The Power of Art

Markus Gabriel

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509540983
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

We live in an era of aesthetics. Art has become both pervasive and powerful – it is displayed not only in museums and galleries but also on the walls of corporations and it is increasingly fused with design. But what makes art so powerful, and in what does its power consist? According to a widespread view, the power of art – its beauty – lies in the eye of the beholder. What counts as art appears to be a function of individual acts of evaluation supported by powerful institutions. On this account, the power of art stems from a force that is not itself aesthetic, such as the art market and the financial power of speculators. Art expresses, in a disguised form, the power of something else – like money – that lies behind it. In one word, art has lost its autonomy. In this short book, Markus Gabriel rejects this view. He argues that art is essentially uncontrollable. It is in the nature of the work of art to be autonomous to such a degree that the art world will never manage to overpower it. Ever since the cave paintings of Lascaux, art has taken hold of the human mind and implemented itself in our very being. Thanks to the emergence of art we became human beings, that is, beings who lead their lives in light of an image of the human being and its position in the world and in relation to other species. Due to its structural, ontological power, art itself is and remains radically autonomous. Yet, this power is highly ambiguous, as we cannot control its unfolding. In this book, a leading proponent of New Realism applies this philosophical perspective to art to create a new aesthetic realism.

The Power of Art

We live in an aesthetic era. Artworks are omnipresent. At the same time, it is becoming ever more difficult to distinguish art from mere design. As they merge, artworks and design objects come in different shapes and forms and make their appearance in ever more unexpected contexts. One can, of course, still choose to view artworks in a museum, attend a concert, or watch a movie and thereby be confronted by cases of art as such. At the same time, one need only stroll around any city with any amount of history to find oneself confronted with sophisticated architecture, one of the forms of traditional art most implicated with design. Or visit the luxury stores of any major global city and your attention will be drawn to articles of fashion, items designed in the light of art’s power to render objects individual and distinctive.

If you have ever been to Japan, you will have noticed that even food can be a form of art, something that tends not to be so visible in cultures dominated by fast food consumption. But, then again, even McDonald’s, which serves up meals seemingly devoid of any aesthetic value, goes to great lengths to exploit art and our tendency to aesthetic appreciation in order to mask the mediocrity, or even the actual harmfulness, of its food. In fact, the food industry in modern societies is not content merely with supplying whichever ingredients are biochemically necessary for our survival. Instead, it presents us with gastronomic objects infused with myths and tales that have been dreamt up with the goal of socially engineering a community of consumers. This is why Ronald McDonald invites himself to the children’s birthday parties that take place in McDonald’s restaurants. The objective of this apparition is to transform the disagreeable experience of consuming distinctly average fare into an aesthetic experience mediated by the semblance of a myth.

Art has multiple uses; it is not of moral, political, or any specific value in itself. In our contemporary design world, it functions as the sock puppet, the veneer of fiction that conceals the uglier aspects of our habits of consumption. To be sure, as I will argue, art itself is not a mask for anything. Yet, the highly aestheticized sites of contemporary capitalist consumption would not be able to attract our attention and steer the course of our behavior were it not for art’s intrusion into our lifeworld. Art’s proliferation thereby indirectly serves the pernicious function of undoing modernity’s insight into the fragility of the human life form. The aestheticization of everyday objects stabilizes the kind of illusion without which our unhindered desire to own those beautiful objects would soon be exhausted.

In our digital age we are in the constant presence of artworks realized in the form of design, be it at the level of hardware – Apple products, of course, being the paradigmatic case study – or the level of homepage design or online advertisements. Artworks are everywhere, or rather their allure is omnipresent, and they fulfil the function of a smokescreen: aesthetic experience is triggered in a population so as to convert their destructive consumption of material-energetic structure in their environment into the experience of the beautiful and the sublime. In short, modernity has sucked the emancipatory power of art from its ontological autonomy step by step. Just think of the Fondation Louis Vuitton (architecture by Frank Gehry) in Paris, which recently hosted a comprehensive Basquiat exhibition. The situation of both the museum and the exhibition made it clear to any analyst of the overall context that the audience was not drawn to the Bois de Boulogne just in virtue of Basquiat’s expression of a voice for the voiceless. Basquiat’s visual rap art did not undermine its use for marketing and design purposes. On the contrary, its presence in the architectural space of the Fondation functioned as an attraction on the same ontological level as the neighboring rides and tourist attractions of the Jardin d’Acclimatation.

Faced with the omnipresence of art and the equally omnipresent worry that art is used and misused for extra-aesthetic purposes, I intend this book to address the following question: How could art have become so powerful that we cannot even imagine a lived, human reality not governed by its parameters?

