Andrea Fraser , 14 Feb 2012

Who are the patrons of contemporary art today? The ARTnews200 Top Collectors list is an obvious place to start. Near the top of the alphabetical list is Roman Abramovich, estimated by Forbes to be worth $13.4 billion. He has admitted to paying billions in bribes for control of Russian oil and aluminum assets. Bernard Arnault, listed by Forbes as the fourth richest man in the world with $41 billion, controls the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, which, despite the debt crisis, reported a sales growth of 13 percent in the first half of 2011. Hedge fund manager John Arnold, who got his start at Enron–where he received an $8 million bonus just before it collapsed–recently gave $150,000 to an organization seeking to limit public pensions. MoMA, MoCA and LACMA trustee Eli Broad is worth $5.8 billion and was a board member and major shareholder of the now notorious AIG. Steven A. Cohen, estimated to be worth $8 billion, is the founder of SAC Capital Advisors, which is under investigation for insider trading. Guggenheim trustee Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who is also chairman of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, recently called for a “modern private initiative” to save the failing Greek economy from a “bloated and parasitic” “patronage-ridden state.” Another Guggenheim trustee, David Ganek, recently shut down his $4 billion Level Global hedge fund after an FBI raid.

Noam Gottesman and former partner Pierre Lagrange (also on the ARTnews list) earned £400 million each on the sale of their hedge fund GLG in 2007, making them “among the world’s biggest winners from the credit crunch,” according to the Sunday Times. Hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin supported Obama in 2008 but recently gave $500,000 to a political action committee created by former Bush adviser Karl Rove and was also seen at a meeting of the right-wing-populist Koch Network. Andrew Hill’s $100 million in compensation in 2009 led Citigroup to sell its Philbro division, where he was the top trader, after pressures from regulators to curtail his pay on the heels of Citigroup’s receipt of $45 billion in US federal bailout funds (he subsequently moved the company offshore). Damien Hirst, estimated by the Sunday Times to be worth £215 million, is one of a handful of artists who have now made rich-lists alongside their patrons. Peter Kraus collected $25 million for just three months’ work when his exit package was triggered by Merrill Lynch’s sale to Bank of America with the help of US federal funds. Henry Kravis’s income in 2007 was reported to be $1.3 million a day. His wife, economist Marie-Josée Kravis, who is MoMA’s president and a fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, recently defended “Anglo-Saxon capitalism” against “Europe’s ‘social capitalist politics’” in Forbes.com. Daniel S. Loeb, a MoCA trustee and founder of the $7.8 billion hedge fund Third Point, sent a letter to investors attacking Obama for “insisting that the only solution to the nation’s problems … lies in the redistribution of wealth.” Dimitri Mavrommatis, the “Swiss-based” Greek asset manager, paid £18 million for a Picasso at Christie’s on June 21, 2011, while Greeks were rioting against austerity measures. And of course, there is Charles Saatchi, who helped elect Margaret Thatcher. The firm of MoMA chairman Jerry Speyer defaulted on a major real estate investment in 2010, losing $500 million for the California State Pension Fund and up to $2 billion in debt secured by US federal agencies. Reinhold Würth, worth $5.7 billion, has been fined for tax evasion in Germany and compared taxation to torture. He recently acquired Virgin of Mercy by Hans Holbein the Younger, paying the highest price ever for an artwork in Germany and outbidding the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt/Main, where the painting had been on display since 2003.

In the midst of an economic crisis, the art world is experiencing an ongoing market boom which has been widely linked to the rise of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) and Ultra-HNWIs (people worth over $1 million or $30 million respectively), particularly from the financial industry. A recent report by Art+Auction even celebrated indicators that these groups were rebounding from their 2008 dip to precrisis wealth. Until recently, however, there has been very little discussion of the obvious link between the art world’s global expansion and rising income disparity. A quick look the Gini index, a measure of income inequality, shows that the countries with the most significant art booms of the past two decades have also experienced the steepest rise in inequality: the United States, Britain, China and India. Further, recent economic research has established a direct connection between skyrocketing art prices and income inequality, showing that “a one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.” It is now painfully obvious that what has been extraordinarily good for the art world over the past decades has been disastrous for the rest of the world.

In the United States it is difficult to imagine any arts organization or practice that can escape the economic structures and policies that have produced this inequality. The private nonprofit model–which almost all US museums as well as alternative art organizations exist within–is dependent on wealthy donors and has its origins in the same ideology that led to the current global economic crisis: that private initiatives are better suited to fulfill social needs than the public sector and that wealth is best administered by the wealthy. Even outside of institutions, artists engaged in community-based and social practices that aim to provide public benefit in a time of austerity simply may be enacting what George H. W. Bush called for when he envisioned volunteers and community organizations spreading like “a thousand points of lights’ in the wake of his rollback in public spending.

