Damien Hirst, Thomas Kincade, and Politics
By Crispin Sartwell
The work of Thomas Kincade - who died on April 6 - and Damien Hirst - whose work is currently represented in a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London - look entirely different. Kincade painted (or supervised others who painted) pretty and pointedly banal pre-modernist landscapes. Hirst creates extravaganzas of post-modern provocation. But they have evoked a common response: revulsion. They are perhaps the two most widely-hated artists of the era. For many critics and professors, Kincade and Hirst serve as emblems of all that has gone wrong with art or perhaps the world.
What people hate about Kincade and Hirst can be summed up in a single word: cash. Both men became wealthy doing their art, and neither has seemed ashamed about it. The attackers usually merely sneer at the images, which they regard as beneath contempt. But the fundamental impulse of the attack is political.
Since Marx, the politics of much of the world has been conceived along the left-right spectrum, or as a left-right duality. This opposition can be crystallized as state vs. capital. The rhetoric of the current presidential campaign relentlessly prosecutes this apparently exhaustive dichotomy: Obama against Romney will come down – rhetorically, anyway – to the relative roles of government and the private sector.
Neither Kincade nor Hirst needs a government grant. Because they are both shamelessly entrepreneurial, Kincade and Hirst code right-wing. And the American professoriate and art establishment – which are, roughly, unanimous in their politics – believe that commercialism pollutes art. This is an application of the general principle that capitalism pollutes everything it touches.
The modernist conception of art comes to us from the same period as the left-right political spectrum, and was dominant in the West from, say 1860 to 1960. But it is still fundamental to the way our culture understands what art is. It contrasts art in one direction to mere popular entertainment, which panders to the false consciousness of ‘the masses’ induced by capitalism and distracts people from their oppression (Adorno is a good representative of this view). In the other direction, modernism contrasts art to industrial mass production, in which the worker is alienated from his work and its product. Art is unalienated labor and authentic consciousness.
But both Kincade and Hirst collapse the distinctions. Both produce their works in a quasi-industrial manner. Hirst is an entertainer, Kincade a kind of interior decorator.
If Kincade is a pre-modernist and Hirst a post-modernist, their commercialism could be considered part of an attack on these modernist notions, and hence part of the meaning of their work. This doesn’t necessarily make their art good, but it makes the relation of their work to art institutions and ideologies interesting. Were I running the Tate Modern, I’d be tempted to follow up the Hirst blockbuster with a Kincade blockbuster, during which the art might be deaccessioned to tourists at reasonable prices.
In both politics and art, the left/right dilemma as between state and capital, regulatory bureaucracy and banker, authentic and commercial, “public” and “private,” presents a rather miserable choice: all you get to do is choose your oppression. Also it is luridly false to a situation in which these entities are utterly intertwined. Also it doesn’t help us figure out what is and what is not good art.
The leftish alternative to selling your art at the mall or auctioning it off to rich people is not a pure realization of an authentic vision; it is an archipelago of gigantic public and quasi-public institutions: non-profit foundations funded by the world’s richest people as emblems of their transcendence of mere commerce; government endowments; huge buildings made of marble or glass; public and private art schools and university art and art history departments. In imagination, these institutions insulate art from mere money. In reality, they are systems of simultaneous patronage and exclusion, roughly as pervasive and as ideological as the Renaissance papacy or a Stalin-style Ministry of Socialist Realism.
One thing that makes Hirst compelling is that to a Kincade-scale commercialism he adds layers of post-modern irony: it’s not clear, for example, whether his famous crystal skull is an obscene object of conspicuous consumption, a vanitas indicating that even rich people die, or a parody of the whole idea of aesthetic value. That he’s coining money might be represented as itself a piece of performance art, or even as a pointed critique of the role of money in the art world.
For such reasons, Hirst cannot be dismissed by the professoriate in quite the way Kincade can be, and even the people who hate him most find themselves returning to his work again and again trying to say why, exactly. At a minimum, Hirst sustains an extraordinary range and depth of interpretation, which keeps the interpreters in business even as they express their loathing.
And though the Tate is not a for-profit institution, it’s using the controversy around Hirst to do a bang-up business in its gift shop.
Kincade, on the other hand, painted by a kind of polling: he tried to give people what they actually enjoyed having on their walls: a pretty, hyper-traditional picture that was painted by someone (though not necessarily by Kincade). But here the leftish art world might ask itself a question: what, exactly, is wrong with that? And one might remark that, in despising the aesthetic sensibilities of most people, the denizens of that world are expressing an elitism that comports badly with other aspects of their politics.
At any rate, though the role of commercialism in art is certainly a problem, it’s not the only problem, and perhaps not at the moment the worst problem. We might also worry about the thoroughly interlocked roles of foundations and state agencies and mega-museums and universities in commissioning and funding and buying and selling art, and in telling us what art is and what it’s for and what we should enjoy and how.
Meanwhile, in both art and politics, we might want to think about how the left-right spectrum excruciatingly simplifies or just falsifies an immensely complicated situation. We might think about how mechanical it is, how repetitive, how little imagination, pleasure, profundity, originality, freedom, or openness it makes available. Politics articulated in these terms, and not the cute, mute objects of Hirst and Kincade, is the actual opposite of art.
Crispin Sartwell teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of Political Aesthetics (Cornell, 2010)
