As an undergraduate in São Paulo, I took four courses in aesthetics, but in truth three of them were art history courses (by one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, Leon Kossovich). We covered topics such as the tapestry of Siberian nomads and the development of art in the Persian Empire, from the Assyrians all the way to the Sassanids. The only ‘proper’ aesthetics course I took was on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, and for my final essay I drew a comparison between Rousseau and Adorno on their respective criticisms of art. This must have been the last time I thought seriously about aesthetics, and since then, whenever I gave it some more thought, I was still convinced (and still am) that Adorno had hit the nail on the head with his concept of the paradox of objectification of artistic expression in (modern) art.
So it was a pleasant surprise to read Mohan’s post last week, on an Adornian critique of bibliophilia; it all came back to me. As a matter of fact, I also suffer from an “increasing dislike of books as personal possessions”, and hardly ever buy any books: whenever I need to consult one, I try to find it on the internet or else handle things in the old-fashioned way by going to the library. Once I’ve read a book or checked what I needed in it, it simply becomes a cumbersome object which I need to store somewhere. (In truth, I do own some books, such as Ockham’s Opera Philosophica, but it doesn’t go much further than this.) I had never related my anti-bibliophilia to my Adornian inclinations, but it all makes perfect sense now.
In a rather interesting turn of serendipity, last week I was spending some days in New York City (as reported here) and going to many, many art exhibitions. I saw some beautiful things which nevertheless fell squarely within Adorno’s critique of art-as-business, such as the fantastic Cindy Sherman exhibition at the MoMA (she has two pieces on the top-10 list of most expensive photographs ever sold) and Klimt’s mind-blowing ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ at the Neue Galerie (acquired for the modest amount of U$ 135 million in 2006, a record at the time). Sometimes one simple has to indulge in some alienating art awesomeness…
I also visited the exhibition on Keith Haring’s early years (until 1982) at the Brooklyn Museum. Haring's work is now a regular presence in the infamous ‘gift shops’ to be found in every museum (including at this very exhibition, naturally), but in his early work he was a ferocious critic of the objectification of art. One of his main projects in the 1980s was his subway drawings: he would glue black paper over commercial ads in subway stations and the draw on them with chalk.
His motto was ‘Art is for everyone’. He was an avid reader of philosophy and critical theory, and it is not too far-fetched to infer a strong Adornian influence here. His subway drawings were meant precisely not to become objects of art, given the fragility of the materials used (although some of them survived and can be admired in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition). And yet, many of them defied their own ephemeral nature by being photographed by a friend of Haring’s (whose name I cannot remember, and have not been able to find out on the internet -- UPDATE: Tseng Kwong Chi, name located by my awesome husband), who would systematically go out and take photos of his subway drawings.
And here’s the irony of the whole thing: if it hadn’t been for the photos which in some sense infringed the intended ephemerity of the drawings, those of us who weren’t roaming around New York’s subway system in the early 1980s would not have been able to experience them. Some level of ‘objectification’, or what we could describe as ‘material instantiation’, is inevitable, simply because we happen to be creatures who rely on our senses to experience the world – artistic expression in particular. Can Adorno’s Marxism be reconciled with an embodied conception of art?
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