna’s intention was to juxtapose innocence against deviancy (Figure 14.1). This was the first of Madonna’s sacrilegious scripts, switching between virgin to whore and back again to reveal the underlying contradictory tension prevalent in culture vis-à-vis sexuality. Then there was ‘Like a Prayer’ (1989) with its sacrilegious imagery and themes of burning crosses, rape, stigmata and interracial sex with a Black saint. In her Rebel Heart Tour (2015–16) Madonna and her dancers wore modified nun’s habits and twirled around dance poles to ‘Holy Water’, an intentionally blasphemous song (Figure 14.2). Weaving these opposite meanings into a text calls attention to their roles in male hegemony and calls into question the ways in which these meanings conceptualize women and femininity. By parodically undermining her sexuality within a patriarchal context, Madonna exerts control and power in the way that she uses signs and meanings to convey transgression and rebellion to her fans. When the video ‘Justify My Love’ was released in 1990 depicting sexual images of sadomasochism, voyeurism and bisexuality, feminist Camilia Paglia praised Madonna as ‘the future of feminism’.11

Figure 14.1  Madonna on stage for her 1985 ‘Virgin’ Tour. Photo by Mark Downey Lucid Images/Corbis via Getty Images.

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Figure 14.2  Madonna performs her Rebel Heart Tour at Allphones Arena on 19 March 2016 in Sydney, Australia. Photo by Zak Kaczmarek/Getty Images.

In a way, the Madame X album is a continuation of the themes that have come to represent Madonna as a feminist figure and as a crusader ‘against the patriarchal forces of religion, gender, and celebrity’.12 Madonna first embodied the persona of martyr and French nationalist (later canonized) Joan of Arc for the Rebel Heart Tour publicity campaign. The tour poster depicts Madonna dressed in a leather corset designed to resemble medieval armour, except that instead of being completely covered, her breasts are exposed. She wears a black embroidered angelic halo made of wire, similar to the halo worn by saints in religious iconography, and clasps a knightly sword in her hands. Her eyes are closed shut and her lips parted as though caught in a moment of orgasmic ecstasy by the camera. The reading here is quite explicit, the sword acts as a fetishized symbol of phallic power that mediates between the sacred and the fleshy. The image contains an erotic aura of danger that transcends between the boundaries of purity and profanity. When interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine, Madonna said that ‘more than anything, [she was] drawn to [Joan of Arc’s] commitment to what she believed in. In the face of death, she did not back down . . . that is a theme that resonates with me and women need female role models like that’.13 Madonna uses popular culture as a means in which to forge a particular type of hypersexualized, über-empowered femininity that appeals to third-wave feminists and intersectional politics. In 2019, Madonna released ‘Dark Ballet’, the fifth track from her Madame X album starring transfeminine hip-hop performer Mykki Blanco performing as Madonna who is performing as Joan of Arc (Figure 14.3). Blanco mouths along to Madonna’s lyrics, ‘Cause your world is such a shame  /  Cause your world’s obsessed with fame / Cause your world’s in so much pain / Cause your world is up in flames.’ What is

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Figure 14.3  Mykki Blanco, ‘Dark Ballet’, Madame X. Madonna (released 14 June 2019) YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=6Ua​​g​w4zs​​er8.

so interesting about this video is that Blanco is not only a man performing a popular song, he is a man performing being a woman while performing being Madonna who is performing being Joan of Arc. It is a triple-helix that provocatively but clearly discloses the instability of gender and its elaborate fabrication. By casting a Black man as a persecuted person, much like the Black saint in ‘Like a Prayer’ (1989), Madonna was drawing attention to the disproportionate impact of inequality on minorities. The video begins with a quote from Joan of Arc: ‘One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.’ Filmed in a non-linear narrative, the video is an allegory about the evils of discrimination and portrays a harrowing vision of injustice exemplified in the figure of Joan of Arc. Set in an imposing medieval cathedral in Lisbon sometime during the Inquisition, Blanco is tried and convicted of heresy by the Catholic church and imprisoned. He is bound with ropes and led by Catholic bishops from his stone cell to the cathedral square where he (like Joan of Arc) is burned at the stake. ‘She fought the English and she won, still the French were not happy’, said Madonna, ‘Still they judged her. They said she was a man, they said she was a lesbian, they said she was a witch, and, in the end, they burned her at the stake, and she feared nothing. I admire that.’14 Madonna appears only briefly at the end of the film, her face covered in a black lace mourning veil known as ‘widow’s weeds’ that was worn by high-ranking Catholic women during the Middle Ages (Figure 14.4). Half-hidden by her veil, she offers encouragement to Blanco as he is led from his cell to his execution. The video ends with a quote from Blanco: ‘I have walked this earth, Black, Queer and HIV positive, but no transgression against me has been as powerful as the hope I hold within.’ Towards the end of the same year, Madonna released the next instalment of the Madame X video entitled ‘God Control’, directed by Jonas Åkerlund (who also directed Lady Gaga’s ‘Paparazzi’ (2009) music video discussed in the previous chapter of this book). Set in the present, rather than the future, ‘God Control’ depicts a societal order that is brutal to its inhabitants and offers a grim scenario of the effects

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Figure 14.4 Madonna, ‘Dark Ballet’, Madame X. Madonna (released 14 June 2019) YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=6Ua​​g​w4zs​​er8.

of gun ownership, which when placed in the wrong hands can cause the death of innocent lives and the loss of individual freedoms. The film begins with an automated American Typewriter font mimicking that of the antiquated manual typewriter. After billing the title of the song, the screens that follow declare: ‘THE STORY YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS VERY DISTRURBING. IT SHOWS GRAPHIC SCENES OF GUN VIOLENCE./ BUT IT’S HAPPENING EVERY DAY./ AND IT HAS TO STOP.’ Cut to a New York skyline at night, with the sounds of police sirens blaring, then an alleyway with a gibbous moon in the sky, the lower corner reads ‘3:00 AM.’ Pan down a bland abandoned hallway of a tenement building then a close up to a burning cigarillo in a crystal ashtray, a metaphor for the passing of time, we see Madonna sitting at a desk typing. The scene is not much different from the opening scene of The Matrix (dir. Wachowski Brothers, 1999) and acts as an intertextual device to shape the film’s meaning. Automated neon green Japanese text mimicking the code of a computer scrolls down the screen, the capitalized title of the film, THE MATRIX appears in the same American Typewriter font as the font used for the billing of ‘God Control’. Somewhere in an abandoned hotel room in a major city, Trinity is cornered by government agents and overpowers them with her superhuman strength. The sound of an antiquated telephone is heard ringing, Trinity picks up the receiver and disappears. Madonna is typing the lyrics to ‘God Control’ in an open letter to the American people pleading to take action. ‘I want to draw attention through my platform as an artist to a problem in America that is out of control and is taking the lives of innocent people. This crisis can end if our legislators act to change the laws that fail to protect us all’,15 said Madonna. As she types the lyrics to the song, ‘Everybody knows the damn truth, our nation lied, we lost respect. When we wake up what can we do?’ The audience can hear a radio recording announcing a

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Figure 14.5 Madonna, ‘God Control’, Madame X. Madonna (released 14 June 2019) YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=zv-​​s​dTOw​​5cs.

nightclub shooting massacre that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Pulse gay club massacre in Orlando Florida (2016) where forty-nine people were killed and fifty-three seriously injured. Hanging above Madonna’s desk is a framed portrait of the revolutionary artist Frida Kahlo alongside a photograph of feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and political activist Angela Davis,16 heroes of women’s struggle for equality and independence (Figure 14.5). A pile of old books is stacked on the floor, arbiters of knowledge amid old technology; a tape recorder, an antiquated telephone and an old turn table record player. The scene is interspersed with a montage of graphically violent footage of a nightclub shooting, a chilling recreation of the Orlando massacre. The footage is close enough to the audience’s reality so that they are able to forge an emotional attachment with its contents. Portrayed as dark, grim and chaotic, ‘God Control’ offers a future that is unsafe and dangerous, much like George Orwell’s novel 1984, or The Matrix. Its plot is not too dissimilar to anyone of the dystopic films that highlight the failure of systems that have been put in place to protect humanity. The brutal environment and bleak conditions of American neoliberalism are motivators for Madonna who, as the hero, is trying to dismantle the power structure and free its citizens. Even though the sequence of events that seem to unfold in present time, the story is told in reverse, marking time backwards. In keeping with her image as a sexual provocateur, Madonna is dressed in a tight pencil skirt, white shirt and black tie. She is the film noir journalist with a gendered twist. Her faintly visible black brassier under her white shirt hints at her transgressive personae. Her lace gloves, rings and multiple silver bracelets are a stylistic device intended to connect Madonna with her performances in the 1980s when she wore an overload of accessories, armfuls of rubber bangles, beaded crucifixes and large heavy earrings. Madonna uses products whose meanings belong to the past and recycles them into a new context and a new style, a practice typical of popular culture. As Fiske notes,

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Figure 14.6 Madonna, ‘God Control’, Madame X. Madonna (released 14 June 2019) YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=zv-​​s​dTOw​​5cs.

this street-produced bricolage of style, the commodities of the capitalist industries are purified into signifiers . . . they do not acquire new signifieds; rather, the act of freeing them from their ideological context signifies their uses’ freedom from that context.17

The camera pans to a man with a machine gun mowing into the crowd in a disco where revellers are dressed in 1970s fashions, lame halter tops, bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, spandex pants and Afro hairstyles. The colour is high-key, the blood luridly staining everything, Madonna, now wearing a blond wig and dressed in sequined jacket and matching flared pants lies dead on the dancefloor, one among a lifeless crowd of partygoers (Figure 14.6). Although the scene draws loose references to the Orlando nightclub shooting, the stylistic and sartorial orientations are drawn from the 1970s’ New York disco, Studio 54 with its disco ball, floor-to-wall mirrored dance floor and topless barmen and busboys. At Studio 54, fashions varied ‘from Pierre Cardin suits to silver cosmic clothing, from [Roy] Halston originals to backless halters, through all the shades, cycles and fetishes of chic, camp and queer’.18 Known as the ‘Sodom and Gomorrah of high street’,19 Studio 54 attracted celebrities from fashion, film, music and art: Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Truman Capote and supermodel Jerry Hall were regular patrons (Figure 14.7). The club was known for its ‘velvet rope policy’ and the doorman would select guests ranging from unknowns to high profile gay, bisexual and straight celebrities. The wellbuilt (‘stacked’, ‘buff ’) topless barmen and busboys dressed in sneakers and tiny gym shorts added sexual energy to the crowd. Returning to ‘God Control’ the video rewinds back to the start of the shooting with club patrons waiting to enter the disco. The club is a disused theatre, like Studio 54, and is called The Globe after Shakespeare’s theatre. The scene is a duplicate of the photograph taken by Michael Norcia of a crowd milling outside Studio 54 in the 1970s

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Figure 14.7  (L-R) Editor Bob Colacello, model Jerry Hall, artist/publisher Andy Warhol, singer Debbie Harry, writer Truman Capote and jewellery designer Paloma Picasso at a Studio 54 party for INTERVIEW magazine and Harry’s appearance on the cover. Photo by Robin Platzer/Twin Images/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images.

(Figure 14.8), instead, the words ‘WE NEED TO WAKE UP’ appears on the billboard (Figure 14.9). The scene switches to a Catholic church and a statue of the Virgin Mary fills the screen before the camera pulls back to reveal a line of coffins lining the aisles between the pews. Towards the end of the video, or in this case the beginning, Madonna is walking along the street when she is held up by two men wielding a revolver. ‘Gun Control’ ends with footage of news coverage from various real-life shootings and a close-up of Madonna’s face with a tear rolling down her cheek. The message is clear and simple, Madonna is raising awareness of gun violence. The film ends with a quote (in the same American Typewriter font) from Angela Davis: ‘I AM NO LONGER ACCEPTING THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE. I AM CHANGING THINGS I CANNOT ACCEPT.’ The statistics follow: ‘EVERY YEAR OVER 36000 [the number in read and steadily mounting: 36001, 36002 etc.] AMERICANS ARE KILLED IN ACTS OF GUN VIOLENCE./ AND APPROXIMATELY 100000 MORE ARE SHOT AND INJURED./ NO ONE IS SAFE. GUN CONTROL. NOW [‘now’ in red]. All of this is dubbed over with hurried, haunting whispers repeating, ‘wake up!’. The last refrain, ‘wake up!’, may strike the reader as the most extreme example of Adorno’s ‘committed art’, l’art engagé, which he found so objectionable in the work of Sartre and any work directed squarely at the social. In as much as it is a rallying-call, a thinker of Adorno’s generation may also read into the exclamation itself the shadow of the Nazi exhortation, Deutschland Erwache!, ‘Germany Awake!’ In other words, a

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Figure 14.8  Manhattan’s renown disco and nightclub Studio 54 was located at 254 West 54th Street. Photo by Michael Norcia/Sygma via Getty Images.

Figure 14.9  Outside the Globe discotheque from Madonna’s ‘Gun Control’ music video. Madame X (2019) YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=zv-​​s​ dTOw​​5cs.

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counterargument may be that, despite its ostensibly benign intentions, it appeals to viewers in a way that is of a piece with demagogy and is therefore complicit in the same codes of reception that potentially enslave us. A defence could run something as follows. First, we have established the porousness of autonomous and heteronymous art, especially with the prevalence of filmic and cinematic approaches in art. To the accusation that the video is complicit in mass appeal and manipulation, that can hardly be refuted. However, heteronymous art exists within a heteronymous field of which Madonna’s video is an example, as one of a growing set of video-films that sit outside of the simple MTV-mode of music video. Further, it sits within a landscape of reception where a large portion of its viewers supplement their reception of material with (heterogeneous) searches, including verifications and alternative perspectives. Moreover, we remain uncertain as to the status of the video. While it does perform its commercial function in the manner of other videos, it nonetheless contains within it aesthetic fields that are not immediately legible. In short, what it does is in excess of its primary function, but the video uses its primary function as a platform for this excess. As James Hellings points out, that in Adorno’s thought, while art is a thing, whether a painting of a musical score and therefore something to be bartered, it ‘may also become something more than an object or a commodity. Hence the important part of art’s double character’. Art’s status as an artefact, that it is more than a thing, and in this case Madonna’s video is more than just a video to launch a song (for is it the song that launches the video?), means that it can also reach ‘what makes art spontaneous, playful and autonomous or independent from society’.20 This is not a far-fetched conclusion if we cast ourselves forward proleptically to speculate on what this video could mean in ten or fifty years-time, when it is truly an historical artefact on a number of counts (Madonna dead, social interactions changed, music different, etc.) for it to exist as a work that speaks more universally to gratuitous human barbarism. It is straining our relationship with the reader here to draw parallels with the literal and triumphal character of many major Renaissance works of art, except to suggest that the autonomy we experience from them now is not the same as their intent or the conditions of their making. The conclusions we draw may be hard to swallow but it is as follows: instances of Gaga aesthetics in contemporary culture have good grounds to be considered to be poems, and even more likely in the future when the dross of anecdote has dissipated and collapsed, through the weight of time and forgetting, into their autonomy, so that the allegorical and aesthetic qualities are permitted free-reign. They will collapse into their abstracted independence and autonomy. Or we may take yet a different tack here, from one of Adorno’s most famous and oft-cited meditations in Monima Moralia, namely ‘Baby with the bath-water’, where he states: Among the motifs of cultural criticism one of the most long-established and central is that of the life: that culture creates the illusion of a society worthy of a man which does not exist; that it conceals the material conditions upon which all human works rise, and that, comforting and lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of existence.[ . . . ] But precisely this notion, like all expostulation about lies, has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology.21

 Madonna to the Power of X 131 He later warns: ‘To identify culture solely with lies is more fateful than ever, now that the former is really becoming totally absorbed by the latter.’22 Adorno’s lamentation over the failure over culture, swallowed by its own mendacity, may seem to have come full circle. Madonna can be sued as an exemplar of the product of the cultural industry and its beneficiary who then uses that industry as vehicle for negotiating ethical values that transcend lines. This is more, we contend, of capitalism absorbing and using the strategies that critique it, but rather, due normative nature of mass culture, a necessary and effective means of expression. This raises a new set of arguments, which include effectiveness, in which the effectiveness of art cannot be measured by numbers but by its offshoots, progeny and epigones.

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Fashion and the redeployment of kitsch

In 1939 Clement Greenberg penned what was arguably be his first major essay and what would inarguably be the backbone of the aesthetic position he would advance throughout his career. The premise of ‘The Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ is easily deduced in the title: the avant-garde is a product of modernity that is also an antidote to modernity’s many debilitating spoils. It was written while Greenberg was twenty-nine, when he was more preoccupied with literature than art, and he would later renounce the essay and its conception of kitsch. Yet despite its flaws, it remains a reliable sounding board for many of the interests and anxieties of his time and, indeed, the cause to which many modern artists of his time were rallying – namely, a more profound and effective form of expression than that of the easy middlebrow taste of uncritical cultural consumption. Contemporaneous of Adorno and Horkheimer, and also influenced by Marx, it can be adduced for the pervasiveness and entrenchment of aesthetic and cultural binaries that were in play, and the need to articulate them, against the overwhelming extent of popular culture with its ever-stronger grip of society. With youthful fervour, Greenberg writes of the ‘hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society’ through the way in which the avant-garde have embraced abstraction, whereby ‘[t]he avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms’.1 This may have been rousing then, but it certainly reads as dated now, although some of us can be forgiven for feeling nostalgia for the ‘master narratives’ (Lyotard) that it cherishes. A dimension of this is also the kinds of certainties that it also avails itself of, for we are now in a cultural place in which there is no longer an avant-garde and where kitsch has been deployed and redeployed by artists and designers in many reflective and dynamic ways. Club-footedly, we might reorient the title to: ‘Good Art and the Imbrication of Kitsch’. Earlier, we discussed that kitsch is too often lazily defined, too often the straw-man and therefore more of a ‘non-concept’. Yet it is the persistence of the binary that Greenberg uses, a persistence that is present because it is so facile, that has been so advantageous to kitsch’s redeployment in art and in fashion from the 1980s until the present day. Kitsch as the taste both unobserved and taken too far, as the bugbear of beauty and truth, is used in fashion in particular as a vehicle to rebuke the concept of good taste wherein good taste is simply a cipher for normative codes of behaviour and appearance. At the end of the 1980s, Artforum looked into the most common word (noun or adjective) used in art criticism in their own pages and came up with ‘kitsch’. To be sure, this was no small affirmation of Danto’s end of art thesis and Kuspit’s notion of

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post-art. The place, nature and status of kitsch in art, as we have already touched on, remains a controversial one, although somewhat diminished today. The critical values of kitsch in art follow out of Pop but are still tenuous. The so-called age of post-Pop in the 1980s was viewed as a capitulation of the highly experimental and ephemeral practices of the previous two decades that were associated with the protest era. The conceptual ‘dissolution of the object’ and the primacy of the idea were clearly strategies that were aimed to sidestep the problems presented by the commercialization and mass-marketing of beauty, alternatives to the ‘white cube’ of modernist display, and to invent aesthetic experiences that were not easily commodifiable. The ‘return to painting’ as it was called in the 1980s and the resurgence of the commercial scenes in New York and then in London have now commonly been viewed as holding a mirror to the rampant corporate culture that climaxed in the crash of 1987, but which rose again the following decade. The pseudo-critical two-step perfected by Koons but followed by countless other artists was to say that the artist raises a mirror to the world, so to flout kitsch is to make the viewer aware of the rampancy of commodification. The overt commodification of the artwork, its absorption into the system, was supposed to be a component of the work’s critical value. Its complicity was somehow ironic. To this day, there is far from a consensus as to the critical efficacy of such work, whether it opens up a new order of uninhibited beauty or whether it is a self-satisfied solipsism. Kitsch in fashion, we can argue, is another case altogether. And here we advance again the argument in Critical Fashion Practice, where fashion proves to be more effective in its critical power than art. For one, the historic bias that place art above fashion immediately relegates fashion into the realm of kitsch, or close enough to it, since it is frivolous, ‘feminine’, unthinking and invested in the moment as opposed to posterity. But in fashion, as we argue further, kitsch is used as a syntax that is central to a restaging and a reorienting of classic good taste. It has been so pervasively redeployed that we barely know what classic good taste is any more except as something that is highly reductive to the point of austerely drab. Kitsch is the close sibling of camp, as it is with the ways in which folk and tribal idioms have been used as alternatives to high modernism, even to the extent that they knowingly counter the traumatic histories that are embedded in the hierarchy of aesthetic values. Kitsch is a fillip to the regnant order. In fashion, it is a multivalent mechanism of speaking out that is not limited to status and consumption, as seen in bling, which is used by an underclass as a challenge to the wealth of the classes that oppress them. Kitsch provides the scene of power in which the excessive and the artificial play havoc with the serious and elevated. In the hands of fashion, good taste has now become a by-word for a form of suppressed reductivism and opprobrium levelled at audacity. In short, ‘good taste’ in contemporary fashion is used with caution. This chapter looks at the ways in which kitsch style is deployed in fashion as a way of exposing the very constructedness of gender and class by using irony and camp as strategic devices.

