Post-Commercial: Beyond Fake Opposites*

By Toke Lykkeberg

“The moment the artist thinks of money, he loses his sense of beauty,”¹ wrote Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot in 1781. And young British artist Damien Hirst reiterated in 2006: “Sometimes, if a piece is worth too much money, you can’t see the art on the wall for the dollar signs.”² The idea that art and money are antithetical is old and by now so widespread that it serves as a backdrop to almost any discussion about art and the art world-either explicitly or especially implicitly. This also goes for a rather local affair, which has nevertheless been a main concern for international art professionals last summer.

When curator Paul Schimmel “left” L.A. MOCA in June, it sparked a controversy, which seemed to reveal a divide within the museum. The museum’s founding trustees decided to leave the board, insinuating that whereas Schimmel incarnates “artistic and curatorial integrity,” the museum direction represents the opposite. Four artists of high stature followed suit. The ensuing debate has not only been concerned with misgivings about the head of the board, businessman Eli Broad, but also museum director Jeffrey Deitch, whose concerns have been described as all about attendance and business.

Yale University School of Art Dean Robert Storr has felt an urge to cut to the bone in a language neither artistic nor curatorial: “Dismissing Paul Schimmel in favor of Deitch is like cashing in all your value stocks and doubling down on junk bonds for the sake of a long-shot windfall.”³ Just like doctor from Oxford University Blake Copnik, who paints a crude double portrait. On the one panel we have “Jeffrey Deitch, the showy New York dealer,” who made “Art in the Streets” show, which told 200,000 people that they could have fun with graffiti, as we’ve all known for 40 years.” On the other panel Paul Schimmel, “a world-class figure, of real substance,” whose “Out of Action,” which opened a few viewers’ eyes to the worth of performance art, is a more “profitable product” in a museum’s true cultural currency.⁴

However, as some commentators are now reminding us, Schimmel is just as known for highly accessible blockbuster shows⁵-Not least his travelling exhibition “©Murakami,” in which the curator succeeded in persuading Takashi Murakami into integrating a Louis Vuitton store into the exhibition, run by the luxury brand so as to sell LV-Murakami items; an idea that Schimmel considered so integral to the show that he would not compromise it as the show travelled on to other museums: “It’s important though that it remain part of the exhibition, meaning within the body of the exhibition, or not associated with it at all (sic).”⁶

Chris Johanson, Celebration of Time Goes Both Ways Forever Painting No. 6, 2011, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

A BLURRED OUTLOOK

The MOCA debate is strange. How did Deitch and Schimmel become opposites to the extent that their positions mutually exclude one another? The main reason is that the divide at MOCA has been described not in artistic terms, but mainly economic terms. The opponing commentators of Broad and Deitch have as such nothing but fulfilled their own dystopia of business taking over the art world. But how did that happen? Well, today art and the art world are so highly complex phenomena that the articulation of the problem, which per se can also always be considered a reductive one, has been grounded in the idea that commercial and non-commercial activities are opposites. The case serves as a perfect example of how the binary pair comercial/non-commercial produces other binary pairs, which condition and blur our outlook. The moment Jeffrey Deitch is identified as dealer and Paul Schimmel as curator the battle at MOCA becomes a battle between a whole variety of opposites, namely between gallery and museum, private and public, street art and performance, fun and seriousness, corruption and integrity-all of which are ignored on their own terms. However, just because Deitch was once a dealer, he has never solely been active at one pole, namely the commercial, just like Schimmel as a curator is not only active at the other pole, namely the non-commercial. Schimmel as well as Deitch know this very well.

As the article “Museums Solicit Dealers’ Largess” in 2007 made clear, working with Murakami not necessarily involves working with Louis Vuitton, but without question his dealers. For “©Murakami” it was none other than Larry Gagosian, Emmanuel Perrotin and Blum & Poe. And as Deitch made clear in the very same article, when he was what we might rather call a “gallerist,” a gallery at a certain level also involves constantly being sollicited by nonprofit institutions of all sizes.⁷

Since we know-from the time of Diderot to Hirst-that true art should transcend commerce, we think that art has nothing to do with commerce; to the extent that we can only see art where there is no commerce involved. And then, preoccupied by this idea, we paradoxically end up focusing only on dollar signs, not art, because money is everywhere. However, we still believe in art, but only with difficulty in anything transcendental, i.e. something that goes beyond. Therefore, as Pierre Bourdieu has put it, within art “The denegation of economy presents itself with all the appearances of transcendence.”(278-279) And thus we understand true art as that which is not commercial or even opposed to commerce.

