21 aphorisms for a career in the arts
The first question to ask anyone who wants to pursue a life as an artist – a poet, a painter, a composer, a playwright – is “Are you rich?” Because if you are, everything else will be an awful lot easier. 1/
Of course, this is true for anyone who wants to do anything. But there is a reason that a large percentage of working poets, painters, composers and playwrights, now and through history, have been single white men of what we used to call “independent” means. 2/
If you answer “Yes” to the first question and “No” to the second question – you want to be an artist and you’re not rich, then the second question is: Are you bloody-mindedly persistent? This question should be asked again and again every five years or so. 3/
A warning! If you have been bloody-mindedly persistent and have refused to go away for long enough – your personal circumstances, that is your home ownership or family circumstances will dictate exactly when this happens – you are likely to find yourself trapped as an artist, that is, trapped as otherwise unemployable. 4/
There are three ways to go at this point: finding a more or less menial way of making a living, sometimes connected to the arts (usually in some managerial capacity) but often not; this may be a version, conscious or otherwise, of the second alternative, which is total surrender and acknowledging that your parents were right all along. 5/
The third alternative, which sane people should rightly balk at, is remaining bloody-minded (or deranged) enough to insist and persist. This is much easier if you’re rich, as indicated above. It is also easier on sunny mornings than rainy afternoons. 6/
Sometimes, most often, the end point of artistic bloody mindedness is a life and death of comparative penury, sometimes rewarded by posthumous fame, most often by total obscurity forever. This is neither romantic nor is it a joke. Those who can face and accept this doom do so either because they are trapped or mad. 7/
When giving advice to someone who is looking at a career in the arts, the categorical imperative, therefore, is to tell them not to do it. Only the rich, the mad and the trapped should contemplate doing any such thing. 8/
We must never forget that it is ONLY successful artists who are culturally visible. We must not mistake this visibility as being in any way the normality of a life in the arts. 9/
If it seems that a career in the arts leads artists to an interesting life led in the company of other interesting people, there are two things not to forget. One is that this outcome is, in reality, vanishingly rare. And second, that this form of “success” is itself a cultural construct. 10/
Artistic activity has always been, and will always be, connected with wealth. This wealth can be socially, nationistically or even socialistically understood. The arts can be an adornment of public as well as private wealth. But wealth, the use of economic surplus for inherently uncommercial ends, has always been essential. 11/
Wealth is normally inherited. But if you’re an artist, sometimes – rarely – the wealth that an artist enjoys is because they’ve been involved with what is called “a hit.” Sometimes, even more rarely, you yourself can become a hit…a “treasure.” 12/
It is important to understand that both a hit and a treasure are specific forms of what is known as “success.” It is also important to understand their specific meanings. In pragmatic terms, if an artist has or is “a hit” they can now continue as an artist because they are protected by the established affection of an audience. 13/
Critical success, even artistic employment is not the same thing as a hit. There is no way of knowing in advance whether or not your success constitutes a hit. This is not entirely a rational matter. Everyone knows a hit when they see one. But they are not sure for some time whether they see one or not. 14/
If it is, then anything might be possible. If it isn’t then nothing has changed. And Sisyphus is pushing the rock up the hill once again. (Even if your last outing was indeed a hit, then Sisyphus is still pushing the rock…but is starting from nearer the top of the hill.) 15/
It is unclear whether the protection of an audience is inherently preferable to protection by any other patronage. What is clear is that protection by some form of patronage is essential. It is possible that being a hit or a treasure at least partake of some form of democracy, albeit loosely defined. 16/
What is being enjoyed, at the most basic level, is wealth. Wealth has changed exactly what it looks like over the years and through the ages, but it has always been basically constituted of interesting lives being lived with interesting people in interesting places. 17/
The company of successful artists has always been one of the adornments of a life lived as a wealthy person. Successful artists in turn, can borrow some of the other adornments of wealth in order to fit in. 18/
This is as much the case now as when Michealangelo depended on the favour of Popes, or Mozart of the Emperor of Austria. The favour of audiences is as dependant on their disposable wealth every bit as much as was (and is) that of Emperors of one kind or another. 19/
There is nothing inherently wrong with dependence on favour – it is a constant -, but it is important that those contemplating a career in the arts understand what “success” actually signifies. And that the most important aspect of it, artistically speaking, is to be able to wake up tomorrow morning knowing that you can survive as an artist, even live like one, at least until tonight. 20/
That is, even if you are not wealthy, you can and must live as if you are. Artists either actually are wealthy people, or they can live on the wealth of patrons as if that wealth were their own. There is no alternative. 21/
As an artist myself, I can add this:
Art is a calling, a must-do disease, a compulsion, that, as an artist, if you don’t do, your mental health will suffer. Trying to do mainstream jobs instead is just suicidal. Trying to mechanically produce art in the same way you might produce widgets in a factory is also suicidal. The poverty that may ensue carrying out art may also be suicidal, but at least you’ll die doing something you love.
