technical images and linear text

“Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out:: with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. . . With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If we were to follow the method of Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted Paintings,” and survey Canadians to determine what their ‘most wanted’ painting might be — not that the Canadian art market would ever merit such close and particular scrutiny — we might come up with something fairly similar to the Bruegel reproduced above. After all, we are so little different from the United States in terms of our ‘masses,’ we might even be able to use the American ‘most wanted’ painting. As Komar & Melamid state of the general public in the United States: “To a surprising extent, the public tends to agree on what it like to see in a work of art. Americans generally tend to prefer, for instance, traditional styles over more modern designs; they also express a strong preference for paintings that depict landscapes or similar outdoor scenes. In addition, most Americans tend to favor artists known for a realistic style over those whose artworks are more abstract or modernistic.” None of the paintings that they develop on the basis of their survey data are really particularly unique, varying only in size, season, and ambiguous ‘national’ signifiers; thus, Denmark’s painting features a Danish flag and is the size of a ‘refrigerator door,’ while Kenya’s is identical but for its size (’small filing cabinet’) and the inclusion of a hippopotamus. Thus the natural setting of the Bruegel, with the addition of snow, to suit our masochistic Canadian taste for winter, is made ‘national’ by the inclusion of some skaters, perhaps playing hockey, that great national Canadian game, incidentally invented by the Dutch. The ravens add just the necessary touch of allegorical morbidity, representing our conflicted relationship to the landscape and its harshness, while the traditional ‘realist’ style ensures that the painting induces no problematic thoughts in those who live their lives in avoidance of such.
And so, we have another bland work of traditionalist art, differentiated from the others on a purely surface level. Why is this the ‘art we want?’ Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction gives us, as always, the tools to comprehend the forces implicated in this grand homogenization of the world. As he states, in the age of mechanical reproducibility, the artwork is no longer premised on its use value for ritual, but on its exhibition value to the greatest number of people. No longer was the function of the artwork to communicate with the Divine or to regulate social conduct, but instead the artwork became an ‘object’ of looking, and insofar as that object was looked at by the greatest number of people, it was ’successful.’ This is the ‘qualitative transformation’ of the nature of the artwork described in the quote above: for Benjamin, ‘art’ was a certain historically specific notion of cultural production, with a balance between these two poles of signification, the ‘cult value’ and the ‘exhibition value.’ For the earliest artists, the work of art was purely an instrument of magic, and thus was not a ‘work of art’ as such, but rather a ritual object par excellence; today, the ritual value has been almost entirely excluded from the function of art, and thus the art is a commodity, or more specifically a public spectacle like any other. The artistic function, the equivalence between the poles of ritual value and exhibition, is discarded, in favour of the primacy of the commodity function.

This is of course problematic, and most of us would instinctively agree. However, we ought to unpack more carefully exactly that which is problematic about this absolute emphasis on the exhibition value of the artwork. Komar & Melamid’s piece is incredibly significant for just this reason; it implicitly deconstructs some of the central assumptions of modern corporate-administered capitalism, namely, the primacy of ‘public opinion,’ the homogenization of the world through polls, and the depredation of individuality in favour of the supposedly omniscient body politic. ‘Opinion polls’ have to some extent taken the place of truth in the contemporary discourse: as Michael Govan states in the introduction to Komar & Melamid’s project, “we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. It doesn’t say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.” Govan’s own orientation toward the ‘truth’ of numbers is ambiguous, but he does recognize that this faith in numbers is not solely a contemporary phenomenon: “In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that’s how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created.” Yet Plato’s mode of relating to the world is not our own. Numbers have always been the primary mode of relating to ‘the masses,’ and as such essential in a democratic society ostensibly governed by those ‘masses.’ However, we have a contemporary faith in numbers which I think seems fundamentally different from that of Plato.

There were a vast array of characteristics which separated Athenian democracy from our own. The ownership of slaves, for instance, made the leisurely existence of the intellectual class possible, and made the engagement of the citizenry with the political system practical. The size of the city-state and the homogeneous ethnic and gender group that was the ‘polis‘ ensured that the citizens could remain involved with the life of the state, and the state with the lives of the citizens. The ‘public interest’ was simply taken to be the interest of a small group of Greek landowning men, and the issue of ‘public opinion’ was thereby bracketed, worked out in public discourse: agourein. In our contemporary technologically-mediated democracy, we have taken the enlightened steps of including previously-marginalized groupings in our polis, and extending the geographical boundaries of the democratic state across the entire widths of continents. No longer could the question of ‘public interest’ in fact be discursively determined by all the individual members of the public, but instead, the public would have to be allegorized: allos agourein, an ‘other’ discourse, a discourse which speaks for the ‘other,’ in this case being the idealized ‘public.’ And so this ideological necessity, of knowing the ‘public opinion,’ begat our contemporary obsession with the cataloguing and quantification of the ‘masses,’ that takes its most egregious form in the guise of the opinion poll.