Since the advent of the avant-garde, art has increasingly been dealt with in terms derived from the divide of art and money. In this perspective art cannot be dealt with in positive terms and is thus categorized negatively. This change illustrates how the idea that art and money are ultimate enemies has evolved through time. The idea of Immanuel Kant that an aesthetic experience is disinterested has come to mean that true artistic activity is simply non-commercial.⁸ This reduction of Kant’s idea about disinterestedness comes in handy at a time when art is so difficult to define and judge that we prefer to address it indirectly.

A FUNDAMENTAL OPPOSITION

Art is no longer something made solely within a few genres with particular means of production for one or a few specific locations. Given the “de-definition of art” coined by critic Harold Rosenberg, we are no longer capable of assigning any intrinsic qualities to art. Instead we define art by extrinsic qualities. Earlier on, art was art if it was provocative, then subversive, political, socially engaged and relational. But first and foremost, art has for a long time been considered art if it is non-commercial-rather than just beyond commerce. Maybe because truly provocative, subversive, political, socially engaged or relational art is only very true if it has an aura of something non-commercial.

As Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, all fields of cultural production and distribution are “organized around the fundamental opposition between (…) ‘the commercial’ and ‘the non-commercial.’ This structure (…) tends to function today as a mental structure, organizing the production and perception of products; (it) is the generative principle of most of the judgments that (…) claim to establish the frontier between what is art and what is not, between ‘bourgeois’ art and ‘intellectual’ art, between ‘traditional’ art and ‘avant-garde’ art.” (270)

A Kassen, Lamps # 2, 2007, mixed media, 13.7” x 13.7” x 54.3”. (See Note 17)

OPPOSITION AS MENTAL STRUCTURE

It is now evident that the fundamental opposition between the commercial and the non-commercial is more than anything else exactly a mental structure. This does not mean that this opposition as a guiding principle is fiction, relying on a phantasm. On the contrary, it means, that we seemingly cannot escape applying it to everybody and everything we encounter whence everybody and everything is defined by this opposition. Wherever the agents in the art world and the art public look, they see this opposition at work, since it structures their outlook. As such, the binary pair commercial/non-commercial does structure the art world. These very terms are used as predicates - all predicates-all the more frenetically just like the synonyms “not-for-profit” and “nonprofit” versus “for-profit”-when talking about art and the art world. Their use is so widespread that it borders on abuse.

GENERALIZATION OF “CYNICAL CALCULATION“

The interest involved in flashing a “commercial” or “non-commercial” banner is by now so well known that the so-called “cynical calculation,” which Bourdieu mainly associates with the “commercial pole,” is found to be at play just as much at the non-commercial pole. (271)

One reason is that sociologist-artists have become just as current as art sociologists since the time of Bourdieu. Harold Rosenberg noted a shift when conceptual art saw the light of day in the ’60s and ’70s; a form of art that defined itself as non-commercial only to turn out later as a conscious, game-changing commercial success⁹: “Sociology of art overtly enters into the theory and practice of creation,” Rosenberg said.¹⁰ Since then, all the agents in the art world have become engaged in daily sociological inquiry, which the success of Artforum’s Scene and Herd art world reportage illustrates.

Another reason for the generalization of “cynical calculation” is that commercial and non-commercial activities no longer necessarily obey two opposing life cycles. In the artistic field, which Bourdieu maps, we have non-commercial art at one end, which is characterized by no profit in the short term and profit in the long, as exemplified by a Samuel Beckett book. At the other end, we have commercial art making profit in the short term and none in the long, exemplified by most bestsellers. Though these two poles “mutually exclude each other,” they are nevertheless simply different models of a certain type of “economism.” (Bourdieu 31) This becomes even more clear today, when the two poles, which define and create the dynamics of the artistic field, seem interchangeable. What happens in the art world is not just a conflation of two life cycles, but also a spatiotemporal conflation.

POLYVALENCE OF THE AGENTS IN THE ART WORLD

What makes all the important agents in the art world important institutions or individuals is the fact that they are commercially and non-commercially engaged at the same time and place. It is even difficult to be one without the other. Sociologist Raymond Moulin’s extrapolation is just: “The auction world is increasingly, just as the whole of the art world, marked by the roles’ polyvalence and instable nature.”(91)

Before I turn to examples of this polyvalence, or role mix-up-most evident when it comes to the divide between certain perceived commercial and non-commercial players such as Deitch and Schimmel-I want to start out by that, which all the agents of the art world participate in creating: art.