The importance of being fabulous In 1987, the New York Times fashion critic Bernadine Morris described the Christian Lacroix aesthetic as ‘a costume party where everyone has a good time’.2 Lacroix’s ‘more

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 135 is more’ kitsch style was best summed up by comedienne Jennifer Saunders’s character Eddy (Edina) Monsoon, the hard-drinking, drug-taking public relations fashion agent from the British comedy series Absolutely Fabulous (dir. Bob Spiers, 1992–6). Eddy would often quip (while juggling a bottle of wine or Bollinger champagne) ‘Lacroix Sweetie, Lacroix’, a catchphrase that made the French fashion designer a household name. Lacroix gained further popularity in 1994 when the British electronic music group the Pet Shop Boys released a single titled ‘Absolutely Fabulous’, based on the comedy show. The video featured the Pet Shop Boys performing while Eddy and her best friend, louche fashion editor Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), danced around the band (Figure 15.1). The series portrayed the reckless fashion-obsessed pair whose comedic misadventures parodied designer collections, celebrity gossip, diet fads, ‘it’ bags and everything else associated with fashion. If it appeared in the fashion press, then Eddy and Patsy would provide satirical commentary in the show. In short, the viewers’ own complicity in the series was never without being brought to task about the extent of consumerist excess to which they were susceptible. One could not ‘get’ the show without also to some extent being the butt of its critique. Although the cult series ended in 1996, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (dir. Mandie Fletcher, 2016) followed in the same vein. The incorrigible duo gatecrash a Vogue fashion shoot and are accused of killing supermodel Kate Moss leading them to be ousted from the fashion industry. Threatened by fashion designer Stella McCartney, the comedic pair manage to escape to Pierre Cardin’s mansion in the French Riviera and attempt to regain their wealth and status among the glitterati. With cameo appearances by ‘Baby Spice’ (Emma Bunton), supermodel Jerry Hall and designer Jean

Figure 15.1  Actresses Joanna Lumley (left) and Jennifer Saunders (on the right wearing Christian Lacroix) in a scene from the episode ‘Fashion’ of the television sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, 28 June 1992. Photo by Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images.

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Paul Gaultier, the flouting of high fashion with garments by Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, the film is a scathing satire of the fashion industry and how dress and appearance is bound up with class and status. ‘Everybody’s there, everybody!’, remarks Eddy, ‘Big names, you know. Chanel, Dior, Lagerfeld, Givenchy, Gaultier, darling. Names, names, names.’3 Eddy sums up fashion’s role in class status by namedropping at a fashion launch, ‘every rich bitch from New York is there; Hockwenden, Ruttenstein, Vanderbilt, Rothschild, Hookenfookenberger, dachshund, rottweiler sweetie’. The parody of class distinction is exaggerated in an effort to display the vulgarities of celebrity culture by referring to dog breeds. Georg Simmel wrote that class distinction, essential to the workings of fashion, is driven by two forces – imitation and individuation. Those who belong to a high social class maintain their position within a group by granting its members status as a means of exercising control. While imitation by those belonging to the lower classes only provides incentive for new innovation, ‘the lower classes look and strive towards the upper classes, and they encounter least resistance in those fields which are subject to the whims of fashion’.4 At the broadest level, wealth (made visible through conspicuous consumptions) measures status and fashion is the principal means by which wealth is displayed. In Absolute Fabulous, Eddy and Patsy belong to the nouveau riche, acquiring wealth and status through their participation in the fashion and celebrity industry. Their choice of fashion items and accessories are ostentatious and flamboyant and almost verging on the ugly and the kitsch. Another way of thinking about the use of kitsch in fashion is the way in which designers use the ugly as an aesthetic to push the boundaries of innovation. Muccia Prada, for example, applies unconventional and discordant textures, colours and prints together in a collection. Fabrics clash and stripes are placed next to florals, appearing almost perversely uncomfortable and jarring to the eye. This is what makes Prada’s style uniquely ugly. Another example is Alessandro Michele for Gucci, whose aesthetic is characterized by overdress on multiple registers, using outdated styles for an aggregate of content-saturation and aesthetic dissonance. Gucci and Prada’s intention is to make ugly fashionable by invoking ornamentation and excess to challenge conventional standards of beauty and taste. As discussed in Chapter 8, Adorno viewed the concept of ugly as interchangeable with kitsch. For Adorno, kitsch is a sociological concept rather than an aesthetic one and considered kitsch as an intrinsic part of the culture industry in the way that it trivializes societies problems with its dehumanizing methods. It chews up culture and transforms it into tasteless and easily digestible drivel. Following Adorno, John Storey writes that if a certain motif becomes successful in popular culture ‘it is used to the point of commercial exhaustion which culminates into the crystallization of standards’.5

Fashion as kitsch The relationship between kitsch and fashion has its roots in the study of luxury, conspicuous consumption and class differentiation that dates back to the fourteenth century. Luxury goods and fashion were associated with the upper class, and sumptuary

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 137 laws were put in place to regulate class distinction and keep the lower classes in their place. This was a dynamic that remained until the advent of the couture industry in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century with the designs of Charles Frederick Worth, who effectively ushered in high fashion. Haute couture was based on finery and built on the premise of preciousness, craftsmanship and an unquestioned order of beauty. There was something unshakable about it, as unshakable as the lineages and status of the feudal order it clothed. Couture was the domain of the aristocratic elite who set styles and trends that ‘trickled-down’ class structures and were copied by the masses. In his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Thorstein Veblen argues that clothing and fashion were an important way in which the leisure class could compete among themselves for status and prestige, as well as a way of displaying their superiority of their class, in short, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. The ownership of quality clothing made by time-consuming methods and expensive materials added to the prestigious reputation of the wearer granting them social status. The appearance in public of current up-to-date clothing and the latest fashions becomes a sign of pecuniary strength. ‘If each garment is permitted to serve for a brief term, and if none of last season’s apparel is carried over and made further use of during the present season’, observes Veblen, ‘the wasteful expenditure on dress is greatly increased.’6 The imitation of clothing styles worn by the elite leisure class by women of lower classes reflected their social aspirations, or ‘the aesthetics of deception and self-deception’.7 Kitsch is therefore a product of modernism, where social mobility is in theory available to all, but where it can be seen as inadequately deployed when the very elite codes of finery are violated through vulgar simplification. Here we are the nub of the way that kitsch is a device for the implementation of power: it is the point of collapse of an aesthetic that is not sufficiently self-aware, that is not reflective of class, privilege and knowledge. In this model, fashion operates as a status symbol that emphasizes social hierarchy and any imitation runs the risk of the vulgarization of taste. As Matei Calinescu opines, ‘the whole concept of kitsch clearly centres around such questions of imitation, forgery [and] counterfeit’.8 That said, kitsch fashion can be interpreted as the intermediary stage between elite fashion and mass fashion and imitates highly valued models, though as Calinescu insists, kitsch has little, if anything to do with conspicuous consumption.9 Adorno was scathing and highly critical of Veblen’s ‘status-seeking’ theory of conspicuous consumption, arguing that Veblen had misjudged the modernity of kitsch (as copy and imitation). For Veblen, ‘the false castle is nothing but a reversion’, argues Adorno: He knows nothing of its intrinsic modernity and visualises the illusionary images of uniqueness in the era of mass production as mere vestiges instead of responses to capitalistic mechanisation which betray something of the latter’s essence. The realm of objects which functions in Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is actually a realm of artificial imagery. It is created by a compulsion to escape from the abstract sameness of things of a kind of self-made and futile promesse du bonheur.10

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A good place to begin to extrapolate the redeployment of kitsch in fashion is with Norbert Elias’s essay, ‘The Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch’, published in 1935, at about the same time that Adorno was writing his essay ‘On Jazz’ (1936). According to Johan Goodsblom and Stephen Mennell, Elias’s essay was reminiscent of the work of Adorno in the way that it was over-theorized. However, unlike Adorno who critiqued culture in his writings, Elias provided a diagnosis of culture instead.11 In Elias’s view, the aesthetic transformations that took place during the nineteenth century and its effect on clothing were profound and well documented, however much under-investigated. In Elias’s opinion, the division between aesthetic styles (say, Regency Style) is not one that can only be adequately understood in terms of a change within the same social strata, but one that is an expression of the rise of power of a new social class, that of the capitalistindustrial bourgeoisie who replaced court style and taste with a ‘capitalist’ style. ‘Can one speak of a “style” in this context?’ asks Elias, who then proceeds to outline the conditions which gave rise to kitsch style as an aesthetic form whose heightened formalism was threatened by its decadence, creating an ‘unabating struggle against formlessness and disintegration’.12 If, as Elias writes, kitsch style expresses the formal uncertainty found in all artistic production within industrial society, then the origins of kitsch can be found in the ambivalence and struggle of all great artists for their clientele. In court society taste was handed down tacitly and upheld by each member of a social group, while artists were controlled by a rigid, socially powerful circle, producing work that played an active part in both confirming and shaping artistic taste. Under capitalist-industrial conditions artists became isolated in the free market and became dependant on patrons, which meant they had to mine their own resources to produce work to an unknown public. The influence of the bourgeoisie created specialist connoisseurs and tastemakers who taught individuals the correct attitude in dress, comportment and appearance. ‘The dandy Beau Brummell, the archetypal specialist in taste’, writes Elias, ‘had to instruct English good society, the courtiers and even the Prince Regent himself, in poise and taste.’13 A coterie of snobs and imitators circled these new connoisseurs because their influence conferred prestige. The bourgeoisie’s quest to attain the lifestyle and luxury enjoyed by the aristocracy resulted in the mass production and manufacture of cheaper copies of exclusive products. As Elizabeth Wilson notes, ‘this led to enhanced definitions of good/bad taste as the rich and powerful endeavoured to create new social and cultural barriers between themselves and the upstarts.’14 In this sense, kitsch is ‘nothing more than the expression of the tension between specialist tastemakers and the underdeveloped, uncertain taste of the masses’.15 Seen in this light, the industrial nature of prêt-à-porter (known as ready to wear or off-the-rack) fashion, with its continual cycle of change and innovation as distinct from the made to measure or bespoke clothing regarded as haute couture, can be considered kitsch. High-end ready-to-wear apparel is often based on a popular couture garment and then duplicated to raise the designer’s visibility and presented as catwalk collections during fashion weeks. According to this topology, what would we call a ready-to-wear apparel that uses a kitsch idiom in its styling? Kitsch-kitsch? Hence again, the term ‘kitsch’ runs adrift to its own inherent instability. Elias further maintains that the distance between the elite and the masses in late capitalism collapses into a kitsch style, conditioned by leisurely pastimes and

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Figure 15.2  A passer-by wears a white mesh studded, ruffled and pleated short dress, and a black Chanel quilted leather bag, on 4 July 2020 in Paris, France. Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images.

emotionally charged by the conditions and pressures imposed by social regimentation. This emotive charge ‘designed solely to touch the beholder’s feelings’,16 and to give pleasure of some sort, can also be found in the altercation between a stress on form and classic fashion often associated with haute couture and conflated with modern style. Classic fashion is defined by its use of clean silhouettes, tailored cuts, neutral colours and minimal detailing, compared on the other hand to the radicalism of kitsch fashion with its busy prints and bold clashing colours. This idea of pleasure in kitsch fashion may be difficult to define in the sense that Adorno understood it as a kind of parody of catharsis, in which pseudo-art, in this case ready-to-wear fashion, gives the passive working-class consumer a diversion through the heightening of aesthetic stimuli.17 Perhaps a way in which to describe the pleasure derived from kitsch fashion is the manner in which a garment or accessory, say the classic Chanel quilted flip bag with gold strap with its brash display of (the signs of) wealth, can evoke desire to own the object for what it represents (Figure 15.2). Thus kitsch fashion, with all its ostentatious flamboyance of wealth, parodies class connoisseurship and bad taste. Here, kitsch slips into bling.

Kitsch as a strategy of parody and irony By the beginning of the twentieth century, women’s ready to wear became increasingly affordable and available to purchase, and designers began manufacturing bulk

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quantities that became accessible to women regardless of income and class. After the Second World War, with the accelerating proliferation of popular culture, the rise of counter-cultural youth casualized fashion to an even greater extent and subcultural styles began to ‘bubble-up’ from the street onto the catwalk. As David Ayes writes, this counter-cultural diffusion was associated with ‘a new flamboyancy and the cultural extremes of kitsch: glam rock, progressive rock, disco . . . flares and heels’.18 The breakdown of social class differentiations and the collapse of style distinctions via mediation and digitalization meant that fashion was no longer about class distinction but represented representation itself. The demand for new fashion collections and the speed in which fashion travelled capturing trends and propelling forward cheap synthetic copies of original styles resulted in ‘fast fashion’. Major fashion corporations Zara, H&M and Top Shop began imitation of high-end designs by replicating street styles and fashion trends in ‘real time’ via rapid production and manufacturing techniques that saturated the market. Fashion labels responded by increasing the number of yearly collections, sending the fashion system into overdrive and in turn becoming unsustainable. The sharp divide once held between haute couture and prêtà-porter could no longer be maintained: fashion began to reflect taste preferences rather than class differentiation. Whether couture or ready to wear, fashion has often deployed symbolic systems from popular culture such as film, comics and pop art as a way of highlighting the

Figure 15.3  A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2019– 20 fashion show at Milan Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2019/20 on 21 February 2019 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 141 effects of mass culture on consumption and everyday life. Arbiters of high taste have always been suspicious of mass culture, and avant-garde artists have deployed kitsch as a form of irony to shed light on the corporatization and conspicuous consumption of everyday life. For instance, Moschino’s Autumn/Winter 2019 readyto-wear collection featured models dressed as 1960s game show hosts parodying the television game show franchise, The Price Is Right,19 complete with giveaway prizes such as washing machines, gym sets, a red sports car, a bedroom suit and a snooker table which were displayed on the catwalk. The catwalk was lined with bright flashing lights and models wore exaggerated 1960s kitsch style bouffant wigs and gold-sequined dresses with diamanté necklaces (Figure 15.3). Other garments included a jacket styled on the classic Shott leather jacket with matching pencil skirt and handbag printed with American currency, as well as other garments with gambling paraphernalia (Figure 15.4). Accessories included bags that were printed and shaped as American dollar bills, tubes of toothpaste, champagne bottles and a briefcase and matching coat with poker machine prints (Figure 15.5). This collection was all about money. Perhaps the kitschiest of kitsch accessory was an oversized cape printed with a television dinner of microwavable frozen vegetables and butter. The collection is intended to highlight the impact of mass culture on consumerism and mass consumption.

Figure 15.4  A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2019– 20 fashion show at Milan Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2019/20 on 21 February 2019 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

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Figure 15.5  A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2019– 20 fashion show at Milan Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2019/20 on 21 February 2019 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Kitsch and mass fashion Fashion, food and the body have long enjoyed a mixed but consistent partnership. This is because fashion shares a symbolic relationship with food and the body that converge through codes of social interaction. Whether exercised through regimes of dress, diet, cosmetic surgery or bodybuilding, fashion and food inscribe the body into a system of signs. As we remark in Fashion Installation, Body, Space and Performance (2019), the consumption of food has been at the centre of fashion productions, whether print or digital media, fashion films or catwalk installations. Noteworthy is the Chanel readyto-wear Autumn/Winter 2014 collection which was presented at a purpose-built supermarket installation at the Grand Palais in Paris, where models paraded down the isles posing as customers pushing shopping trollies, carrying shopping baskets with the Chanel handbag chains and talking among themselves while grabbing Chanel stamped products off the shelves (Figure 15.6). The produce and products all contained the brands logo in a nod towards mass consumption. The models wore kitsch accessories and brightly coloured sneakers that matched the aisles of bright merchandising. The retail market has always been portrayed as a harmonious and naturalized practice that disguises systems of inequality, especially the supermarket chain as a massmarket retailer and a site of gendered power. The use and representation of the image of the post-war woman as an ideal consumer of retail goods has been a theme that has

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Figure 15.6  A model walks the runway during the Chanel show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2014–15 on 4 March 2014 in Paris, France. Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images.

dominated fashion for some time. In the heavily industrialized economies of 1960s Europe and America, domestic life was altered with the availability and affordability of domestic appliances to solve tasks that previously required manual labour. The process of suburbanization and economic boom in the West created a greater division between genders as men returned from the war with the promise of work and a return to public life, and women were pushed back in the household and into the domestic interior. The availability and marketing of domestic goods from electric irons to washing machines were intended for women to create an ideal and harmonious homelife for her family. Women were constructed by popular culture and mass media discourses as the ideal, thin and graceful housewife whose daily routine consisted of cleaning the house and shopping for groceries to prepare the evening meal in anticipation of her husband’s return from work. In this masculine post-war dream women were available exclusively to service mans every whim. Images in the popular press presented women as sex kittens who greeted their husband at the front door every evening on his return from the office dressed in a lingerie or a peignoir set and fluffy heeled slippers. Martini in hand and roast baking in the oven, he would place his weary head on her lap as she listened patiently about his day at work. While femininity was constructed as the image of the dutiful wife, men were presented as playboys tinkering with technological gadgets and fast cars. Films like the 1967 American comedy-drama The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols) starring

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Figure 15.7  The Graduate, lobby card, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, 1967. Photo by LMPC via Getty Images.

