As more and more artists make movies, build houses, fabricate furniture, open restaurants, patent inventions, and design clothing and wallpaper, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re not threatened by the specter of commercial viability. “Bring it on!” the best works being made today seem to shout, “If I can’t stand the hype that accompanies being liked by more than a handful of standoffish fans, I’m not worth the paper I’m printed on, the canvas I’m painted on, or the various mixes of media I’m made of.”
Early on, Pop Art built this wisdom into its form. Jasper Johns’s flag paintings are based on the simple idea of putting something out in the world that people might stand before and salute, as if they cared so deeply about what it represents that they would line up behind it and be willing to fight for it. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyns use the rhetoric of fame to expand this relationship between objects and individuals to the culture at large, suggesting that a painting that doesn’t aspire to popular regard isn’t much of a painting at all. Edward Ruscha’s pictures of words don’t put words into your mouth or leave you speechless as much as they get anyone who comes across them to stutter and mumble, trying to say why they are so goddamned interesting when none of their elements appears to be anything special.
In the decades that followed, many viewers were not so promiscuous or open-minded. Despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, most still tended to think that selling equals selling out–that artistic integrity is so fragile, precious, and rare an essence that it can’t be mixed with too much popularity or success without being diluted to such a degree that its original impact is lost. Unfortunately, original impact is over in a moment–and vastly overrated. While it may leave indelible impressions in one’s memory, it’s not as important as ongoing impact, through which works live in the present, their effects rippling out into the world. Although integrity is central to all creative endeavors, the stubborn belief in it became for many little more than a palatable, aesthetically-correct defense of Art-with-a-capital-A, a catchall of a cliché in whose name all sorts of boring nonsense is perpetuated.
In the name of this capitalized abstraction, we often heard art audiences decry all kinds of entertainment, decoration, and design. Yet, decoration and design are the territories traversed by many of today’s most far-reaching artists–including Lari Pittman, Jim Isermann, Jorge Pardo, Takashi Murakami, Larry Johnson, and Pae White, to name but a very few–all of whom use easy-to-read vernaculars to change the world by making it look better, one satisfied customer at a time. Or think of Andrea Bowers’s drawings of solitary sports fans, concertgoers, and karaoke-singers–surrounded by mirrorlike fields of synthetic silver or gold leaf–which drive the point home: Artistic integrity is far less important than the responses viewers bring to works, even blatantly imitative ones.
Like commercial integrity, artistic integrity is a slippery concept that’s hard to pin down. But commercial integrity typically has discernible, pragmatic consequences. Consumers may not be able to define it, but our behavior reveals otherwise: We know what we’re doing whenever we acknowledge a product’s quality and value by buying it and using it (or admire more affluent consumers doing the same thing). There is no mystery to a job done with integrity in the world of commerce: Everything is up-front and surprises are few you’re satisfied with the service and happy to be a repeat customer.
In contrast, artistic integrity does not elicit such agreement, much less a coherent definition. What is clear is that it is not a matter of what something is made of. Using oil-on-canvas does nothing to insure that an object’s got it. (In fact, it’s probably more difficult to wrestle some integrity out of these tried and true/materials than it is to use ones that don’t have the historical burden.) Nor is it a matter of how something is made. We detect integrity in movies (upon Which numerous contributors collaborate and countless compromises are made). and poems (about as solitary an endeavor as exists in our world of multitasking team work) as well as in dance and theater symphonies, pop songs, TV shows, installations, photographs, and design. What links the diverse works in which we find artistic integrity is not the number of well-intentioned people who collaborate on them, but the number of viewers who respond to them.
