Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Let’s Not and Say We Did

As everyone knows, politics is theater, and theater requires the active suspension of disbelief. That permission is granted in light of need and promise, the need being to make sense of perplexing realities, the promise being that of the author or company that their product will fill our need. Did I say product? Indeed I did, because our topic is the initial staging and present revival of The Anti-Aesthetic, which was in its first version and thirty years later improbably remains a premium product of the culture industry, vigorously promoted in the niche markets of the academy and the intellectually respectable neighborhoods of the art world. Although the ostensible focus of this dramaturgical commodity—now a period piece—is the contradictions, falsehoods, and corruption of “late capitalism ,” it was in fact launched by a previously unknown private press partially subsidized by a major American developer, investor, and collector of contemporary painting and sculpture. As such, it did not emerge from the ferment of “off West Broadway” experimentation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, much less from the gritty storefront political theaters of the Lower East Side or the Bronx, but rather was financed by the kind of money that usually goes straight to mainstream projects and was thus parachuted into a plum spot in the critical lineup without having to battle for position from outside it. Now, I have nothing categorically against such arrangements. As a former museum curator, I consider negotiating the subsidization of art and ideas as an intrinsic part of the practical politics of culture in a flawed democracy, and since I happened to know the patron in question, I can also speak well of him. But the suspension of disbelief of which I spoke at the outset begins to wobble the minute one becomes aware that the stern institutional critiques voiced within the pages of the book that popularized the idea of the anti-aesthetic were in fact highly privileged commodities among many others paid for by “enlightened capitalism,” rather than the fruit of the radical countercultures that grew organically out of the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s, for example those championed by Lucy Lippard and scrutinized in their inconsistencies by Yvonne Rainer. This and many other instances make clear the extent to which institutional critique was in truth a “natural” offshoot rather than the revolutionary “mutation ” of institutional culture. The unsurprising result has been that most of those who specialized in it issued from universities—freshly restored to their ivory tower status following attempts to demolish such splendid isolation during the 1960s—and, after more or less brief periods in publishing or other parts of the let’s not and say we did robert storr Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 186 1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. culture industry, most went back to universities or segued into museums or the market without bothering to reconcile their ideological oppositions to either with their actual jobs and without trying very hard to reform either in ways consistent with those oppositional stances. (Of course, I have held jobs in all these domains, but in keeping with my “impure” position I have assiduously abstained from “purist” rhetoric while simultaneously working hard to bring those on the outside in so as to diversify those overly homogenous precincts.) All “fundamental challenges” to the existing order have working premises and make predictions. The basic tenets of the anti-aesthetic combine schematic glosses of Ernst Mandel’s late Marxist analysis of “late capitalism” with an eclectic , sometimes irreconcilably contradictory assortment of Lacanian, Derridian, Foucaultian, Spivakian, and other additives. Central to the polemic in Hal Foster ’s introduction to the eponymous 1983 essay collection that popularized the term “anti-aesthetic” is a tendentious, inherently weak misreading of Laura Mulvey ’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”1 and I will pause here briefly to state that her work and that of Fredric Jameson are of lasting value in ways that very little that is modeled on them has been. With its Greenbergian underpinnings ever apparent, Foster’s contempt for art that does not suit his fastidious, patrician tastes and his moralizing rather than dialectically political approach to criticism results in his condemning the things that displease him as examples of the crass exploitation of the pleasure principle by the manufacturers of art luxuries . It is but a short step to the notion that somehow “denying” the bourgeoisie its delights would destabilize...