Peter Suchin, 'Visible Business, Invisible Art'
Published in 'Round Midnight 4: Grand Objects' directed by Judith Staines. 'The Newcastle Papers: Art, Industry and Commerce' discussion papers which were published and distributed through the magazine Artists Newsletter in 1997.
[...]
In his short but provocative essay "Painting and Technological Society" R. N. Wynyard proposes that in Britain.
....it is easy to be fooled by the ambiguity of the situation painting finds itself in. Fabulous exhibitions...are stage-managed by the media...Yet in spite of the large numbers viewing such works...popular viewing is not "popular", neither is it spontaneous, nor does it become an essential societal activity. No matter how many people visit galleries painting cannot enter into any relationship with its audience because its function has already been prescribed by society. The audience is only expected to look not think; the best painting can achieve in such a situation is an expressive not a cognitive function.
Wynyard's concern over what he sees as the decreasing social role of painting in technological society implies that painting has become an unimportant component of contemporary culture. One does not, however, have to follow him all the way on this point to recognise the general validity of his account. He observes that painting has accrued other values, notably as a form of cultural capital. A still widespread belief in painting's importance is employed as a manipulative device by those whose interests are primarily commercial. "Painting as it exists in modern society", writes Wynyard,
Becomes part of a cliche about stability in that society [...] it is only allowed to be considered when reference to it cannot be avoided [...] This is what Adorno meant by the "culture industry" [...]
In mentioning Adorno's critique of the culture industry Wynyard indicates an awareness of one of the most influential and acerbic accounts of capitalism's relation to art. In Adorno's culture industry essay, written with his colleage Max Horkheimer in the 1940s, it is suggested that:
...culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system... [...]
While it might be said that mass culture has been considerably transformed during the fifty or so years since the essay was first published Adorno and Horkheimer's observations have not become obsolete. Some of the tendencies they pointed out in the forties are now only more intensively entrenched, the framework of their influence more pervasive and tightly fixed. The view that financially productive works of art are valid and successful works is a powerful idea, and is one of the most prominent ideologies of our culture. In a society purporting to be democratic popular art must be seen to be good. A given work's popularity is the proof of its quality, of the rightness of mass aesthetic choice. A popular film makes millions at the box office, its financial success validating it as an important cultural object.
[...]
The various mass mediums of publishing, radio, television and film together comprise an extremely effective means of influencing taste. Fashion, in the broad sense of the word, is the device employed to filter out objects and appearances that are without status at a given point in time. At any given moment only a very small number of artists are "in", whilst the remaining vast majority are excluded from attention.
[...]
Selecting the few at the expense of the many is the predictable outcome of a culture which mouths belief in equality of opportunity but which never actually operates to secure such a thing. This is what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he uttered the claim that, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Values supporting the continuing existence of those in power are paraded centre-stage whilst other interests are made to languish in obscurity.
[...]
Artists have often benefited financially by working close to centres of power and influence. Business sponsorship does not always compromise the artist but it can so easily do this. Artists may think they can maintain their own personal values and aspirations even in a situation where the company financing them ensures its name is everywhere to be seen. The artist may be empowered by association with a sponsor and may be able to produce work that otherwise he or she could not attempt; but the reverse is also a possibility - the artist's particularity, his or her idiosyncratic synthesis of ideas and perceptions can be rendered null and void. In this latter case the sponsor gains at the expense of the artist; business wears the mask of art and accrues high cultural status by its association with a practice for which it has no real concern.
[...]
There is nothing immanently critical about the practice of art - it can be subservient to the canons of capitalism or attempt an antagonistic stance. But in an ever more policed, increasingly packaged culture the artist's position offers one of the few remaining spaces for critique. I, for one, am bored with hearing artists and art students telling me they have no option but to go with the flow. It doesn't have to be that way.
R N Wynyard, "Painting and Technological Society", The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 1986, p. 39. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 1979, p. 121. The unashamed emphases on profit and the attendant loss of aesthetic quality when culture becomes big business is one of the essay's prominent themes. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", in Benjamin, Illuminations, Fontana, 1979, p. 258.