Meh.
We should be like Denmark (I think it is) where you can register as an artist and get £9K a year state wage, thereby allowing the artist to do as much as they possibly can without having to worry about being destitute.
Let it be known that art was around a long time before money. With the encoming collapse of pretty much everything, money will become history, so maybe there will be more art to come.
All humans are creative. It’s not just self-proclaimed ‘artists’ whose mental health suffers in mundane ‘mainstream jobs’.
The Irish government is currently piloting a Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme, which will pay artists €325 a week out of total pot of €25 million. You’ve got to meet the criteria by which the government defines ‘an artist’ in order to qualify for the payment, which is problematic. Is it really a satisfactory situation to have the government rather than artists deciding what art is?
Wouldn’t it be better to have a universal unconditional guaranteed income, below which no citizen’s income is allowed to fall, rather than one that’s specific to those whom the government deems ‘artists’?
There’s a difference between being an artist (someone who makes stuff of intrinsic value) and making a living as an artist (someone who makes creating stuff that has exchange value and which they can therefore sell).
Over the 70 years of my adult life, I’ve successfully combined having an artistic career with doing other stuff to support myself and my children while pursuing that career. Artistic activity is by its nature amateurish; it’s activity that one cultivates and participates in for the sake of its own intrinsic value (i.e. for the sheer love of it) rather than with any eye to gain from it.
Sad but true.
Seems a recipe for unrepresentativeness. Part of society’s system of filters, I guess.
In 2019 the Sutton Trust said:
“However, access across the creative industries is not equal for all. Just 13% of those working
in publishing, 12% of those in film, TV and radio, and 18% in music, performing and visual arts
come from working class origins.”
https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/elitist-britain-2019/
Back in 2016, in an article quoting Michael Sheen’s concerns about increasing obstacles, the Sutton Trust wrote:
“A recent study by the Sutton Trust revealed around half of Britain’s best actors have been privately educated, and a Warwick Commission study found that arts audiences are still overwhelming middle class and white.”
I do not know what the overall trend is, according to them or others.
I cannot see how an unrepresentative and filtered creative arts industry can reflect (collectively) unbiased views on society, nor (collectively) bite the hands that feed it. I suspect we are broadly looking at collective failures and establishment collaborationism here, with the odd (often rude rather than damning) allowed ‘rebel’ or fool to give the illusion of anti-establishmentarianism.
Perhaps if you are privileged, or offered patronage/grants, the ethical question is: “should I work in the arts, given that there are already too many like me?” Who, and what views, what criticisms, what insights, are regularly being missed out of the conversations the arts have with themselves?
‘I cannot see how an unrepresentative and filtered creative arts industry can reflect (collectively) unbiased views on society, nor (collectively) bite the hands that feed it.’
Nor can I. But, then, the arts are greater than the creative industries. Outside the creative industries, where no hand feeds the artist and art is practised equally and non-exclusively across the range of our various social classifications.
Also, you’re still labouring under the old Aristotelian notion that art functions to reflect or represent as objectively as possible some external reality rather than to subjectively (or intersubjectively, in the case of collaborative art) express some internal response to one’s own experiential reality. In the case of the latter, all art is necessarily ‘biased’.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, I am not pushing a single view of art, I am asking why our society supports art in particular ways. My view is that a great deal of artistic support is geared towards the status quo, or at least the demands of established interest groups, similar to age-old patronage. Even to the extent that most such supported artists perform the roles of the puppeteers, scene-shifters and shadow-casters of Plato’s Cave.
In terms of Scottish Independence, I would say there is an exception in a small group of science fiction writers who have imagined a future outside the Union. But most art, maybe especially avant garde, seems reactionary to me, and definitely much is mimesis and learnt algorithms. And I did briefly study Art History and the views of EH Gombrich.
But sure, there are reasonable socialist approaches to arts and crafts that are humanist-universalist and collaborative. Art forms part of the global idea communisms, not least in digital commons and open source software. Against that, there are proprietarian views on art that prioritise ownership and named credit.
