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[jed - np. if you knew me you'd know how silly your accusation was. kinda weird being accused of being an elitist snob when i'm the furthest thing from it... tho that sentence was ambiguously phrased, so I understand where yer misinterpretation came from]
Anyways, on to Berger. I haven't read Ways of Seeing, and maybe I should just shut up until I have. Because it's hard for me to generalize what I think he's doing without making it sound very fucking obvious and even a bit trite (locating the intersection of history/politics and the production/consumption of art is surely what all criticism does). As for precedents (is that better than "influences"?)... Clearly he's from the "we love Freud and Marx" school of thought (who isn't, really?), but while I can see how the Picasso book shares affinities with Benjamin, I don't know that he had actually read him at that point (he certainly doesn't make reference to him, and keep in mind this is 1965, predating when mark says Illuminations was published, but maybe Berger reads German). But maybe that question is beside the point - Berger's argument doesn't need to be innovative in order to be interesting...
The part that particularly stood out to me was a passage toward the very beginning of the Picasso book that had to do with the interplay between the idea that art can be a commodity and the idea that art has some intangible essence that cannot be bought or sold. Berger talks about how the Romantics' obsession with the author/creator, or more precisely the "spirit" of the author/creator, was a reaction against the entrenchment of bourgious culture in the 19th c. Which is to say "you can buy my art... I'll happily sell it to you because god knows I gotta eat... But you can't buy the thing that makes it art, the thing that actually matters. You can't buy ME." [as an aside, this is the most sympathetic potrayal of the absolute and vulgar egoism of 19th c. art I've read, which is to say that, being from the "I love Marx and Freud" school of thought myself, I had always associated the Romantic idea of will/authorship as a compliment of capitalist culture, something that buttressed it rather than worked against it... ironic, and rather creepy, that a reaction against the bourgeois aesthetic ultimately served to further entrench it -- birth of the author = birth of the copyright, surely -- but damn am I digressing]
What was for me the real "ah-hah!" moment in Berger's analysis was how he claims this relationship between the real/essential and the commodity has changed. On the one hand, he says, Picasso fully embraced the Romantic ideal of the author mattering as much as and perhaps more than his work (and here "Picasso" means two things - both the real actions and intentions of the person calling himself Picasso AND the way the image/name of Picasso figures in mass culture -- Berger makes the [unfortunately empirically unqualified, but probably mostly true] point that while everyone [c. 1965] knows the name Picasso, and everyone has an opinion about him, "genius," "madman," "commie," "charlatan," etc., few people would be able to identify a painting as his).
But what I think Berger is identifying as the innovation that occurred in our conception of art/the artist with Picasso was this: with Picasso, not only the work of art, but the man himself was for sale. When Picasso insisted that it was the creative spirit, rather than its product, that mattered, he was implying "this, too, can be yours for a price." And we all bought it -- this conflation of art/artist/spirit/commodity has been the norm ever since. When we purchase a work of art, we are investing not only in the work itself but in the idea of the person or people who created it.
Now the trick to making this idea relevant to music (or, to a lesser extent, to any work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction) is to remove it somewhat from the idea of capital without removing it from the idea of capitalism. Berger is telling the story of the artist's relationship to the capital-owning class, and how the transformation of art into not only a commodity, but capital has transformed the way we percieve art and artists. But as music (especially now with the advent of mp3, p2p, etc) cannot be capital in the literal sense that a painting or sculpture can be, it is never truly a financial investment for its consumer (even in the case of collectible vinyl, we are talking about something quite removed from the buying/selling of a Pollack or a Van Gogh).
So maybe the story I would want to tell about a musician using Berger would be this: I fell in love with her music. We all fell in love. And we all bought it. And she got rich. But she also got scared. Because this was her art, and we were treating it frivolously. So she began to act in such a way as to distinguish herself from this product that we were buying and selling, because she didn't want to be bought and sold like her music. And as she began to distinguish herself by her reclusive lifestyle or by her bizarre antics or by just living a "normal life" that happened to be in the public eye, we fell in love with her. Not just her music. Her. Her person. Her spirit. Or this image of herself that she had created. We fell in love with her persona/Personality, and convinced ourselves that we had fallen in love with her Person, and maybe we were right, or as right as we could be anyways. And we bought the magazines with interviews of her and when we bought the music is was richer now because it wasn't just music, it was something that this person that we loved had made. It was a peice of her.
And this seems like a really obvious story to me. I imagine any biography of Bob Dylan would read exactly like this. Which is why I initially asked "isn't this already there in rock/pop criticism?"
What I don't like is the idea (implicit or explicit) that commodification ALWAYS equals polution (though perhaps sometimes it does). BUT, I think it's interesting to consider that the IDEA that commodification equals polution is, unintentionally, the very engine through which the artist transforms not only her art, but herself into a commodity.
Okay, this is too long, and I fear that in the process of trying to clarify my point, I've just made things muddier...
― flightsatdusk (flightsatdusk), Thursday, 28 August 2003 14:45 (twenty years ago) link
nineteen years pass...