Art, An Enemy of the People

Philosophy Now Series #3

by Roger L. Taylor

This is a provocative book concerned with the social significance of high-cultural activities. It is a rejection of the role of art as the highest manifestation of society's achievements, exposing art as the perogative of elites and an enemy of the people.

Art has not been with us for ever. According to Roger Taylor, it is of recent origins; its function has been one of class domination. The author argues that philosophy and aesthetics are responsible for illusions about art which give ordinary people an unjustified sense of inferiority. When these are penetrated -through historical and social investigation- the position of art as an enemy of the people becomes apparent.

Popular culture is itself in danger of being weakened through attempts to reconcile it to high-culture. Roger Taylor has written for people who wouldn't normally read a philosophy or other book with intellectual pretensions.

Roger Taylor looks at the history of jazz as an example of the threat to popular culture. Jazz has been absorbed by the cultural establishment. It is no longer a conflicting alternative to high-culture and no longer a truly popular culture.

The arguments of Art an Enemy of the People were for when it was written and first published. Being committed to this contingency was the critique of philosophy which the book contains. Therefore, in preparing a second edition, no effort has been made to update its arguments. Its arguments were for then and not now. Arguments for now are contained in Roger Taylor's new book Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses. Art an Enemy of the People is part of the history of anti-elitism and anti-art which developed in Cultural Theory during the latter quarter of the twentieth century. As Stewart Home says in his Mute interview with Roger Taylor, "Taylor was the first writer I'd come across whose arguments about art didn't exude the rotten egg smell of the idea of God". This book is then a challenging example from the history of Anti-Culture.

Genres: Art, Philosophy

193 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Roger Taylor is the author of Art, an Enemy of the People, Beyond Art and Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses. He is a Marxist philosopher whose subjects include the As If, Rethinking Marxism and the Philosophy of Escape. He has played an influential role in the deconstruction of Art and Culture. For over 20 years he taught philosophy at Sussex University, UK. A variety of his contributions have been published in many books and journals. Roger Taylor is the terrestrial form of the avatar Rumpledsilkskin and Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses is their most ambitious undertaking, made available May Day 2013. It develops a Theory of Virtual Revolution and a Theory of Make-Believe.

Reviews

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can art be radical? Not very likely. This book is more important now than when it was published in 1978 (before the radicals were old enough to score jobs at marketing firms). Back then, artists pretended to be radical cause it was hip, and, you know, sold more shit. Now they know better, don't give a shit, and head straight from art school to marketing firms. The result is advertising using imagery of revolution. You want a good advertisement? Well, fucking recruit a former Marxist or Anarchist to design a nice little campaign for you. After all, they know the game of propaganda, right?

And what role did punk rock play in all of this? Well, it was loud enough (and powerful enough) to finally make the capitalists see that hiring these assholes with tattoos and torn up clothing was in their best interests. Punk rock was a bunch of assholes banging their heads against the walls of corporate America begging to be let in, or else! Or else, what? Or else they'd burn the fucking place down like a bunch of spoiled little children. And so they let them in. And boy was that a good idea! Now no one can tell the difference between an Exxon Advertisement and a call for revolution. But who the fuck cares what the difference is, anyway? People like things that stir them up. It's a drug. They get high. Doesn't matter if it is an advertisement for a certain micro-brew (fuck you Magic Hat) or a call for bombarding the headquarters. People like that fuzzy feeling.

None of what I wrote above is in this book, but it sure did help me think about these things. I highly recommend it.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I noticed, but didn't read, this book years ago when I was an undergraduate. Taylor isn't opposed to people painting, writing poetry, making music .... but he does think that "art" is a socially and historically bounded ideological concept that exerts a malign influence on our class-divided societies and on creative performance itself. Shades of Foucault, Bourdieu and Nietzsche here, but written in deliberately accessible language and without apparent direct influence from any of them (though Sartre is plainly in evidence). The first chapter debunks the notion of "art" as an eternal and universal category in favour of a view of it as a kind of tyranny of taste exercised by elites as a social marker and leaving the bewildered masses excluded and feeling inadequate. The second attacks Marxist writing on art as being effectively an uncritical attempt to save the values of the haute bourgeoisie from the corrosive philistinism of the market (hence the appeal of Marxism to the "sensitive" intellectual. "Not radical enough!" is Taylor's verdict: "art" itself is tainted and oppressive! The final chapter explores the assimilation of jazz into art, the shifting historical meanings of the desire for jazz to become "art" and the differing psychological and social needs served by this at different times. Taylor's view is that the aspiration to be "art" ended up killing jazz as a musical and social form.