Progressive artists, critics and curators face an existential crisis: how can we continue to justify our involvement in this art economy? At minimum, if our only choice is to participate or to abandon the art field entirely, we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical or political art practices or–adding insult to injury–social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by, and benefit from, the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality. The only true “alternative” today is to recognize our participation in this economy and confront it in an open, direct and immediate way in all of our institutions, including museums and galleries and publications. Despite the radical political rhetoric that abounds in the art world, censorship and self-censorship reign when it comes to confronting our economic conditions, except in marginalized (often self-marginalized) arenas where there is nothing to lose–and little to gain–in speaking truth to power.

Indeed the duplicity of progressive claims in art may contribute to the suspicion that progressive politics is just a ruse of educated elites to preserve their privilege. In our case, this may be true. Increasingly it seems that politics in the art world is largely a politics of envy and guilt, or of self-interest generalized in the name of a narrowly conceived and privileged form of autonomy, and that artistic “critique” most often serves not to reveal but to distance these economic conditions and our investment in them. As such, it is a politics that functions to defend against contradictions that might otherwise make our continued participation in the art field, and access to its considerable rewards–which have ensconced many of us comfortably among the 10 percent, if not the 1 percent or even the 0.1 percent–unbearable.

A broad-based shift in art discourse may help precipitate a long overdue splitting off of the market-dominated subfield of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs. If a turn away from the art market means that public museums contract and ultra-wealthy collectors create their own privately controlled institutions, so be it. Let these private institutions be the treasure vaults, theme-park spectacles and economic freak shows that many already are. Let the market-dominated art world become the luxury goods business it already basically is, with what circulates there having as little to do with true art as yachts, jets, and watches. It is time we began evaluating whether artworks fulfill, or fail to fulfill, political or critical claims at the level of their social and economic conditions. We must insist that what art works areeconomically determines what they mean socially and also artistically.

If we, as curators, critics, art historians and artists, withdraw our cultural capital from these markets, we have the potential to create a new art field where radical forms of autonomy can develop: not as secessionist “alternatives’ that exist only in the grandiose enactments and magical thinking of artists and theorists, but as fully institutionalized structures, which, with the “properly social magic of institutions,’ will be able to produce, reproduce and reward noncommercial values.

Andrea Fraser is an artist and professor in the art department at the University of California–Los Angeles. This is a revised version of an essay originally published in Texte zur Kunst, Issue no. 83, September 2011.

POSTED BY JEB PURUCKER ⋅ FEBRUARY 6, 2012 ⋅ 6 COMMENTS

Twenty-four hours into my incarceration in Santa Rita Jail, I found myself in yet another tactical conversation, dissecting the numerous failures that had led to the kettling and mass arrests of about 400 Occupy Oakland demonstrators. This is one of the few upsides of a mass arrest. After getting the rowdy activists off the streets, the police find themselves hosting a three-day strategy conference inside the jail. Whenever a conversation begins to get stale, the guards show up and shuffle people into new discussion groups, and the debate begins afresh.

For the most part, the atmosphere in my cell was not one of defeat, but rather of rigorous self-criticism. This is a necessary moment in the growth of any movement – coming up against the limits of the premises that underlie a practice – and it seemed to be getting underway just hours after that practice had collapsed on the streets of Oakland. This was decidedly not the unreflecting group of militants that Chris Hedges has recently accused of a pathological aversion to strategic thought.

Outside of jail, the conversation seems to have been somewhat different. The focus within the movement over the past week has increasingly been on the brutality that we experienced in jail. We were denied food and necessary medication, leading to seizures; we were abused both physically and verbally; we were crammed into overcrowded and inadequately ventilated cells in which the tear gas that still clung to our clothes made breathing unbearable. All of this is true. This was a traumatic experience for many of us, and the support from cheering crowds waiting with coffee and cigarettes when we were released was powerful. This collective healing is important; it builds solidarities.

But we need to be careful. The discourse about police brutality that has been disproportionately filling the Occupy echo chamber this week is an essentially liberal one, and it tends to mask other problems that surfaced on Saturday. There is always something tautological about the complaint that one was treated badly in jail. It’s jail, after all. To focus on the brutality of the experience as though this is somehow exceptional is to misunderstand the basic function of jails and police forces in society. The violence that we came up against on Saturday is the violence that is required daily to maintain and reproduce society as it is presently constituted. What we experienced for a few nights, while awful, is simply daily life for the unpaid prison laborers who cleaned out our cells when we went home.

I know that this will not strike most of the people that were arrested on Saturday as a particularly controversial point. Many of them are no strangers to the penal system themselves. Indeed, Oakland’s radical edge within the Occupy movement largely comes from the fact that the quotidian violence that is required to reproduce capitalism is closer to the surface here than in many other communities.

