Hunting Art World Predators: Kant’s ‘Disinterestedness’ versus Financial
Interests at the Armory Show, NY, 2011
Alessandro Imperato, April, 2011, Atlanta, USA.
Alan Schechner’s recent series ‘New York City Art World Scum’ (April, 2011) asks
questions concerning the art world, commodity trading and the cynical condition of art as
a luxury item to be bought and sold with little regard for the work in-itself.i It is well
know that art has always been entangled in financial concerns since the Feudal period of
aristocratic patronage and the development of the art market in which artists had to sell
their work to survive in the capitalist economy. The art market has increasingly dictated
the cultural landscape of what is considered art for over two centuries. Although there is
no room in this article for a sustained analysis of the art world and it’s economic foibles,
it is safe to say that this tendency of art commodity exchange has intensified to a greater
degree with sale prices reaching record highs in recent years.ii Artists have engaged with
this issue since Warhol’s embrace of the market in the sixties, the ‘Post-Modernist’ Jeff
Koons’ commodity broker art in the eighties and more leftists critiques in the form of
Capitalist Realism in the work of Sigmar Polke during the nineties. What differentiates
the art world today from the last few decades is it’s metamorphosis into a quasi ‘fashion
world’ due to the increasing influence of major fashion moguls such as Francois Pinault
(Gucci). Sarah Thornton’s sociological study in Seven Days in the Art World (2008)
unwittingly revealed the similarities that contemporary art has to fashion via the
dealerships and mainstream art magazines like Artforum and events such as the Armory
Show & Art Basel.iii Who happens to be the flavor of the month is very short lived and
contingent on financial patronage and superficial evaluative and collecting criteria as the
street artist/s known as ‘Banksy’ recently exposed in the documentary Exit Through the
Gift Shop (2010). In the film Thierry Guetta or ‘Mr. Brainwash’ hosted a blockbuster
and sell-out show with little talent or aptitude for art. Indeed, what now constitutes art is
down to who or what is promoted in the galleries and institutions of the hip centers of
London, New York, LA, Geneva and Miami.
New York City Art World Scum is a digital photographic series consisting of candid shots
taken at the New York Armory Show in early March this year. The audience of art in
this sense is a far cry from the shock and awe created by Duchamp in his art world hijack
with Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) at the Armory Show in 1913. In the
photographs, art world dealers, agents and gallery staff are captured, either as aware of
being photographed and therefore project a constructed self-image or they are
unknowingly caught on camera. Schechner’s approach has traits of the aggressive
intrusion of a big game hunter, in which his victims are ensnared and the ‘slice of time’
arrests their complicity in a crime against art. This has the qualities of an anthropological
excursion. The ‘hunted’ are those who are usually the ‘hunters’ of art deals, and are
guilty of total disinterestedness in the art they are supposed to be involved with. Laptops
and smart phones abound as the uni-sex uniformed black-clothed custodians of the art
market are caught ‘red-handed’ in acts of disregard and obliviousness to the work on
show. Here the issue is not art’s otherness, but its use-value as a commodity. This
spectacle is revealed through new social media and instant communication technologies.
What would once have been private and hidden back-stage is now paraded publicly in the
‘hallowed space’ of the art temple. The sanctity of art blasphemously abused by crass
philistine commercialism. Schechner’s work has always been difficult for the art world to
digest due to his focus on political issues regarding the Holocaust and the social injustices
that are involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, work that I have also written on.iv
This series follows in a similar vain to his socially aware artwork.
