1860s
1880s
1900s
1920s
1940s
1960s
1980s
83
2000s
84
nlr 94
85
1939
1913
1929
15
10
1966
0
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
decadence
0.00015
decadent
0.00010
0.00005
0
1800
1820
1840
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
86
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Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, New York 1967, p. 170.
87
The analogy between the disintegration of the text and the atomization of
society was not original to Nietzsche, but taken directly from the French
novelist and critic Paul Bourget, who had picked up the cellular theory of
society from mid-nineteenth century scientists and applied it to literature
in his 1881 essay on Baudelaire.3 Both Bourget and Nietzsche characterized this atomization as a breakdown of hierarchy. But organicist theories
of sociology were not the preserve of political conservatives. They lent
themselves equally to socialist interpretation.4 In Marxism too, decadence
was understood as an excess of individualism. Plekhanov, for example,
argued that in the era of bourgeois decadence people had lost all capacity
of communication with other people and the idea that there is no reality
save our ego had become the theoretical foundation of the new aesthetics. In his view, this art was characteristic of the decay of a whole system
of social relationships, and . . . therefore quite aptly called decadent.5
Acknowledging Nietzsche as the cleverest and most versatile exponent of
this decadent self-knowledge, Georg Lukcs developed his own account
of decadence in similar terms.6 Whereas great literature shows individuals interacting with each other, and with society, in decadent literature
every character has a particularized, isolated and unique existence from
which there can be no bridge of communication to other men.7 The
human type portrayed is the individual, egoistic bourgeois isolated artificially by capitalism, whose consciousness is an individual isolated
consciousness la Robinson Crusoe.8 In these circumstances, dialogue
is not the expression of encounters between people, but rather shows
how men talk past each other without actually communicating.9
The epigraph to Lukcss essay The Intellectual Physiognomy in
Characterization (1936) is a quotation from Heraclitus: Awake, men
have a common world, but each sleeper reverts to his own private world.
Reprinted in Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, Paris 1883. For further background, see Matei Clinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, nc 1987,
pp. 149221.
4
As Durkheim quotes Edmond Perrier as saying, a community of polyps in which
one cannot eat without the others is Communism in the fullest sense of the word:
Division of Labour, London 1984, p. 140.
5
Georgi Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, London 1957, pp. 201, 204.
6
Lukcs, The Destruction of Reason, London 1980, p. 316.
7
Lukcs, Writer and Critic, London 1970, pp. 150, 169.
8
Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, London 1971, p. 135.
9
Lukcs, Writer and Critic, p. 174.
3
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The basis of all great literature is this common world of men, so writers
must rouse themselves:
To portray what men have in common emotionally and intellectually in
general experience and in their personal lives and finally to awaken them
from the sleep of decadence in which each man revolves in his private
world, in his own narrow impoverished subjectivity.10
89
For Jameson, the disappearance of the shared norm must be taken seriously; if there is no norm, there is nothing against which decadence can
be measured, and so the claim that the culture has become decadent
because it has lost its bearings is necessarily meaningless.
So where does that leave the concept of decadence? Jameson concedes
that decadence is in some ways the very premonition of the postmodern
itself, and that postmodernity could pass for ripely decadent in the
eyes of any sensible Martian observer. But he maintains that because
postmodernity lacks the sense of the normativity of the past which the
moderns still possessed, the concept of decadence has lost its raison
dtre. It rather compels by its absence, like a smell nobody mentions,
until such time as it fades away and is no longer available for characterizing our reactions to the postmodern.17
The argument is never systematically articulated, but it is worth examining further. If each individual were to become a linguistic island,
Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York 1976, pp. 136, 95.
Jameson, The Cultural Turn, London 1998, p. 5.
17
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991,
pp. 382, 377, 383.
15
16
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separated from everyone else, what would be the consequences for the
culture? Would it, as Jameson claims, become meaningless to think in
such terms at all, or might there be other ways of co-ordinating these
private codes and idiolects?
The exchange might serve as an example of how, in Lukcss words, people talk past each other without actually communicating. But in the
art school, according to Atkinson and Baldwin, it is assumed either that
everyone can more or less know what everyone else means by these
18
Atkinson and Baldwin, Art Teaching, Art-Language, vol. 1, no. 4, 1971, p. 34.
