Signs like this make me uneasy. This particular sign appears outside the Royal Ontario Museum above a wing that is already heavily funded by the Weston family (of Loblaws fame). It seems our culture is warm soil (along with highways and oil pipelines) for the Harper government’s economic tinkering. Naturally, the McGuinty/Wynn Liberals (who are conservatives in disguise) have stuck their own hoe in the dirt. In the next elections, both Feds & Provincials get to claim they’re doing great things for us in the culture sector, the culture industry, what with all the job creation and enhanced production, output, whatever, all supported by infrastructure. It makes musicians, visual artists, actors, novelists, poets sound like the tar sands; ship all the culture goo through shining metal pipelines to markets; export it to international markets; keep people busy; crank the economic engines.
I feel like a Ferengi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, you know, one of those aliens who can only measure value in terms of profit. Damn Gene Roddenberry and his liberals at Star Trek; they were actually poking fun at Thatcherism and Reaganomics. And yet it feels like we now live on the Ferengi home world. Culture makes no sense unless we can smell profit in it. Any other measure of value lies beyond our capacity to imagine. Or maybe it’s more Orwellian than Roddenberryian. Maybe the words we need have been excised from our dictionary and the only words we have left are words like “infrastructure” and “investing” and “industry” and “production”.
Since we live in neither the world of the Ferengis nor the dystopia of Orwell’s 1984, we have other ways to talk about culture. One (kind of the opposite of Culture-as-an-Economic-Action-Plan) comes from Death of the Liberal Class, where Chris Hedges devotes a significant part of his writing to cultural concerns:
The media, the arts, scholarship, and political and social movements must become conduits for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. We must defy systems, and even laws, that permit corporations to strangle our culture and the natural world. But, at the same time, all who speak in a moral voice, one tied to facts rather than illusions, will become freaks. It will be difficult to live with a conscience in an age of nihilism. … A culture, once it no longer values truth and beauty, condemns its most creative and moral people to poverty and obscurity. And this is our [American] destiny.
For Hedges, the Arts is a prophetic vocation with a moral centre that calls power to account. Its legitimacy rests in its capacity to challenge instead of kowtow. In a way, his language is as narrow as the Harper government’s. Admittedly, he writes in the American context where there is little experience of social democracy with guaranteed state funding of cultural institutions like the CBC and the Canada Arts Council. Then again, the Harper government seems to have forgotten that guarantee, allowing the Conservatives to claim credit for Economic Action Plan projects while pretending that they have nothing to do with slashing the CBC budget in the name of austerity.
Almost a year ago, a twenty-something named Vladimir Umanets tagged a Rothko painting, Black on Maroon (1958), in the Tate Modern Gallery. It was part of the Seagram collection. It was originally commissioned by the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. Here’s what he wrote on the painting: “Vladimir Umanets, A Potential Piece of Yellowism.” Since then, I’ve been puzzling over questions like: What is Yellowism? What did he mean? What were his motives?
Vladimir Umanets and Marcin Lodyga wrote a manifesto which you can read on their web site. But I reproduce it here in case the site is taken down:
Manifesto of Yellowism
Yellowism is not art or anti-art.
Examples of Yellowism can look like works of art but are not works of art. We believe that the context for works of art is already art. The context for Yellowism is nothing but yellowism. Pieces of Yellowism are not visually yellow, however sometimes can be. In Yellowism the visibility of yellow is reduced to minimum; yellow is just the intellectual matter. Every piece of Yellowism is only about yellow and nothing more, therefore all pieces of Yellowism are identical in content—all manifestations of Yellowism have the same sense and meaning and express exactly the same. In the context of Yellowism, all interpretations possible in the context of art, are reduced to one, are equalized, flattened to yellow. Interpreting Yellowism as art or being about something other than just yellow deprives Yellowism of its only purpose. Yellowism can be presented only in yellowistic chambers.
An yellowistic chamber is a closed room that is not an art gallery and because of its nature cannot exist or be presented in an art gallery. An yellowistic chamber serves only to show pieces of Yellowism. Violet walls of an yellowistic chamber are the only neutral background for pieces of Yellowism.
There is no evolution of Yellowism, there is only its expansion. Art is forever developing <<diverse whole>>. Yellowism is forever expanding <<homogeneous mass>>.
Following on the tagging incident October 08, 2012, attempts to explain Yellowism were pretty predictable. See Blouinartinfo [Link Broken] which opened with some bullshit words no less opaque than the manifesto itself: “Yellowism appears to be a novel—if violent, misguided, and, to many, abhorrent—update to Situationism and appropriation art.” The article pretty much sums things up with: “In general, their movement shows an adolescent obsession with vandalism and attractive women….”
I guess.
But doesn’t it make you wonder?
The way I read the manifesto, it supports propositions like:
The purpose of art is art.
The meaning of art is art.
To put it differently, art exists in a hermetically sealed discursive environment (a yellowistic chamber?). You can’t enter that environment; you can only be in that environment. This is easier to understand when we talk about music or visual arts because, when we talk about them, we use words. We step outside the medium and gain a footing for our discussion somewhere else. But when we talk about novels or poetry, it gets confusing because we use the same raw materials (words & syntax) as the art itself and so it’s easy to fool ourselves into believing that we are still talking within the discursive world of the novel or the poem when, in fact, we’re somewhere else.
If art can only be received on its own terms, nevertheless the space it occupies influences/taints it. (Hence the need for the yellowistic chamber.) How are we to respond to art displayed in a gallery with plaques to indicate that it is funded for the primary purpose of encouraging us to consume alcohol? Or to shop at a particular grocery store? Or to remember the largesse of a particular political party?
When people ask: why would anybody tag a painting whose estimated value is in the tens of millions of dollars? I wonder in response: why not? After all, it creates employment opportunities in the arts industry. And protecting the painting with guards and alarms and plexiglass promotes cultural infrastructure. Let’s all do our bit.