But I think you are falling into the intentional fallacy in your narrow description of art, not to mention the Problem of Other Minds, and err on the side of a mystical view of human creativity. After all, much art these days ends up in advertising.
Our society supports art in lots of different ways, both formal and informal; so many and diverse, in fact, that you can’t really generalise them. A more interesting question is how art supports society. As a social phenomenon, art supports society through the forging and sustenance of its own communities of interests and networks thereof.
Our government, on the other hand, tends to support art primarily for its capacity to generate exchange value and/or (in the case of the current ruling party) for the sake of the contribution it can make to the creation of a distinctively national cultural identity or ‘branding’. Other corporate interests similarly support art mainly for branding purposes. This support is exploitative, and artistic activity is ‘happier’ (more autonomous) when it’s independent of it. Even so, I don’t think it’s reasonable to conclude that ‘supported artists perform the roles of the puppeteers, scene-shifters and shadow-casters’ for the status quo.
I’m a big fan of Gombrich’s aesthetic theories too. As an exercise in close analysis and critique, I was set to study his Art and Illusion during my apprenticeship. His central notion of ‘schemata’ had a wide impact on the development of irrealism in subsequent theory of science, influencing in particular the work of Umberto Eco, Carlo Ginzburg, Nelson Goodman, and Thomas Kuhn, all of whom I’ve drawn on in the ongoing evolution of my own thinking. His Story of Art still remains one of the more accessible introductions to the visual arts, though its own schemata is now a bit outmoded.
‘I think you are falling into the intentional fallacy in your narrow description of art, not to mention the Problem of Other Minds, and err on the side of a mystical view of human creativity.’
Why do you think that?
And to characterise avant-garde art (artwork that breaks with established practice, innovates, and pushes boundaries) as ‘reactionary’ and supportive of the status quo seems a bit ‘eccentric’ (to put it charitably). Because of its radical nature and the fact that it challenges existing ideas, processes, and forms, avant-garde art has often been met with resistance and censorship from the status quo. It would be interesting to hear the reasoning behind your characterisation..
Your mention of ‘idea communisms’ puts me in mind of something I wrote anent my anonymity in the margins of the Apollo arts magazine last month:
In our continuing conversations about authorship, I find frustrating the emphasis we put on individual geniuses to the detriment of the people who make their work possible, both in terms of the actual work that takes place in its various social contexts and and in terms of the ideological frameworks that make any work possible at all . We don’t make art alone; we make it while others grow our food, generate our energy, keep us safe, cook, clean, edit, and care for us; we make art in conversation with others, in response to them, adding, subtracting, and changing what we make as we converse.
The view that an individual artist creates something wholly on her own is the application of a heroic paradigm to our creative lives, an interpretative framework that ignores the fact that cognition and creativity happen within an embedding culture.
We’re all recipients of intellectual and creative traditions mediated by time, place, and language; we all surf the same currents of history. Why, then, do we so strongly feel the pull to impose upon the flotsam thrown up by those currents the name of a single person rather than the milieu that’s constructive of that individual and her work? Why do we so strongly feel the need for ownership?
There’s also the contribution that the recipients of our work make to its performance, whether on stage, in a gallery, or in its reading or viewing, a contribution that goes largely unseen and is difficult to recover. The recipients’ responses to each performance of a work help shape and give meaning to that work, as do the successive generations of writers who’ve edited, altered, or otherwise curated it and handed it down. This is why no work can justly be owned or monetised for individual profit; to do so is to appropriate it from the commons wherein it originates and has its meaning.
We don’t normally see the contributions others make to our own work because we’re conditioned not to see it. As artists, we see ourselves as heroically creating on our own because we’re accustomed to see the world in that way and to see others as only instrumental tm our creation, because that’s the ideological structure that ‘frames’ our seeing. To reshape that frame and the world whose possibilities it delimits, we need to deconstruct the heroic paradigm that determines our current creative practice.
My experience of writing over the past seven decades has only strengthened my belief that I’m less an ‘author’ in a modern sense and more a ‘medium’, a voice that brings ideas together, a node in a worldwide web of human creativity. Indeed, it is no accident that my own organic growth as a reader and a writer over my lifetime is connected to my anonymity: I am, at the core, an aggregator and a synthesist; my work has always been to imitate, emulate, and surpass – remix – the work that’s going on around me.
