Abstract
From the refusés in nineteenth-century France, the German Secessionists, Dada and Duchamp to abstract expressionism and Pop Art during the post-World War II period, the narratives of art history tell one story about a long, ardent controversy: the confrontation and struggle between artists who went beyond existing aesthetic boundaries, cultural conventions, and symbolic structures, and defenders of some sort of aesthetic and conceptual unity of art. It is a history of “progressive conquest,” in which “each state in this advance provoked (intolerance)”—intense debate, fierce disputes, and sometimes even fistfights.1
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Notes
Arthur C. Danto, The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987), pp. 204, 211.
See for the now classic modern art controversies: Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker & Co., 2006);
and Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1987); for the éclat the Impressionists provoked in nineteenth-century France, Howells (Chapter 1 in this book);
for Roger Fry, the Tate Gallery exhibitions, and modern art in Britain, Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial German (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); for the Secessionists in Germany at the turn of the last century, Kristen M. Osborne, “The 1913 Armory Show: Much Ado about Everything,” Art & Education (July 2009), http://www.artandeducation.net/papers/view/9 (accessed 3 December 2011);
for the 1913 Armory Show, Max Hollein and Tobias G. Natter, The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoscha and Other Scandals (Munich, Berlin, and London: Prestel, 2005);
and for Vienna and twentieth-century music, Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), p. 128.
Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 50.
In Howard Becker’s symbolic interactionist art world, autonomy resides with the artist, whose almost primordial creativity is an inexhaustible source for art and will enable her—in Becker’s view—to prevail over all sorts of external pressures, from financial constraints to open censorship; see Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
For Bourdieu, autonomy is a central normative value for an art field that is embedded in the field of power. Those who hold positions in the art field cannot escape impositions of the political and economic field; however, they may gain autonomy by struggling against them; see Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). For Luhmann, autonomy is a defining characteristic of modernity. “Society has settled for autonomous functional systems,” and this means that every effort to forestall the internal dynamic of art is regressive; see Art as a Social System, p. 184.
In the following, I choose the term “art field” over “art world,” “system,” or “network” for its structural bias. It is hard to understand what happens in the “art world” through the analysis of the actors, their interactions in this field, and the interpretations they offer for their actions. Such an approach disguises “the objective relationships between the relative positions that one and the other occupy in the field, that is to say, the structure determines the form of those interactions”; see Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. 181 ff. See, for a comparative discussion of the different concepts, Hans Van Maanen, How to Study Art Worlds: On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic Value (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009),
and Niels Albertsen and Bülent Diken, “Artworks’ Networks, Field, Systems, or Mediators?” Theory, Culture & Society, 21:3 (2004), pp. 35–58.
M. McConnell and H. Hess, “A Controversy Timeline,” Journal of Museum Education, 23:3 (1998), pp. 4–6.
Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985 [1964]).
Andrea Fraser, “A ‘Sensation’ Chronicle,” Social Text, 19:2 (2001), pp. 127–156, at p. 143.
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 6.
Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk (London and Sterling: Earthscan, 2000).
Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), p. 50.
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© 2012 Albrecht Funk
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Funk, A. (2012). The End of the Modern Art Controversy and the Many Controversies over Art. In: Howells, R., Ritivoi, A.D., Schachter, J. (eds) Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283542_15
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