This Is Not Art

This book makes no secret of writing from the perspective of an artist on the current practice of art. As its title suggests, the mode of address of This Is Not Art is essentially corrective, which is an unusual way for artists to talk to one another. Consequently, it sometimes comes across as somewhat didactic, although this is balanced by a sense of modesty that is identified with the autodidacticism of the artist. From the point of view of a critic, theorist or historian, one feels somewhat excluded from the discussion, since one is not really being addressed, but nevertheless one feels implicated by the nature of the questions of theory that are raised. The central figure of the book is that of the artist, and the problem addressed is that of her position and potential for resistance within the wider structures of the art world and contemporary capitalist ideology. The first two chapters of the book establish this position, first through an account of neo-liberalism and then through the institutional definition of art as it has been developed in analytical philosophy from Danto to Dickie. There is a potential contradiction between the ahistoricity of the latter and the historical determination of the former, which could perhaps have been mediated by an historical account of the institution of art such as Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. What is really at stake, however, in this first part of the book is the identity and value of art. Jelinek’s complaint in the first chapter is that the ideology of the free market determines the value, in all senses, of art. One might then have expected to read in the second chapter that this wider, historically determined, ideology also conditions the definition of art in its institutionalized sense, so that the definition of art, which it is the function of the art world to determine, is itself overdetermined by the definition of art as a commodity. And yet Jelinek makes a claim for the validity of the institutional theory of art in its own terms, as a necessary detour into a more abstract realm. It is as if Jelinek, interested in the relation between art and politics, had first asked the separate questions ‘what determines politics’ and ‘what determines art’ in succession, paratactically. What is established in the first two chapters are thus two modes of totalizing determination—one describing the extension of neo-liberal capitalist ideology into all areas of life, and the other the internalized and tautologous relationship between the institution and its object—that are not necessarily compatible. Bringing them together runs the risk of undermining the coherence of each, and Jelinek only partially succeeds in clarifying what the relationship between these two perspectives might be, although the argument that the art world unwittingly reproduces, in its own workings, the wider capitalist ideology, or that it thinks it is saying and doing one thing whereas in reality it is saying and doing something else, does have genuine critical validity. (One should point out, however, that the argument concerning art and political economy is deserving of a more dialectical treatment, which would, for example, involve a more extended engagement than Jelinek allows with Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s extraordinary recent book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005).)

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Art methodology · Art world · Contemporary art · Contradiction · Epistemology · Identity (music · Ideology · Institution · Performance art · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Philosophy

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