Everything I write, will ever write, and have ever written is the product of ongoing conversations with others; that work is, has been, and will continue to be sharpened and improved in and by my ordinary and everyday social interactions with my service providers, caregivers, and passers-by (who may or may not know about my work), as well as by the reactions and responses of those who read it.
It’s difficult to credit all the contributions that others make to ‘my’ authorship through all the social and linguistic networks that make its work possible and inform its content. However, I can acknowledge that contribution through the assumption of anonymity, which blurs the boundaries where ‘I’ end and ‘others’ begin and deconstructs the heroic paradigm of the artist as the ‘author’ of her work.
‘The creative industries’ or ‘culture industries’, a term invented by Adorno as a damning indictment on the commodification and ruination of art. This still holds true but we have long ago forgotten this and talk of such ‘industries’ with total ignorance or insight into what we are actually implying.
The more we try and codify, commodify, institutionalise art (and yes, and its funding), the more we kill it stone dead. The true value of art is in how it operates outside of all of that. But that can also mean outside of the financial streams that could both sustain and absorb it into the status quo.
I liked this article. It is inconclusive but sums up the conundrum well. There is no direct link between artistic creation and money – it is not an industrial product primarily made to shift units for momentary gain (or if it is, it is generally impoverished if not artistically worthless) but at the same time artists need money to make the art. Every artist must have their own approach to solving the puzzle but if they expect the money to be delivered to them in some way as an expectation of society, they will be waiting a very long time, and the more they buy into the ‘sector’ as a means of support, the more compromised they will be.
@Niemand, “codify”, hmmm. Playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales (Sony Interactive Entertainment) gave me more insight into a cost-of-living crisis during winter than any other artform I’ve encountered, but perhaps that is just me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Miles_Morales
Anyway, although I find superhero stories generally (deliberately?) disempowering, it is remarkable how many evil corporations feature in such corporate art. But yes, patronage is compromising.
If you’re looking for art to give you an insight into the cost-of-living crisis that others are experiencing, then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Unless you experience such crises for yourself, you can have no idea.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, that speaks to your empathic failure, on more than one level.
You can’t empathise with anyone whose experience you don’t share. You can have no idea what it’s like to experience a crisis unless you experience itself. Otherwise, to say ‘I know how you feel’ is just to patronise someone who’s worse off than yourself.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, that is not how empathy works. Empathy is (so far) biological, not situational. See studies of canine empathy with humans, and so on. And there are variants of empathy (cognitive, affective). Some humans have impaired empathy, which is another problem for valuing free speech over good speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Impairment
You may be confusing empathy with situational sympathy, but I really don’t see how your definition can be applied to the real world, since nobodies’ experiences can be identical. And empathy is not the same as saying “I know how you feel”, it is about understanding how another might feel. A dog may not know what it is like to be a human, but understand when a familiar human is upset or joyful.
I think your statement “You can’t empathise with anyone whose experience you don’t share.” would be a red flag for a community mental nurse, and perhaps you would gain self-knowledge by getting yourself checked out.
I know! I’ve found that community mental health nurses (and the psychiatric priesthood generally) abhor deviance.
You’re confusing ‘empathy’ with ‘sympathy’ perhaps? Empathy was invented in the first decade of the 20th century and was modelled on Rudolf Lotze’s concept of Einfühlung (literally ‘one feeling’). Lotze claimed in his theory of art appreciation that it depends on the viewer’s ability to project his personality into the viewed object. In the some psychology, Lotze’s concept is used analogously in psychiatry for the (somewhat mystical) ability to project one’s mind into or ‘colonise’ other bodies and feel first-hand what those other bodies are feeling. Sympathy, on the other hand, is of a much earlier vintage and means understanding someone else’s feelings. It’s more cognitive in nature than and maintains a certain distance from others and a certain respect for their otherness, its virtue being that of affinity rather than identity. The romantic back-construction of ‘women’ asserted – and still asserts – that the fairer sex has a greater native capacity for empathy than men do, which is why it’s considered a more ‘feminine’ virtue in contrast to more ‘masculine’ independence.
And why do you dichotomise ‘free speech’ and ‘good speech’? Surely, free speech *is* good speech insofar as it’s a necessary condition of bringing about – or, at least, approximating to – an ideal speech situation in which the general will of a community, rather than the particular will of a majority or minority within that community, can be realised in its public decision-making.