91
terms, or else, given that it is far from certain that they do, that one
need not know what others mean by these terms and that this is the
essence of art. However, to hold the latter view would be to commit oneself to the idea that the public character of the art-educational domain
can be realized through dialogues that are no more than an exchange of
private languages. And this, Atkinson and Baldwin contend, is ridiculous, for (after Wittgenstein) it is clear that the idea of a private language
is itself absurd.19
Rosalind Krauss made a very similar point a couple of years later in
an Artforum article that tried to differentiate post-minimalism from
conceptualism and establish the former as the heir to the minimalist
(and modernist) legacy. Though dematerialization was common to both,
Krauss argued that it was over the notion of privacy or private languages
that the division between these artists [the conceptualists] and minimal/
post-minimal art arises. The former betray a deeply planted traditionalism with respect to meaning which involves the construction of the
work of art around the notion of intention in such a way that it points
directly inward: to the privacy of a mental space. That is what is implied
by Rauschenbergs telegram saying This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say
it is, just as much as by Douglas Hueblers claim that its perfectly fair
to say that time is what each of us says it is at any given moment.20
In fact, the privacy involved in conceptual art extended beyond meaning
and intention to the very existence of the work itself. Robert Barrys work
Closed Gallery (1969) was composed solely of invitations (to gallery shows
in Amsterdam, Turin and la) which stated that During the exhibition
the gallery will be closed. Even less tangible was Barrys contribution to
the exhibition Prospect 69 which, as he explained in an interview, consisted of the ideas that people will have from reading this interview,
with the result that Each person can really know that part which is in
his own mind. And more inaccessible still was Barrys Telepathic Piece
(1969): During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a
work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image.21
Atkinson and Baldwin, Art Teaching, pp. 356.
Krauss, Sense and Sensibility, Artforum, vol. 12, November 1973, pp. 456.
21
Krauss, Sense and Sensibility, p. 45; Robert Barry quoted in Alexander Alberro,
Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, ma 2001, p. 207 fn 22.
19
20
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Secondary information
As it turned out, exploring the externality of language was not the only
option. Private languages that lacked externality themselves could be
represented by other means. As Carl Andre once said: The beef stew
cooking on the stove doesnt need any advertising. It has advertising. It
has aroma. You can smell the beef stew on the stove. But the beef stew in
the can has to be advertised. And this, as the gallerist Seth Siegelaub realized, was what was needed for the private languages of conceptualism:
When someone painted a painting what had been done and what you saw
were the same thing . . . it was all there in front of you . . . With a painting on the wall, the art and the presentation of it is the same. But with
conceptual art, the presentation of the art and the art are not the same
thing. What this meant in practice was a separation between the art, or
the primary information, and its presentation, the secondary information. In this way, even private languages could have a public face.23
There were different ways of doing this. Barrys Inert Gas Series, in which
the artist went out into the California desert and released inert gases into
the atmosphere, was represented by a mailshot with a poster giving the
title of the work, and an address and telephone number. The address
22
23
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conceptual art that was ever done in the world.28 Giving the work a monetary value also proved to be an effective way of ensuring that collectors
did not throw away their acquisitions and kept conceptual work in circulation. A secondary market developed, and Barrys Closed Gallery was
subsequently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
For some of the artists, particularly those associated with Art & Language,
this development appeared ambivalent. Ian Burn complained that market values were distorting all other values, so that even the concept of
what is and is not acceptable as work is defined first and fundamentally
by the market. As a result, the artist became alienated from his work:
Once entering the market it becomes foreign to mebut without the
market I dont recognize it, because it is defined via the market which
I have internalized.29
The paradox that the artist depended on the market not just to sell
the work, but also to define it, preoccupied another member of Art &
Language, Mel Ramsden:
This is the mode of existence in which we become prices on the mediamarket, in which we become commodities, a mode of existence in which
what counts is the demand for what the market defines as your talents . . .
The products may change . . . but the form of life remains the same: the
ruling market provides the standard of intelligibility. One question to raise
about this standard of intelligibility is whether market relations are really
separate from what we do? That is to say, just how far has market-standing
been internalized.30
But how exactly do you price an invisible artwork? Indeed, how do you
know it is an artwork at all? A work whose content cannot be communicated, like Ramsdens Secret Painting (The content of this painting is
invisible; the character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the artist) of 19678, and purchased by
the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2003, exemplifies the problem
posed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations:
Anthony Haden-Guest, A New Art World Legend, New York Magazine, 28
April 1975.
29
Ian Burn, The Art Market (1975), in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds,
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 327.
30
Mel Ramsden, On Practice (1975), in Alberro and Stimson, eds, Institutional
Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Cambridge, ma 2009, p. 171.
28
95
If you say he sees a private picture before him, which he is describing, you
have still made an assumption about what he has before him . . . If you
admit that you havent any notion what kind of thing he has before him
then what leads you into saying, in spite of that, that he has something
before him? Isnt it as if I were to say of someone: He has something, but I
dont know whether it is money, or debts, or an empty till.31
32
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97
But what Fraser calls the nouveau-riche approach is not necessarily irrational. If someone says somethings worth money, then thats the price,
which tells you what someone is willing to pay for it, and so registers
information about size, medium, authorship, subject, style, date, quality of execution and preservation, provenance, and so on. Price alone
does not reproduce specific information of this kind, but it is sensitive
to whatever is known, or assumed, about all of these things, and anything else that might conceivably be of relevance. Thus price is liable to
include more information about the work than any one person is likely
to have at their disposal, including a great deal of information that would
be unavailable on visual inspection.
Andrea Fraser, May I help you? [performance script]: available at artarchives.net/
artarchives/frasertexts.html.
