metropolis m

Let us try and sound the term, bring it within earshot. How does it generate its effects? What world do you make when you say it? What does it say about you? In my mind, ‘art world’ sounds like a gilded interior with self-referential urgencies. Art made hierarchically available by legitimate players. It sounds like business attire and the wrong drugs. An easy manner, a balanced buzz, money around. Art as norm, and the good life around it. A symbolic economy based on what is already mediated through gossip or distinction. People who are in the know, and know what to do and say.

  But maybe I am jumping the gun and simply following my prejudice. It could be that one of the mechanisms of the term is that it turns the one who utters it into a cynic. This would go to show the power of the term, at the cost of the analytical capacity we would like it to possess. In this way it would create a projection of art through a certain version of art’s social setting. At the same time, it is strictly speaking a misrepresentation of the art field and the art system. This is clearly a bad starting point for a sociological inquiry, and an even worse for a discussion of art, provided we want art to have any kind of real autonomy.

Consider the journalistic use of the term in Sarah Thornton’s book Seven Days in the Art World (2008), a title that perversely sounds like a Günter Walraff style undercover job in some cannibalistic industry – only now with inverted class markers: here is a writer who reports, not from ganz unten in society, but from the transnational uptown realm of contemporary art, ganz oben. Thornton banks on alienation and opens her story by emphasizing that ‘access is rarely easy’ to the art world, as if there were a definite centre and a shibboleth demanded of the ones who presume to enter it. The reader is taken to the auction, the biennial, the prize, the art fair, to meet gallerists, artists and art students, curators, editors, and so on: denizens of the art world for whom ‘contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion’, with ‘concept-driven art’ as the ‘existential channel through which they bring meaning to their lives’. It would be less confusing if Thornton simply called the art world a ‘statusphere’, in Tom Wolfe’s cleanly power-focused pun. Seven Days in the Art World evokes the glamour of the urban elites, their cultural literacy and professional authority. As such, it figures that the author does not take us to the daytime job, the meeting in the artists’ union, the routines of the art institution’s unterlings. Does this imply that these mundane subjectivities and sites mark the limit of the art world? Do the night cleaners at the gallery? If so, how do we address this class limit? An art world without the power of seduction and the seduction of power is not one. 

Maybe the significations of ‘art world’ that to me make up the term’s negative energy are historically contingent. In any event it is true that you cannot know a world profoundly. In The Animal that Therefore I Am (2006) Jacques Derrida makes this point in his elegantly fussy style: ‘between my world and any other world there is first the space and time of an infinite difference, an interruption that is incommensurable with all attempts to make a passage, a bridge, an isthmus, all attempts at communication, translation, trope, and transfer that the desire for a world (…) will try to pose, impose, propose, stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands.’ If a ‘world’ fundamentally represents infinite difference, then we can infer that judgments about the art world presuppose impossible knowledge that is typically not acknowledged as such. Derrida, again: ‘We do not finally know what world is! At bottom it is a very obscure concept!’ 

To stay with Derrida’s terminology, an island would in our discussion be the near-synonymous term ‘art scene’. This denotes a finite and local space, composed of individual encounters. Katharina Sieverding’s photomontage Düsseldorfer Szene, for instance, works with this idea, through a dry arrangement of a dozen close-cropped, black and white portrait photos of artistic players. This is Düsseldorf 1974, nowhere else: its agents are singular, and their significance isolated. A scene is predicated on its agents, whereas a ‘world’ makes its agents beholden to it. The art world would not change its composition if some of its (replaceable) actors went away, because it is imagined as transcendental, boundless. And unlike the sea of culture-at-large in which the art scene is located, there is no beyond the art world: the art scene consists of figures on ground, while the art world is a ground that absorbs all figures in its totality.

By their very nature, totalities resist cartography. This is a problem for everyday life, not just an academic one. What Frederic Jameson calls cognitive mapping is ‘the production of the concept of something we cannot imagine’, namely the totality of capital. An impossible or paradoxical kind of mapping then, but one we must undertake. Any systemic transformation of our life world depends on such attempts. Exactly because capital’s disconnected, abstract spaces must be acknowledged as ‘properly unrepresentable’, it is demanded of us that we try to gain an orientation that necessarily takes place at odds with our ignorance and limited perspective. For this reason, even a successful representation ‘may be inscribed in a narrative of defeat’, Jameson writes. 

Not so with the totality of the art world. The term builds on success, not defeat; on individualism, not structure; on an unmappable centre that holds everything. In so far as its narratives revolve around closure, fascination and affirmation it flatters us that we know what art means, or who is pulling the strings, or which economies it is inscribed to, and so on. In effect – and this is the disaster of the term – it produces the impression that there is no need, or no way, to re-imagine art. Which effectively means the undoing of the art concept.