@Lord Parakeet the Cacophonist, it is possible that people who advocate the kind of high-octane, never-ending, chatter-boxing, parish-level participatory democracy (as you do) have benevolent motives, and are simply expecting others to enjoy the experience as much as they expect they will; but whose empathy failure prevents them from understanding that to many people this prospect is even less appealing than jury duty.
Some political ideologues (an example in the UK is Tony Blair’s choice agenda) have pushed consumer choice for public services, which puts the onus on people to compare providers using league tables and other sources of information, effectively putting the blame on them if they don’t pick optimum choices; when many people expressed instead a preference that the role of government should be to provide a baseline acceptable level of quality of service wherever in the country it was needed. If those pushing the tyranny of choice had benevolent intent, it is likely that they also had an extreme empathy failure.
Note that you cannot have sympathy for people in the future experiencing the result of a proposed policy; the skill/capacity required is empathy. If you are trying to envisage if you will enjoy a new activity in future, you require self-awareness amongst other factors.
There is a role in the Arts for empathy-building, precisely because they can (at their best) show what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes, face their problems and quandaries, experience their mental states, and so on. For example, the computer game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice explored psychosis through the playable character.
“To properly represent psychosis, developers worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people living with the condition.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellblade:_Senua%27s_Sacrifice
But with composition of people employed in the Arts in the UK so demographically skewed, the opportunities for expressing the worldviews and experiences of society’s underdogs is limited.
I once went to a multimedia conference where disadvantaged children had been given the opportunity to make an interactive piece using professional software, and were on hand to introduce it to attendees. One girl had made something so dark I found it really disturbing, moreso since she said it represented her real life, which looked like a horror story. I regret, I was a bit at loss for words. Yet I do not see this kind of art published anywhere today. Perhaps vulnerable, neglected and abused people, like I supposed her to be, have little or no voice within Arts in our society; perhaps audiences, like myself, find it difficult to cope with, and turn away.
‘Perhaps vulnerable, neglected and abused people, like I supposed her to be, have little or no voice within Arts in our society; perhaps audiences, like myself, find it difficult to cope with, and turn away.’
Very true but then is that not more about the person and their life than the art itself? I do think most still see the art as the most important thing, if not the only thing even though it can be used as a deliberate vehicle to look at something else (often highlighting something bad). Increasingly we are encouraged to see art in this way but people can rebel against that.. Though art is by default some form of self-expression, if it primarily focusses itself back to the originator and/or points to some non-art-based thing whilst at the same time raising only negative questions and emotions, I think you will find people turning away as it is virtually designed to do that: ‘look at me, me me, and how shit my life and *everything* is! I’ll pass thanks, got anything that makes me feel life is worth living?’
Yes, I know from my career in community development that not everyone elects to participate in local decision-making; some choose to participate only when the decision to be made directly affects them. And that’s fair enough, providing that everyone has the unrestricted opportunity to exercise their citizenship as and when they choose. The decision not to participate for reasons of indifference also feeds into the emergence of a general will in relation to the matter being decided. If you remember, that participation is voluntary and not compulsory is another necessary condition of an ideal speech situation.
‘There is a role in the Arts for empathy-building, precisely because they can (at their best) show what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes, face their problems and quandaries, experience their mental states, and so on.’
But that’s not what psychologists generally understand as empathy. To understand ‘what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes, face their problems and quandaries, experience their mental states, and so on’ is sympathy, not empathy. As I intimated in my last post, psychiatry generally understands as empathy the ability to project one’s mind into (or ‘colonise’) other bodies and directly experience the interiority of what those other bodies are feeling.
I’d agree that artists can produce work that evokes sympathy. However, the capacity to evoke sympathy (‘sentimentality’) is no more essential to art than is the capacity to purge repressed emotions (as per Aristotle’s poetics) to morally edify (as per Tolstoy’s aesthetic theory) or to ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ (as per Hamlet’s theory of at as representation) or to support the aims of the party (e.g. the heroic realism of 20th century totalitarian regimes). Such instrumentality is incidental to art as art.
‘Though art is by default some form of self-expression, if it primarily focusses itself back to the originator and/or points to some non-art-based thing whilst at the same time raising only negative questions and emotions, I think you will find people turning away as it is virtually designed to do that: “look at me, me me, and how shit my life and *everything* is! I’ll pass thanks, got anything that makes me feel life is worth living?”‘
While this is true, I do think that the importance of art lies more in its production rather than its consumption or utility, in its incommensurabilty rather than its commodity, in its being something that’s worthy (as per Kant’s groundwork in the metaphysics of morality) of being valued as an end also and not only as a means. In Kantian terms, artworks enjoy the dignity of belonging to the Kingdom of Ends and, therefore, worthy of a moral consideration that mere instruments, in their perfect exchangeability, do not.