Eugenio Merino, For the Love of Go(l)d, 2009, silicon, polyester, polyurethane, clothes, human hair, pistol replica. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Unix Fine Art (Miami) and ADN Galería (Barcelona).

PAINTING VERSUS INSTALLATION ART

Contemporary art is said to have entered a post-media state, and the hierarchy between genres has dissolved. Nevertheless, the categorization of art into different media and genres has never ceased and is biased by a distinction between sellable and non-sellable work. Examples are infinite, but a few suffice.

Painting is by no coincidence considered the perfect commodity on the art market-empirically because painting percentage-wise occupies a huge part of the market. Historically, easel painting was a contemporary of early capitalism, which liberated painting from the ecclesiastic realm of the church so as to be able to circulate on the market. Painting is thus considered a commercial language game, per se, and accordingly less advanced.

Though other artistic products are similar or different in many respects, they can in one prevailing perspective be considered the very opposite of painting. An example is installation. For instance, philosopher Boris Groys thinks so. “Since an installation, by definition, cannot circulate easily, it would follow that if installation art were not to be sponsored, it would simply cease to exist,” he says.¹¹ Accordingly, Groys advocates public funding of installations-unlike painting, which is well taken care of by the private sector.

If we follow Groys’ line of thought, an idée reçue, we are able to define all artistic products during the well-known economic divide. Hereby we substitute the Système des Beaux-Arts hierarchy of genres, which once structured the conception of art, with a new hierarchy based on art’s presence on or absence from the market. Within this hierarchy, sculpture and photography might, just like painting, be considered commercial, and installation, just like performance, non-commercial. Nevertheless, this is only plausible if capitalism has not changed since the renaissance so as to deal in services, spectacles, experiences and attention as well as goods. Installation is an art form characteristic of capitalism at a certain point, just like painting once was. As art historian Julian Stallabrass notes: “Installation no longer necessarily resists commodification, since it is now often moved around and (…) used by artists and dealers as a loss-leader for more marketable products.”(24)

By opposing what Groys calls “let’s say, traditional art objects,” which are defined as media characterized by a specific materiality, with installation art, he not only compares incomparable things-he also occludes a proper understanding of contemporary art. Much contemporary art renders media-specificity oblique, and installation is at the forefront of this tendency. Installation is, as the name implies, installation of something, which might just as well be video as painting-or both.¹² As such, installation is blurring boundaries and dissolving hierarchies, not creating hierarchies and oppositions like Groys. Instead, it might thus be fruitful to think about how painting has changed with the advent of installation art, changing the way painting is perceived, turning-intentionally or not-even an exhibition of painting into an installation such as former Deitch Projects artist Chris Johanson is doing.

Art can be installed in various ways, and discussing this issue naturally leads to dealing with the various spaces of its display. These spaces, designed for the presentation of art, are in general thought of no differently than what they present, i.e. art.

ART FAIRS VERSUS BIENNIALS

Two major places for presentation of art today are art fairs and art festivals-in common parlance, biennials. Just like painting and installation they are seen as opposites. Fairs are commercial and privately financed. Biennials are non-commercial and publicly funded. But this is mainly the case because our outlook on the art world is occluded by said mental structure. The reality is quite different.

In 2007, when the art festivals in Venice, Kassel and Münster and the art fair in Basel all coincided the same year, they joined forces and promoted the product as the “Grand Tour.” Suddenly it was hard to recognize the antagonism, which Bourdieu normally ascribes to the dynamics of the artistic field, “a field of power (which) is also a field of struggle.”(31) This does not illustrate that there are no longer commercial and non-commercial poles, but rather that they converge at “the heights of the cosmopolitan art world.”(26)

Biennials and art fairs have become interchangeable in many respects. Curator Paco Barragán’s study The Art Fair Age is just as much about art fairs as their biennialization. At art fairs you find biennial-like curated exhibitions, critical talks, symposia and academic publishing-and at biennials gallerists covering transportation and production costs and selling works on display in situ. The new “freelance curator,” who has a non-commercial aura, is emblematic of this development.¹³ Also known as an “independent curator,” he or she might just as well work for an art fair as a biennial, for a museum as a gallery, for a public as well as private initiative.

Pablo Helguera, Are these site-specific prices? Artoon 3, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Jorge Pinto Books, Inc, New York.