The book appeared in the Harvester "Philosophy Now" series in 1978, a series somewhat associated with Radical Philosophy. It was oppositional then and anything like it would be now. You can't see a book like this getting a good score in the UK's Research Excellence Framework or, indeed, getting taken seriously as philosophy. Which is a shame.

[Stevphen Shukaitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and often forgotten book. I came across it after reading an interview where Stewart Home talks about it. Basically his argument is much in line with the avant-garde argument against art as a specialized and separated sphere of activity. The question is why we can see class or culture as historically and socially produced and emergent phenomenon, but for some strange reason still fall back on the notion of art as a universal and ahistorical category. For Taylor art as concept has a specific history and is tied to the emergence of a particular class composition and formation, primarily an aristocratic one, and the notion of art carries this formation within it. That's why for him art, as well as philosophy, are things to be defended against, because of the latent class content and character carried within the concept. So, all aesthetic compositions, as conceptions relating to a notion of art as universal and ahistorical, are forms of class composition that are to be guarded against rather than celebrated. To put in in autonomist terms, art is a form of class decomposition. That strikes me as an interesting way to expand and deepen the avant-garde rejection of art as separation, and to do so within a compositional framework.

[Stewart Home · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first book I ever read than answered the question 'what is art?' to my satisfaction. Taylor basically argues that art is whatever those in positions of cultural power say is art. But there is a lot more to the book than that. My 2004 interview with Taylor exploring how his take on art evolved after the publication of this book in 1978 can be found here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pol...

[Jeremy]

Taylor writes, "Jazz is a form of life having a deep base, and the deep base, constituting the most authentic area of jazz as art, was not within the limits of the social consciousness which first drew jazz and art together. In terms of this first view of jazz and art, jazz moved into art as it moved away from the deep base [read: African American cultural context], and moved towards (as a set of musical techniques i.e. techniques formally definable) the world of art as normally constituted." Here Taylor is stretching in two respects; first, he assumes without much evidence that the first people to think of associating jazz and art were whites, which seems extremely unlikely. The merit of his account is to show what form this association often took in the context of white reception; his more general claims about who thought about this association first (whites or blacks) are an attempt to show that the idea of jazz as "art" was never thought of by blacks, but was an imposition by whites. This fits into his general program which is clear enough in the title of his book, Art. an Enemy of the People. However, the world does not fit into the dichotomized division that Taylor wants it to, and there were plenty of African American musicians who strove for recognition as "artists" even when white society would only recognize them as "entertainers". See for example Reid Badger's biography of James Reese Europe, A Life in Ragtime. Furthermore, Taylor's equation of "musical techniques" with "techniques formally definable" is offensive to any improvising musician who works from an always partly implicit framework of techniques...

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book thirty years ago, was convinced, and remain so. I think there has been some progress in that time - the sloppy reverence for "Art" that was once universal is now less so, attempts to graft Art values onto popular music (Taylor mentions jazz, but progressive rock was even worse) have failed completely.

[Molotov Mosley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought this book was pretty fucking good. Very clear, very precise. I like the way Taylor writes. Still, leaves it all a bit open-ended (not at all a bad thing though) so don't come to it looking for all the answers.

[Igor Holanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Não é um livro tão ruim no início, mas quando ele começa a falar de jazz na quarta parte ele se perde completamente, criando uma análise pobre do jazz.

[dv · Rating 2 out of 5]

Libro composito: una introduzione metodologica troppo lunga e pesante, un capitolo centrale sul tema che dà il titolo al libro, una digressione poco utile sulla considerazione dell'arte nel marxismo, una lunga riflessione sullo statuto del jazz come forma d'arte. L'impressione è di un libro poco coeso e poco scorrevole, che avrebbe potuto essere molto interessante se si fosse concentrato solo sul capitolo che risulta centrale, quello cioè relativo al ruolo delle idee di arte e cultura.