‘Viewed from the standpoint of the objective relations of capitalist society, the greatest work of art is equal to a certain quantity of manure.’

As I said, this market-sustained split in the arts has immense ramifications. Suppose we look at some. It’s not insignificant that the work of fine art is embedded in our art language as a (more or less) unique commodity. (We sometimes use the word ‘original’.) But isn’t it a little curious that we talk so commonly of a painting as unique, but not a poem? What then is so special about uniqueness? Here is the point; uniqueness is the most highly treasured and privileged characteristic in the exchange market. Thus what may once have related to genuinely personal expression has been transformed into an impersonal factor of ‘mere’ economic activity. The fine arts have been integrated into the commodity market in ways not conceivable for other fields of art. And thus contemporary fine art has become the least able to express anything but an acquiescing reflection of its own economic dependence. 

I guess this way of characterizing fine art as unique or original evolved in the early Post-Industrial Era when goods began to be mass produced and the work of fine art, having already become part of the commodity market during the Industrial Revolution, was forced to re-define its characteristics against the new technologies of production. We can perhaps glimpse this in William Morris’ lecture before the Trades’ Guild of Learning in 1877, “…the great arts commonly called Sculpture and Painting…I cannot in my own mind quite sever them from those lesser so-called Decorative Arts, which I have to speak about: it is only in latter times, and under the most intricate conditions of life, they have fallen apart from one another-, and I hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonest; while the greater, however they may be practiced for a while by men of great minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by each other, are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts, and become nothing but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men.”

This is why that power is largely invisible to us. It is hidden behind bureaucratic walls, a jungle of paper experts separating the producers of art from the owners of art. This is the new, non-marxian conflict we face—no longer the capitalist openly exploiting the producers, bureaucratic organizations have taken over the exploitation as a service for the corporate rich. We have become ruled by ‘the rule of rules’: the decision power is shielded behind the barricades of second-rate minds and third-rate spirits in the museums and galleries, in the magazines, in the art schools.

This is what protects and conceals the private property system, encourages it to continue. But, in thus perpetuating itself, it sets up conditions which are antithetical to genuinely innovative or imaginative change. The economics has provided an impersonsonalization greatly contributing to the functional simple-mindedness and uniformity of contemporary art. Moreover, bureaucratization, wherever possible, has routinized, organized, rationalized, codified, quantified, and trivialized—and built in risk-avoiding self-preservational measures contradictory to the ostensive purposes of these institutions. We’ve come a long way from Thomas Jefferson considering the Constitution ought to be rewritten every twenty years…a ‘permanent revolution’ in the democracy.

It’s obvious to everyone there’s little relation between the price set on a work of art and the cost of production to the artist—that’s almost never used as a criterion. Socialist theory explains how, in most of our social lives, we have come to apprehend only the exchange value of things and are no longer able to directly apprehend the use value of anything(“…capitalism is the moment of negation: negation of use value, hence also negation of culture, negation of diversity.” Samir Amin, Monthly review, Sept. 1974). You would have to be pretty naive to assume, if the price of your work increased ten-fold in so many years, that its use value had increased 1000% during that time.

any work of art has political impact once it enters the culture.

12/17/79

Dear Jan,

I finally had several hours to go over the transcripts you sent. I found a few very interesting points. There are some places where I am sure I didn’t say that which was transcribed. At least these places would be antithetical to everything I have been working on. Regardless of this, we only touched upon one quarter of my production and an extremely small number of issues regarding that production. The time needed to further discuss what I have done would mean several days. I don’t know how I could fit those days in without compromising my practice. I don’t even think we would have time to record if you lived in Los Angeles, and we could record a couple of hours every day. These problems are multiplied by the difficulty I have in front of a tape recorder and the warm-up time that is needed before I feel comfortable. I would still be happy to send you written material, which is far more complete (in many cases), and says almost exactly what you have recorded. Just give me a call and let me know. To comment on the mistakes in the transcription will take a while, and perhaps could also be done on the phone in a more efficient way than me trying to write. There is one thought I will comment upon now, although it reiterates what I said in the transcription. I dislike any category, and often my work is a response to the category makers. In this case, I would like to emphasize the fact that everything I’ve done, I consider an object. There is a physicality to everything I have concretized. The idea itself has consistently taken on physical proportions. I don’t know of any visual artist whose work is not objectified if it is to be received. The words “non-object” and “conceptual” were coined by the system and not by artists. These words served as alibis from dominant economics to make a tendency they didn’t understand marketable.