But there comes a point at which these conversations can hinder further thought. I don’t want to normalize or apologize for the brutality of the system, nor do I want to lapse into a debate over what constitutes an “authentic” experience of this brutality. Nevertheless, we as a movement have to stop and ask ourselves what conversations are being displaced by this exclusive focus on police brutality. More than that, we have to look at this focus as itself a symptom of deep contradictions in our practice, which we have been unable to come to terms with.

Chief among these is the fact that up until now Occupy has experienced its growth spurts as a result of confrontations with the police. The general strike in November was in large part made possible by the excessive force with which the police evicted the campers at Oscar Grant Plaza. Similarly public instances of brutality at UC Berkeley and UC Davis led to massive mobilizations on all campuses across the UC system. The basic premise underlying Saturday’s action was in keeping with this pattern. By picking a sufficiently ambitious target and casting the action in sufficiently antagonistic rhetoric, a confrontation was with cops was assured.

Organizers were ready for this. I was ready for this. If “Move-in Day” was successful, so much the better – if not, the inevitable clash with cops would unmask the absurdity of a system that would use such force to keep an empty building from becoming a community center.

The problem is that police forces can adapt. On Saturday there was no dramatic image that crystallized the brutality of the police state, just a whole lot of the standard violence that is inherent to the nature of policing. Even the teargassing of children is, by this point, more or less normal. Whether we admit it or not, we were implicitly relying on the spectacle of police brutality to catch national attention. This didn’t happen as it did in November. And it couldn’t happen, precisely because it already happened in November.

When this narrative of victimization was not immediately forthcoming, we kicked into high gear to manufacture one. This is ultimately what underlies the focus on brutality. It’s not that anything that is being said about our experiences in Santa Rita Jail is incorrect, and of course we need to denounce police brutality wherever it exists. The National Lawyers Guild class action lawsuit should go forward, and for those who had their first material encounter with the violence of the state, the lessons learned last weekend can only have a radicalizing effect. But we also need to understand why this essentially liberal discourse about reining in police excesses has become so hegemonic amongst radicals. It points to a deeper problem within Occupy: so many of our actions are premised on producing narratives for liberal consumption. Scott Olsen was one such story. The attack on students on the “Mario Savio Steps” in Berkeley is an even clearer example. These can be useful organizing tools when they present themselves but they cannot be the basis of the actions we plan from here on out.

I don’t want to gloss over the huge advances that Occupy Oakland is continuing to make. There has been a chronic problem with building occupations in the recent past. Typically, the bulk of planning goes into the actual takeover of a building, while the question of what to do with the space once it’s occupied is an afterthought. Saturday’s action marked an advance insofar as there was clearly a tremendous amount of work that had gone into “planning for success.” A schedule of events was made, materials were gathered, and it seemed like there were the numbers to sustain an indefinite occupation. But at a more fundamental level, success was not the point. It was more or less a contingency plan for what to do in case we accidentally succeeded. The romanticized confrontation was still the unconscious premise of our actions, no matter how many people outwardly believed we would win the day.

In the holding tanks of Santa Rita, we discussed these questions. Many of us were coming to grips with the recognition that we went into Saturday thinking that there was a crew of radicals in Oakland who had it all figured out. All we had to do was show up at their event and things would go off without a hitch, which is how it had worked at the general strike and the port shutdown.

This logic broke down on Oak Street. Saturday clearly demonstrated the limits of a mode of organizing that has thus far been successful. Up until now, Occupy has involved a contradictory and unstable mixture of liberal and more radical elements held together by a thin tissue of stories of injustice and violated “rights.” This fact has led to endless unproductive disputes about the role of “violence” in our movement, of which Chris Hedges is just the most recent and banal example. The problem is that if our unity can be reduced to our shared victimization, we are reliant on police and civic officials to continually give us these stories. As police tactics adapt, and as the demands we make of the system become more radical, this will become increasingly difficult. The basis of the connections we make within the movement must involve a deeper sort of radicalization. The central antagonism is not between the police state and the people, but between labor and capital. The anti-police repression marches that are now happening weekly in Oakland, while focused on a crucial issue, tend to sideline this larger point. To the extent that this discourse dominates our practice, we are operating with exactly the same limited and moralizing conception of our movement’s unity as our liberal critics. The romanticized picture of the brutal repression of peaceful demonstrators that Hedges fetishizes is on a continuum with the images of victimization in many of our own actions. We need to tell a new story.

After we experienced the material limits of this type of organizing, some very necessary conversations began in Santa Rita in earnest. The focus on the brutality has its uses, but to the extent that it stands in as a substitute for this more substantial self-criticism, it allows the tenuous alliance between adventurism and humanitarian liberalism to persist. While we are all justifiably angry at the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriffs, what comes out of this experience needs to be more than simply a strengthened conviction that we hate the cops. If we don’t swiftly move towards the self-criticism that we need, the opportunity will be missed.

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Jeb Purucker is a graduate student in Literature at UC Santa Cruz and a member of UAW Local 2865.