It can be argued that Immanuel Kant’s theories of art’s separation from the world is an
accepted ideological aesthetic principal in the art world, for bourgeois scholars and
unreconstructed Modernists. One of the main discourses within aesthetic theory is that of
Kant’s notion of ‘disinterestedness’ or ‘aesthetic attitude’ as argued in Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment (1892). Here, the significance of a particular aspect of art
appreciation is part of the consciousness of the viewer. To the aesthetic idealist, aesthetic
value is mainly a question involving the primacy of aesthetic responses to a work, and
this is via sensation and individual pleasure. The focus on a direct experience of the
work and the sensation received adopts highly entrenched ideals of spiritual experience
and subjectivism. The left cultural theorist Raymond Williams rejected the notion of the
aesthetic ‘as a special province of a certain kind of response.’v Williams questioned how
the purely visual could be pleasing and successful. Aesthetic gratification is considered a
belief that is ideological in practice by theorists like Williams and Terry Eagleton.vi This
belief in aesthetic value is not a property or quality inherent in things themselves but in
human society, it is created by the social existence of humans as creative beings. To
answer what aesthetic value is in these terms is to explain why certain works or groups of
artifacts are considered appropriate for aesthetic attention. Aesthetic judgment then
becomes contingent due to the social nature of the experiencing of art objects in contexts
of meaning and evaluation. Is aesthetic experience a historically relative mode of
perception because perception is a product of history, which legitimises particular forms
of art and not others? Do ‘aesthetic’ evaluations reside in form or in a discourse and
belief in cultic objects where society sets the standards of behaviour and the criteria of
judgment?
Kant argued that for art to be called beautiful it had to be: “…the object of an entirely
disinterested [ohne alles Interesse] satisfaction or dissatisfaction.”vii There are no interests
at stake and can only be: “a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of
sense or reason, here forces our assent.”viii Qualitative judgments that are defined in terms
of aesthetic valuations such as disinterestedness are rooted in Platonic philosophical
discourse. As Richard Shusterman claims: ‘This tradition of intellectual formalism…can
be traced back past Kant to Plato.’ix According to Kant, the senses and bodily pleasure
was facile and inferior to the taste attained through mental reflection. Kant derived his
binary from Rene Descartes’ body/mind dualism; therefore the cerebral capacities of the
rational viewer were accorded a greater value, even ethically, as a superior distinction
over the body.
What is revealed to be ironic in Schechner’s photo series is that a ‘doubledisinterestedness’ exists, not only is art to be approached as if it is autonomous, decontextualized and without social origin; it is then treated to a complete lack of interest
by the very people who are supposedly it’s custodians. Thus the interest in art is not for
art in-itself but is due to an interest in the financial aspects of a work’s worth. By
capturing this state of money interests and disinterestedness in art and by being interested
in this state of affairs in the gallery environment, Schechner has produced a photo series
that highlights the political and social issues involved in the current take-over of the art
world by the fashion industry, the fickle cycles of styles, ‘creative’ recipes and the status
of ‘art for money’s sake’.
Alessandro Imperato is an artist and theorist who lives and teaches in Atlanta, USA.
The use of the word ‘scum’ in the title has several connotations, the first is the obvious slang insult use of
despicable people, though further definitions of the word also involve the ‘rising to the top of impure
residue in liquids’ as well as ‘refuse’ or ‘worthless matter’. I was also reminded of the individualistic
Feminist Manifesto of S.C.U.M (Society for Cutting up Men) coined by the insane and eccentric artist
Valarie Solanas who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. To see more of Alan Schechner’s work see:
www.dottycommies.com. The works in this series can be downloaded for free from this website at
http://dottycommies.com/nycartworldscum/.
i
ii
For a good treatment of these issues see: Mattick, Paul, Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern
Aesthetics, Routledge: London, 2003 and Mattick, Paul and Siegel, Katy, Art Works: Money, Thames and
Hudson: London, 2004.
iii
Thornton, Sarah, Seven Days in the Art World, Norton and Co.: New York, 2008.
‘Boundaries of Representation: Holocaust Manipulation, Digital Imaging and the Real’,
On-line Journal: Drain Magazine, ‘Lost in Translation’ Edition, Issue 4. 12/04,
www.drainmag.com
http://www.drainmag.com/contentFEBRUARY/RELATED_ESSAYS/boundaries.htm
iv
v
Williams, Raymond, Politics and Letters: Interview with New Left Review, London: 1979, p. 325.
vi
Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell Pub: London, 199
vii
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, (trans. Bernard, J. W.) Haffner: New York, 1951, p. 1.
viii
Ibid., p. 2.
Shusterman, Richard, ‘Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art’, The British Journal of
Aesthetics, Vol.31. No.3. July, 1991, p. 213.
ix