Anne Bancroft as Mrs Robinson, the bored and attractive middle-aged housewife who seduces a young (and inexperienced) college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman, captured the popular imagination (Figure 15.7). So too did French actress and sex symbol Brigitte Bardot (Figure 15.8) who starred in a number of films that portrayed her as a sexually overcharged teenager as in Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman, dir. Roger Vadim, 1956), where she is filmed lying nude and frolicking in her backyard, or a troublesome schoolgirl in Cette sacrée gamine (released in English as Naughty Girl, dir. Michel Boisrond, 1956) who is kidnapped and held captive by the handsome and wealthy cabaret entertainer, Jean Cléry. Celebrities such as Bardot and Bancroft reinforced women’s bodies as commodities available for men. This hyperreal fantasy of sexual servitude and availability has been hijacked by fashion designers and stylized in kitsch settings as a strategy to reveal the very constructedness of femininity as masquerade in the same way that drag exposes the artificiality of gender with its exaggerated gestures and clothes. The same kitschy 1960s styling is not only regulated to the fashion catwalk, but has also been adopted by the fashion media as a trope for the hedonistic consumption of designer goods. A good example is the fashion editorial ‘Domestic Bliss’, photographed by Steven Klein for W magazine in June 1995. The fashion editorial featured celebrities Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (‘Branjelina’) as a sixties married couple with a family of triplet boys living in suburban Palm Springs. Jolie is styled as a sex kitten (the

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Figure 15.8  UNITED STATES – CIRCA 2000: French film star Brigitte Bardot arrives in Los Angeles with boyfriend Bob Zaguri. Photo by Hal Mathewson/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.

term coined for Brigitte Bardot) with bouffant hair, bright pink lipstick and wearing an ostrich feather dress designed by Giambattista Vali, while Pitt is dressed in retrostyled menswear. The editorial’s concept promoted the irony of the perfect American suburban family disillusioned by commodity culture. In a land of milk and honey where the poverty and scarcity of the war had given way to opportunities and prosperity, America became a dream land where popular images of glamourous lifestyles were no longer fantasies but were seen as achievable. America was the dream machine that offered a carrot in the form of movies, stars and a stream of new products. Mass media campaigns used images of women to sell products from cars to holidays, fashion, cosmetics and fragrances. Stephen Gundle writes that ‘the tensions between domesticated and eroticised female appeals was played out not only in the mass media and leisure industries, but also in the new dialectic . . . [of] the Americanled consumer revolution’.20 Sophistication, glamour, class, good taste and even sex was photographed, packaged and sold. According to Gundle, during the 1960s, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was the most photographed woman in the world. As the wife of President John F. Kennedy, she redefined the image of the first lady, as his widow she held a special place in the imagination of the nation and the world: later, as the wife of the Greek shipping millionaire Aristotle Onassis, she became a queen of café society – no longer a saint, she became a super celebrity. ‘Jackie’ was the informal sobriquet by which everyone knew her.21

As the first lady, Jackie spent a considerable amount of money on designer clothes and accessories which she crafted as part of her signature look as a fashion icon. Colourful

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pill box hats designed for her by Roy Halston and oversized black sunglasses (later adopted by Prada) which she often paired with headscarves, capes and coats of camel hair. She wore elbow length white satin gloves with strapless, shoulder-baring gowns to official events and often accented her small waist with strategically placed bows. Her luminous bouffant hair style created by Kenneth Battelle (who also styled Marylin Monroe) became the coiffure that came to symbolize the hedonism of the 1960s. But it was her pink Chanel bouclé tweed skirt suit that she was wearing when President

Figure 15.9  Nine Jackies, Andy Warhol, 1964. Acrylic and enamel on Canvas. 80-3/8 x 64-3/8 inches unframed. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala Florence/ The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York.

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 147 John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, that became etched in America’s historical consciousness and the public imagination as ‘emblematic of the ending of innocence’.22 The photographs taken a few hours later of her standing next to Lyndon Johnson wearing the blood-spattered Chanel suit (which she refused to take off) while Johnson is sworn in as president contributed to her beatification. Days after JFK’s assassination and funeral, Jackie invited Life magazine journalist Theodore H. White to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis, Massachusetts, where she crafted a fairy-tale story about the 1000 days that JFK spent in the White House. ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was Camelot’,23 said Jackie to White, referring to her favourite Broadway musical of the same name. With a circulation of seven million and a readership of more than thirty million, the myth and image of Camelot ‘as a place of noble acts and youthful idealism’24 immediately took hold. Like that moment in cinema when the image of Greta Garbo’s face ‘a kind of absolute state of the flesh . . . that plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy’,25 or the face of Rudolf Valentino ‘that caused suicides’,26 the face of Jackie with her pillbox and bouffant hairstyle is marked by a sad poetic elegance that reconciles awe and charm. It is this mass-produced image that Andy Warhol chose to incorporate into his famed pop-art silk screen portraits, Sixteen Jackies (1964, acrylic and enamel on canvas) using bold red and gold colours (Figure 15.9).

Figure 15.10  MILAN, ITALY - FEBRUARY 21: A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2018–19 fashion show during Milan Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2018/19 on 21 February 2018 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

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Figure 15.11  MILAN, ITALY - FEBRUARY 21: A model walks the runway at the Moschino Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2018–19 fashion show during Milan Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2018/19 on 21 February 2018 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

It is this Jackie that informs Jeremy Scott’s Autumn/Winter 2018 collection for Moschino paraded at Milan Fashion Week. The collection featured sixty looks in orange, purples and yellows that recreated Jackie’s pink tweed suit and pillbox hat (Figure 15.10). Models wore head-to-toe body paint in bright neon yellow, blue and lime green which made the model look like aliens with carefully coiffed bouffant wigs. In this kitschy hue of coloured Jackie clones, textiles print called attention to the work of Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein with their ideas of glamour, celebrity stardom and consumer culture (Figure 15.11). So too were logos of Skittle sweet candy printed on dresses and accessories. The kitsch collection was more than a homage to the glamour of Jackie and Camelot, Jeremy Scott, intended to draw attention to president Donald Trump’s views on migration. ‘I’m not anti-alien’, he said, ‘I don’t want to build a wall [between Mexico and Texas].’27

Camp as kitsch The year 2018 was a particularly kitsch year in fashion as Stella McCartney transposed artist Joseph Henry Lynch’s painting of his sultry-eyed Tina (1964) onto her Autumn/ Winter collection. The painting was reprinted on diaphanous slip dresses and blouses

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 149 of tulle and lace that hinted discreetly at eroticism and desire. Painted in the style of a B-grade movie poster, Tina was mass produced in the thousands and hung in living rooms of fashionable urbanites in the 1960s. That same year, Tom Ford mixed bright clashing colours with sequins and leopard prints with handbags that spelled ‘pussy power’ and Balenciaga produced tote bags with retro illustrations of puppies cuddling kittens and cow print faux fur. But it was Rae Kawakubo’s exaggerated sculptural garments in neo pink leopard, gold lame and polka dots that captured the meaning of camp as extravagant kitsch. Calling the collection ‘Comme des Garçons Camp’ (Autumn/ Winter, 2018) Kawakubo noted in a post-show email that she had been reading Susan Sontag’s 1964 ‘Notes on Camp’ and could relate to Sontag’s essay. Kawakubo comments: Susan Sontag wrote about a creative movement and sensibility. I can really relate to this vision. . . . This collection came out of the feeling that, on the contrary, camp is really and truly something deep and new, and represents a value that we need. For example, there are so many so-called styles such as punk that have lost their original rebel spirit today. I think camp can express something deeper, and give birth to progress.28

Matei Calinescu believes that camp fashion resorts to artistic forms and techniques related to kitsch (irony and parody are good examples) and insists that camp constantly renews itself by producing stereotypes that mimic avant-gardism.29 While Calinescu who believes that camp activates bad taste as a form of superior refinement and irony, Kawakubo insists that ‘camp is not something horribly exaggerated, out of the ordinary, or [in] bad taste’.30 When Kawakubo appeared on the fashion scene in the early 1980s with her Comme des Garçons label, she was one of the second wave of Japanese avant-garde designers to come out of Japan, including Yohji Yamomoto, Junya Watanabe and Issey Miyake. Kawakubo’s designs have been alternately labelled ‘avant-garde’ and ‘deconstructive’. Avant-garde is the more problematic since it is a term used in art history for the leading artists and movements in modernism. One of the key characteristics of postmodernism, and beyond, is the lack of a discernible style, group or artist that has gone beyond a status quo to found a new aesthetic establishment. Art’s pluralism and its imbrication in commercial markets and popular culture have made such a schema impossible. However in fashion, where the term continues to circulate, ‘avant-garde’ is used for garments that by and large challenge what clothing should be and which stretches the limits of wearability. Clothing that is experimental in design and innovative in shape, volume and silhouette tests conventional ideas about the body. Right from the start, Kawakubo offended European taste with her raw deconstructed and tattered garments that enveloped the wearer’s body like a kimono rather than the hard-edged and ostentatious glamour that was in fashion. At the same time her runway collection, ‘Destroy’ (Autumn/Winter 1982), contained garments that were shredded and bedraggled evoking a sense of decay and ruin, such as the ‘hole sweater’, a black hand-knitted jumper that contained randomly placed holes, as though the jumper had lain long forgotten in a wardrobe only to be eaten by moths. Not the case, in fact Kawakubo intentionally created the holes in the sweater by loosening the screws in

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the knitting machine. Years later, her ‘Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body’ (Spring/ Summer 1997) collection otherwise referred to as ‘Lumps and Bumps’ because of the many padded extrusions in the garment looked more like cancerous growths than elegant garments. Kawakubo’s designs have always been a direct onslaught on Western notions of high fashion and class, in which the best haute couture was always expected to be a combination of the best tailoring and the best fabrics. Simply put, Kawakubo’s designs were always viewed as bad taste. As Sarah Mower reported ‘from the beginning, [Kawakubo] defied the usual expectation that her audience brings to a Comme show – the feeling that something dark will lie behind whatever is about to unfold’. And so it came of no surprise that Kawakubo should embrace camp and the pleasures offered by kitsch. It is as if Kawakubo was consciously acknowledging and pursuing bad taste with her ‘Comme des Garçons Camp’ collection which included sixteen fairy-tale characters with golden hair led by a good queen in a frilly frockcoat over a skirt of a voluminous lace with bubbles in front. There was a giant walking flower with Rococo hairstyle and a princess with purple ruffles and a Betty Boop sweater (Figure 15.12). The collection contained Rococo notes and a kitsch style that prioritized style over content, aesthetics over morality and irony over tragedy. Bernhard Willhelm is a great fan of comedian Joan Rivers, even naming his Spring/ Summer 2014 collection after a segment on her television talk show Fashion Police

Figure 15.12  A model presents a creation for Comme des Garçons during the 2018–19 Fall/Winter collection fashion show on 3 March 2018 in Paris. BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images. Photo credit should read BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images.

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 151 (2010–17). ‘Bitch Stole My Look’ was reconfigured to ‘Look Stole My Bitch’ and contained prints of scissors, clashing colours, loud fabrics and voluminous garments alternating with body-hugging tights. Breaking with fashion protocol, the designer chose to display his collection as a lookbook that featured rather than a catwalk production. The theme? Older models in their 1960s frolicking about at a Los Angeles hotel swimming pool having fun. The playful, kitsch and ironic style defines the work of the designer that sets out to trouble fashion industry norms of gender, sexuality, beauty and race. ‘Joan Rivers was a very strong woman and deserves all my respect, but also my irony’, said Willhelm in an interview with MYKITA journal. She was the one who coined the phrase ‘Who are you wearing?’ and allowed people to experience the red carpet in a funny way. She was the first person who dared to make fun of fashion, and I found that very inspiring. My favourite show was one featuring Victoria Beckham. In her typical fashion Joan was making fun of her and asked: ‘Does my tampon make me look fat?’31

Ingrid Loschek writes that Willhelm regards kitsch and narrowmindedness as essential components of his design philosophy. He finds everything trivial from bourgeois elements from popular culture and turns them into campy kitsch fashion collections

Figure 15.13  A model walks the runway during the Bernhard Willhelm Menswear Spring/ Summer 2012 show as part of the Paris Fashion Week on 25 June 2011 in Paris, France. Photo by Kristy Sparow/Getty Images.

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Figure 15.14  Models are seen during the Walter van Beirendonck Menswear Fall/Winter 2020–21 show as part of the Paris Fashion Week on 15 January 2020 in Paris, France. Photo by Foc Kan/WireImage (Getty Images).

and accessories – garden gnomes, cuckoo-clocks and illuminated Venetian gondolas, but also comic figurers, fairy tales and folklore to pop art and graffiti.32 Willhelm is not interested in pure aesthetics, he is more interested in the way that camp and kitsch produce different perspectives and twists (Figure 15.13). He says, ‘I find bad taste interesting. . . . I love to change the context of things.’33 Walter van Beirendonck is another European designer who mines comics, computer games, aliens and toys for his menswear collections and turns them into kitsch statements about consumption that he calls ‘relics of the future’.34 As we wrote in Critical Fashion Practice he is attracted to the extreme, to subjectivities on the verge of crossing over into Other worlds, camp, kitsch and queer (Figure 15.14). In van Beirendonck’s Autumn/Winter 2005 menswear collection, aptly called ‘Weird’, an inflatable balloon falls in love with a hedgehog. This ill-fated, unconventional and unconsummated union materially manifests itself in removable collars; the hedgehog and balloon lovers appear in various kitsch prints.35

The New Rococo: Good old-fashioned kitsch with a twist In an essay devoted to the films of Sophia Coppola, Rebecca Arnold writes of a new strand of fashion imagery and design that evokes the Rococo style of the eighteenth century to construct an ideal femininity that celebrates artifice, frivolity and irony. She calls this style with its shimmering surfaces the ‘New Rococo’ and suggests that

 Fashion and the Redeployment of Kitsch 153 this reassertion of Rococo ideals within a contemporary fashion context allows designers to ‘explore emotions through the surface’s sensuality, and through play with history and memory’.36Arnold locates this new rendition of the Rococo to two images: François Boucher’s 1756 portrait of the marquise de Pompadour from Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and Corrine Day’s photograph Kates Flat, originally published in British Vogue 2003. Each image argues Arnold contrasts pastels and deep hues and delicate feminine features. ‘Decorative surfaces, whether the frills on Pompadour’s gown or the lace knickers that Moss wears, are contrasted with fields of drenched colour and natural references points are rendered artificial.’37 She further adds, ‘artifice denies any essentialist view of gender, and asserts its performativity and playfulness.’38 This would be a good place to look at Vivienne Westwood’s designs, beginning with her ‘Harris Tweed’ collection of Autumn/Winter 1987. It is worthy to note that Westwood has always been drawn to rebellion and delights in shocking the establishment, whether the fashion industry or the British upper classes with her crass and lurid graphics of sexual organs that covered her fabrics. In the 1970s and early 1980s her designs were shaped by the eclectic constellations of music, ideology and style that was antithetical to mainstream fashion and mass culture. She is one of the significant figures who turned subcultural style from a concept of abstract dissidence – dressing poorly or shabbily – to one that had a significant role to play in all areas of fashion, whether high or low. Adorno would be rolling in his grave. As we wrote in Critical Fashion Practice, Westwood’s designs (whether punk or new romantic) not only problematized long-held attitudes to class and clothing but also accommodated more alternatives to the idea of the body, which included making class and sexual difference an alternative as opposed to presumptions based on fixed stereotypes.39 Westwood’s British punk style transformed the zippers and straps of sexual fetishism into fashion, and her ‘Pirates’ (Autumn/Winter 1981) and ‘Buffalo Girls’ (‘Nostalgia of Mud’ Autumn/Winter, 1982) collection of muslin stockings and brightly coloured silk sashes plundered from the eighteen century became a major influence of the New Romantic Movement, which was beginning to dominate fashion, music and popular culture in the 1980s. ‘Dress, costume and fashion are presented as playful and fluid; able to be made and remade in line with contemporary mores and individual tastes at the eighteencentury court, at the [London] Blitz club in the 80s.’40 During this period, Westwood turned to the Tatler41 girls of the eighteenth century who wore clothes that parodied the English aristocracy. By inverting dress codes of the conservative establishment and deconstructing sartorial traditions, Westwood produced garments that were antiestablishment with sexual parody bordering on a lurid ‘cheeky’ pornography. This spillage of traditional British fabrics and tailoring combined with Rococo references plundered from the Wallace Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum – one of the great collections of eighteenth-century fine and decorative arts – created a kitsch collection that parodied British upper class. The ‘Harris Tweed’ Collection (Autumn/ Winter 1987) was a snub to all things aristocratic. ‘I have taken the vocabulary of all royalty’, said Westwood of the collection, ‘the traditional British symbols, and used them to my own advantage. I’ve utilised the conventional to make something unorthodox.’42 Westwood’s historic revisionism and her love of kitsch parody and sexual liberty mixed with Rococo influences would manifest in five subsequent collections known as ‘Britain

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Figure 15.15  Models kiss as they wear outfits during a fashion show by British designer Vivienne Westwood. Photo by John van Hasselt/Sygma via Getty Images.

Must Go Pagan’ (1988–90), ‘Pagan I’, ‘Time Machine’, ‘Voyage to Cythera’ and ‘Pagan V’. Returning to the Wallace Collection for ‘Portrait’ (Autumn/Winter, 1990) Westwood chose François Boucher’s 1743 oil painting Daphnis and Chloe to design a corset that displayed all the frivolity of the ancien regime. The painting was lifted out of its historic content and placed in a different arrangement on the front of a boned bodice (Figure 15.15), ‘the eroticism of the painting [found] a cheeky partnership with the bosomenhancing corset.’43 Writing on the way that fashion designers and mass-market brands use Rococo themes in their collections, Arnold says that ‘the imagery was infused with an ironic frivolity, [that] showed femininity in relation to a curving line of beauty that focused on decoration and surface. These constructions emphasised fashion’s role as escape, pleasure and disguise’.44 In modernist language, kitsch is stultifying recursive, a dead end. Whether it is dead end that resurfaces interminably is open to debate. Yet as a resource for invention and for the expression of excessive identity, that is, identity that exists beyond strict confines, it has proved to be immeasurably rich. To paraphrase Diana Vreeland, it is vulgarity with vitality. Kitsch as a pejorative has decisively changed course to enter squarely into the dominion of what we call ‘Gaga aesthetics’.

16

Philosophy in fabric Deconstruction in contemporary fashion

It is generally agreed that deconstruction in fashion was ushered in by the first major collections of Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) in the early 1980s. Kawakubo, together with Vivienne Westwood and Martin Margiela, revolutionized fashion by turning their back on finery and preciousness in favour of a fundamentally aberrant sartorial language that suggested impoverishment, discontinuity and discord. However, these three designers came to this aesthetic in differing ways and intentions. As we argue in detail in Critical Fashion Practice Kawakubo’s (and Martin Margiela’s) approach can be strongly aligned to the philosophies of deconstruction as advanced by Jacques Derrida and more specifically to deconstructivism, which is the more structural and practical application of deconstructionist principles when applied to architecture. Kawakubo’s deconstructivist approach destabilizes binaries of inside–outside, body– clothing, old–new, worn and discarded and so on. Kawakubo’s groundbreaking designs went on to influence Margiela who would revolt against the holy scriptures of couture by experimenting with silhouettes, reversing linings and hems inside out and experimenting with oversized proportions. Just as Derridean approaches to philosophy, literature and cultural theory influenced feminist and postcolonial scholars, so too has Kawakubo and Margiela influenced several generations of designers, such as Demna Gvasalia of Vetements, who have not only followed Margiela’s example but continues to expand the notion of what clothing, fashion and dress means, functions and signifies in the Anthropocene age. For the sake of analysis and argument, it matters little that Vivienne Westwood predates Kawakubo or Margiela by a small number of years in making clothes with stress, tears and holes. What concerns us here is that their styles evolved from different circumstances and with different motives in mind. To characterize the difference, it may be best to turn to the expanded applications of the term ‘deconstruction’ and its misuse, or to put it more generously, the looser and more colloquial usages. ‘Deconstruction’ is often used instead of ‘dismantle’, ‘disaggregate’, disassemble, ‘pull apart’, ‘take to This chapter, under a different title, was first published under the title ‘Time, Cruelty and Deconstruction in Deconstructivist Fashion. Kawakubo, Margiela and Vetements’, ZoneModa Journal. Special Issue on Deconstructions, Stefano Marino and Ines Tolic ed, 10 (2020).https://zmj​ .unibo​.it/, https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.6​​092​/i​​ssn​.2​​611​-0​​​563​/1​​1088. Accessed 6 February 2020.

