Lately I came across an article on possible strategies of survival for freelance journalists. One of them had the motto „Declare yourself a prophet“. Through the bad market situation and technology changing rapidly those freelancers find themselves in a forced avant-garde role. And the advisor tells them to play that role and play it well. Through neologisms they should make the language of the revolution and also hard cash for their rent. Almost needless to say this is the way things go in the bigger part of the art world. The artist is the prototype of the self-employed and self-exploiting person, often pauperised, but then also considered one of the experts of innovation in western societies. How did this social role develop over time in Europe and is prophecy the appropriate strategy for artists nowadays?
21st centry art draws on a „tradition of the new“, as one sociologist puts it; also the subject of art seems to have undergone a long process of individualisation in different times and (self-)interpretations. In Renaissance Italy sculptors and painters elevated themselves into the circles of the „free arts“, the Enlightenment centered art and art reception around the ascending secular individual. Cultural discourse became a self-reflection of the growing confidence of the burgeoisie in 18th and 19th century’s salons, coffee societes and clubs in Western Europe. The Romantic period finally gave the term „genius“ the sense that for the arts is in popular use still today: a rather tragic figure, often poor, misunderstood, a strange character that seems to ignore social rules – but hopelessly creative. This period, especially in Germany, was a period of failed revolution, censorship and political restauration. The romantic artists saw themselves as suffering, longing for a world beyond or being in exile, using irony and symbol systems that could not clearly be interpreted as either only subjective expression or criticism of objective circumstances. At the end stood Van Gogh as an early democratic and secular Saint.
The author is one of us
Marx saw in art possibly one kind of unalienated work where the producer ideally has full control over his or her means of production. Van Gogh would have been happy in classless society, I assume. In the capitalist countries with the developing anonymous art market the individual artist became in fact the figurehead of burgeois society. And the avant-garde movements in the first half of the 20th century struggled desperately to keep pace with socio-political and technological change. Painters had to reinvent themselves with the rise of photography, architects had to do the same when publicly funded housing became more important in growing cities. Adolf Loos and Pablo Picasso are only two examples of self-made art prophets who are considered icons of European modernism. And they did make some money. Finally Duchamp made the point to sign a shovel and a urinal and display what the arts world wanted to have: a name. The author is the hero of classical modernism – and he (and sometimes she) was one of us. Not a cleric, not an aristocrat – Duchamp was the son of a notary, Picasso son of an arts teacher. The funding of this avant-garde art by collectors and museums is an expression of wealth of civil society in secular 20th century.
For post-war German art Joseph Beuys has to be mentioned as one of the greater innovators. Many of his performances and symbols can also be called prophetic. He entered the scene as a world teacher, explained art to a dead hare and thus helped to expand the range of materials, forms and discourses. In the Sixties there emerged many time-based art forms. I will only mention video- and television art, besides performance. Especially video in my view brought art into the context of hi-tech and quasi-scientific discourse and can be compared to what cubism had meant to painting. With the protest movements of the late Sixties artists also took to the streets, picking up and assembling rubbish and organizing happenings. This clearly was a declaration of war to the „establishment“, especially in a very forgetful German society. And so this whole time of protests installed different social rules that have been valid roughly until today. But by the Eighties in the West there was just another kind of establishment that tried to conservate the social statuses of its members.
Artists are freelancers
Today the (younger) artist mostly is the member of an ever mobile class. Production as well as interpretation of art in the Western societies are highly professionalised. In Germany there is a bridge of prizes and scholarships that can lead artists to a professorship at an arts academy, some also to the big capital of major collectors. Deviance, the displaying of oneself as a rebel, or even prophecy can be ascribed to some actors on that scene; but it is mostly a pose. The civil society has emancipated itself from kings and popes. The Western European art market is saturated and the successful artist circles constitute a class of their own. In fact the newest thing in art is the entrance of financial speculation into that market. So what is so special about „the artist“?