Someone once told me they wrote poetry “to get the shit out of [their] system”, and then asked if I would read some and offer an opinion on it. I’m not sure what the correct response to that should be. But I do suspect that some small subset of art is at some level a cry for help, or a plea for understanding, or an expression of pain or distress. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/12/sadness-and-fear-what-the-drawings-by-children-in-detention-showed-us
Both the socialist Arts and Crafts movement and anarchist thought tends to see art as fulfilling and unlocking potential, at individual up to society level (and beyond), developing culturally-useful symbols and technologies, allowing the world to be remade, better. But I still suspect that most poetry is unwholesome excreta.
Any benefit you gain from writing poetry (or practising any art), whether catharsis (getting your shit out of your system) or education (realising one’s potential – or ‘virtue’ – as a human being), is purely incidental to the practice of that art.
BTW that art is cathartic and the idea that it’s educational, are both incidental benefits ascribed to it by Aristotle. That it misleads us into believing that things really are as they appear is an incidental harm ascribed to it by Plato. Both ascriptions have been fateful in the evolution of subsequent European culture and the globalisation of its institutions.
I don’t write poetry but do write music and makes short films. Call me old fashioned but my primary motive is to create something I and others hopefully will like. My main focus is on the techniques of making it ‘good’. Contextual things can come in as can self-expression but the former is very often secondary or absent in any obvious way, and the latter happens by default and is rarely consciously thought about. I have never been into making art as a vehicle for anything other than itself. Of course it still is a vehicle of some sort but as the creator I am happy for others to look into that if they can bothered; I steer clear of it as much as possible. I sometimes see concert programmes with extensive programme notes written by the composer and over a certain length I never read them – delight me with the music, not your verbal erudition (and of course they are not erudite anyway) but as a general rule, the longer the programme note, the worse the music turns out to be.
‘…my primary motive is to create something I and others hopefully will like.’
Yep, that’s it in a nutshell. And, as an artist, I’m not that all that fussed whether others like what I make or not.
I’d also include the work of self-creation as art. To make of one’s ‘self’ something that one likes, whatever that might be, is my definition of happiness.
Harrison Birtwistle always said he wrote music for himself and was unconcerned about others. Plenty of people liked his stuff though and maybe the uncompromising nature of it is what appeals – his music is out on its own style-wise. He wasn’t arrogant about it, just how he felt. Personally I do care because it is how am made and I would lying to say I didn’t but still, I write for myself mostly, just hoping it appeals to others.
What I like about Harrison’s music is that it’s uncompromisingly ‘his’ response to whatever captured his imagination. That’s why his work was often held up by reactionaries as an example of all that’s unapproachable and difficult about contemporary music: it’s irreducible and inappropriable; it can only be heard in its own terms. I love that. Very Adornoesque in its aesthetic.
His best stuff is total magic. And My dad who like Tchaikovsky and The Beatles also liked him. He had a way of cutting through – complex yes but so visceral and almost primitive.
Yep, the chapter in The Dialectic of Enlightenment in which Adorno and Horkheimer, in which they introduce their ‘culture industry’ thesis is one of the seminal ‘points of departure’ in my own thinking about Scotland’s ‘creative industries’. Their thesis contends that cultural industries function to enforce (and reinforce) the capitalist ethos and its hegemony. The key claims of the thesis are:
The more difficult something is to reproduce, the more is it fetishised. In particular, it is ‘misread’ as an inanimate object rather than a human drama (an intersubjective dialogue).
Culture (or ‘consciousness’) is commodified through the capitalist process of industrialisation This enables those who own or control the industrial means of cultural production to control consciousness, particularly through the eviction and manipulation of our desires..
While art has always been *also* a commodity, under capitalist relations of production it’s *only* a commodity. Capitalism thus ‘completes’ the alienation of the artist and their product AND the audience from its participation in the human drama of the artwork.
‘Industry’ doesn’t necessarily imply industrial production techniques (e.g. printing multiple copies of the same text), although many works of culture commodification do indeed reach us in this way. Rather, it refers to the standardisation and psuedo-singularity of cultural products and the regulation of how they’re distributed as goods..
Of course, that should read ‘through the evocation and manipulation of our desires’.