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pieces’, undo, and in plainer parlance, simply destruction. Indeed, ‘destroy’ has become a popular metonymic epithet for Kawakubo’s work, not only in its use of methods of breakage and degradation but for the way it shatters basic sartorial premises and protocols. But while we will not persist too far with contesting the use of this term – as terms from journalism derive not from philosophical rigour but from their capacity to conjure and to stick – it is in fact Westwood in the 1970s and to some extent the early 1980s for whom destruction is the main strategy. Destruction in the manner of punk and related subcultures: the destruction of firmly entrenched social strata, a wholesale rejection in a convulsive style that was as repellent to the status quo as it was potentially self-destructive, as in the fate of the Sex Pistols and countless other hapless suburban punks. The punk aesthetic is rooted in frustration and anger, and call to violence, as a result of impatience with the slow pace of social evolution. So to speak rigorously, ‘deconstruction’ as used in fashion conflates the philosophical application of the term as destabilizing assumed hierarchies with that of a more simplified understanding of destruction per se, however much such destruction does indeed destabilize and reorient habitual power-language stereotypes. In contrast to punk, the destruction played out in the work of Kawakubo is one that is more silent, and it is experienced not as a provocation but as aftermath. Hers is an aesthetic of ruins and of mourning. As we have argued in detail in Critical Fashion Practice, Kawakubo’s practice can more properly be called ‘deconstructivism’, which designates the adaptation of the philosophical principles of deconstruction into architecture.1 That is, architecture needed to be workable and functional expression of the deeper abstract beliefs around discontinuity, pluralism, dysfunctionality and discord. Otherwise referred to as postmodern architecture, the most famous proponents include Robert Venturi, Eero Saarinen, Daniel Libeskind, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, the latter at one point having engaged in a philosophical dialogue with Derrida over the relationship between deconstruction and philosophy and deconstruction and architecture. Deconstructivism faced its own impossibility head-on through the metaphors of the plan on the one hand and the ruin on the other. The big questions were how to engage with transience, permeability and fallibility in structures that were expensive to build and were answerable to practical applications. All of this is easy to transpose into the tropes of fashion, and all the easier as single garments are significantly cheaper and have less to risk that whole buildings. Asymmetry, unaccountability and gratuitousness – all that represents a spoliation of modernist ideals of architecture – are active in deconstructivist design. In 1983, Rei Kawakubo launched her career-making collection, ‘Destroy’, which would cast a long shadow of inference over many collections to come. Commentators would draw parallels between the stressed fabrics and the gaping holes with an aesthetic mourning the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a connection that Kawakubo continues to deny. Nonetheless, the correlation has proven particularly tenacious, and ‘La mode destroy’ is often referred to as ‘Hiroshima chic’.2 La mode Destroy are garments that were literally dismantled in an expression of nihilism and revolt. Six years later in 1989, Margiela would launch his first ready-to-wear collection of deconstructed flat-folding and upcycled garments that suspend in paradox the construction and the decay of

 Philosophy in Fabric 157 clothing. His preference for the abject, epitomized by the old, the used and the oneoff, appeared as tropes of poverty and disenfranchisement. Garments were cut up and stitched together, a ball gown became a long waistcoat, a mannequin is recreated as a waistcoat so that ‘foundation becomes outerwear, the body becomes the dress’.3 If time has made the use of such phrases acceptable rather than insensitive, time has also shown that the tendency is symmetry, simplicity and suitability are insufficient expressions to the new millennial age of multiple crises and new ways of thinking about the body in its closer and closer encounters with biogenetic engineering, prostheses, cosmetic surgery and other interventions. Deconstruction in fashion is as pertinent as ever as we confront an increasingly fragile notion of the concept of the natural, and hence the normal, the stable, the essential. By introducing holes and other signs of wear, Kawakubo’s and Margiela’s garments engaged in the language of time, hence of wear, mortality and death. Again, there are some subtle distinctions to be made between Kawakubo and Margiela’s garments and those of Westwood’s repurposed clothing. Westwood’s DIY aesthetic reaches to a culture for whom recycling is a necessity, elevating it to the dignity of fashion, but if it speaks of ennui and anomie, it is clothing that does not hold the same kind of melancholia as that of Kawakubo in the early collections, in other later ones for that matter, or Margiela’s. While the history behind Westwood’s repurposed garments is a de facto one, it does little to illicit narrative of the absent presence of a body. What was remarkable about the language of wear, and the traces of a past, in Kawakubo’s and Margiela’s collections is that it was a language analogous to the language of literary fiction that in its intensity still sought to speak a language of truth. For the holes, stretches, tarnishings and so on were not the work of life but rather gestured to an anonymous and universal past. Thus, the garment was imbued with the language of time, a time and a life before that was entirely hypothetical, but which perforce had to be linked to a future and an end. Hence the destruction within the garments is far from limited to the details themselves, as signs of hostility and decay, but in foregrounding time itself, by making time internal to the meaning. How can deconstruction be used as a method to unpack this approach to time in its relation to fashion? In an early essay in Writing and Difference, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, Derrida delves into Antonin Artaud’s undertaking to undermine and ultimately destroy representation and the possibility of a pure theatre. The essence of theatre, which makes it different from film even when it is filmed, is time. Film is representation from the outset, while a filmed theatrical performance is always a record of what will never be again. Representation, as is so often noted, is a presentation again as signalled in the prefix ‘re’ and thereby implies a lag in time. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is an attempt to overstep this lag, to avoid it altogether. As Derrida affirms: The theatre of cruelty is not a representation. It is life itself inasmuch as life is unrepresentable. Life is the non-representable origin of representation. ‘I’ve said “cruelty” as I would say “life.”’ This life carries man but is not the primary life of man. It is only a representation of life and in this lies the limit – the humanist limit – of the metaphysics of classical theatre.4

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For this to be achieved, however, Derrida explains that Artaud would need to remove theatre’s tie to language, thereby severing its connection to human interpretation towards a basic and primordial immediacy that has its being only in a present action. Then Derrida proceeds to an observation that has rich appurtenance to the language of destruction in fashion, the language that foregoes objective standards of quality and the good: The theatre of cruelty chases God from the scene. It doesn’t stage a new atheist discourse, it does not borrow the words of atheism, it does not raise theatrical space to that of a philosophical logic proclaiming once again, for the sake of our greater lassitude, the death of God. It is the theatrical practice of cruelty which, in structure and act, inhabits or rather produces a non-theological space.5

In other words, it allows for a slippage that elides laws and rules. ‘Theology’ is used as a multi-valent term that applies to rules, to causality and a regime of obeisance to these rules. To abjure rules is to open up a space of cruelty, of destruction, in which there is no totalizing order. While theology is retained in the sense of authorship, it is destabilized in the premium set on chance. ‘Cruelty’ and ‘destruction’ are deployed as mechanisms to interrupt the basic flows of creative endeavour and of interpretation. Traditional high fashion is one that affords itself an authority that it believes to be universal. Fashion dedicated to destabilization defies order, linear time and logic, symmetry and beauty. Destabilized fashion – fashion devoted to destruction and, if we may now add, cruelty – is fashion that follows no positive direction or progression. Even if it points to a past and a future, these are not ideal points, as its temporality is always rhizomatic. It can be compared to what Derrida calls abstract theatre in regard to Artaud. Abstract theatre is what foregoes ‘the totality of art, and so life and its resources of communication: dance, music, volume, physical depth, the visible image, sonority, the phonic, etc. An abstract theatre is a theatre in which the totality of sense and senses would not be consummated.’6 Despite all of this, Artaud’s efforts are thwarted, because there is no pure present, as the present is accompanied by its double which is its representation of having been present, a repetition that must transpire as affirmation of what occurred. In the deconstructive garment, the interminable overlap of time exists from the very point of its false origin, or origins. Time is injected into the garment, where the garment’s origin lies in the insertion, and hence the repetition of the past seen in the trace of the hole, the tear, the stretch or the stain. These signs are a re-presentation of something and exist only as a representation. Yet in this kind of fashion, it is impossible to replicate its essence, for each spoil, however intricately similar, is still in its organization and its minutiæ, unique. ‘The theatre as repetition of what does not repeat’, observes Derrida, ‘the theatre as the original repetition of the difference in the conflict of forces, where “evil is the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already a form of cruelty superadded to the other”, such is the mortal limit of cruelty that begins with its own representation.’7 Deconstructivist fashion must always begin with its own representation by its situatedness in time, but not a time but in an abstract time. Its history is always abstract but because of that, most forcefully there. It

 Philosophy in Fabric 159 participates in the proverbial ‘ends of man’ through its indefinite and unspecific nature which alerts us to the ways in which time is created, just as beings and personalities are created, and recreated through strategies and social languages, fashion being prominent among them. As we wrote in the End of Fashion (2019), the ways in which modern fashion has been produced, manufactured, consumed and disseminated have radically shifted since its inception in the nineteenth century. Almost a century later, the setting of styles by the aristocratic elite that trickled down and were imitated by the masses began to bubble-up, moving from the street to the catwalk. The breakdown of social class differentiations and the collapse of style distinctions via mediation and digitalization meant that fashion was no longer about class distinction but represented representation itself. The demand for new fashion collections and the speed in which fashion travelled capturing trends and propelling forward cheap synthetic copies of original styles resulted in what could be called ‘landfill lux’. The more one had, the more one wanted. Fashion labels responded by increasing the number of yearly collections, sending the fashion system into overdrive and in turn becoming unsustainable. Fashion had reached its apogee or its ‘end time’. It is in this space of annihilation that Demna Gvasalia, creative director of Balenciaga, and his brother Guram created the deconstructed streetwear label Vetements, tapping into a new Zeitgeist that defined the spirit and mood of the times. ‘It’s a kind of movement, but it’s an air in fashion in general’, Gvasalia told i-D magazine in 2016, reflecting on the new mood, aesthetic and silhouette of the era. Hypebeast and haute couture are two very different worlds, but they function as mirrors of each other.’8 In Vetements, Gvasalia brings together a team of creative streetwear designers from historic fashion houses to form a ‘design collective’ that deconstructs garments and logos from multinational conglomerates. Levis jeans DHL Couriers, Heineken beer and Internet Explorer mixed together political themes and symbols of luxury, making no distinction between high and low culture, kitsch and chic, corporate and cool, mainstream and underground (Figure 16.1). All of a sudden streetwear became very serious rising from low to high fashion and mixing hypebeast with haute couture. Where once Kawakubo’s designs heralded the destruction and degradation of a post nuclear world, Vetements turns streetwear into a statement about the corporatization of everyday life at a time when cultural establishments are crumbling. While the deconstructive ethos of Kawakubo’s and Margiela’s work makes use of the signifiers of ruin in a very active and confrontational way in the ways in which garments are tattered and torn, Vetements takes ugly, big and chunky ‘dad’ sneakers (Balenciaga’s Triple S) and upcycled jeans and turns them into revolutionary statements about metanationals, large stateless companies that are coordinated out of swiss holding accounts, unsettling the definition of global superpowers. To borrow from the title of Slavoj Žižek’s book (who paraphrases Jean Baudrillard) Welcome to the Desert of the Real: for a generation that has been raised on climate change and environmental destruction, Vetements taps into the new world order where the forces of capital and technology have superseded the nation state. As Žižek notes, ‘the ultimate truth of the capitalist despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of the “real life” itself, its reversal into a spectral show’.9 According to Žižek, the ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is when

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Figure 16.1  Vetements and DHL Couriers collaboration, YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​ /ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=HYF​​​69yiY​​pDE.

an individual living an idyllic life of consumption suddenly suspects that the world that they live in is a fake, a ruse staged to fool them into believing that they are living in a real world.10 ‘Luxury used to be so exclusive that it would sell a dream to the people who could afford it, and to others who couldn’t afford it to still dream about’, Gvasalia said. ‘For me, fashion has to be inclusive and cannot be exclusive any longer to survive. It no longer sells a dream, but it sells an identity to people’, be it a corporate identity turned on its head. During Spring/Summer 2020 Paris Fashion Week, Vetements staged its menswear collection in a McDonalds franchise store. Models dressed in the familiar red and yellow-themed attire offered milkshakes and paper cups of coca cola as audiences were seated in tables and booths. A model appeared wearing a deconstructed McDonalds staff uniform with a name badge that read ‘capitalism’ pinned on his chest. Another model wore a version of a security uniform with an embroidered Vetements badge as the security company logo (Figure 16.2). Uniforms were exaggerated and subverted and deconstructed tailoring and sizing was blown up to XXL proportions with wide short sleeves tapering down to the elbows. Oversize is Gvasalia’s territory. Writing on Viktor & Rolf, Patrizia Calefato notes that the designers have incorporated two types of semiotic strategies in their garments: the first involves inserting the text that transforms the garment into a word and the second strategy uses the traditional inscription as in the case of t-shirts.11 The same semiotic strategies have been applied by Vetements, the word Internet Explorer became ‘ecstasy’ and Heineken became ‘Vetements’. Tropes of capitalism are twisted and their original meanings perverted as brand logos are dismantled and given a new context in the collection. By deconstructing corporate logos and upcycling garments, Vetements effectively inserts a ghost or spectre into the clothing suggesting that the garment or logo is haunted with a previous life. The garment is no longer an original but a copy, a residual form of something past. Margiela’s own

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Figure 16.2  Vetements Menswear Spring/Summer 2020 Paris Fashion Week, Mcdonalds, Paris, YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Yjv​​​J3Q9y​​FX8.

garments carried a ‘ghost tag’ that were marked by only four white stitches. No name. No label. Simply anonymous. This is because Margiela shunned the cult of celebrity which haunts the designer, instead preferring anonymity over stardom. Gvasalia’s luxury leather version of the original 99 cent blue IKEA polypropylene Frakta tote bag that he designed for Balenciaga sold for $2000 US dollars. Then there was the banana yellow DHL Express t-shirt that sold for $300 and expanded the collection in 2018 to include a baseball cap, jacket and socks. When placed in the context of a luxury fashion item, the t-shirt’s original meaning as a courier company is disrupted, commenting instead on the frivolity of consumer culture and the perceived value of clothing. Furthermore, the link between an original and copy, high and low, popular culture and the everyday, can be traced back to the work of Marcel Duchamp, with his Bottle Rack (1914) or Fountain (1917), an up-ended urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’. Thus ‘[the Balenciaga IKEA bag] is a perfect example of Readymades, but there is a little bit more to it’, said Gvasalia. ‘We changed the logo and we made it beautifully out of leather and that’s why it costs so much money.’12 Gvasalia learnt about the tenets of deconstruction when fresh out of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp when he was employed at Maison Margiela designing its womenswear collection. Margiela himself was an alum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the de facto minimalist member of the Antwerp 6 fashion collective. He was known for his conceptual designs, repurposing vintage clothing, making seams visible and expanding all the proportions of a garment, including pockets, zippers and buttons. Gvasalia has followed Margiela’s suit, adding references to streetwear and urban culture which were not part of the Margiela legacy. Like Margiela who had a predilection to show his collections at unusual derelict locations: car parks and warehouses where models moved anonymously among the crowds. As Caroline Evans notes, Margiela’s shows were more like performance and installations rather than catwalk presentations.

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Two shows might take place simultaneously, one containing white garments, the other black. Or, a series of presentations might take place at the same time across multiple cities.13 In the Autumn of 1989, Margiela chose a derelict playground replete with graffitied walls and dilapidated buildings in the 20th arrondissement of Paris to show his collection. The seating was first come first serve, the rows were filled with local children and the runway was uneven as models stumbled across the floor. The show was a game-changer, fashion ‘then was about bold colours, wide shoulders; everything was extravagant, big and bold and here was Margiela with ripped sleeves and frayed hems with tailored jackets made of dry-cleaning bags’.14 Gvasalia as well chose grungy underground venues like the Parisian gay sex club Le Dépôt for Vetements Fall/Winter 2015 collection which featured hoodies and supersized trench coats. Vetements straight legged, high-rise jeans made from secondhand vintage denim was first introduced in the labels debut collection in 2014, but it did not gain cult status until the Fall/Winter 2015 show. The jeans are made of two reworked pairs of jeans, cut along the seams and restitched together, much like Margiela who dissected garments and reworked them into new and unusual contexts. The Spring/Summer 2014 collection was shown at the kitsch banquet-style Chinese restaurant, Le President, in Paris’ old Chinatown Belleville and featured Vetements staple long hoodies with graphics featuring Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in The Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997) and leather jackets that were comfortable when worn siting on motorbikes and deconstructed when standing. Then for Vetements Spring/Summer 2017 collection the label hijacked Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris while it was still open to the public (Figure 16.3). Breaking with the fashion calendar and showing in October instead of July, the ‘anti-couture’ collection consisting of menswear and womenswear featured oversized and reworked garments from eighteen different brands. ‘The idea was to take the iconic, the most recognizable product from their brand, and put it into a Vetements frame, whether in terms of shape or construction’,15 noted Gvasalia. Juicy Couture’s baby-hued velour trackpants and hoodies became evening wear, Brioni tailored jackets were glued together rather than traditionally stitched so that the jacket became a single-layered garment, oversized and deconstructed. There was also the Manolo Blahnik Hangisi shoe whose sparkling signature was removed transforming them into kitten heal sling backs that tied at the ankle, a court shoe and an ankle and thigh high boot with frayed edges and unfinished closings. ‘We’re going to destroy the shoes. Are you okay with that?’ Gvasalia told Blahnik and he said, ‘Well, I love that. Please, please, please, destroy them.’16 While Margiela’s deployment of deconstructive methods, his persistence with the concept of renewal and his reuse of materials drew attention to the concept of ‘disposable fashion’, Vetements blends couture with streetwear to comment on the banality of fashion, or to be more precise, fashion’s demise. By naming the fashion brand after the French word for mere clothing, Gvasalia renders fashion obsolete. ‘I started Vetements because I was bored of fashion and against all odds fashion did change once and forever since Vetements [has] appeared.’17 Or at least, Vetements changed couture fashion rendering it more practical and utilitarian. One could have easily mistaken the most coveted invitation to Paris Menswear Fashion Fall/Winter

 Philosophy in Fabric 163

Figure 16.3  Vetements Spring/Summer 2017 Galeries Lafayette, Paris, YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=HYF​​​69yiY​​pDE.

