In the age of the creative industries, academic stars sometimes become pop cultural celebrities. In some cases, for example Slavoj Žižek, the public intellectual is able to satisfy both the academic fans of the author's work and the curious publics who want to know what ideas are changing the landscape of contemporary culture. In some cases, the goal of contributing to public discourse satisfies neither the requirements of scholarship nor is it popularly successful. In the case of Schama's episode on Caravaggio, which you saw last week, we get something in between.
How can we explain the success of academic "superdon" Simon Schama, whose dramatized television series on the history of Great Britain has earned him an Order of the British Empire in 2001 and a five million dollar contract for another series on the history of migration with the BBC in 2003? The task I have today is to account for this by focusing on one episode in Simon Schama's Power of Art, a 2006 BBC television series that was recently broadcast in Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand.
Simon Schama is a historian who studied at Cambridge University. He later taught there and at Oxford and moved to Harvard in 1980 and then Columbia University in New York City after he to took a job as art critic for the New Yorker magazine in 1995.
Without creating too much suspense around what I have to say about Power of Art, let me say this: The reason why Schama can satisfy both the public and liberal academics is that he successfully exploits the contradiction between the two. Schama's unaffected, natural and sensible manner provide an all-too familiar version of the enlightenment's liberal humanist view of social order, natural beauty and social progress, presented with a good deal of worldly satire and sarcasm. He is a William Hogarth for our neoliberal age, both as a historian and as a journalist who comments on contemporary issues like the American response to 9/11 and the War against Iraq. He serves up the foibles of the wealthy and powerful, the vanity of the nouveau riche, and he does so to great popular interest on the part of the educated public, and on the part of philistines who could care less what happens in the world. Schama plays the quintessential liberal, the Voltaire of Westminster, and it's no surprise that he begins his series on art with the seventeenth century, the great age of liberalism and the period in which the concept of art as a liberal profession first emerged as a subject of intellectual inquiry.
The story that Schama uses to close his series is a true story concerning Colin Powell, the Secretary of State under George W. Bush. Making his case against Saddam Hussein at the United Nations, Powell requested that Picasso's Guernica, one of the great artistic indictments of war, be covered over with a large blue cloth. Powell was obviously worried that similarities would be drawn between the Bush administration and the fascist regime of Francisco Franco. Schama presents this incident as an example of how art is not only a matter of pleasure but of life and death, a point that is brought home by the packaging of the DVD which depicts a red liquid that brings to mind both red paint and blood. The power of art, in the end, is no less than its ability to reveal to us the beauty of truth and freedom, and to redeem us from a mechanical and complacent world. Art takes nothing for granted and this is noticed especially when the artists he studies struggle against the odds, in dramatic moments of passion, pain and ecstasy, and astound the world through the integrity of an artistic vision and its realisation.
Anyone trained in contemporary cultural theory could point to any number of flaws in Schama's unvarnished historicism, but we would not fault him for seeking to popularize an earthy version of culture, however canonical and well-kept. Let's keep in mind that it is television that earned Schama a Knighthood and not his scholarship alone. We might criticize him, however, for the villainy with which he packages tired and outworn ideas about men of genius. The intellectual battle may be won in advance, but this is hardly the case for the political battle. How can we, as students and scholars interested in art and culture, reconcile this contradiction?
Schama selects David with the Head of Goliath as the key image to the question of why art matters. We could specify what he means by this and ask: why or how does art, as a liberal art, matter? One of the questions that Schama asks in the introduction to his series is the sort of question that every avant-garde artist since Courbet has asked: "Does art triumph over commerce?" In other words, can art transcend the circumstances of its production? For sure Caravaggio, and what we known about him, was unafraid of the dark truths of self-knowledge and kept the motto of the Roman bohemians: "without hope, without fear." Schama, as a good historicist, insists that everything is contextual. As he says, Caravaggio "wasn't born a thug," he became one. What allowed Caravaggio's patrons to make of him one of the most privileged painters of the seventeenth century was their eye for quantity, he argues, linking power to Church propaganda.
