Abstract:
In his book Anywhere or Not at All Peter Osborne highlights the apparent contradiction expressed in the idea of an ‘art industry’ to those with a Modern, ‘critical’ sensibility still sensitive to the idea of art’s autonomy, going on to point out that contemporary art, through the increasingly trans-national character of its market based distribution and its institutional forms, is at the forefront of this industry’s establishment and progressive expansion. The existence of something called an art industry broadly suggests three possible things according to Osborne: the complete integration of art, previously considered to possess a degree of freedom insulating it from the dictates of the market, directly into the logic of commodity production; art’s restriction to a supposedly authentic pre-modern idea of craft or technique; or, simply an oxymoronic, self-cancelling contradiction in terms. Osborne’s discussion resituates these interpretations within an account that understands this contradiction as objective, with a social and historical basis grounded in the conditions of capitalist modernity. In doing so he usefully clarifies what he considers to be perennial misunderstandings of the significance of the tripartite cluster of categories – popular culture, the culture industry and autonomous art - originally presented in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, from which the term ‘art industry’ is synthesised. His exposition proceeds with the overall aim of elucidating the structure of the last of these categories – autonomous art – in light of which the critical anxiety about art’s relation to capitalist industry with which we began, is expressed. His account doesn’t dispel the anxiety stemming from the apparent contradiction, but rather shows how the ambivalence it produces is an unavoidable aspect of art’s historical situation. In Osborne’s gloss of Adorno and Horkheimer’s three classifications, the idea of popular culture is articulated as a category that encapsulates locally produced, ‘organic’ cultural traditions of the variety of folk-art forms, distinguishing it from the mass-produced goods of the culture industry characterised by industrialised production and an explicit, pre-established commodity status. ‘Autonomous art’ in this schema is distinguished from both of these categories by its institutionalised independence from the ‘dictates of church, state, politics and markets alike’, though it necessarily involves a complex mediation of the fabricational logics of these other two terms.