After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties

by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The relative autonomy that art and academia have been equipped with for the last 200 years is under tremendous pressure from both within and without. From the inside, the promise of happiness is forcing art into avant-gardist transgressions or revolutionary engagements in the ongoing struggles against power and capital. From the outside, the culture industry is threatening to realize art upside down as an expanded participatory experience economy. When it comes to academia, the commodification of education, research and knowledge appear almost complete.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and especially since the late 1990s, the art market has not only tended to acquire a hegemonic status in contemporary art, but contemporary art has also become part of an expanded experience economy, where art has fused with cultural tourism, pop culture and gentrification. The explosion in the number of biennials and the erection of one more spectacular museum after another is the most visible expression of this development.

Contemporary art is no longer just a research and development unit of advanced capitalism. Instead, it is part and parcel of an all-encompassing experience economy on a level with advertising, fashion, music, TV and games.

The ruling class continued amassing wealth, while art exhibitions were turned into parties or discussions about postcolonialism and economic inequality. This forces us to ask whether or not playing a transformative game within the institution is still a viable option. What to do then? Although an exit from the institution looks increasingly desirable as the institution reveals its class character, it is perhaps not altogether wise, as we will need all available sources of criticality in the fight to come. But considering the ability to manage radical art and divert it in order to maintain social equilibrium—Marcuse’s affirmative character of art—it seems reasonable to say that only art sited at the very margin of the art system can help to build a passage beyond capitalism. In the coming insurrection, the safe interior of the art world will perhaps become too compromised.

After decades of being hollowed out by neo-liberal changes and cuts, these institutions are there for the taking. The Left must re-enter political and cultural institutions, putting them to a new use. As Fisher writes: “Mainstream media” is not “a monolith but a terrain” on which to fight and engage in “popular experimentalism”. We shall neither “remain in the margins nor replicate the existing forms of mainstream”, Fisher notes.10

As Robert Kurz has explained, capitalism is “domination without a subject”, in which the subject is not people but capital.14 It is thus not a question of different politics or a new common sense; it is not a question of the wrong class running the economy. The economy is the problem.

If the nostalgia cultures of the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a fascination with the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, from adventure stories to go-go girls, and staying away from a more politicized past, as Fred Jameson argued in his seminal analysis of the postmodern, present-day nostalgia, culture has no problem mining more militant events, emblems, images and styles, converting them into fashionable signs like Che and Guy Fawkes.33 But the end result is the same: historical amnesia and the commodification of history.