There is certainly a great deal to be said for the opinion poll, and for the extension of the franchise, and for democracy. These are all things which are said constantly, at great volume, across the various media systems that constitute our simulated public discourse, and they are not ‘incorrect’ per se. Rather, they are merely a veiling the true nature of democracy, which, like art, should ideally balance the interests of the individual and the polis. Athenian democracy, in spite of its self-evident flaws, balanced the interests of rational individuals in public discourse, and then determined the general course of society according to this aggregated interest of individuals. Contemporary democracy produces ‘opinion polls’ which demand only the most reactionary, simplistic responses, and then passes those off as indicative of the ‘public opinion.’ These opinion polls have an evident function, as a gauge of the public’s opinion. This is unproblematic. The issue arises when opinion polls are taken to be normative, and the data presented in polls is presented as truth. When the actual opinion of the public, and the course of society as a whole, is informed only by the mediated ‘public opinion,’ there is no means by which the individual or the society can develop. As Benjamin states, in this society founded on mechanical reproduction, “the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” The end result is a lack of anything new.

Opinion polls are, it must be said, a privileging of the opinions of the wise and the stupid alike. The opinion poll gives equal weight to truth and fallacy, to true belief and blind faith, to mass conformity as to individual genius. This is something which always ought to be recognized: the public opinion is not ‘the truth,’ but is rather a syncretic blend of the truth and lies. They can be taken as a guide to the opinion of the masses, but never as a guide to action. Komar and Melamid’s project, were it instigated by a government for the purpose of determining what art was positive and what was ‘degenerate,’ might seem like a fascistic or communistic endeavour, and yet when we truly consider the matter, it would be the pinnacle of ‘true democracy.’ And thus we ought to be led to question the nature of ‘true democracy.’ After all, ‘rule’ by the demos is nothing more than mob rule: the nature of contemporary democracy stems from the constitutional strictures we apply to the will of the masses. This is something which should be recognized in culture as in politics: ‘the public’ as a quantified and egalitarian mass should never make any real ‘decisions.’ This is why we don’t live in a society governed directly by mobs, but one governed by representatives. The ‘public interest’ should be determined as the aggregate interest of individuals: and so, the ‘public,’ that bizarre construction of opinion polls and administrative research should have no say in determining ‘what is art.’ Art is a question for individuals. The beauty of the market system — itself of course not without its own problems — is that it offers a niche for the public and a niche for the individual. Those individuals whose tastes have been so thoroughly monotonized by a relentless stream of mass culture and public opinion that they crave the sort of sappy medium represented by Komar & Melamid’s paintings have a ‘public’ forum in which they can indulge their specious tastes, in the guise of those Holiday-Inn art sales; those who have constructed for themselves an identity so oppositional that they crave pure individuality can spend millions at Sotheby’s on a work of the Abstract Expressionists. The rest of us will go on, as always, balancing our appreciation of ‘pop’ universality with individual genius and carving out our own artistic convictions, bearing little resemblance to the opinions of this mathematic fiction of “the public.” And some of us can thereby continue to adore the pure abstraction, the almost Lettrist brilliance of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, which I think we can indisputably state represents the Canadian public’s “least wanted” painting. The power and beauty of Lettrist hyper-abstraction is almost wholly lost on the general public, and yet no less valid for it. 100 million people, as the aphorism goes, can and often have been woefully, unbelievably wrong, especially about art., for artistic genius is the mark of the individual, not of the ‘public.’ This cultivation of the balance between individual taste and shared cultural practice is thereby of utmost importance in the realm of art, wherein homogenization and governance by opinion poll could only mark the end of art altogether. Art is the expression of the individual genius par excellence; though it functions in a communitarian system of signification, the individual spirit must always be of prime importance to the work of art, else our culture will ultimately be left with nothing but one infinitely-reproduceable lithograph of a cat hanging from a tree, and a 50 Cent CD.