2018 as nothing more than a shopping receipt and casually thrown it in the bin. Except that on closer observation one realizes that the scrap of paper is the invitation to the off-schedule presentation of Vetements show at the Paul Bert Serpette flea markets in Paris’ Saint-Ouen district (Figure 16.4). Aptly named ‘The Elephant in the Room’, Gvasalia was referring to Margiela who began repurposing old garments from flea markets unpicking the seams and reworking the garments into new arrangements. As Caroline Evans explains, ‘Margiela scavenged and revitalised moribund materials and turned rubbish back into commodity form.’18 The hybrid garments in this Vetements collection were worked-up fabrics exposing linings and labels. Jeans were cut out to resemble army camouflage nets, denim jackets were scattered with floral embroidery and t-shirts had been retooled as patchworks. As much as the garments in this collection looked like repurposed old clothes, they weren’t. Instead they would end up as new manufactured garments sold at a price point that would be on par with the majority of couture collections. They became a very exclusive (and expensive) apocalyptic vision of a deteriorating world. If one key aspect of deconstruction is to reverse standard binaries, then this had been done indeed, for detritus had been converted into luxury. The only thing that remained unchallenged was that the creative audacity for doing so would continue to be rewarded by prices that only the very élite (or the reckless) could justify. Rather than staging a catwalk show for Vetements’ Spring/Summer 2018 Menswear collection, Gvasalia photographed people in various fashion poses wearing the

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Figure 16.4  Vetements Paris Menswear Fashion Fall/Winter 2018, Paul Bert Serpette flea markets, Paris. YouTube. Public domain: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=8tP​​​NgpFB​​iuE.

garments on the streets of Zurich outside a bank, a grocery store, in a park and on a bridge. The photographs were then enlarged to life-size prints (and a lookbook) and placed on display in a parking lot in Paris near the Gare Saint-Lazare for a press party. The lookbook was presented to buyers the following day at the Vetements showroom along with the collection. The installation was clearly intended to mock the pretentions and conventions of fashion by not producing a show, but instead holding the garments in suspension, or in absence in an effort to expose how the hype surrounding catwalk productions generate a greater value than the garments themselves. The installation was very much in the vein of Martin Margiela’s Fall/Winter 1993-4 which produced a film instead of showing an actual collection. Using a Super-8 camera, Margiela filmed seven women of differing ages wearing the garments from the collection at home or in settings from their everyday lives and then invited buyers and the press to the show room to view the film. The garments were completely absent, only their representation existed on the screen. As we wrote in Critical Fashion Practice, ‘absence can stand for many things such as the void that the fetish seeks to disavow; perception and desire; the; the intangibility and irreducibility of perception and desire (as applied to fashion or anything else); the absence of the precise starting point for the fashion object, or the absence of the pure thing.’19 The concept behind Vetements ‘No Show’ was simple enough: a candid comment on the overproduction of fashion and its conspicuous consumption, in other words, no garments, no waste. In another attempt to draw attention to the frenetic pace (and prodigious waste) of the fashion system, Vetements installed a large pile of old mismatched clothes donated by Saks employees in the display window of Saks Fifth Avenue. At the end of the show the clothes were donated to RewearAble, a social justice charity that recycles clothing. Similar installations followed at Maxfield’s in Los Angeles and Harrods in London. Labelled a ‘disrupter’ by the press, Vetements agenda is to deconstruct the fashion system by showing two

 Philosophy in Fabric 165 off-season shows a year, mixing women and menswear garments in his collections and not creating a pre-season, resort or cruise collection. Recently, Paul Tierny called on the need for a degree of introspection and the role that Kawakubo, Margiela and their epigones have played in destabilizing the entrenched complacency of the fashion world: Gvasalia has simply filled a gap that wasn’t being filled by any other brand and the time was right for it. Fashion needed a kick up the arse. It needed a new Kawakubo, who pissed off the French fashion aristocracy in the late eighties. It needed a Margiela, who drastically changed the shapes and silhouettes we wore and still wear. It needed creativity to preside over commerce and challenge the system that is so desperately outdated. Those who don’t get it will catch up in twenty years and wish they’d bought it and kept it. And now that Demna is royally flipping it to the system and not succumbing to the circus, he’s truly carrying the Margiela torch. More designers need to, it’s the only way fashion will get its integrity back.20

While all revolutions come at a considerable price, revolutions in fashion continue to come with a considerable price tag. Alas, not many can participate in it. But what is also true is the trickle-down effect of high fashion. If from a philosophical point of view ‘deconstruction’ is often used in a loose and literal way in fashion, the salutary effects can be far deeper and more widespread. From haute couture to streetwear, fashion has survived on imitation, and to make recycling chic, and even more to make it a common day practice available to all, is a commendable aspiration – we only hope that that aspiration has not come too late.

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Conclusion Jazzing it up

In 2018, two years after Dylan received the Nobel Prize, Keith Jarrett won the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 62nd Biennale Musica in Venice. It was the first time a jazz musician was delivered this honour whose alumni include Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Sophia Gubaidulina and Steve Reich. Although a large portion of his output is jazz, Jarrett began in his youth playing the classical repertoire, to which he would return in his adulthood with several recordings. He is best known for his solo piano concerts and recordings, and his recording of the Köln Concert (1975) is billed as the best everselling piano album. While such a statistic may not be the definitive marker of success or quality, it has enough significance. This is also because Jarrett in his solo career is not a conventional jazz musician. Ironically, when the jazz is conventional, it is with his trio (Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock), who are known for playing standards, that is, replaying works by other jazz musicians from what is now considered the ‘standard’ jazz pieces. When playing alone, it is always improvised, the sets, or movements, can be short but are mostly of a sizeable length, sometimes going to around forty minutes. The style is neo-Mahlerian musical patchwork of original melody interspersed with pastiche and quotation, drawing well beyond jazz itself. The melodic lines often have a hypnotic quality, and in concerts like the Vienna Concert, the first movement builds with bracing and poignant intensity. So: a folk-rock singer-poet wins the Nobel, and a jazz musician the Golden Lion. But to think that this is history’s rejoinder to Adorno, that the world of culture has all but imploded, is to be mistaken. There is far more nuance to this. For a hallmarking of Jarrett’s solo work is its strong dedication to juxtapositions that can often be jarring and to dissonance that can often reach explosive proportions. The fusion of assimilable melody with a sizeable lack of it is hard to escape. Another example: in a recent commentary in the New York Review of Books on an HBO television series, Watchmen, based on the comic book series of 1987, Namwali Serpell muses about how the superhero genre has now expanded beyond simple (didactic) heroism towards a reflexive critique of the genre and of heroism itself. She praises the show for the way it ‘admirably eschews didacticism’ by providing a discursive space for the viewers to make up their own minds.1 Thereupon she asks if the show is ‘good art or just good fun?’ She then dwells on this question with an emphasis on this binary, the ‘just’ hanging censoriously over what follows. Good and fun are both relative – to the viewer, to history, to culture – yet they’re common, familiar feelings, recognizable terms we still like to use because they

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gesture at our evergreen debates about the relationship between art and ethics. You can map good vs. fun into: aura of authenticity vs. mechanical reproduction; high art vs. mass culture; midcult vs. mass cult; avant-garde vs. kitsch. Every binary implies a hierarchy one way or another. Critics have generally (though not always) favoured the good over the fun, while mass audiences have made a case – with their numbers if nothing else – for fun.2

Benjamin, Greenberg, Adorno and possibly even Lukács are all pulsating in the background here. It is striking but no longer surprising, as the critical list is growing all the time that a series on superheroes should be subjected to such scrutiny. Although it brings down Adorno’s aesthetics to a simple level, as it must in this context, it is for us an exculpatory example of the persistence of such values and an example of contemporary reflections about the way in which such values are valid, yet according to a different rule book or script. Not least is the warning that ‘fun’ is now more elusive than ever and perhaps not discounted out of hand. This many can accept, but what we still have yet to do in any rigorous way is to find the critical criteria for prizing out and evaluating the ‘good’ from within the ‘fun’ – while also, of course, allowing for the good that is not fun, as antiquated as this increasingly may sound. Why have we pursued the task of revisiting and applying Adorno so tenaciously? We have sought to answer and justify this at various junctures in the book and with much of what the book sets out to explore and demonstrate. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, incomplete and for all its inconsistencies, is the most important philosophical treatise to situate art against history and subjectivity. In anticipating the ‘aesthetic turn’ in philosophy (that was also catalysed by his nemesis, Heidegger), it still remains the most penetrating and sustained text to defend art as a source of knowledge and to apply standards salutary to this search. Adorno was both cantankerous and brave in his application of standards of aesthetic measure that may allow to distinguish between good and bad art. For art to be judged as valuable, he believed, it must express itself as not claiming to be whole, complete and objectively successful, that is, insulated from critique. As such, art must mirror the fragmentary character of our existence and the inexorable incoherence of our inner being. Art must shatter any presumption of an answer or a cause. Art and aesthetic practices that shield us from that which give us a false sense of transcendence or rectitude are corrosive and lead to a much more tragic alienation. Art whose base motivation is pleasure, pure and simple places a false world before us, wasting the greatest benefits of what art can afford, which is to apply new and beneficial standards of knowledge to the world. Art is historical and it has an historical task to fulfil in its reflective critique of the moment of its arising. ‘If art, as theoretical witness of social truth’, states Adorno, ‘wants more than the experience of what is attainable and what shaped it, then it becomes less, and the objective truth correlative to the time becomes corrupted by fiction.’3 The fiction clouding the potential truth is when too much can be drawn from a work of art, which, Adorno repeatedly reminds us, is made not by irreproachable heroes but by flawed human beings. (‘The producers of notable works of art are not demigods but fallible, often neurotic and damaged people.’)4 To project an image of flawlessness is to enlist into avarice and delusion. The utopian dimension is in the

 Conclusion 169 accurate, tragic and redemptive expression of these flaws, that is art’s truth, in casting into sharper relief life’s unaccountable vicissitudes. To put it crudely, art does not castrate, but immanent to it is the knowledge that nothing and no one is immune to the symbolic gallows. We have not drawn on all aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics, most noticeably in the background are discussions of ‘gesture’ and ‘mimesis’. This has been for two main reasons: to maintain the argument’s trajectory by minimizing digressions and to limit analyses on form. For as many commentators over the years have been quick to point out, Cage receives passing reference, and Duchamp none at all. The aleatory and minimally mediated, anything that interfered with the inventiveness of the artist and gave primacy to the material, was for Adorno an obfuscation and a cause of irritation.5 The materials of art have changed, as have the degrees of immateriality. It is, however, instructive to note that contemporaries in the 1960s were already prophesying radical changes in how art was done, and where it would be found as a result of technological advancements since the economic boom of the post-war years. A member of the Independent Group, John McHale, declared in a lecture at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London in 1961: The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks but with the defining alternative cultural strategies, through a series of communicative gestures in multi-media forms. As art and non-art become interchangeable, and the master work may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, the artist defines art less through any intrinsic value of art object than by furnishing new conceptualities of life style and orientation. Generally, as the new cultural continuum underlines the expendability of the material artefact, life is defined as art – as the only contrastingly permanent and continuously unique experience.6

This is remarkable for the time it is written, and while focused more on developments in technology than in popular culture, the two cannot be separated. The problem of form that we have chosen to face is one not limited to Adorno, needless to say, but stretches towards the shifting consensus on where art is situated. We turn to Adorno as a sounding device more for what art should be and what it should enshrine, namely that it trusts in us as reflective and fallible beings. We have in no way attempted a comprehensive review of all of these new sites. Instead, we have concentrated on several examples in order to explore how they function as art, in part or as whole. The areas of focus have been fashion, fashion film, performative personae and music video. The distinction within all of these genres of creative and aesthetic practice in relation to art is on one dimension: linguistic. Art can be called art from the first by an artist (the Duchampian designation), and it is affirmed by its status as art according to the economic, social and ideological machinery, including galleries, museums, art fairs, art sponsored as an ‘art project’, biennials and all the rest. Even if the art therein is paltry and weak, it remains art by virtue of being insulated by the array of signifying systems that exist in reciprocal relation to it. ‘Gaga aesthetics’, by contrast, is defined as activities embedded within popular culture (the culture industry) that share a number of traits of ‘good’ art. One important function

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of this book has been to extract what these traits may be and justify them. For we have identified a small number of practices in which the frailty, tragedy, perishability and absurdity of human existence are mobilized within the vast machinery of popular culture, and are prominent enough to be components to what has come to define the texture of contemporary (historical) creative-aesthetic practice.

Notes Introduction 1 The Nobel Prize, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nob​​elpri​​ze​.or​​g​/pri​​zes​/l​​itera​​ture/​​201​6/​​summa​​ry/. Accessed 11 November 2020. 2 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to van Beirendonck (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 3 Radu Stern, Against Fashion, Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 3. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 468. 5 Ibid., 286. 6 Ibid., 286–7. 7 Ibid., 287. 8 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 12. 9 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1996), 53. 10 James Gardner, Culture or Trash? A Provocative View of Contemporary Painting, Sculpture, and Other Costly Commodities (New York: Birch Lane, 1993), 199. 11 Andrew Bowie, ‘Adorno, Pragmatism, and Aesthetic Relativism’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 58, no. 227 (January 2004): 45. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Bloomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), 15. 13 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991), 192. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik, ed. Rolf Thiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 149. 15 Donald Kuspit, ‘Critical Notes on Adorno’s Sociology of Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 327. 16 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996). 17 Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 18 David Carrier, ‘The Blind Spots of Art History: How Wild Art Came to Be – and Be Ignored’, Praedella 35 (2014): 31. 19 David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro, Wild Art (London and New York: Phaidon, 2013), 10. 20 David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins, The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019). 21 Carrier and Pissarro, Wild Art, 10. 22 See Geczy chapter 9, ‘Inside-Out: Outsider Artists Go Inside’, in Fashionable Art, 149–61.

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23 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the “Popular’’’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1981), 240. 24 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘That’s All Folks: Contemporary Art and Popular Culture’, in A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 508–9. 25 Ibid., 509.

Chapter 1 1 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 139. 2 Ibid., 48. 3 J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity, (1992) 1997), 190–1. 4 Jonathan Gilmore, The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 140. 5 Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film, Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 228. 6 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 175. 7 Ibid. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63. 9 Ibid., 71. 10 Ibid., 71–2. 11 Ibid., 72. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 186. 13 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana Press, 1981), 11–12, emphasis in the original. 14 See also Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 188–9. 15 Ibid., 209. 16 Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 17 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 18 Williams, Culture, 228. 19 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”,’ in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 228. 20 Ibid., 232. 21 Ibid., 234. 22 Ibid., 239.

Chapter 2 1 Jere Surber, ‘Art as a Mode of Thought’, in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. William Maker (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), 46. 2 William Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), xii.

 Notes 173 3 Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2014), 7. 4 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst: Vorlesungen von 1826 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 64. 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, (1970) 1995), 2: 255. This passage adduces the different faculties in terms of what they can convey, hence smell is not germane to works of art, while sight is. 6 Jason Gaiger, ‘Hegel’s Contested Legacy: Rethinking the Relation between Art History and Philosophy’, The Art Bulletin 93, no. 2 (June 2011): 188. 7 Ibid., 191. 8 Annemarie Gerthmann-Siefert, ‘Interpretation as Cultural Orientation: Remarks on Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in Interpretation: Ways of Thinking About the Sciences and the Arts, ed. Pater Machamer and Gereon Wolters (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 33. 9 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Kantische Philosophie’, Janaer Schriften 1810-1807 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 324–8. 10 Even more uncompromisingly, Pippin explains: ‘the common translation of Hegel’s Geist is “spirit”, but since that misleadingly suggests immaterial substances, or even ghosts, from now on I shall leave it untranslated, hoping that the context of the discussion makes clear what it means.’ Pippin, After the Beautiful, 6. 11 G. W. F. Hegel, Nürnberger und Heidelberger Schriften 1808-1817 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 65. 12 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 1: 52. 13 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 470. 14 Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), see especially chapter 9, ‘Les récits de la légitimation du savoir’, 54–62. 15 Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, ‘Die systematische Bestimmung der Kunst und die Geschichtlichkeit der Künste: Hegels über ‘Aestheticen sive philosophiam artis’, in Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, 20. 16 Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, 56. 17 Martin McQuillan ed., The Paul de Man Notebooks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 261 18 Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, 63. 19 Ibid., 65. 20 McQuillan, The Paul de Man Notebooks, 264. 21 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 514. 22 Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, 74. 23 Desmond, Art and the Absolute, xiii, emphasis in the original. 24 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 28. 25 Ibid., 283–6. 26 Ibid., 378. 27 Desmond, Art and the Absolute, 105. 28 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 26. 29 Desmond, Art and the Absolute, 107. 30 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 547–8; translation taken from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 455. See also Desmond, Art and the Absolute, 109–10, 196. 31 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 127. 32 Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, 67.

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33 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 528. 34 Richard Dien Winflield, ‘The Classical Nude and the Limits of Sculpture’, Revue Internatioanle de Philosophie 56, no. 221 (2002): 450. 35 Ibid. 36 Stephen Houlgate, ‘Hegel and the Art of Painting’, in Maker ed., Hegel and Aesthetics, 63. 37 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 23. 38 See, for example, Shoni Rancher, ‘Suffering Tragedy: Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Butler on the Tragedy of “Antigone”’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41, no. 3 (September 2008), 63–78. 39 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 2: 144. 40 Houlgate in Maker ed., Hegel and Aesthetics, 64. 41 Rudolphe Gasché, ‘The Harmless Detail in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41, no. 4 (December 2008): 52. 42 Gaiger, ‘Hegel’s Contested Legacy,’ 187. 43 SHOWstudio: Thoughts on Fashion Film – Nick Knight, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=BOB​​ZMS9B​​hr0​&t​​=2s​&h​​a​s​_ve​​rifie​​d​=1. Accessed 12 August 2018. 44 For a discussion of Mueck and other contemporary hyperrealist sculptors, see Adam Geczy, The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art: Marionettes, Models and Mannequins (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 79–87.

Chapter 3 1 As Max Paddison affirms: ‘Adorno had ability as a composer, and appeared to be highly regarded by Berg. His compositional output was small, however, and by the mid-1930s Adorno had virtually ceased composing as his theoretical and philosophical interests finally dominated. Nevertheless, the works are of interest in themselves. The Sechs Bagatellen, for voice and piano, op. 6 (1923) demonstrate a close motivic-thematic working within a freely atonal idiom, while his Sechs kurze Orchesterstücke op. 4 (1929), are particularly effective in their economy of gesture and confident use of orchestra. These latter pieces show the strong influence of Berg, and, in spite of his hostility to neoclassicism, show distinct traces of traditional forms and genres. There are sketches for a projected opera on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, entitled Der Schatz des Indian-Joe (1932–3), of which two songs are complete. The idiom of most of his pieces is firmly based in the heyday of Second Viennese School free atonality pre-1914, the period he regarded as the radical high-point of twentiethcentury music from which composers had subsequently retreated into diverse attempts to systematize their compositional procedures.’ Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5–6. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 34. 3 Ibid., 37. 4 In a coruscating deconstruction, Slavoj Žižek contests this popularly held binary as so much cliché: ‘In the case of Prokofiev as well as that of Shostakovich, the reason why critics so desparately look for the ultimate proof of secret dissidence is to avoid a highly embarrassing truth: their most popular works today in the West overlap to a surprising degree with the very works which get the greatest official support (not

 Notes 175

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

only popular) support from the regime: Shostakovich’s Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh Symphonies, Prokofiev’s Peter and Wolf and the Romeo and Juliet ballet. Even among Shostakovich’s chamber music, his Piano Quartet, which got the Stalin prize in 1940, is his most popular piece!’ Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York and London: Verso, 2008), 239. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 154. George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 47.