I would first like to state that art today shares grounds with many other fields: marketing and design, economy, journalism. What we know today as a live documentation with shaky video-camera was made up by people in the 1960s that considered themselves artists. When a company like Google says in an easy tone „don’t be evil“, we know that big economy has understood how important aesthetics are for their image: Who would mistrust those guys in denim? And fields like Guerilla Marketing have their roots in artistic forms as performance, as well as in other, underground, culture. Many artists in turn draw on research or investigation, methods usually associated with scientists or journalists. There have of course always been those who wanted to unite „art and life“. Also the academic degree of a doctorate in arts is now another common way to merge different fields of cultural work in the broader sense. To cut a long story short, artists are first and foremost freelancers; with a philosophy, admittedly.
That is on the one hand the most important similarity with designers etc., on the other hand the biggest difference: The artist has the traditional stance of the outsider, or, in the sense of Bourdieu, the inherited habitus; whereas other parts of the mobile class don’t have that kind of „tag“. In Germany the term „digital bohemia“ was made public some years ago for a new „coffee house culture“ of totally insecure but, again, hopelessly modern existences. Some people regard freelancing as a modern kind of slavery and don’t find much good about it. Those guys, on the contrary, seem to make the best out of it. I would say that there is a remarkable readiness to aestheticize one’s own social status in these circles – which is also a good tradition in the arts world. Decadence, Bohemia, avant-garde can be seen as parts of an ideology to literally black out the misery of a totally mobile existence, which more and more people experience as a result of the crumbling away of middle class in western societies.
Second, for any prophetic purposes it is good to ride on a wave of new technologies – the „social media“ now resemble even more a tsunami that has a lot of possible foamy identities floating on top. So when looking at social and technological change, I would say that artists, not only today, are more of an arrière-garde than the opposite. And they share this position with those other members of the mobile class who are trying to survive. Historically speaking, artists have profited from the rise of the classical burgeoisie of money. But with the breakup of the middle class with many going down and few going up, art as part of the social system loses its coherence to this class as the very point of belonging and also the main source of recipients. When artists and recipients get poorer, production as well as discourse gets tougher. The question is in the end if art still has a societal basis. (Of course, the most common and obvious solution is emigration to a richer society.)
A new realist toolbox
But I am not speculating about the end of art. It’s just that authorship is stripped of its aura and in contemporary (Western) society the bigger number of artists finds themself in a pool with very diverse people, all struggling for survival. Although the social situation of many artists is bad, the artist is not the new proletarian as she is overbred. That means that artists draw on a symbol system that they have inherited from their ancestors and that makes them belong – still – to an upper part of society. Or at least use the corresponding signs. Many have argued that there is a system of power behind that symbolicity and stated that artists are part of a collusion or a conspiracy. What potential does this symbolic quality have under today’s conditions?
First of all art can reflect the situation of the „mobile class“ just as it once reflected that of the burgeoisie. For sure that extremely civilized underclass is in need of symbols as a true heritage of former material wealth. That will probably not produce so much money. But as times get harder, the social function grows in importance. Because art is arrière-garde, is an extension of a social system. It is already infiltrated by society because the subject of art, to loosely quote Bourdieu, is everybody involved in making the existence of the art work possible. The symbol can potentially reflect its own circumstances of existence. And when it does this, it does not shade the struggle that is behind it. Shared work spaces and methods of ethnology could be in the „realist toolbox“ of art in that sense. The avant-gardes tried to cut the ties to the burgeoisie and still got paid for their art. It is not clear who is going to pay for art in the future. But following the now developing ‚communities‘ and taking social media literally is one possible way. I am not necessarily referring to „underground“ culture because I think that the funding of culture as a whole is in decline.
Again: Artists and other freelancers have a lot of common ground. And it is not clear what kind of „class“ is emerging there. Plurality is one key word. Considering the economic situation in Western countries it is questionable if „they“ are likely to accumulate greater capital. But symbolizing a class or community has always been an important way to canalize social energies and, finally, the key to any good prophecy.
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