The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism

by Pascal Gielen

Here, art sociologist Pascal Gielen examines the notion that the global art economy-with its ever-renewable youth quota, its gender imbalance, flexible working hours and short-term contracts (or lack of contracts)-is wholly congruent with the worst aspirations of late capitalism, and is ripe for economic exploitation. Conscious that art also offers real liberties, Gielen also proposes alternative models and argues for a recognition of the values implied by the creative process, rather than by the subtle coercions of post-Fordist production imperatives to which we are all subject

Genres: Art, Sociology

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2010

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the state of the neo-liberal-dominated world where the progressive immiseration of the many is accompanied by the obscene wealth of the few, studies in the sociology and politics of art may seem self indulgent and an exploration of the flippant. Gielen makes a powerful case against this (admittedly straw-mannish on my part) position. For me, and in part for Gielen, there are two principle reasons to be interested in art – in the first instance, art has and continues to play a powerful social role as a site of justification of and resistance to the rich and powerful. In this excellent and challenging collection of mainly previously published (although not in English) essays woven together into a single narrative Gielen’s exploration of the work of artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto or the ways in which curators make their exhibition decisions reveals important things about art’s relations to power.

In the second instance, art is big business and its conduct embodies an enormous amount of capital – financial, social, cultural and symbolic. It shapes cultural and social authority, helps frame and craft history and memory, and exercises our individual and collective social and cultural consciousness and mental labour. Crucially, and this is where both the world of art and Gielen’s analysis of it resonates most powerfully for me at the moment, it also embodies a huge amount of physical labour – of making art, of exhibiting art and so forth. Gielen’s case in this area is among the most innovative aspects of the book: the work of making art since the emergence of the individual Romantic artist and the weakening the Academy tradition (he cites Van Gogh as the quintessence of this shift) provides a key to understanding contemporary labour and work processes. The Romantic artist is the model of the precariously employed worker who ‘loves’ their job, brings to their work new ideas that help improve the overall product and is a ‘sovereign’ worker – that is, who embodies the myths of the post-Fordian labourer. In one of the most unsettling moments in the book, Gielen inverts the Nazi slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’ to suggest that in the post-Fordian world of the newly reinvigorated capitalism in the art world, ‘Freiheit macht Arbeit’ – it is hard not to look at new management theory and neo-liberal orthodoxy and not see this inversion as applying across many more work sectors.

The book challenges many of the taken-for-granteds of those of us whose work explores various aspects of the cultural sectors and industries – drawing on intellectual traditions from the Italian autonomist (post)Marxist world of Hardt & Negri but more importantly from the work of Paul Virno (especially his idea of virtuousity) as well as from the critical scholarship of sociologists and theorists such as Luc Boltanski, Foucault, Latour and the like. Latour is important here – Actor Network Theory is compellingly deployed in discussions of the politics of art in a globalised world in a way that suggests important approaches to wider analyses of cultural practices.

My current interests lie in work and labour in sport and fashion industries and forms of cultural industry – there is much to learn from Gielen. What is more, despite the big ideas this book explores it is, for the most part, readable and engaging (although the first section of the essay on Pistoletto falls into some obscurantist traps, it is the exception) while also being obviously full of transferable ideas, although these are models for analysis, not models of analysis. Highly recommended.

[Scope · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chaotic compilation.