Chapter 4 1 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, xi. 2 James McFarland, ‘Der Fall Faustus: Continuity and Displacement in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Thomas Mann’s Californian Exile’, New German Critique 100 (Winter 2007): 127. 3 Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt Am Main: Fischer, 1999), 320. 4 Ibid., 321. 5 Ibid., 322. 6 Ibid., 323. 7 Ibid., 324. 8 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 14. 9 Jeremy Tambling, Histories of the Devil (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 266. 10 Evelyn Cobley, ‘Decentred Totalities in Doctor Faustus: Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno’, New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 86, no. 86 (2002): 185. 11 David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory After Adorno (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 27. 12 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 265. 13 Ibid. 14 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 216. 15 Christopher Dennis describes Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music in the following way: ‘The twelve-tone music of Schoenberg can be characterized in its essentials as confronting a system of compositional rules which are designed to avoid the appearance of continuity which is the aim of tonal music. The most important of these rules is that the basis of composition should be what is termed the tone row: a sequence in which all of the twelve degrees of the western tempered scale are to be sounded, without the repetition of any one of them (except immediately without any other note in between, which counts as one occurrence). The row can also be

176

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

Notes

sounded inverted, backwards, or backwards and inverted. The two important features of this rule for our purposes are: first, that there is no repetition of notes, and second, that all of the twelve tones make up a row. Between them, these two characteristics ensure that the row does not function in the same way as a tonal melody or theme, because there is no centre around which a key (and thus an identity as a whole) can be perceived. Every sound, in a sense, is a surprise, and bears no relationship other than simple juxtaposition, to any other. Because all of the notes are contained in the row, no particular sound can carry with its occurrence an implication of another to follow. The row has no identity upon which the tonal expectation can be founded.’ Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 57. Roberts, Art and Enlightenment, 48. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 193, 196. ‘Stravinsky: Ein dialektisches Bild’; ‘Stravinsky: A Dialectical Image’. James Marsh, ‘Adorno’s Critique of Stravinsky’, New German Critique 28 (Winter 1983): 163. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 215. Ibid., 216. This is echoed by Paddison, see Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 270. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 129. Ibid., 131. ‘Die Idiosynkrasie gegen den Kitsch ekelt sich vor dessen Anspruch, das Erwartete zu sein, das er doch durch seinen Defekt entwürdigt. Er äfft mit dem, was er zugleich vor der Kunst voraus hat.’ Mahler: Eine musikalsche Physiognomik, in Die musikalischen Monographen, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (1971) 1985), 193. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 133.

Chapter 5 1 See our detailed discussion of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its relation to contemporary popular culture with an emphasis on fashion and art in chapter three of Geczy and Karaminas, Fashion Installation. 2 Adorno, Versuch über Wagner in Die musikalischen Monographien, Gesammelte Schriften, 16. 3 See, for example, in Ibid., 32, 38. 4 Ibid., 137. 5 Ibid., 43. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 44. 8 Ibid., 140. 9 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 175. 10 Adorno, Mahler: Eine muikalische Phisiognomik in Gesammelte Schriften, 192–3. 11 Anton Zijderveld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 100. 12 Ibid., 101. 13 Ibid.

 Notes 177 Adorno, Mahler, in Gesammelte Schriften, 205. Ibid. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 269. Theodor W. Adorno, Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, (1956) 1963), 44. 20 Ibid., 44–5. 21 Ibid., 278. 22 Ibid., 295. 14 15 16 17 18 19

Chapter 6 1 David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 302. 2 Christian Fuchs, Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas in the Age of the Internet (London: University of Westminster Press, 2016), 80. 3 Ibid., 81. 4 Ibid., 89. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 106. 7 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 190. 8 Calvin Thomas, ‘A Knowledge That Would Not Be Power: Adorno, Nostalgia, and the Historicity of the Musical Subject’, New German Critique 48 (Autumn 1989): 169. 9 Ibid., 174. 10 Songtao Luo, ‘Art and Society in Light of Adorno’s Non-Identity Philosophy’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 8, no. 2 (June 2013): 360. 11 Eva Geulen, ‘Endgames: Reconstructing Adorno’s “End of Art”’, New German Critique 81 (Autumn 2000): 157. Note that the Querelle in question dates to the seventeenth, not the eighteenth, century, but this does not alter the point made. 12 Ibid., 159. 13 Ibid., 161. 14 Wilhelm Wurzer, Filming and Judgment: Between Heidegger and Adorno (London and New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1990), 64. 15 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 286–7. 16 Geczy and Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to van Beirendonck, 158. 17 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 113. 18 Ibid., 113–4. 19 Robert Witkin, ‘Why Did Adorno “Hate’ Jazz?”’, Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2000): 165. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 166. 23 Ibid., 169.

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Chapter 7 1 Jameson, Late Marxism, 144. 2 Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ (1963), trans. Anson Rabinbach, New German Critique 6 (Fall, 1975), reproduced in Brian O’Connor ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 231. 3 Ibid., 233. 4 Christopher Dennis, Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music (Lewisten and Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998) 95. 5 Revill, The Roaring Silence, 47. 6 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2016), 130. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 133. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 134. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 138. 16 Marianna Papastephanou, ‘Aesthetics, Education, the Critical Autonomous Self, and the Culture Industry’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 75. 17 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 139. 18 Ibid., 144. 19 Ibid., 146. 20 Ibid., 171. 21 Ibid., 176. 22 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, (1970) 2003), 51–2. 23 Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, 233. 24 Ibid., 234. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, trans. Stephen Crook (London and New York: Routledge (1994) 2002), 101. 26 Ibid., 105. 27 Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, 235. 28 Ibid. 29 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Prolog zum Fernsehen’, Eingriffe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (1963) 1996), 73. 30 Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, 236. 31 Ibid., 237.

Chapter 8 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwolf theoretische Vorlesungen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968), 82. 2 Ibid., 33.

 Notes 179 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., 39. Dennis, Adrono’s Philosophy of Music, 88. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 143–4. In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 there is a passage that reads: ‘Schlage, the officer explained, was the German word for sledgehammer; others was a Polish saying, “Szlag trafi” which meant roughly “Drop dead” or “I hope you’re hit with a sledgehammer.”’ trans. Michael Glenny (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 435. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, 35. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 60. Adorno, Dissonanzen, 10. Ibid., 11. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, 78–9. Adorno, Dissonanzen, 13. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 18. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Adorno, Dissonanzen, 43. ‘Das Komischwerden der Musik in der gegenwärtigen Phase hat vorab den Grund, dass etwas so gänzlich Nutzloses mit allen sichtbaren Zeichen der Anstrengung ernester Arbeit betrieben wird’. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, 233. Adorno, Dissonanzen, 159. ‘So sehr alle Kunst ein schlechtes Gewissen hat und haben muss, wofern sie sich nicht dumm machen will, so falsch wäre doch ihre Abschaffung un einer Welt, in der immer noch das herrscht was als seines Korrektivs der Kunst bedarf: der Widerspruch zwischen dem was ist und dem Wahren, zwischen der Einrichtung des Lebens und der Menschheit’.

Chapter 9 1 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse 12, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1989–90): 47. 2 Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, 34. 3 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 48. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the ‘jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1990), 3. 5 Theodore Gracyk, ‘Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music’, The Musical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 527. 6 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 136. 7 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 66. 8 Sarah Churchwell, ‘The Oracle of Our Unease’, The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2020, 23. 9 Ibid. 10 Adorno, ‘Adorno to Benjamin’, in Theodor W. Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso (1977), 1995), 125. 11 Ibid.

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12 Ibid., 125–6. 13 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 49. 14 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, (1981) 1990), 121. 15 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 49. 16 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, 122. 17 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 52. 18 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, 122–3. 19 Ibid., 123. 20 Ibid., 124. 21 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 54. 22 Ibid., 55. 23 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, 124. 24 Ibid., 125. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 123. 27 Ibid., 125. 28 Ibid., 126 29 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 50. 30 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, 126. 31 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 51. 32 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion: Jazz’, 127. 33 Ibid., 132. 34 Adorno, ‘On Jazz’, 62. 35 Ibid., 63. 36 Ibid., 66. 37 Okiji, Jazz as Critique, 8. 38 Ibid. 39 Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, 123. 40 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 24. See also Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Krakauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2012), 207. 41 Gracyk, ‘Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music’, 536. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 538.

Chapter 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, 239. Adorno, Prisms, 34. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, 359. Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 13. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 15–16. Ibid., 16.

 Notes 181 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 466–7. Ibid., 355. Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 210. Ibid., 60. Carrier and Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins, 166–79. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 166–7. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 171. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso (2005) 2007), chapter 3, 31–64. Carrier and Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins, 176. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 224. See Geczy, ‘Kawakubo: “I Want to Be Forgotten”’, Transorientalism in Art, Fashion and Film: Inventions of Identity (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 134–9. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 475. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 74. Ibid. Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen (1853) (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2007), 5. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 403. Ibid., 49–50. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 79. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 407. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 49. Peter Hohendahl, ‘Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”’, Cultural Critique 60 (Spring, 2005): 174. Ibid., 175.

Chapter 11 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, (1970) 2003), 267. 2 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, 356.

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3 Gerhard Richter, ‘A Portrait of Non-Identity’, Monatschrifte 94, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 4. 4 Richard Wolin, ‘Utopia, Mimesis, and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, Representations 32 (Autumn 1990): 34. ‘Nonconceptual’ can here be taken in the Kantian sense as opposed to ignorance of Conceptual Art, in which the slippages between the concept in philosophy and the nonconcept of art are negotiated. 5 Ibid., 43. 6 Shierry Weber Nicholson, ‘Toward a More Adequate Reception of Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”: Configurational Form in Adorno’s Aesthetic Writings’, Cultural Critique 18 (Spring 1991): 56–7. 7 William Melaney, ‘Art as a Form of Negative Dialectics: “Theory” in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11, no. 1 (1997): 45, 49. 8 Ibid., 368. 9 Adorno, Metaphysik, 184. 10 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Art of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 17. 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). 12 Bersani and Dutoit, Art of Impoverishment, 25. 13 Ibid., 355. 14 Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge MA: MIT Press (1991) 1993), 11. 15 Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 43. 16 See, for example, Gertrud Koch, ‘Mimesis and Bildverbot’, Screen 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 211–22, and Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 224–7. 17 As Wellmer states: ‘Walter Benjamin had argued in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that the “puppet of ‘historical materialism’” needed to enlist the services of theology. Adorno’s philosophy could be understood as the attempt to fulfil this postulated need. There is, however, a fissure between messianic-utopian and materialistic motifs in Adorno’s thought, which cannot be overlooked; moreover, the same fissure is repeated within the elements of materialistic theory, running between historical materialism and utopian sensualism.’ The Persistence of Modernity, 11. 18 Idit Dobbs-Wesinstein, ‘Negative Dialectics, Sive Secular Jewish Theology: Adorno on the Prohibition on Graven Images and Imperative of Historical Critique’, in Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, ed. Michael Fagenblat (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017), 202–3. 19 Adorno, Âsthetische Theorie, 40. 20 Dobbs-Wesinstein, ‘Negative Dialectics, Sive Secular Jewish Theology’, 209. 21 Adorno, Âsthetische Theorie, 46. 22 Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity, 12. 23 Adorno, Âsthetische Theorie, 55. 24 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 254. 25 Adorno, Âsthetische Theorie, 97. 26 Ibid., 113. 27 Ibid., 152. 28 Adorno, Beethoven, 74. 29 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 232. 30 Ibid., 233.

 Notes 183 31 Martin Lüdke, ‘Der Kronzeuge: Einige Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis Th. W. Adornos zu Beckett’, in Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik (1977) 1983), 136–49. 32 Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, trans. Michael Jones, New German Critique 26 (Spring-Summer 1982): 119–50. 33 Ibid., 121–2. 34 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 154. 35 Adorno, ‘Jene zwanziger Jahre’, in Eingriffe: Neuen kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (1963) 1996), 68. 36 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 106. 37 Ibid., 159. 38 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, 373. 39 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 154. 40 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, 373. 41 Ibid., 374. 42 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977), 24. 43 As Zuidervaart eloquently explains at the end of his book: ‘Even though Aesthetic Theory expresses suffering in an incomparable way, those who share Adorno’s concerns cannot avoid raising questions about this expression. The experience of suffering, direct and pervasive though it be, cannot directly illuminate itself. It must be interpreted. The need to express suffering, clearly urgent and significant, cannot be self-evident as a condition of truth. The need must also be met in ways that are true. The philosophical recognition of this need, no matter how compelling, cannot be self-contained. The recognition must also represent those for whom the suffering is expressed and interpreted.’ Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 306. 44 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984). 45 Roberts, Art and Enlightenment, 130–1. 46 Ibid., 131. 47 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 227. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Richard Wolin, ‘Utopia, Mimesis, and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, Representations 32 (Autumn 1990): 33–49, 35–6. 51 See Adorno, Eingriffe. 52 Wolin, ‘Utopia, Mimesis, and Reconciliation’, 36. 53 Ibid., 48. 54 Erica Weizman, ‘No Fun: Aporias of Pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, The German Quarterly 81, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 185. 55 Ibid., 187. 56 Ibid. 57 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 213. 58 Weizman, ‘No Fun’, 199. 59 Ibid., 200. 60 Catherine Lui reaches a similar conclusion when she states: ‘If art is to be rescued from its spiritualization or its transformation into ‘‘objects of sensual gratification,’’ a certain amount of mediation is necessary. In fact, the two processes

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are related: spiritualization wants to reduce art to pure sensuous intuitability, but nonsensuousness restores what is singularly resistant to apprehension in the concrete muteness of the art object. To insist that mediation is necessary to any reflection on the crisis in art and the crisis of the museum is to take seriously both pleasure and critical thinking as vital elements of aesthetic experience and democratic process. Art is indeed related to the sideshow, the carnival, and the whole array of popular and folk culture’s most fantastic and cruel entertainments. A mindless celebration of the museum’s and contemporary art’s familial relation to megamall or dancing bear produces the same result as the rationalization of art object as a vehicle of a message of reconciliation: to defend either position by excluding the other to render criticism inane and art, innocuous.’ ‘Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno’s Museum’, Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005): 240–1. 61 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 231. 62 Ibid., 245. 63 Ibid., 246.

Chapter 12 1 For example, Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik eds., Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), where the authors also have a chapter. 2 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (1967), trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1983). 3 Sandra Nissan and Anne Brydon, ‘Introduction: Adorning the Body’, in Consuming Fashion Adorning the Transnational Body, ed. Sandra Nissan and Anne Brydon (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998), ix. 4 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 47. 5 Yuniya Kawamura, Doing Research in Fashion and Dress. An Introduction to Qualitative Methods (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011), 1. 6 Stefano Marino, ‘Body, World and Dress: Phenomenological and Somaesthetic Observations on Fashion’, Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy XII, no. 1 (June, 2020): 30. 7 Lars Svendsen, Fashion. A Philosophy, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Press, 2006), 9. 8 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion. Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4. 9 Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (London: Hogarth, 1976), 62. 10 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Intellectual Fashions’, in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Geiman (London: UCL Press, 1993), 24. 11 Ibid. 12 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas eds., Fashion and Art (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 6. 13 Rocamora and Smelik, Thinking through Fashion, 12. 14 See Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body. Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge and Maiden: Polity Press, 2000). See also Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson, eds., Body Dressing (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001). 15 Geczy and Karaminas, Fashion Installation.

 Notes 185 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 2–3. Ibid. Ibid. See Joanne Entwistle, ‘Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice’, Fashion Theory 4, no. 3 (2000): 323. Ibid. Ibid, 324. Ibid, 325. Ibid. Stefano Marino, ‘Body, World and Dress: Phenomenological and Somaesthetic Observations on Fashion’, Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy XII, no. 1 (June, 2020): 27–48, 38. Ibid.

Chapter 13 1 See our mention of this event in our article, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, ‘Lady Gaga, American Horror Story: Fashion, Monstrosity and the Grotesque’, Fashion Theory 26, no. 6 (2017): 3. 2 Mary Caputi, ‘Unmarked and Unrehearsed’, in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, ed. Renée Heberle (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2006), 317. 3 Ibid., 311. 4 See Geczy, Transorientalism in Art, Fashion and Film: Inventions of Identity, 12, 24, 26, 75, 177. 5 Caputi, ‘Unmarked and Unrehearsed’, 307. 6 Ibid., 310. 7 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism, and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 137, and Butler, Bodies That Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 235–6. See also Adam Geczy, ‘Performance Art and Performing Gender’, in What Is Performance Art? Australian Perspectives, ed. Geczy and Mimi Kelly (Sydney: Power Publications, 2018), 167–82. 8 Caputi, ‘Unmarked and Unrehearsed’, 319. 9 Jackie Stacey, ‘Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton – the Mistress of Flat Effect’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, Society 28, no. 3 (2015): 267. 10 J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism. Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), xii. 11 Laura Barton, ‘‘I Felt Famous My Whole Life’, The Guardian, 21 February 2020, https​ :/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/mu​​sic​/2​​009​/j​​an​/21​​/lady​​-gaga​​-i​nte​​rview​​-fame​. Accessed 21 April 2020. 12 Camille Paglia, ‘Theatre of Gender. David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution’, in David Bowie Is . . . , ed. Broakes Victoria and Geoffrey Marsh (London: V&A Publications, 2013), 72. 13 Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (Saint Paul: Minnesota, 2012), 65. 14 Daniel Kreps, ‘Lady Gaga: My Whole Career Is a Tribute to David Bowie’, Rolling Stone, 21 February 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.rol​​lings​​tone.​​com​/m​​usic/​​music​​-news​​/lady​​

186

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

Notes

-gaga​​-my​-w​​hole-​​caree​​r​-is-​​a​-tri​​bute-​​to​-d​a​​vid​-b​​owie-​​12504​​0/. Accessed 5 April 2020. Ibid. Britanny Spanos, ‘Watch Lady Gaga Deliver Astonishing David Bowie Tribute Medley’, Rolling Stone, 16 February 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.rol​​lings​​tone.​​com​/m​​usic/​​music​​ -news​​/watc​​h​-lad​​y​-gag​​a​-del​​iver-​​aston​​ishin​​g​-dav​​id​-bo​​wie​-g​​rammy​​​-trib​​ute​-m​​edley​​ -1839​​57/. Accessed 15 April 2020. Theresa L. Geller, ‘Trans/Affect. Monstrous Masculinities and the Sublime Art of Lady Gaga’, in Lady Gaga and Popular Music. Performing Gender, Fashion and Culture, ed. Martin Iddon and Melanie L. Marshall (New York: Routledge, 2014), 213. Andrew Ross, No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 5. José M. Yebra, ‘Camp Revamped in Pop Culture Icon Lady Gaga: The Case of “Telephone” and “Born this Way”’, European Journal of American Culture 37, no. 1 (2018): 42. Ibid. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2015), 252. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=Kxf​​​BbMjn​​WxU. Accessed 8 September 2019. ‘Lady Gaga Talks about Marina Abramovic’, 2010, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​ =EVY​​​4Whay​​w0s. Accessed 8 September 2019. ‘James Franco on Display at the Museum of Modern Art’, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=Trw​​​9vYV_​​g6c. Accessed 8 September 2019. See our detailed analysis of another video-film by Åkerlund, Duran Duran’s Girl Panic (2011) in Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 96–104. See our analysis of this video in ‘Lady Gaga, American Horror Story: Fashion, Monstrosity and the Grotesque’, 16–17. Blake Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 2020), 345. Lori Burns and Marc LaFrance, ‘Celebrity, Spectacle and Surveillance. Understanding Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” and “Telephone” through Music, Image and Movement’, in Iddon and Marshall eds., Lady Gaga and Popular Music, 118. Paul Hegarty, ‘Lady Gaga and the Drop. Eroticism High and Low’, in Iddon and Marshall eds., Lady Gaga and Popular Music, 84. Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film, Art and Advertising in the Digital Age, 44. Ibid. Daniel Kreps, ‘Lady Gaga: My Whole Career Is a Tribute to David Bowie’, https​:/​/ww​​ w​.rol​​lings​​tone.​​com​/m​​usic/​​music​​-news​​/lady​​-gaga​​-my​-w​​hole-​​caree​​r​-is-​​a​-tri​​bute-​​to​-d​a​​ vid​-b​​owie-​​12504​​0/.

Chapter 14 1 E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Madonna Politics: Perversion, Repression, or Subversion? Or, Masks and as Master-y,’ in The Madonna Connection. Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 150.