Schama is mostly correct when he tells us that Caravaggio's paintings are not art, they're heavy artillery. And as we know, this heavy artillery is eventually turned against the artist himself. Let's forget for a moment Schama's story of Caravaggio the sinner and let's consider the assertion I made earlier. If David is art and if Goliath is power, then who or what has Caravaggio triumphed over? In this work, Caravaggio has not so much killed himself but has killed the impulse to give up, to do what his patrons expect of him and what is popular. He seeks, on the stage of art, a space to contest conformity and to pursue a subjective vision. In this regard, Caravaggio paints a more dramatic version of similar self-portraits by many of his artist contemporaries: Gentilleschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630), Velasquez's Las Meninas (1656) and Vermeer's Allegory of the Art of Painting (c.1675).
Another work that comes to mind is Michelangelo's Reformation era addition to the Sistine Chapel, The Last Judgement of c.1540. In this macabre mural, the artist paints his face on the flayed hide of St. Bartholomew. What makes Michelangelo and Caravaggio contemporaries is not so much their sins, but their great skepticism about the very existence of God. Does humility conquer pride, or is it already too late?
What is striking about Caravaggio's Counter-Reformation piece is not the subject matter itself, but the point of identification. The psycho-sexual dynamics that are implicit in Caravaggio's work have been enough to warrant several books, not to mention a feature film by Derek Jarman. A number of religious questions intersect with this moment of the advent of a picturesque mode of figurative representation. Some of its themes are drawn out of the neoplatonist comparison of earthly and heavenly love, a humanist conceit that produced works such as Donatello's David of 1430, where the decapitation by the young boy signals that the older man has succumbed to his sexual seductions. The virtue of physical beauty, rendered in a relaxed contrapposto, has overpowered the generational order of things. The decapitation symbolizes the fact that the older man has "lost his head" – bowing to the humility and masochistic pleasure of "giving head" to the younger man. In this sense, the image serves as both a sensual delight and a cautionary warning, a twist on the Christian vanitas or memento mori: have sex with boys, but don't let one of them ruin your family and social status.
Themes that later appear in the psychoanalytic study of sexuality, such as castration anxiety and fetishism, abound in humanist culture, from the competing points of perspective in Holbein's 1533 painting The Ambassadors to Ruysch's Flower and Still Life, c.1700. Both are paintings that have to do with worldly knowledge and religious notions of providence. Neither of these, however, has the unaffected simplicity of Caravaggio, as seen in Boy with a Basket of Fruit of c.1594. Caravaggio's vanitas seems almost the antithesis of Donatello's. It seems to say: the devil may care – go ahead, get your hands dirty and enjoy the fruits of sensual delight.
Further, Caravaggio's "realism" is a far cry from the erudite confections of the mannerist period or baroque classicism. In Caravaggio's work, religious themes are made palpable through a gritty naturalism that succeeds in meeting the pedagogical mandates of Counter-Reformation theologians, though this does not mean that they were better appreciated by the public. In fact, they were not. As we know from the success of baroque art, the subaltern masses preferred to be delighted by the spectacle of wealth, glory, and power. In contrast, there is an unsettling quality to Caravaggio's work that we could, from a contemporary point of view, associate with ego formation and the instability of the psyche in relation to the operations of vision and the demands of the superego. This is especially noticeable in works like Head of Medusa (1598), Narcissus (1600), and The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601).
Why did Schama choose to begin his series with the Counter-Reformation? We could answer this question by going back in time a few decades. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Papacy had been plundered by foreign monarchs. Italian culture nevertheless withstood invasions and was later imported into the foreign courts of Spain, France and elsewhere. One of the reasons for this was because in the age of Machiavelli, the power of a king was related not to popular support within a local culture, but to the authority of central planning and bureaucracy, moving in the direction of the kind of absolutism we associate with Queen Elizabeth the First or King Louis the Fourteenth. We have in the sixteenth century, the beginnings of modern capitalism, with the large-scale production of goods and industry, organized banking, stock exchanges, state loans, insurance and speculation, all of them creating opportunities for financial disasters that forced rulers to engage in almost constant warfare.
