Gaga Aesthetics

Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition

Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350102712
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Philosophy
• Categoria: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the "low" into the "high". The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term "Gaga Aesthetics" characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby 'upending tradition'. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is "Gaga Aesthetics": aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where "fine art" is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.

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 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 context-giving 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 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 post-life 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 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 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 ...

Indice dei contenuti

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