In the world of objects surrounding us, art has become the rule, not the exception – so much so that many suspect that art might, after all, be the expression of something much more powerful, something which expresses itself in a disguised form through art. A contemporary candidate for such a force, secretly running the artworld, is of course capital(ism), in the Marxist sense of an accumulation of wealth on the basis of structures of exploitation hidden from view by smokescreens such as the artworld and its products, the artworks. Structures of highly asymmetric exploitation, so the argument goes, work only if they are rendered invisible to some extent, sometimes by being explicitly shown, as is often the case in Broadway musical productions, such as in the recent masterpiece Hadestown.

In Hadestown, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is embedded in a tale of exploitation perpetrated by the underworld god Hades and his drunken wife Persephone. The artwork is utterly perfect, beautiful “beyond impressive,” as one member of the audience put it when I went to see this incredible piece for the fourth time. Hadestown is the ideal fusion of a thoroughly American imaginary with the ontological power of myth. It tells the story of the destruction of planet Earth by a cynical god, Hades, who is invisible to the ordinary mortal. But the musical does not offer any solution apart from itself. It shows us the ways in which “the world could be” by staging an empty fantasy of rebellion against the underworld industrial conditions of its own production: Hadestown could not exist without its production being embedded in precisely the socio-economic conditions that its viewers deplore while being drawn into one of the most powerful contemporary artworks out there.

One might wonder whether art does not in fact precisely serve the function of rendering invisible the conditions of production of material goods (on a popular etymology, Hades – Greek: Ἄιδης – means the invisible, A-Ides) by lending them an aesthetic sheen. In light of these kinds of considerations, too prominent among art theorists and artists alike, it seems as if the Hegelian “sensible shining of the idea”¹ has morphed into a sensory sheen of the material.²

If this hypothesis were true, it would indeed be necessary to question art as a whole and, as a sign of resistance to the multiple forms of structural violence built into the current socio-political and ecological regime, reject it in all its forms.

In what follows, I will refute this hypothesis. Art itself, or so I shall demonstrate, is not controlled by any alien and alienating force expressing itself in an aesthetic guise. Rather, art itself is genuinely uncontrollable. No one, not even the artist, is in a position to steer the history of art. And I’ll go even further: art itself controls us without taking any specific interest in us; it occupies a position strikingly similar to that of the superintelligence feared by many prophets and pundits of digital technology.³

From the time of the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, art has taken hold of the human mind; it is embedded in our very being. Moreover, it is thanks to the emergence of art that we became human beings – that is, beings who lead their lives in light of an image of the human being and its position among its fellow animals, flora, fauna, and the stars.⁴

Let me explain. Before science helped us comprehend our place in the universe, humans believed that they occupied a metaphysically privileged place in the order of things. This specific status was traditionally based on the concept of the gods and then of a single God. Yet even after “the death of God,” in the postmodern sense that God no longer plays a central role in our concept of the human being (for a certain, rather small number of people, at least), there remains a trace of this mythical epoch: the idea that something or other sets us apart. As it happens, our faculty to think of ourselves as set apart actually does set us apart. No other animal, so far as we know, comes up with theories of the universe. This is why we are still justified in perpetuating the humanism of our ancestors. Human beings are a species set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom and from the mindless and thoughtless universe because an event took place that provoked the initiation of the history of the human mind. But it is not the gods who made us human. In this essay, I will propose the idea that it is art which lies at the origin of humanity, of our conception of ourselves as a species set apart.

It is not a coincidence that the very term “artificial intelligence” contains the idea of art. Yet what has thus far gone unnoticed is that we human beings have always been an artificial intelligence.⁵ Human thought has been shaped by the artifacts of our ancestors (tools, paintings, jewelry, tattoos, clothes); these objects took hold of the human imagination, which then, in turn, began to transform them.

What has power over our imagination has absolute power over us. History is fundamentally the history of art, and that very history is more powerful than any actor or institutional agency that endeavors to control it. Hence the enduring power of God, the supreme fantasy. In effect, it matters little whether God exists outside of the human imagination. If God does not exist beyond the imagination of human beings, as run-of-the-mill atheists maintain, the idea of God still pervades the mind. Ideas can be extremely powerful even without representing anything in the material reality of spacetime. Just think of numbers or memories, for example. We cannot see numbers in any part of the universe; the number 3 does not reside anywhere. The same goes for memories: they do not have the ontology of realist photography. Nevertheless, without numbers and memories there would be no human society. Society is essentially tied to human imagination.⁶

Consequently, the history of imagination is not a history of pure error. To imagine something is not to commit an error. Imagination is not a nothingness. Contrary to what Sartre might have thought, its function is not the paradox of bringing nothingness into being.⁷

Imagination does not transcend reality in any way (nothing does); it can only transform it from within. What we imagine is real, at the very least to the extent that we imagine it. Otherwise, we would leave reality behind whenever we dream. The dreams, reveries, and aesthetic experiences activated by works of art place us firmly in relation to something real, because artworks or memories reconfigured in dreams add to reality – they take...