The story of the Protestant Reformation is the quixotic story of faith-based struggles against this new world of capitalist economics. Church leaders like Martin Luther stirred nobles to fight against peasant uprisings and support the middle class, who, paradoxically, wanted to get rid of the privileges of the feudal class. While Protestantism emerged in Northern Europe as the morality of the majority of peasants, it quickly became the faith of the emerging middle class. One of its characteristics was an interest in the inwardness of faith against the splendour and corrupt wealth of the Church.
The political consequence of the Reformation, however, was the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which ushered in a "political realism" and a doctrine of double standards – one for the powerful and wealthy and another for the poor. Renaissance humanism was replaced with the age of scientific naturalism. In cultural terms, this led to a naturalization of politics, making inequalilty seem normal and natural. This is the crucible in which most of today's liberal values were created. The idea that in a pluralist country there is freedom for everyone, for all creatures great and small, under the power of God and Government, the same logic that gave rise to the idea of the British Empire, was born, surprisingly enough, in Catholic Europe. The training ground for "political realism" today is the mass media – television, radio, cinema, newspapers. In the 1500s and 1600s it was Church propaganda.
Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul, c1600.
In art, the concepts of naturalism and political realism find their analogue in the separation of form and content, on the one hand, and the totalizing unity of the work, on the other. This fairly "modern" approach to art is felt in the emphasis on opposing tendencies: light and dark, counter-balancing devices in terms of composition, visual weight and depth, classical monumentality and realistic detail. This unity of the work corresponds to a new, scientific worldview. The separation of form and content means that the artwork can be attributed an independently optical view on reality, a speculative reality based in the independence of thought and judgement. The distance that sutures vision to the world is therefore dependent on the viewer. The work no longer expresses an idea, but is made to interact with the viewer, meaning that the work is, by itself, incomplete. Images seem like incidental scenes, removed from the flow of life, creating for the viewer a sense of voyeurism and thus deepening Renaissance illusionism. We are, Schama says, rendered impotent spectators.
The price to be paid for the development of natural science is the realization of the relative unimportance of humans. "Man" no longer shares in divine grace, but becomes insignificant in a disenchanted world. This feeling of unimportance is contradicted by science, which is linked to doubt, skepticism and experimentation, and which gives humanity a new source of self-confidence. This scientific worldview gives rise to the new concept of universality, representing at once both the infinite and the finite totality.
Intellectually speaking, Caravaggio is thus caught between two worlds, between the world of Renaissance culture, where virtuoso artists are celebrated, and the world of the Counter-Reformation, which rejects the aesthetic and intellectual culture of the Renaissance. Caravaggio's rejection by the public and by some of his own patrons marks not only his criminal temperament, but the rigid distinction between form and content and the separation of official religious art from secular art – in other words, the separation of the Christian community, expressed in the emergent form of nationalism, from extreme individualism.
The rise of individualism at this time is linked to the admission of the middle class into the ranks of the civil service and the patent nobility. As a result, a growing fear of the power of the middle class gave rise to absolutism and pageantry within the Courts and much art production at this time fell under the monopolistic control of the state-run Academies. Nevertheless, seventeenth-century naturalism becomes tied to a new taste for personal experience, personal possessions, property, psychological inquisitiveness and education. This is noticed in works like Georges de la Tour's Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (1640), Rembrandt's Self-Portrait (1659) and Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew (1600).
Caravaggio's enlightened Roman patrons appreciated the naturalism of his "genre" paintings and the psycho-biographical aspects of his portraits. His low-life figures, fortune-tellers, homeless and beggars, dressed up as religious and mythological figures, involve the viewer in a game of voyeuristic and formalized social relations that we could associate with the drama of Shakespeare and the comedies of Molière. The lack of decorum they portray evokes the eroticization of power that is a result of social and class inequality. His religious pictures are not meant to provoke religious piety, they are petty offenses that are meant to shock and stimulate. The difference between the viewer who appreciates Caravaggio's transgressions and the one who doesn't is thus naturalised and individualised. The works set up a comedy of manners and double morality that forms the basis of eighteenth-century notions of genius and originality, and nineteenth-century notions of progress, scientific racism and social Darwinism. Caravaggio's precociousness was well-known and paintings like The Calling of Saint Matthew were made by directly observing life without the use of study drawings. Some considered these works signs of the end of painting. Ordinary people regarded his work to be improper and lacking decorum. His works are in fact allegories of visual identification and visual dis-identification – precisely the logic of a new kind of psychological realism.