 Notes 187 2 Tim Dams, ‘Madonna Vents Anger as London Palladium Cuts off Madame X Show’, Variety, 6 February 2020. Accessed 14 May 2020. https​:/​/va​​riety​​.com/​​2020/​​music​​/ news​​/mado​​nna​-l​​ondon​​-pall​​adium​​-mada​​me​-​x-​​12034​​95011​/ 3 Raiser Bruner, ‘New Video Inspired by Madonna’s “I Rise” Captures Global Protest Movement’, Time, 19 June 2019. https​:/​/ti​​me​.co​​m​/560​​8577/​​madon​​na​-i-​​rise​-​​video​/. Accessed 14 May 2020. 4 James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred, L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson and Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 21. 5 John Fiske, Reading the Popular, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2017), 79. 6 Cathy Schwichtenberg, The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 3. 7 João José Reis, ‘Batuque: African Drumming and Dance between Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 24, no. 2, Brazilian Popular Culture in Historian Perspective (April 2005): 202. 8 Ibid. 9 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2007. 10 Ibid., 33. 11 Camilia Paglia, ‘Madonna – Finally a Real Feminist’, The New York Times, 12 December 1990, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/1​​990​/1​​2​/14/​​opini​​on​/ma​​donna​​-fina​​lly​-a​​ -real​​​-femi​​nist.​​html. Accessed 19 June 2019. 12 Sal Cinquemani, ‘Review: Madonna’s Madame X is a Fearless Eccentric Musical Memoir’, Slant, 12 June 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sla​​ntmag​​azine​​.com/​​music​​/revi​​ew​-ma​​ donna​​-mada​​me​-x-​​is​-a-​​fearl​​ess​-e​​ccent​​ri​c​-m​​usica​​l​-mem​​oir/. Accessed 30 May 2020. 13 ‘Madonna Admires Joan of Arc, She Says “Ready to Fight against Discrimination”’, https​ :/​/b9​​75​.co​​m​/new​​s​/art​​icles​​/2015​​/mar/​​06​/ma​​donna​​-admi​​res​-j​​oan​-o​​f​-arc​​-says​​-shes​​ -read​​y​-to-​​fight​​-a​gai​​nst​-d​​iscri​​minat​​ion/. Accessed 30 May 2020. 14 Althea Legaspi, ‘See Madonna’s New Dark Ballet Video Featuring Mykki Blanco as Joan of Arc’, Rolling Stone Magazine, 7 June 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lbb​​onlin​​e​.com​​/news​​/ emma​​nuel-​​adjei​​-crea​​tes​-a​​-harr​​owing​​-spec​​tacle​​-for-​​madon​​​nas​-d​​ark​-b​​allet​/. Accessed 30 May 2020. 15 ‘Madonna Calls for Gun Control in a Violent New Music Video’, Dazed, https​:/​/ww​​w​ .daz​​eddig​​ital.​​com​/m​​usic/​​artic​​le​/45​​056​/1​​/mado​​nna​-c​​alls-​​for​-g​​un​-co​​ntrol​​-in​-a​​-vio​l​​ent​ -n​​ew​-mu​​sic​-v​​ideo. Accessed 1 June 2020. 16 Angela Davis was a Marxist feminist and member of the Black Panthers. She was a student of Herbert Marcuse. She attended the Institute of Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, where she studied the works of Kant, Hegel and Adorno. Davis was involved in the Californian Main County Courthouse incident in 1970 when Jonathan Jackson, a heavily armed African American youth, entered the courthouse and took two Black convicts, the judge, the prosecutor and three jurors hostage. Police started shooting at Jackson as he left the courtroom with the hostages, fatally killing. Davis was convicted of purchasing and supplying arms to the youth and was imprisoned. A year later she was acquitted of the crime. 17 Fiske, Reading the Popular, 87. 18 http:​/​/ult​​imate​​histo​​rypro​​ject.​​com​/d​​isco-​​fashi​​​on​.ht​​ml. Accessed 22 May 2018. 19 Anthony Haden-Guest, ‘The Opening Night of Studio 54 Was Exactly the Hedonistic Riot that You Would Expect’, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​daily​​beast​​.com/​​the​-o​​penin​​g​-nig​​ht​-of​​ -stud​​io​-54​​-was-​​exact​​ly​-th​​e​-hed​​onist​​​ic​-ri​​ot​-yo​​ud​-ex​​pect. Accessed 17 May 2018.

188

Notes

20 James Hellings, Adorno and Art: Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 33. 21 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 45. 22 Ibid., 46.

Chapter 15 1 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 1939, https​:/​/ww​​ w​.aca​​demia​​.edu/​​75152​​41​/AV​​ANT​-G​​ARDE_​​AND​_K​​ITSCH​-​_Cle​​m​ent_​​Green​​berg. Accessed 18 July 2020. 2 Leah Harper, ‘“Its Lacroix, Sweetie!” Flamboyant 90s Look Comes Roaring Back for a New Generation’, The Guardian, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/fa​​shion​​/2020​​/feb/​​15​/ ch​​risti​​an​-la​​croix​​-fash​​io​n​-c​​ollab​​orati​​on, Accessed 2 June 2020. 3 Patsy Stone (Jennifer Saunders), Absolutely Fabulous, dir. Bob Spiers (UK: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1992). 4 Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherston (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 190. 5 John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture. From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 90. 6 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Random House, 2001), 127. 7 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity. Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 229. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 228. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 401. 11 Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell eds., The Norbert Elias Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 26. 12 Ibid., 28. 13 Ibid., 31. 14 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined’, Fashion Theory 23, no, 1 (2018): 115. 15 Ibid., 32. 16 Ibid., 34. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Leckachman (London: Continuum, 2004), 312. 18 David Ayes, ‘Literary Criticism and Cultural Politics’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature, Volume 1, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 587. 19 The Price Is Right is an American television game show franchise that has been airing since 1956. It premiered on CBS and is produced by Fremantle Media North America. It centres on a game show and invites contestants to guess the price of merchandise to win cash and prizes. Comedian Drew Carey has been hosting the show since 2007. 20 Stephen Gundle, Glamour. A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 231.

 Notes 189 21 Ibid., 267. 22 Justine Picardie, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (London: Harper Collins, 2010), 307. 23 Tierney McAfee and Liz McNeil, ‘How Jackie Kennedy Invented Camelot Just One Week after JFK’s Assassination’, People, 22 November 2017, https​:/​/pe​​ople.​​com​/p​​oliti​​cs​ /ja​​ckie-​​kenne​​dy​-in​​vente​​d​-cam​​elot-​​jfk​-a​​​ssass​​inati​​on/. Accessed 10 July 2020. 24 Xan Brooks, ‘Jackie: Behind the Creation of JFK, America’s Once and Future King’, The Guardian, 7 January 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/fi​​lm​/20​​17​/ja​​n​/07/​​jacki​​e​ -nat​​alie-​​portm​​an​-be​​hind-​​the​-c​​reati​​on​​-of​​-jfk-​​camel​​ot​-mo​​vies. Accessed 10 July 2020. 25 Roland Barthes, ‘The Face of Garbo’, in Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (London: Paladin, 1979), 56. 26 Ibid. 27 ‘The Women Who Inspired the Autumn/Winter 2018 Collections’, Another Magazine, 8 March 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ano​​therm​​ag​.co​​m​/fas​​hion-​​beaut​​y​/106​​60​/th​​e​-wom​​en​-wh​​ o​-ins​​pired​​-the-​​autum​​nwint​​er​-20​​18​-co​​llect​​ions?​​fbcli​​d​=IwA​​R3S6l​​RAkX8​​FCtv5​​zs​-f9​​ ozp0F​​LBnVU​​8MPUy​​VvZXm​​4EGtQ​​lGDli​​zo1Pj​​j48​?fbcl​​id​=Iw​​AR3S6​​lRAkX​​8FCtv​​​5zs​-f​​ 9ozp0​​FLBnV​​U8MPU​​yVvZX​​m4EGt​​QlGDl​​izo1P​​jj48.​ Accessed 10 July 2020. 28 Sarah Mower, ‘Comme des Garçons Fall 2018 Ready to Wear’, Vogue, Paris, 4 March 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​m​/fas​​hion-​​shows​​/fall​​-2018​​-read​​y​-to-​​wear/​​comme​​​-des-​​ garco​​ns. Accessed 13 July 2018. 29 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 231. 30 Mower, ‘Comme des Garçons Fall 2018 Ready to Wear’. 31 https://mykita​.com​/en​/journal​#layer:​/en/​​journ​​al​/be​​rnhar​​d​-wil​​lhelm​​-inte​​rview​​-los-​​ angel​​es. Accessed 13 July 2020. 32 Ingrid Loschek, When Clothes Become Fashion. Design and Innovation Systems (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009), 45. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 See Geczy and Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to van Beirendonck, for a more comprehensive analysis of Water van Beirendonck’s work. 36 Rebecca Arnold, ‘The New Rococo: Sophia Coppola and Fashions in Contemporary Femininity’, in Rococo Ecco: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola, ed. Melissa Hayes and Katie Scott (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 297. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Geczy and Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to van Beirendonck, 10. 40 Arnold, in Melissa Hayes and Katie Scott eds., Rococo Ecco: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 308. 41 Tatler was a society magazine first published by Sir Richard Steele in London in the early eighteenth century, which featured poetry and stories on the lives of the rich and famous and reported on society events such as charity balls, races, hunting parties, high society balls, fashion and gossip. It is now published by Condé Nast and targeted towards an upper-middle-class readership. 42 Claire Wilcox, Vivienne Westwood (London: V&A Museum, 2004), 21. 43 Lucy Elis, From Boucher to Bodices: Finding Art in Fashion, https​:/​/ar​​tuk​.o​​rg​/di​​scove​​r​ /sto​​ries/​​from-​​bouch​​er​-to​​-bodi​​ces​-f​​i ndin​​g​​-art​​-in​-f​​ashio​​n, 18 February 2018. Accessed 13 July 2020. 44 Arnold, in Melissa Hayes and Katie Scott eds., Rococo Ecco, 310.

190

Notes

Chapter 16 1 Geczy and Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to van Beirendonck, 33–5. 2 https​:/​/st​​ylejo​​urno.​​blogs​​pot​.c​​om​/20​​13​/07​​/dest​​​roy​.h​​tml. 3 Caroline Evans, ‘The Golden Dustman: A Critical Evaluation of the Work of Martin Margiela and a Review of Martin Margiela: Exhibition (9/4/1615)’, Fashion Theory 2, no. 1 (1998), 75. 4 Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 343, emphasis in the original. 5 Ibid., 345, emphasis in the original. 6 Ibid., 358. 7 Ibid., 267. 8 ‘How Demna Gvassalia’s Balenciaga Defined the Aesthetic of a Generation’, iD Magazine, https​:/​/i-​​d​.vic​​e​.com​​/en​_u​​s​/art​​icle/​​xwvwj​​3​/how​​-demn​​as​-ba​​lenci​​aga​-t​​ook​ -o​​ver​-t​​he​-wo​​rld​-a​​nd​-de​​fined​​-the-​​​aesth​​etic-​​of​-a-​​gener​​ation​. Accessed 4 February 2020. 9 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, in Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentriccia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 131. 10 Ibid., 131. 11 Patrizia Calefato, Fashion, Time, Language, Èditions universitaires européennes (Moldova:Verlag, 2017), 47. 12 ‘Demna Gvasalia on Appropriation, Ugly Sneakers and the Curse of Pre-Collections’, WWD, 26 February 2019, https​:/​/ww​​d​.com​​/fash​​ion​-n​​ews​/f​​ashio​​n​-fea​​tures​​/demn​​ a​-gva​​salia​​-talk​​s​-app​​ropri​​ation​​-ugly​​-snea​​kers-​​and​-t​​he​-cu​​rse​-o​​f​-p​re​​-coll​​ectio​​ns​-12​​ 03001​​305/. Accessed 2 February 2020. 13 Evans, ‘The Golden Dustman,’ 79. 14 Richard O’Mahoney, ‘Remembered: The Game Changing Martin Margiela Show of 1989’, BOF, 16 February 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.bus​​iness​​offas​​hion.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/bo​​f​-exc​​ lusiv​​e​/rem​​ember​​ed​-th​​e​-gam​​e​-cha​​nging​​-mart​​in​​-ma​​rgiel​​a​-sho​​w​-of-​​1989. Accessed 10 February 2020. 15 Cathy Horne, ‘Vetements Redefines the Whole Idea of Designer Collaborations in One Show’, The Cut, 23 July 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​cut​.c​​om​/20​​16​/06​​/vete​​ments​​-coll​​ abora​​tion-​​levis​​-juic​​y​-han​​es​​-18​​-bran​​ds​.ht​​ml. Accessed 3 February 2020. 16 Ibid. 17 Miles Sosha, ‘Demna Gvasalia Exists Vetements’, WWD, 16 September 2019, https​:/​/ ww​​d​.com​​/fash​​ion​-n​​ews​/d​​esign​​er​-lu​​xury/​​demna​​-gvas​​alia-​​exits​​-vete​​ments​​-excl​​u​sive​​ -1203​​28359​​0/. Accessed 8 February 2020. 18 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 249–50. 19 Geczy and Karaminas, Critical Fashion Practice from Westwood to van Beirendonck, 91. 20 Paul Tierny, ‘Martin Margiela. Deconstructing to Reconstruct’, Neue Luxury, Issue 5, https​:/​/ww​​w​.neu​​eluxu​​ry​.co​​m​/fea​​ture/​​marti​​n​-​mar​​giela​/. Accessed 6 February 2020.

 Notes 191

Conclusion 1 Namwali Serpell, ‘In the Time of Monsters’, New York Review of Books, 9 April 2020, 24. 2 Ibid. 3 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 385. 4 Ibid., 256. 5 See Gerald Bruns, ‘On the Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 225–35. 6 John McHale, ‘The Plastic Parthenon’, in Pop Art Redefined, ed. J. Russell and Suzie Gablik (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 110. See also Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 120.

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Index Abramovic, Marina  4, 114–15, 114 The Abramovic Method Practiced by Lady Gaga  115 The Artist is Present  115 Absolutely Fabulous (TV series)  135–6, 135 Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (film)  135 Abstract Expressionism  31 Adjai, Emanuele  121 Adorno, Theodor W.  2–9, 11–16, 20, 27, 29, 31–5, 41–5, 47–63, 65–101, 104–7, 111, 113, 114, 117, 128–31, 133, 136–8, 153, 167–9, 182 n.17. See also culture industry; Horkheimer, Max Aesthetic Theory  2, 5, 9, 11, 37, 39, 52, 65, 81, 87, 89, 91, 95–6, 168 and Cindy Sherman  105–7 Dialectic of Enlightenment  57 Dissonances  65, 179 n.21 and fashion  2–3, 52 Introduction to a Sociology of Music  65 Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic  29–31 lectures on metaphysics  14–15 Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy  44 Minima Moralia  97, 130–1 Musiksoziologie  81 Negative Dialectics  5, 31, 61, 82 Philosophy of Modern Music  5, 16, 35–40, 47, 96 Åkerlund, Beu  116 Åkerlund, Jonas  116, 124 American Music Awards  111 And God Created Woman (film)  144 André, Carl Equivalent VIII  6 Antigone (Sophocles play)  26 Arnold, Rebecca  152 Artaud, Antonin  157–8

Artforum (magazine)  133 Art Nouveau  81–2 Asher, Michael  6 Auschwitz  47, 49–50, 82, 89, 94. See also Holocaust autonomous art  32, 34, 39, 67, 84, 93, 96–7, 104–6, 115, 130. See also heteronymous art Avengers (film franchise)  61 Ayes, David  139 Bach, Johann Sebastian  75 Baez, Joan  3 Baldwin, James  120 Balenciaga (fashion house)  159, 161 Triple S  159 banality  26, 44–5, 54, 75, 162 Bancroft, Anne  144 Bardot, Brigitte  144, 145 Barney, Matthew  50 Baroque music  66 Barringer, Colleen  114 Miranda Sings  114 Barthes, Roland  99 Bartok, Bela  38 Battelle, Kenneth  146 Batukadeiras (orchestra)  121 Batuque  121 Baudelaire, Charles  2–3, 101 Baudrillard, Jean  58 Bauhaus  32 The Beatles  53 Beauvoir, Simone de  126 Beckett, Samuel  3, 6, 33, 87, 91–5 Endgame  94 Waiting for Godot  91, 94 ‘Westward Ho!’  6 Beckham, Victoria  151 Beethoven, Ludwig van  6, 16, 72, 93, 105 Fifth Symphony  66 Beirendonck, Walter van  52, 152, 152 ‘Weird’  152

202 Bell, Quentin  100 Benjamin, Walter  6, 30, 40, 43, 57, 58, 63, 73, 79, 80, 92, 96, 101, 168 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’  182 n.17 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility  57 Benn, Gottfried  87 Berg, Alban  29, 30, 41 Derr Schatz des Indian-Joe  174 n.1 Lulu  51 Orchesterstücke  174 n.1 Sechs Bagatellen  174 n.1 Berio, Luciano  167 Berlioz, Hector  41 Bernstein, J. M.  12, 84, 92–3 Bersani, Leo  91 Better Call Saul (TV series)  18 Bhabha, Homi  52 Location of Culture  52–3 Bildverbot  92, 94–5 Blahnik Hangisi, Manolo  162 Blake, William  32 Blanco, Mykki  123–4, 124 Bloch, Ernst  6, 30, 31, 90 The Principle of Hope  4 Boisrond, Michel  144 Boucher, François Daphnis and Chloe  154 Portrait of Mme de Pompadour  153 Boudin, Gut  117 Boulez, Pierre  37, 167 Bourdieu, Pierre Distinction: Social Critique of Judgment  16 The Rules of Art  16 Bowie, Andrew  5 Bowie, David  108, 109–10, 110, 111 Aladdin Sane  109 Blackstar  117 ‘Fashion’  110 ‘Let’s Dance’  110 ‘Rebel Rebel’  110 ‘Space Oddity’  110 Ziggy Stardust  109–10 Bowie, Malcolm Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult  32–3

Index Brahms, Johannes  8, 41 Braque, Georges  83 Breaking Bad (TV series)  18 Brecht, Bertolt  93–4 Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui  94 Brioni (fashion house)  162 Broodthaers, Marcel  6 Brummell, Beau  138 Brydon, Anne  99 Buchloh, Benjamin  85 Bunton, Emma  135 Bürger, Peter  85, 95–7 ‘Decline of the Modern Age’  95 Theory of the Avant-Garde  95 Burns, Lorie  116 Butler, Judith  107 Cage, John  47–8, 169 Calefato, Patrizia  160 Calinescu, Matei  137, 149 Cameron, James  162 camp  111–12, 117, 127, 134, 148–52. See also kitsch Camus, Albert  87 Capote, Truman  127, 128 Caputi, Mary  105–7 Cardin, Pierre  127 Carrier, David  7–8, 53, 85–6 Castelbajac, Jean-Charles de Kermit Jacket  111 Catholicism  121–2, 124, 128 CGI (computer-generated imagery)  60, 61, 63 Chalayan, Hussein  105 Chanel (brand)  139, 142, 143, 146–7 Chaplin, Charlie  57 Charles VII (France)  100 Chrysler (company)  58 Churchwell, Sarah  72 Clinton, Hilary  111 Cobley, Evelyn  37 Cohen, Leonard  3 Comme des Garçons. See Kawakubo, Rei Constructivism  32 Cooper, Badley  108, 112 Coppola, Sophia  152 Critical Fashion Practice  2, 51–3, 134, 152–3, 155, 156, 164 Cubism  31, 83

