The Violence of Autonomy

What makes a work of art? How does the work of art resist the status of the mere commodity, one like any other, exchangeable and substitutable? Answering these are key concerns of Nicholas Brown's Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. From a certain perspective these questions may seem negligible nearly a half century on from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans, which equally insist that art is indeed a commodity like any other (not to mention a century on from Marcel Duchamp's readymades), but Brown revisits them as the thirtieth anniversary of Frederic Jameson's watermark analysis, Post-Modernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991) nears. In the introduction, Brown examines how the supposition of the restricted field of production for the fine arts (both as genus and species) has become increasingly untenable. The high modernist preoccupation with questions of medium specificity marked a crisis point in which to maintain a restricted field, for any aesthetic form, such as painting, necessitates greater and greater limitations on what defines it as a field of production. For Brown, the hemming in of the restricted field nearly to the point of its disappearance is in large part a response to the intensification of commodification and its fated invasion of the fine arts. Consequently, today, as Brown asserts, the notional exploration of any artistic medium must necessarily address "the commodity character of the work" (22).

There are many moments in the history of modern art that would seem to lead to this eventual crisis point and the rise of the art commodity, perhaps particularly the invention of the reproductive arts: lithography, photography, and cinema. As an acolyte of art historian and critic Michael Fried, however, Brown locates the commodification of the visual arts in an aesthetic development parallel to Pop art, that is, Minimalism, or as Fried preferred to call it, literalism. Fried is clearly identifiable as a key interlocutor for Brown's project, invoked directly by name in places but more frequently through the adaptation of his well-worn terminology (e.g., "absorption," "theatricality," and "conviction").¹ Whereas Fried's 1967 work of art criticism "Art and Objecthood" reflects an anxiety regarding the infiltration of the visual arts by the literal objects of Minimalism, one of the more interesting observations of Brown's Autonomy is that what Fried was in fact fearfully witnessing was the descent of the fine arts into the status of a commodity like any other. As Brown explains, "Fried's 'formalist' account of the distinction between art and recent nonart is also a historicist one fully derivable from the Marxist problematic of the 'real subsumption of labor under capital" (7). The theatricality that Fried ascribes to the Minimalist art installation asserts a certain confrontational situation involving the spectator. The Minimalist object beckons and thereby for Fried rebounds in an uncomfortable if then novel mode of self-awareness of himself as its audience or, as Brown implies more aptly, its consumer. When revisited through the lens of Brown's study, Minimalist theatricality is indicative of art succumbing to the status of the commodity, a commodity that delivers variable and unstable values (experiences) to its viewers but as such inherently lacks the ability to produce conviction, in other words to assert its autonomy as a work of art (7). Indeed, within the industrial manufactured and serial geometries of Minimalist artworks, such autonomy is explicitly rejected.

What Fried, writing in 1967, merely senses as representing a crisis point in the history of the visual arts, Brown fully accepts as a fait accompli, that is, the exacerbation of the art commodity as general condition. In such a context, in which no viable alternative to capitalism exists, he argues the former politics of something like Warhol's Campbell's soup cans is evacuated. Asserting art as commodity in the context of the twenty-first century represents in Brown's view a simple acquiescence to the...