Despite the dramatic aspects of Caravaggio's life, we find similar approaches to painting in the work of other artists. Velasquez, for example, also worked with "genre" subjects, displaying his virtuoso talents in the depiction of commonplace subjects, poor people, and everyday objects, as seen in The Water Carrier of Seville (c1619) in which there is represented different kinds of reflection on a ceramic jug, a glazed water container and a transparent glass. Velasquez's gentlemanly manner is extended liberally to his compatriots, great and small. They are each of them a symbolic representation of "humanity," something that is ascribed to them, and bequeathed to them through the formal distance of political realism. Just as in real life, the figure in the foreground is not only a man, but also a representation of a man. The controlling power of the viewer is a political fantasy that is part of the construction of an intimate and individualized viewing position. In the baroque age, this characteristic of humanity could be attributed to all human subjects, regardless of their race, gender or class status. The fact that it usually was not does not alter the new potential that the symbolic representation of universality introduced into society. A similar set of issues is found in Frans Hals' The Merry Drinker. An ordinary man in a tavern invites you, the viewer, for a drink. He is a gallant fellow but unlike yourself, he is not a parliamentarian, he is a monarchist, an anti-bourgeois associated with the House of Orange. However, you are more civic minded and humanistic. Your liberal parliamentarian attitude is tolerant.
Surely this is a much less dramatic image than David with the Head of Goliath. But what do they have in common? Can we ask of this painting the same question asked of the former: Does art triumph over commerce? Or, does the question concerning humanity triumph over commerce? Is Schama's definition of art a stand-in for a political definition of humanity? Translated into the terms of political liberalism, do the pleasures of sharing a drink triumph over those of political contestation? There is no raw, physical aggression in Hals' work. Instead, political violence is subsumed in the morality of the superior viewpoint, backed by a liberal education and the power of the upper bourgeoisie.
In some ways Schama's presentation of Caravaggio asks us to make a comparison between the Counter-Reformation, a period of Church propaganda and political realism, and our own, a period in which neoliberalism has challenged the values of social democracy and political liberalism. I would be tempted to take this position of moral superiority, siding with Schama against figures like Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, if not for the fact that, in my opinion, Schama's moderate and tolerant liberalism is part of the same political ideology as the more authoritarian versions of liberal politics that we have been witness to in the last decade. How then might we specify the liberal humanist approach to the question "Does art triumph over commerce?" I would suggest that we begin by examining the context for the production and dissemination of Schama's television series: the culture industry.
The concept of the culture industries was first proposed by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno in 1944. While this term is routinely dismissed in contemporary cultural theory as pessimistic and defeatist, it is retained here as a descriptive term for the political and ideological articulation of relations of production within cultural institutions and the place of appropriation of creative work, where workers and consumers are defined explicitly as units of capital.
In the work of Adorno, the culture industry is the point of contact between two mutually exclusive domains: high art and consumer culture. The function of the capitalist culture industries is tied to the integrative function of capitalist development in general. What makes the culture industries effective in this process is their organization of free time and everyday life in accordance with capitalist cycles of production and with culture as amusement – itself a coping mechanism for the prolongation and extension of the conditions of work. Autonomous high art, as a sphere of restricted production, gives commercially accessible mass culture the semblance of universality. The historically specific question that Adorno was concerned with in the post-World War II period was whether or not society could reach the stage of social democracy while bypassing petty-bourgeois fascism. The conditions he witnessed in the 1930s and 40s clearly pointed towards the negative integration of society.
One major shift that we are confronted with since Adorno's time is the shift from the prewar and postwar welfare state, the age of industrial capitalism, to the forms of analysis that are associated with post-Fordist or postmodern consumer capitalism. Neoliberalism has proven to be a far more reckless form of capitalist adventurism than postwar Keynesian reformism, resulting in less economic growth in all sectors of the global economy and a greater concentration of surplus capital in the hands of the few. There is no question that we are today witness to some of the most authoritarian forms of liberal ideology to date and the restauration of class power. Yet, most cultural workers are accommodating the marketization of knowledge and the silencing of critical thought, in particular, in the form of class analysis. Liberal capitalism knows itself to be an unjust system: this is by definition the cost of freedom. What is therefore at stake in the institutionalization of contemporary culture is the process whereby the social classes that control government have implicitly come to understand the contradictions of art. From a liberal point of view, to say that art triumphs over commerce, is essentially the same things as to say that commerce triumphs over art. To say so in a television series and through the kind of marketable cultural engineering that neoliberalism encourages, is redundant.