 Index 203 culture industry  1, 3–5, 7, 11, 14, 29, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49–50, 53–4, 66–9, 107, 117, 119, 136, 169 and alienation  89, 93, 96–7 ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’  56, 61–2 and jazz  65–7, 71–80 and kitsch  81, 85, 87 and popular culture  8, 55–63 Dada  95, 114 Dalí, Salvador  2 Dante Alighieri  32 Danto, Arthur  4, 12, 21, 50, 133 Davis, Miles  75 Day, Corrine Kate’s Flat  153 DC (company)  60 deconstruction, deconstructivism  155– 65 Deleuze, Gilles  91 de Man, Paul  21, 22 de Marky, Paul  75 Dennis, Christopher  56, 66, 175–6 n.15 Derrida, Jacques  155–8 Writing and Difference  157 Desmond, William  19, 23 DHL Couriers (brand)  159, 161 DiCaprio, Leonardo  162 Dick, Kirby  111 Disneyland  58 Dobbs-Wesinstein, Idit  92 Dongen, Kies van  77 Donizetti, Gaetano Lucia di Lammermoor  66 Douglas, Mary  103 Duchamp, Marcel  169 Bottle Rack  161 Fountain  161 Rrose Sélavy  113 Duchampian  6, 109 Dutoit, Ulysse  91 Duve, Thierry de  6 Dylan, Bob  1, 3, 17, 167 Einstein, Albert  72 Eisenman, Peter  156 Elias, Norbert  138–9

‘The Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch’  138 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  78 Elvira Madigan (film)  72 The Enlightenment  42, 49, 57, 90 Entwistle, Joanne  103 Evans, Caroline  161–3 Facebook  50, 61 Fascism  35 Fashion Police (TV show)  150–1 Fauvism  45 feminism  101, 119, 122, 123, 126, 155 Fernandex, Frank  111 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  21 film noir  126 Fink, Eugen Fashion…A Condescending Game  103 First World War  72–3, 84 Fiske, John  119, 121, 126–7 Fletcher, Mandie  135 Ford, Tom  149 Formichetti, Nicola  111, 117 Foucault, Michel  103 Foujita, Tsuguharu  77 Franco, James  4, 115 Frankfurt School  1, 4, 6, 73, 85, 119 Fraser, Andrea  6 French Revolution  32, 85 Fuchs, Christian  48 Gaiger, Jason  20, 26 Galeries Lafayette, Paris (store)  162 Game of Thrones (TV series)  52, 63 Garbo, Greta  147 Gardner, James  4 Gasché Rudolphe  26 Gaultier, Jean Paul  135–6 Gehry, Frank  156 Geller, Theresa  111 General Motors (company)  58 Gershwin, George  57 Gerthmann-Siefert, Annemarie  20, 21 Gesamtkunstwerk  1, 41 Geulen, Eva  49–50 Gibson, Laurian  116 Gide, André  79 Counterfeiters  82

204

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Gilmore, Jonathan  12 Gnosticism  95 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  19 Golden Lion  167 Goodman, Benny  60 Goodsblom, Johan  138 Gracyk, Theodore  71–2, 79–80 The Graduate (film)  143–4, 144 Grammy Awards  110 Greek art  23–6, 87 Greenberg, Clement  85, 106, 168 ‘The Avant-Garde and Kitsch’  133 Guattari, Félix  91 Gubaidulina, Sophia  167 Gucci (brand)  136 Guggenheim, Peggy  106 Gundle, Stephen  145 Gvasalia, Demna  155, 159–65 Gvasalia, Guram  159 Haacke, Hans  6 Halberstam, J. Jack  109 Hall, Jerry  127, 128, 135 Hall, Stuart  17–18 Halston, Roy  2, 127, 146 Hamlet (Shakespeare play)  26 H&M (braind)  140 Harris, ed  106 Harrods (store)  164 Harry, Debbie  127, 128 HBO  167 Hegarty, Paul  117 Hegel, G. W. F.  13, 14, 19–27, 31, 37, 38, 49, 88–90, 92, 99, 101 Aesthetics  3, 9, 19, 21 Elements of the Philosophy of Right  22, 94 Phenomenology of the Spirit  22, 24–5 Hegelian  2, 8, 11, 30, 36, 87, 89, 90, 95 Heidegger, Martin  34, 168 Heineken (brand)  159, 160 Hellings, James  130 Herder, Johann Gottfried  14 heteronymous art  130. See also autonomous art Hindemith, Paul  30 Hitchcock, Alfred  116 Hitler, Adolph  32, 37, 55 HIV/AIDS  119, 124

Hohendahl, Peter  88 Hölderlin, Friedrich  23 Hollywood  116 Holocaust  82, 89, 91. See also Auschwitz Horkheimer, Max  3, 4, 30, 50, 55–63, 72, 111, 133. See also Adorno, Theodor; culture industry Dialectic of Enlightenment  57 Houlgate, Stephen  25 Hourani, Rad  52 The Hunting Ground (film)  111. See also Lady Gaga Husserl, Edmund  30 Huyssen, Andreas  79 i-D  159 IKEA (brand)  161 Independent Group  169 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique  84 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)  169 institutional critique  7–8 Internet Explorer  159, 160 irony  30, 40, 44, 107, 119, 134, 139, 141, 145, 149–52 Islam  120 iTunes  48 Jacobi, Friedrich  35 Jameson, Fredric  55 Janacek, Leos  38 Jarrett, Keith  75, 167 Köln Concert  167 Vienna Concert  167 jazz  3, 4, 7, 35, 37, 38, 44, 48, 49, 53, 57, 60, 65–7, 71–80, 111, 136, 167. See also light music Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard (Le Corbusier)  83 Joan of Arc  123–4 Johnette, Jack  167 Johnson, Lyndon  147 Jolie, Angelina  144–5 Jones, Amelia  107 Joyce, James  3, 78, 94 Finnegan’s Wake  33 Kafka, Franz  89, 91, 94 Kahlo, Frida  126

 Index 205 Kant, Immanuel  20, 21, 87, 90, 92, 93 Critique of Judgment  19 sensus communis  77 Kantian  7–8, 35, 63, 86, 87 Kaplan, Anne  120 Kawakubo, Rei  2, 51–2, 149–50, 150, 155, 165 ‘Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body’  150 ‘Comme des Garçons Camp’  149, 150 and deconstruction  155–7 ‘Destroy’, la mode destroy  149–50, 156–7 ‘Hiroshima chic’  156 ‘Lumps and Bumps’  86, 150 Kawamura, Yuniya  99 Kellner, Douglas  119 Kennedy, John F.  145 Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline  145–8, 146 Kierkegaard, Søren  29–31, 87 Either/Or  30–1 kitsch  37, 40, 41, 43–5, 47, 49, 73, 81–8, 97, 159, 162, 168, 176 n.25. See also camp; ugliness and fashion  133–54 Knight, Nick  26 Koons, Jeff  40, 50, 114, 134 Krauss, Rosalind The Picasso Papers  82–3 Kuhn, Thomas  3, 11, 32 Kunstmusik  66, 67, 70, 82, 84 Kurtág, GyUorgy  167 Kuspit, Donald  4, 6, 21, 133–4 Lachenmann, Helmut  167 Laclau, Ernesto  85 Lacroix, Christian  105, 134–5, 135 Lady Gaga (Stephani Germanotta)  4, 9, 105–17, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 119 ‘Bad Romance’  105 ‘Born this Way’  105, 108, 111 As David Bowie  110, 110 Haus of Gaga  109, 111 The Hunting Ground (film)  111 As Joe Calderone  112, 113 Meat Dress  111 ‘Papparrazzi’  116–17

‘Telephone’  105, 116–17 ‘Til it Happens to You’  111 La France, Mike  116 Lang, Fritz  116 Laurencin, Maris  77 Leavis, F. R.  3 Le Dépôt (club)  162 Levis (brand)  159 Libeskind, Daniel  156 Lichtenstein, Roy  148 Life (magazine)  147 light music  8, 35, 45, 58, 65–70, 75, 76. See also jazz Lincoln, Abraham  63 Lipovetsky, Gilles  100 Lissitsky, El Prouns  32 Liszt, Franz  15, 75 London Palladium  120 Loschek, Ingrid  151 Louboutin, Christian  117 Louis Vuitton (brand)  114 Lucretius  32 Lüdke, Martin  94 Lui, Catherine  183–4 n.60 Lukács, Georg  99, 168 Lumley, Joanna  135, 135 Luo, Songtao  49 Lynch, Joseph Henry  148 Tina  148–9 Lyotard, Jean-François  4, 71, 90 ‘Intellectual Fashions’  100 McCartney, Stella  135, 148 McDonalds (brand)  160 McFarland, James  36 McHale, John  169 McLintock, Ann Imperial Leather  121 McLuhan, Marshall  80 McQueen, Alexander  52, 105, 135 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone)  108, 119–31, 122, 123, 127 ‘Batuka’  121 ‘Dark Ballet’  123, 125 ‘God Control’  124–6, 126 ‘Holy Water’  122 ‘I Rise’  120

206

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‘Justify My Love’  122 ‘Killers Who Are Partying’  120 ‘Like a Prayer’  122, 124 ‘Like a Virgin’  119 Madame X  119, 120, 123–8, 124, 129 ‘Material Girl’  119 Rebel Heart Tour  123 Welcome to the World of Madame X  120 Mahler, Gustav  40–5, 60, 167 Maison Margiela (fashion house)  161. See also Margiela, Martin Malevich, Kasimir  32 Mallarmé, Stéphane  32–4 Mann, Thomas  1, 38, 57 Doctor Faustus  35–7 Marcuse, Herbert  85 Margiela, Martin  155–7, 161–2, 164. See also Maison Margiela Marino, Stefano  100, 103–4 Marsh, James  38 Marvel (company)  60 Marx, Karl  4, 30 Capital  94 Marx Brothers  57 Marxism, Marxist  1, 2, 78, 85, 91 Matisse, Henri  50, 84 Matkowsky, Peter  120 The Matrix (film)  125, 126 Mauss, Marcel  103 Maxfield’s (store)  164 Mayakovsky, Vladimir  32 Melaney, William  90 Mennell, Stephen  138 Messiaen, Olivier Mode de valeurs et d’intensités  37 Met Gala  53 Metro Goldwyn Mayer (company)  58 Metropolis (film)  116 Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarotti)  25 Michele, Alessandro  136 Microsoft (company)  61 Middle Ages  124 Milton, John  32 Mingus, Charles  75 Minimal art, Minimalism  7, 58 Mirzoeff, Nicholas  8 Misiloglou, Gina  109

Miyake, Issey  149 modern, modernism  1–8, 11–14, 16–18, 24, 26, 29, 31–4, 43, 44, 50, 55, 78, 79, 81, 85, 87–8, 92–3, 95, 97–103, 105, 116, 133–4, 137, 139, 149, 154 modern art  1–3, 5–6, 11, 49, 52, 58, 65, 77–8, 86–7, 92–5, 105, 106, 133, 183 modern fashion  159 modernist architecture  156 modern music  5, 16, 35–40, 45, 47, 82–3, 96 Mona Lisa (painting)  59 Mondrian, Piet  33 Monet, Claude  2, 50, 76 Monroe, Marilyn  146 Morris, Bernadine  134 Moschino (brand)  140, 141, 141, 142, 147, 148, 148 Moss, Kate  135, 153 Mower, Sarah  150 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  16 Don Giovanni  31 Eine kleine Nachtmusik  66 MTV  49, 111, 130 Mueck, Ron  27 Mugler, Thierry  105, 117 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York  115 Mussolini, Benito  55 Naughty Girl (film)  144 Nazism, National Socialism  2, 14, 37, 42, 74, 93, 128 New Rococo  152–4. See also Rococo New Romantic Movement  153 Newton, Helmut  117 Newton, Isaac  72 Newton, Thomas  109 New York Philharmonic  75 New York Review of Books  167 New York Times (newspaper)  134 Nichols, Mike  134 Nietzsche, Friedrich  3, 23, 42, 45, 89, 95 Menschliches, alzu Menchliches  6 On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life  13–14 Nissan, Sandra  99

 Index 207 Nobel Prize  1, 167 Norcia, Michael  127–8, 128 Obrist, Hans Ulrich  114–15 Œdipus Rex (Sophocles play)  26 Okiji, Fumi  79 Old Testament  94 Orwell, George 1984  126 Owens, Rick  52 Ozenfant, Amedée  83 Paddison, Max  37, 43, 93, 174 n.1 Paglia, Camille  109, 122 Papastephanou, Marianna  59–60 Paris Fashion Week  160 Peacock, Gary  167 Pericles  29 Peterson, Oscar  75 Pet Shop Boys (band)  135 ‘Absolutely Fabulous’  135 phantasmagoria  5, 43 Phelan, Peggy  107 Piano, Renzo  156 Picasso, Pablo  50, 76, 83–4 Still Life with Chair Caning  83 Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon  16–17 Pirandello, Luigi  1 Pissarro, Joachim  7, 53, 85–6 Pitt, Brad  144–5 Plato  68, 82 Pollock (film)  106 Pollock, Jackson  106 Pop art  8, 16, 134 pornography  153 posthuman, posthumanism  4, 13, 113 postmodern, postmodernism  4, 8, 11, 13, 20, 24, 34, 51, 54, 59, 85, 95–6, 102, 149 postmodern architecture  156 post-painting  34 Prada (brand)  146 Prada, Miuccia  52 The Price is Right (TV show)  141 Prokofiev, Sergei  174–5 n.4 Peter and the Wolf  175 n.4 Romeo and Juliet  175 n.4 Proust, Marcel  3, 45, 55, 72, 94

À la recherche du temps perdu  82 Puccini, Giacomo  59 La Bohème  66 Madame Butterfly  66 Pugh, Gareth  52 Purism  83 Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes  50 Raismen, Aly  120 Rancière, Jacques  53 rappel à l’ordre  83 Regency Style  138 Reich, Steve  167 Reis, João José  121 relational aesthetics  7 Renaissance  81, 82 Revill, David  47–8 RewearAble (brand)  164 Richter, Gerhard  90 Ricks, Christopher  92 Riefenstahl, Leni  2 Rimbaud, Arthur  2, 87 Rivers, Joan  150–1 Roberts, David  13, 38 Rocamora, Agnès Thinking Through Fashion  101 Rocky (film franchise)  60 Rococo  150, 153. See also New Rococo Rodchenko, Aleksandr  32 Rolling Stone (magazine)  109, 110, 123 Romantic, Romanticism  19, 22, 23, 25–7, 35, 41, 44, 58, 71 Rosenkranz, Karl Aesthetics of Ugliness  81, 87 Ross, Andrew No Respect  111 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  19 Rousseauist  17 Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp  161 Russian Revolution  32 Saarinen, Eero  156 sadomasochism  119, 122 Saint Laurent, Yves  33 Saks Fifth Avenue  164 Santayana, George  27 Saunders, Jennifer  135–6, 135

208

Index

Schelling, Friedrich  21, 23, 35 Schiaparelli, Elsa  2 Schiller, Friedrich  21–2, 81, 88 Schlegel, Auguste  21 Schlegel, Friedrich  19, 21, 81 Schnabel, Julian  50 Schoenberg, Arnold  29, 33, 37–8, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 82, 84, 93–4 Suite for Piano  66 twelve-tone system  29, 37, 38, 40, 82, 175–6 n.15 Schopenhauer, Arthur  92 Schwichtenberg, Cathy  121 Scott, Jeremy  117, 148 Second World War  3, 55, 91 Seinfeld (TV series)  8 Sekles, Bernhard  30 Serpell, Namwali  167–8 Sex Pistols  156 Sex Wars  119 Shakespeare, William The Globe Theatre  127 Sherman, Cindy  105–7, 114 Film Stills  107 Shostakovich, Dimitri  32, 75, 174–5 n.4 Simmel, Georg  3, 100, 101, 136 The Simpsons (TV series)  8 Skarsgård, Alexander  116 Smelik, Anneke Thinking Through Fashion  101 Smith, Patti  1 Sons of Anarchy (TV series)  17 Sontag, Susan ‘Notes on Camp’  149 Southpark (TV series)  8 Spengler, Oswald  3 Spiers, Bob  135 Spivak, Gyatri Chakravorty  106 Spotify  48 The Square (film)  32 Stacy, Jackie  108 Stalin, Joseph  32 A Star is Born (film)  108, 112 Star Wars (film franchise)  60 Stern, Radu  2 Stockhausen, Karlheinz  37 Storey, John  136 Strauss, Richard  2, 41–3 Der Rosenkavelier  66

Elektra  66 Salome  66 Stravinsky, Igor  37–9, 45, 48, 82–4, 88, 93 Studio 54 (nightclub)  127, 129 Surber, Jere  19 Surrealism  95 Svendson, Lars Fashion. A Philosophy  100 Tagore, Rabindranath  1 Tambling, Jeremy  36 Tarantino, Quentin  116 Tatler (magazine)  189 n.41 Taylor, Charles  20 Thomas, Calvin  49 Throup, Aitor  52 Thucydides  29 Tierny, Paul  165 Titanic (film)  162 Top Shop (brand)  140 Trump, Donald  1, 148 Twitter  50 ugliness  81–8. See also kitsch Vadim, Roger  144 Valentino, Rudolph  147 Vali, Giambattista  145 Veblen, Thorstein  3, 101, 137 Theory of the Leisure Class  137 Venturi, Robert  156 Vetements (brand/fashion house)  155, 159–65, 160, 161, 163, 164 ‘No Show’  164 Victoria and Albert Museum  153 Viennese School  45 Viktor & Rolf  52, 105, 117, 160 Vimeo  115 virtual reality (VR)  59 Vivaldi, Antonio Four Seasons  66 VKhUTEMAS  32 Vreeland, Diana  154 W (magazine)  144 ‘Domestic Bliss’  144–5 Wachowski Brothers  125 Wagner, Richard  41–5

 Index 209 Meistersingers  83 Ring Cycle  42 Wallace Collection  153 Warhol, Andy  2, 108–9, 111, 127, 128, 148 Factory  109 Sixteen Jackies  146, 147 Warner Brothers (company)  58 Warren, Diane  111 Watanabe, Junya  149 Webern, Anton  45, 55 Weber Nicholson, Shierry  90 Wei Wei, Ai  40 Weizman, Erica  97 Wellmer, Albrecht  91–2, 182 n.17 Westwood, Vivienne  2, 51–2, 136, 154, 155 ‘Britain Must Go Pagan’  153–4 ‘Buffalo Girls’  153 And DIY  157 ‘Harris Tweed’  153 ‘Pagan I’  154 ‘Pagan V’  154 ‘Pirates’  153 ‘Time Machine’  154 ‘Voyage to Cythera’  154 White, Theodore  147 wild art  7–8

Wilde, Oscar  109 Willhelm, Bernhard  150–2, 151 Williams, John  60 Williams, Raymond  15–17 Wilson, Elizabeth  99 Adroned in Dreams  101–2 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim History of Ancient Art  23 Winfield, Richard  25 Winslet, Kate  162 Witkin, Robert  53–4 Wolin, Peter  90, 96 Woolf, Virginia  3 Worth, Charles Frederick  137 Yamomoto, Yohji  149 Yeats, William Butler  1 Yebra, José  113 YouTube  48, 115, 160, 161, 163, 164 YouTuber  114 Zara (brand)  140 Zijderveld, Anton On Clichés  43–4 Žižek, Slavoj  72, 159–60, 174–5 n.4 Welcome to the Desert of the Real  159 Zuidervaart, Lambert  5, 94, 96–8, 183 n.43

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