Anyway, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Warmest regards,

Michael

1/12/90

Taste is a product of our market economy. 

Taste begins at home and is propelled in dominant education; now is a representation of class.

Taste allows for the accommodation and maintenance of our market economy.

Taste can turn and economically subjugate those—

Taste cannot subjugate those who make it and reinforce it, but it can oppress its user.

Taste can be used for cultural hegemony.

2/24/91

My Own Problems in Doing This Work as It Is Linked to Writing

The project at the Renaissance Society was extremely hard to do in as much as I want to learn, particularly about the bourgeois character, its history and its relationship to labor.

What makes the research so hard is that amidst my desire to learn, I trust little of what I am learning. What is worse is that I am critical of what constitutes the bourgeois, and yet I realize that some of that character I doubt I can elude, as it is a part of my family history.

When researching on this and other subjects, I can reach an exciting idea and it will divert everything. If it’s really exciting, chances are I may lose it.

So to think things through in writing or making a project, I am not logical since my thoughts reveal themselves in large blocks or clusters. Whatever is between I cannot see very well, but what the connections constitute (I think) are those exciting moments that I’ve lost or refused to trust. Perhaps someday this can be resolved.

Perhaps I don’t read since I ruminate so long on the problems of each one of my projects.

I hate to even mention it, but the connections I make in my artwork feel like intuition when I am making them. It is often, and very much after the fact, that I learn that the logic is quite complete and offers models of production which are alternative to the codes and show this resistance I have to learning.

The unfortunate thing is I had the same problem when I was in first grade. This problem has been the cause of some work, which has served to increase my knowledge about what I am doing and has helped me develop.

I hope as I learn more, I become more articulate in my work about resistance in culture and in society.

I am convinced that some people use their artwork for their personal prosperity. For me, it is my extended education, but first of all it is to make sense to the audience I wish to address.

Taste is a market in construction. In a sense, the idea of what is tasteful became fully developed in the US during the age of the Arts and Crafts Movement. It was the ability of capitalism, [which] always looks for new markets, to sell more than just its industrial objects. The idea of taste was partly the expansion of money flow through more abstract ideas such as beauty. In school, as youngsters, in the US we are taught what is beautiful. In actuality, we are not being taught what is beautiful, but we are being taught how to be good consumers that can see economic value in most surplus objects. For those people that want to become artists, we can then learn the rules of beauty so we can make objects of art which will meet these markets. Any work of art which doesn’t meet the criteria of beauty then becomes problematic. Any work of art which develops ideas rather than visual beauty is marginal to the system of capital. Any work of art which doesn’t naturalize beauty creates conflict and interference with driving economic forces.

Most of the art we see today participates in this abstract market construction of beauty, which is nothing more than a superficial façacde to make sure that economic reproduction is moving along safely.

The cost of following the market needs is to devalue meaning in a work of art, which doesn’t support the superficial needs of the market, or devalues a meaning which pierces through the shadow of a work of art to explore the conditions of its production and alienation of its labor.

Beauty, then, is in the service of power; a power which doesn’t want us to find out what makes it function nor find out the rules of its game.

Reference in the work of art has some similar characteristics to beauty. If the work of art makes reference to numerous classifications of experience outside of the artwork, it does nothing to let us know what those references mean to knowledge.

Reference is a way of marketing knowledge so that it is very quick and thereby very superficial. Reference in the work of art is in the service of devaluing knowledge or turning concepts into short names. Using reference in the work of art leaves the viewer to endlessly associate what the work is about. It thereby gives the viewer an illusion that they have experienced something profound. In this respect, it is a decoy so the viewer will do the artist’s labor for them. It is also a decoy to make it seem like the artist is situated within the work of art when the artist is really just back at the studio making another set of references in another artwork.