In his book on social Distinction as a function of judgements of taste, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu effectively described modern art as a factor in the reproduction of class society. That is why art making does not defy explanation, but avoids it. Because artistic transgression further distances the cultivated dispositions of the dominant technocratic classes from the ethical dispositions of the dominated service and working classes, artistic transgressions – and we could now include those of Caravaggio though the stakes are contemporary – can be said to work to reproduce class society. In contrast to Adorno, for whom the precariousness of genuine culture was to be attributed to its resistance to commercial exchange value, the disappearance of the sacred boundary that separates art from everyday life was defined by Bourdieu as a necessary stage in the resistance to the logic of capital accumulation.
Shortly after Bourdieu's work was published, Peter Bürger defined the goal of avant-garde aesthetics as the subordination of the formal characteristics of the work of art to the general characteristics of the work's political content. In this sense, the historical avant-gardes were not so much anti-aesthetic as dialectical in the proper Hegelian sense: art was to be mediated according to its social conditions of production, a notion that was best expressed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on "The Author as Producer." The institutionalization of avant-garde art by the capitalist culture industries led in the postwar period to the separation of art from politics and the radical confrontation of class society.
If neoliberalism has been such an effective model for capitalist ideology in the past few decades, it's maybe because class polarization in the global stage of late capitalism occurs in relation to the growth of a distinctly petty bourgeois class formation. What is the political position of this new "middle" class? In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings argues that in a world of transnational globalization, the language of economic management replaces that of cultural and class conflict. The liberal belief that North America represents a classless society has paved the way for the economic dominance of a global class that refuses all recognizable or fixed social identity. Because of this, it does not think of itself as having reached a different stage of the class struggle, but considers both traditional bourgeois and socialist politics to have nothing to do with its technical expertise and vision of the good life. For the global petty bourgeoisie, one could say, there is no political and ideological relation. What replaces class struggle are identity struggles which tend to privilege, in consequence, a liberal multiculturalist tolerance which then shores up political liberalism and capitalism. Caravaggio's bohemian and unconventional lifestyle fits this schema perfectly.
The paradoxical class position of the new executive petty bourgeoisie is that it is neither working class nor middle class but both: its ideological effect is, one the one hand, class polarization, and on the other, a certain invisibility inasmuch as it privileges the thesis of classlessness. Technocratic powers have learned to exploit this contradiction to great effect and it could do so because neoliberalism appears not only as the engine of trade and deregulation, as the most advanced form of turbo-capitalism or "shock capitalism," but also as a protective reaction to the problems associated with uncontrolled markets. This is one reason why, in the late capitalist democracies, the state has become an instrument for militarization and the manipulation of fear. No wonder too that Schama's Power of Art should come wrapped in blood, as the Blair government cowtows to the U.S.'s bloody conflict in Iraq and its security state manipulation of fear.
Contemporary critical art production can benefit from the recontextualization of Bourdieu's theory of the "cultural goodwill" of the lower middle class as a key sector of the social space. The general mode of production/consumption (or class habitus) that Bourdieu defined as the petty bourgeois disposition is that of allodoxia: an empty form of goodwill and reverence towards high culture that is based in mistaken identifications combined with anxiety about one's social status. While allodoxia owes its sense of distinction to the mode of consumption that is proper to legitimate culture – disinterestedness – it confuses aestheticism with popular culture and prefers accessible versions of avant-garde experimentation. In other words, the political content functions at the general level above that of formal specificity, but the content is the impossible one of an empty form of the political.
