Art for Art's Sake

Day by Kenneth Goldsmith appropriates the text of a particular issue of The New York Times (this is well known). Jason Christie, in “Sampling the Culture: 4 Notes Toward a Poetics of Plundergraphia and on Kenneth Goldsmith's Day,” asserts that Day is another method to deconstruct the conceptual space between “high” and “low” art. While much of the essay is self-evident in its employment of Day to (again) point out this deconstruction between the “high” and “low,” the conclusion of the essay posits something that is very interesting:

His text [Goldsmith’s Day] exists much like a DJ's mix: in the ephemeral space of experience, the concept, disassociated from but reliant on objects, created in transformation and left there, haunting the annex of the Real, created through an act of plunder, created by sampling the culture. And the book is an independent artefact of the process, a urinal, a recording.

The text exists in an “ephemeral space of experience, the concept”: concept is the otherside of experience. It is dissociated from corporal objects but reliant on them. The book is the artefact, the material manifestation, of the plundering of the newspaper. What is compelling is the allusion to the ephemeral space of the concept: Jason Christie, as I understand the essay, sees the concept as being that “he [Goldsmith] fills the sanctuary of the place of worship with the street noise of traffic, and thereby offers us a glimpse of our continuing dependence on the categorical division of high and low art.” However, I think there is an otherside to this ephemeral space of experience.

The otherside of the concept, its shadow, is revealed in its excessive mimetic act; one might call the otherside of the concept as follows: it obviously questions the conception of high art, however, its self-evident representation reveals its fundamental inadequacy to respond and counter the commodification of the speech act. It reveals the inevitable logic of the appropriation of art by the commodity structure and how it eats itself in response: a snake eating its skin while pointing out how delicious the meal is to those around.

However, as Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman point out in Notes on Conceptualisms from UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE, conceptualisms are “strategies of failure” aiming to invite the reader to “redress failure” and “hallucinate repair” (25). The fact of its failed critique is already part of the excessive mimesis of the piece and thus cannot be the otherside of the ephemeral space of the concept. I think the otherside of Christie’s ephemeral space of experience, veiled beneath its overly self-evident critique, is the problematic state of its representation as critique. If the project is a strategy of failure whose purpose is to provoke hallucination of repair (w/o actual repair), and to only appear as a critique, one might say of conceptualisms: “critique for the appearance of critique.” This is a rather cynical form of l’art pour l’art.

It is worth restating Benjamin's view of this from "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century": "Nonconformists rebel against consigning art to the marketplace. They rally around the banner of l'art pour l'art. . . .the solemn rite with which it is celebrated is the pendant to the distraction that transfigures the commodity. Both abstract from the social existence of human beings" (11).

I am making a number of assertions that require a bit more elaboration; however, if the otherside of conceptualism is its negative state of aesthetic l'art pour l'art, then it itself contributes, in an even more veiled manner because of its self-evidence, to the narrative of progress in neo-liberal capitalism; it offers only hallucinations of repair.

Benjamin, Walter. "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" from The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press: Massachusetts, 1999.