In mercantile democracies like the United States, a big part of art’s job Is to allow people to distinguish themselves from one another. Many use art to Identify themselves as discerning consumers, whose refinement and sophistication Make run of the mill things seem dreadful and dispiriting. The beauty of Commercial culture as a critic friend of mine likes to say, is that it allows everyone To be an elitist–a self-educated enthusiast whose passion for fine things (or not so fine things) and cultivated experiences leads to a level of experiences that is constantly tested among one’s cohorts, colleagues, and comrades, by making what appear to be hairsplitting decisions as a matter of course. When it comes to art, outsiders may perceive such activities as privileged and overspecialized, but they are not fundamentally different from those of birders, sports fans, and rock-climbers, for whom a combination of passion, talent and time dedicated to an obsession produces a body of knowledge whose usefulness pales in comparison to the pleasures it makes possible. In all cases, participation has less to do with one’s upbringing and social position than with one’s interests. (I’m not excluded from the yearly proceedings of the NHL because It’s elitist, but because I don’t care about hockey)
Self-selected elites like myself are radically different from aristocratic or bureaucratic ones, although traces of both European and Soviet models make their way into the art world in the form of snobbery and arrogance, which never seem to be in short supply. If part of art’s power is in allowing a few malcontents to stand out from the crowed, the patron saint of this process is the artist as solitary visionary or misunderstood genius: a soul too deep, sensitive, and sweeping to live among those of us whose sensibilities are shaped–and whose desires are sometimes satisfied–by mass-marketed stuff. Laboring away in his or her garret, isolated from the distractions and depravities of commerce, the alienated artist represents an extreme, idealized version of viewers who are unsatisfied by what’s served up by the market.
But there’s a difference between standing out from the crowd and standing apart from it. To stand out from the crowd can be a powerful tactic, for in so doing one maintains some kind of connection to it. In art, as in fashion and rock ‘n’ roll, the more contentious, mettlesome, and unsettling the better. To stand apart from the crowd, however, is to transform the uneasy, back-and-forth tug of this charged, often antagonistic relationship into a flat, this-or-that opposition. It is to reject the imperfections of the commercial world in favor of the mere idea of something better. The result abandons any possible relationship to the presumed vulgarity of the market and, if lucky, ensconces itself within a museum.
In academic circles, works that stand apart from the culture are said to be “resistant.” But their resistance shares little with that of today’s most compelling art, whose power resides in its capacity to throw a monkey-wrench into the well-oiled machinery of production and consumption, generating meanings and experiences that scandalize some viewers while thrilling others. Throughout the history of Modernism, this critical frisson occurred at the point of consumption, when people bought works of art, took them home, argued about what they meant with others who also cared about them, and, every once in awhile, reorganized their lives around them. In the nineteen seventies, however, art’s critical component began to take on a life of its own. Institutions in which the artist’s critical intentions were honored rose up, driving a wedge between art’s critical and commercial components, which, in the past, had depended upon one another to insure that a work would have any impact outside the imagination of its maker. What counted was no longer what a work did, but what its maker wanted it to do. The revolution became an entirely symbolic affair. All too often, until recently, the works that got talked about and shown had stopped criticizing society from within (by presenting a living alternative to the status quo) and started criticizing it from without, from the safety of the ivory tower. Modernist self-criticism degenerated into finger pointing.
Such anticommercial prejudice forgot that works of art–even those that look good over the sofa–are born out of some form of dissatisfaction with the world. Artists wouldn’t take the trouble to make the things they make, or dedicate their lives to doing so, if they could buy them in stores or see them in museums. Like all forms of commercial ingenuity, art begins when an artist looks at his or her surroundings, perceives them to be lacking, and does something about it. Every work of art is a critique of its context in the form of an object that risks disappearing into that context. Of course, there is no problem in thinking of works of art as labors of love, but we often define love too narrowly: as something pure and virtuous, that has more in common with fantasies of knights in shining armor and alabaster-skinned damsels than with the lives of people like us. The love art elicits (and the behavior it incites) is more salacious (and satisfying) than such outdated illusions allow. So too are the compulsions and convictions that drive artists to make it.
One of the funny things about art is that if you act as if it doesn’t have consequences, it doesn’t. Its hold on viewers being consensual, and its powers reciprocal, art requires energized engagement if it’s to have an effect, especially a sustained one. The converse is also true. If you act as if art has any kind of agency, it does. As willing participants, the acting “as if” is what matters. Make no mistake; mistaken interpretations are just as effective as correct ones. More often than not they live longer lives and exert more influence than more sophisticated and meticulously elaborated ones. The same is true of responses: It’s impossible to have a false one. You cannot fake it. All are valid and authentic. The only catch, and the most ambitious goal, is to get others to respond similarly–to sell, and, if things go really well, to sell out.