The petty bourgeois mode of production and consumption attempts to operate as a disengaged, neutral and strictly consumerist index of the power of institutions to impose cultural capital. Consequently, avant-garde arrogance and insolence, itself derived from the "heroic" certainty of possessing culture through serious engagement with it, is replaced by the permanent anxiety of those who do not know how to play the game of culture as a game, and who pretentiously overidentify with culture. It is precisely this hysteria of pretension that Schama exploits.
Pre-tense, according to Bourdieu, is objectively based in the petty bourgeois desire to escape from poverty and to acquire "class" itself – the very substance of social distinction. Because of this race against time, and because the order of time is marked by the increasing gap between the working poor (including the middle class) and the wealth of a small but growing number of billionaires and mega corporations, the petty bourgeois mode of appropriating culture dominates today's cultural institutions.
Among the modalities of allodoxia, Bourdieu proposes the following processes: structural indeterminacy vis-à-vis the social field; countercultural resentment that verges on nihilism (especially among the declining petty bourgeoisie); a taste for the new and a willingness to submit to lifestyle changes (especially among the rising, executant petty bourgeoisie); the creation and selling of new products; new occupations that allow symbolic rehabilitation strategies; occupations that emphasize symbolic production, especially in the areas of communications and new media; the euphemization of seriousness and the fun ethic (postmodern irony); relaxation strategies and conviviality; affectation in simplicity; flair combined with bluff; sympathy with discourses that challenge the cultural order; the denunciation of hierarchy; an emphasis on personal health and psychological therapy; an imperative of sexual relation; the offering of one's art of living as an example to others; pragmatic utopianism; and, a measure of psychic distance from the direct impact of market forces. In short, a host of liberated manners and lifestyle choices that betray an effort to defy the gravity of the social field.
The challenge to authority is a particularly telling feature of class structure and is one that figures prominently in relation to the charismatic conception of the artist as rebel, outsider, or visionary, a conception that Schama exploits shamelessly. The reason for this is less than benign, however. Authority boundaries are the most permeable of class boundaries, in comparison with the more static boundaries of property. As long as the questioning and challenging of authority does not imply a corresponding increase in education levels and a democratic distribution of wealth, the culture industries can carry on with the rebel sell, or what Thomas Frank calls "the conquest of cool." For those who hope to find a redemptive morsel of intelligence on television, there's The Power of Art, the surface marketing of canonical works of art by yet another servile, postmodernist sycophant. And why not, given the alternatives.
Because bourgeois liberalism by and large continues to function as the stated and unstated ideology of art institutions, the actual sociological shift toward the petty bourgeois bureaucratization of intellectual labour remains invisible. In the past few years, the Euro MayDay movement has begun to name the conditions of intellectual and creative work with terms like cognitariat and precariat and with progressive policy concepts like flexicurity – security for workers in an economy that demands flexibility and constant adaptation. One of the icons that emerged from the movement comes right out of the pages of the Counter-Reformation. His name is Saint Precario, patron Saint of the precariat. Saint Precario is the figure who stands between the two ends of the double morality of neoliberal politics. According to the Manifesto of the Barcelona EuroMayDay movement,
"We are the precarious, the flexible, the temporary, the mobile. We're the people that live on a tightrope, in a precarious balance; we're the restructured and outsourced, those who lack a stable job, and those who are overexploited; those who pay a mortgage or a rent that strangles us. We're forced to buy and sell our ability to love and care. We're just like you: contortionists of flexibility."
The flipside to the insecurity of everyday life is the speed of marketing. Already in the late 1970s, Bourdieu was demonstrating how the new petty bourgeois habitus was in the process of supplying the economy with the perfect consumer – dare I say, the perfect student. The culture industry model of commercial communication, with its managerial technocracy and populist rhetoric, also courts communities of dissent, while at the same time leaving little room for any culture that effectively threatens market hegemony. If there's a lesson to be learned from Schama's Caravaggio, it is in fact the point of identification when the painter applies his self-portrait to the head of Goliath. The world that exists only exists insofar as we identify with it and because we identify it as the only world possible.
This paper was presented in the context of an undergraduate course on the history of Renaissance and Baroque art at Bishop's University, Lennoxville/Sherbrooke, Québec, October 25, 2007. Previous to this talk, students had watched the episode on Caravaggio that is part of the Simon Schama's Power of Art series.
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