On the Autonomy of Bourgeois Art and the Avant-Garde Reaction Against it

On Tuesday, we spent a good bit of time grappling with the proletariat/bourgeoisie distinction, with Dr. J warning us to avoid trying to defend ourselves in our exploration of the class struggle that Marx describes. This, of course, is understandable; it's much easier to learn something when you're not implicated in what you're learning. Here's the thing: whether we like it or not, we're part of class struggle. As Dr. J put it, pretty much everything about how we operate in our day-to-day lives is at least partially determined by our situatedness in a capitalistic culture. The food you eat in the Rat? Provided by a corporation (one with more than a few issues with labor). Your iPhone? Though Designed by Apple in Cupertino, CA, actually manufactured in China. I don't mean to get up on a pedestal here; I eat at the Rat and have an iPhone, too. Let's face it: we're bourgeois subjects.

The bourgeoisie extends beyond big, faceless corporations, though. Think of any dead artist whose work you like: Warhol, Picasso, Monet, whatever. Guess what? Their work is bourgeois. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just an inescapable one. Peter Bürger wrote an essay called "On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society" that explains all this. It's not an easy piece to get through, but I’m pretty sure that it’s brilliant (and worth a read if you're interested). Here, Bürger is arguing two things: first, that the autonomy of art is a contradictory idea, and second, that avant-gardistes attempt to negate this view of autonomy by subverting the processes of production and reception. Moreover, he situates both the contradiction and its negation as a result of and reaction against bourgeois society.

The idea of “the autonomy of art,” as far as I understand it, is that art is “free” insofar as it doesn’t have any purpose. Bürger aptly refers to Kant’s aesthetic work in The Critique of Judgement, in which Kant characterizes the aesthetic as “purposive without purpose,” which simply means that the appropriate objects of aesthetic judgement give the appearance of purpose without actually having one. For Kant (if I’m remembering correctly), this mostly refers to nature, though it’s easy to see how it applies to art as well. Bürger then points to Schiller’s extension of these ideas, which suggest that it is exactly this purposelessness that makes art useful in a way—for what Bürger calls “the furtherance of humanity.”

The contradiction of autonomy lies in the belief that such autonomy is the result of historical process; that is, art is autonomous at this point due to a historical progression. Bürger illustrates this progression by dividing art into three general stages: of function, production, and reception. These pertain to sacral art, courtly art, and bourgeois art, respectively. We designate art as “bourgeois” when both its production and reception lose their functionality and give way to individualization. By contrast, sacral art is artwork that is produced and received for a very specific function: group ritual; courtly art is created by the individual, but its function and reception are specialized: to glorify court life, for courtly people. Bourgeois art is created by an individual for an "anonymous audience"—that is, it serves no particular function, nor is intended for any particular person. We all approach bourgeois art as individuals. Avant-gardistes, according to Bürger, negate this individualization; he points to Duchamp’s Readymades as a prime example, in which the individualization of production is called into question by putting a signature on a mass-produced object. By the same token, the individualization of reception is subverted by the sheer controversiality of the object’s placement among other artworks.

The problem with avant-garde art is that, though it may successfully undermine the autonomy of bourgeois art, it eventually becomes accepted as normal. A general rule of thumb is that, when a movement becomes institutionalized, it can no longer claim to attack an institution. The most significant takeaway here, for me, is the problem that avant-garde art faces in bourgeois society: by presenting “something better” in contrast to the prevailing order, art runs the risk of idealizing—and so fictionalizing, or positioning as unattainable—the very thing it seeks to espouse. This propagates a “grass is always greener” sort of mentality, in which the bourgeois make themselves content with fictions, resigned to the stasis of their actual situation. It seems that, if we want to create work that provides some sort of impetus for change and progress, we have to be wary of idealizing that which I think is possible. Art is hard.