37
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It is not just that, as so often in art, aesthetic value and price are entangled in an ongoing dialectic, whose unravelling can only partially be
accomplished.38 In cases where the work is either, of its very nature,
unavailable for inspection, or of a kind that yields little to the eye (or
the other senses), price may actually be the best lens through which to
view it. As Hayek and his followers argue, the most significant fact about
the price system is how little the individual participants need to know
in order to be able to take the right action.39 And not only is very little
knowledge required, but that knowledge may be of an unformalizable
kind, contextual knowledge that cannot be put in language. In this way,
price is a form of communication that might even be said to surpass the
limits of language, by aggregating and communicating tacit and contextual knowledge in the absence of linguistic information.40
Perhaps conceptualism turned to the market because the market was
the form of communication best suited to generating a language for it.
Although private languages cannot be communicated, because their
meanings can never be established, the market potentially provides a
medium for exchange of the meaninglesslike people buying and selling boxes with beetles in them. No one is in a position to know what a
beetle actually is, but the price of the box will communicate the markets assumptions about whats in it, which is not only all thats needed
for an exchange to take place, but as close as anyone will get to discovering what they have in their own box as well.
Interpreting conceptualism
In a famous critique, Benjamin Buchloh argued that by effacing all residues of representation and style, of individuality and skill, conceptual
art had paradoxically transferred judgement from the sphere of aesthetics to that of administration:
In the absence of any specifically visual qualities and due to the manifest
lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction, all the
traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment . . . have been programmatically
38
Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for
Contemporary Art, Princeton 2007, p. 178.
39
Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review, vol. 35,
no. 4, 1945, September 1945, p. 526.
40
Steven Horwitz, Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication
Process, Review of Social Economy, vol. 50, no. 2, 1992, pp. 206, 212.
99
voided. The result of this is that the definition of the aesthetic becomes on
the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of
power rather than taste).41
In other words, the very radicality of the critique enacted in conceptualism created a lack that could only be filled by something external to it, a
vacuum that was filled by institutions which served to align art with the
instrumental rationality of administration.
Oddly, Buchloh makes no mention of the art market, but other writers
described the same developments in market terms. Krauss, reflecting
many years later on Marcel Broodthaerss Department of Eagles exhib
ition of 1972, noted the way in which the artists manic labelling of
every object in the exhibition with a figure number reduced everything,
irrespective of medium or function, to a system of pure equivalency
by the homogenizing principle of commodification, the operation of
pure exchange value from which nothing can escape.42 And writing
from a more conservative cultural position, Donald Kuspit identified
the key difference between modern and postmodern art as the transformation of the artist into an aesthetic manager. Whereas the former
gave expression to unconscious feeling, the aesthetic manager . . . packages exchange value under the guise of making art. In which case, the
final confirmation that one is an artist is that your aesthetic product is
marketablesells . . .43
But rather than being a reduction or an intrusion of market values
into the realm of the aesthetic (as Krauss and Kuspit claim), the reliance on exchange value can be seen as the solution to the problem of
private language that Krauss herself identified in the early 1970s. The
artist, in the position of a Robinson Crusoe who cannot value his own
produce, sells work on the market as a way of making it public, of
41
Benjamin Buchloh, Conceptual Art 196269: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions, October, vol. 55, 1990, pp. 143, 1178.
42
Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition,
London 1999, p. 15.
43
Donald Kuspit, Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries, New York 2000, pp. 1501. In his
essay Art is DeadLong Live Aesthetic Management, Kuspit uses Warhol as the
example of an aesthetic manager, but sees the struggle between the creative artist
and the aesthetic manager continuing in the division between the German NeoExpressionists and the American Conceptualists (p. 138).
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101
The undecadent
Where does this leave the question of decadence? On this view, the market
is an effective way of sharing the reality of the absence of a shared reality,
for it substitutes price for (the absence of) common consciousness. It may
be a poor substitute, but where decadence has been successfully priced,
there is little need to designate devaluation outside of market terms.
Rather than being uncoupled from the fortunes of the capitalist economy,
decadence has been folded into it. Decadence has declined as the market
has expanded because decadence is a non-market form of devaluation
that has little meaning within a market economy. In retrospect we might
speculate that the concept of decadence was itself produced by a lagging
marketin the time it took for modernism to find its price.
46
47
102
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What is significant about a market for private languages is not that price
makes a private language public, but rather that it provides a substitute
for language when it comes to communicating our shared assumptions
about the content of private languages. If decadence is the absence of
any way of co-ordinating multiple private languages, then a market for
private languages renders the concept superfluous because price provides a means of co-ordinating those languages without intruding on
their privacy. It is, in Lukcss terms, a way of monitoring our sleep that
never threatens to wake us.
And if that is the case, there must be an entire category of cultural production whose difficulty, ambiguity, and unknowability has effectively
been absorbed by the marketwork that might have seemed decadent
but is not any more: the undecadent, everything that might have undermined the culture, but hasnt. Undecadence is cultural disintegration
transformed into product diversification, an analgesic for all those
cries of pain of isolated individuals. Its how the market keeps our
culture forever young.