THE POST-COMMERCIAL STAND

The increasing irrelevance of the predicates “commercial” and “non-commercial” in our efforts to grasp art and the art world has not impeached their usage, but rather, it has provoked their inflation, which counters their conflation. An example could be the recent festival No Soul for Sale at X Initiative in New York and later Tate Modern. Though the invited agents were only commercially independent from a certain point of view, the event was promoted as “a spontaneous celebration of the independent forces that live outside the market and that animate contemporary art.”¹⁴

Like a lost tourist who prefers to stick to an outdated map than no map at all, the art professional of today prefers to navigate according to free-floating markers instead of no markers whatsoever. A sound alternative, however, would be going beyond the opposition between the commercial and the non-commercial by considering all these activities as post-commercial, which are more exactly neither. Hereby, we not only avoid the reductive perspective these two terms open, but also all reductive use of all the other oppositions, which are tainted by said fundamental distinction: private or public, art or culture, traditional or advanced, good or bad, moral or immoral, idealistic or cynical.

A post-commercial perspective revives postmodern suspicion of “oppositional thinking.”¹⁵ This involves giving up on the idea that commercial activities exclude non-commercial activities; the idea that a commercial activity or product is synonymous with a private, non-artistic, immoral, traditional, bad, cynical undertaking. A post-commercial stand, instead, involves considering opposites such as the above as differences rather than mutually exclusive elements. Therefore, a post-commercially minded agent in the art world is not nostalgic as are certain postmodernists due to the conflation of the commercial and non-commercial poles.¹⁶ Since none of them are inherently good or bad, nothing is necessarily lost. Gallerists and museum directors, art fairs and biennials, and artists who sell and artists who do not sell are neither the same nor opposites. They differ on certain points and share familiarities on others.

The current state of the art world is tied up in a paradox. Art, the thing around which everything revolves, is believed to give access to a transcendental reality through opposition to commerce. This belief could be viewed in the same way one views an agnostic, with art taking the place of God: “the one who believes in God without believing in God, without believing in it.” The post-commercial alternative involves not believing in art simply because that is not a way to talk about art.

WORKS CITED

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Les regles de l‘art. Paris: Seuil, 1992/98.
• Moulin, Raymonde. Le marché de l‘art. Mondialisation et nouvelles technologies. Paris: Flammarion, 2003.

• Stallabrass, Julian. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford University Press, 2004.

NOTES

1. Denis Diderot, Pensées détachées sur la peinture, 1781.

2. Sean O’Hagan, “Damien of the dead,” Observer 19 February 2006.

3. Robert Storr, “MOCA And The Art Of Being Unreasonable,” Huffington Post 24 July 2012.

4. See, Blake Gopnik, “Museums Are About the Art, Not Racking Up Big Numbers on Crowds and Revenue,” thedailybeast.com 9 July 2012.

5. I owe this reminder to L.A. artist Hugo Hopping, who made me aware of this blind spot in the portrayal of Schimmel.

6. Kris Wilton, “Paul Schimmel on Selling Murakami,” Artinfo 19 November 2007.

7. Jori Finkel, “Museums Solicit Dealers’ Largess,” The New York Times 18 November 2007.

8. For a nuanced analysis of the concept “disinterested” see Norman Kreitman, “The Varieties of Aesthetic Disinterestedness.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 4, 2006.

9. See: Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.

10. Harold Rosenberg, “De-aestheticization.” Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

11. See, Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” in e-flux journal #24, 2011.

12. As Julian Stallabrass notes “installation encompasses video and increasingly older media like painting.” See, Julian Stallabrass, Art incorporated. The story of contemporary art. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 26.

13. Paco Barragán, The Art Fair Age.  Milan: Charta, 2008.

14. See, <www.nosoulforsale.com>

15. Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, (First published in 1979). Manchester University Press, 1984.

16. Jean Baudrillard, “Transpolitik, transseksuel, transæstetik”. Kunsten of filosofiens værker efter amancipationen. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, 1988.

17. Danish artists collective A Kassen develops a practice that involves interventions within the traditional gallery space. Lamps # 2 was exhibited at an art center opened by an auction house in Copenhagen. The artwork was made with recycled lamps that were purchased at the auction house as if there were no real difference between the two institutions.

* A longer and more elaborate version of the ideas in this article will appear later this year in an anthology published by Grimmseum, Berlin.

Toke Lykkeberg is an art critic, curator and director of IMO, an artist-run space established in 2009 in Copenhagen. His recent curatorial projects include “FaceTime,” exhibited this year at On Stellar Rays in NYC. In 2011, he curated “I feel like I’m disappearing…,” at WEST, The Hague, that explored minimalism and depression in contemporary art.