Art Escapes Criticism, or Adorno's Museum

Author(s): Catherine Lui

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 60 (Spring, 2005), pp. 217-244
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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ARTESCAPESCRITICISM,OR
ADORNO'SMUSEUM
Catherine Lui

The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better.

-Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

AND ARRIVALS
DEPARTURES

Theodor Adorno belongs to a generation of intellectuals who did

not celebrate the pleasures provided by popular culture: as a con-
sequence, he has been identified with a kind of elitist condescen-
sion that generations of academics have worked to overthrow. Being
identified with elitism implied that one was consigned to a special
dustbin of history reserved for embarrassing relics of Leftism gone
wrong. Dancing upon the grave of the Frankfurt School may not be
as popular as it once was, but for a while, it was a jubilatory activ-
ity. Adorno himself wrote about the inescapable conflict between
elitist and amateur in the essay "Valery Proust Museum," and in it,
he shows remarkable sympathy for Proust's defense of bad taste
and superficiality. In this essay, Adorno demonstrates that Valery
and Proust represent two perspectives on art that are "diametrically
opposed, but not directed polemically against each other, nor in fact
does either betray any acquaintance of the other."1 The difference
between Valery and Proust is irremediable: to travel the abyss that
separates them is to venture onto the faultline that slices through
the landscape of modernity. Both Proust and Val ry rebelled against
the increasingly rational disposition of art objects, but like two pris-
oners plotting separate escapes from the prison house of moder-
nity's contradictions, they did so without paying any attention to
the efforts of the other.

CulturalCritique60-Spring 2005-Copyright 2005 Regents of the Universityof Minnesota

218 CATHERINE
LUI

In Adorno's essay, Valery represents the unhappy elitist, and

Proust the enthusiastic dilettante. Adorno demonstrates that for both
these critics, pleasure is the point of departure in any discussion of
art. Pleasure in art, or the pleasure of art, is inextricably linked to
museums.
The German word, "museal" [museum-like], has unpleasant overtones.
It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital rela-
tionship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preser-
vation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present.
Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic asso-
ciation. They testify to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are
hoarded in them and their market value leaves no room for the plea-
sure of looking at them. Nevertheless, that pleasure is dependent on
the existence of museums.2

"Historical respect" is opposed to "the needs of the present": the

respect of history institutionalizes and places the art object under
quarantine, at a safe distance from the tensions of contemporary
contradictions. Neutralized culture still has its pleasures. In Adomo's
Aesthetic Theory,aesthetic pleasure is inextricably linked to a promise
of happiness both evoked and renounced by the artwork, which
bears the traces of its struggle with "the instinctual conflicts of its
genesis."3 Moreover, realization of "historical respect" takes place as
a disciplining of both art object and the museum goer: the latter is
produced as a subject of the Enlightenment and a citizen of the
nation-state, while the former is psychologized as an expression of
individual creativity and agency. In this way, the museological art
object underwrites modern individuality. According to Donald Prezi-
osi, the disposition of works of art in museums participates in the
endless construction and reconstruction of a model of individual
agency-as an idealized image of secretive genius at work.4
Preziosi argues that the modern museum establishes the Kant-
ian "aesthetic" as "a separate and distinguishable realm of cognition"
and thus promotes an idealized realm of coherence and commensu-
rability between the objects themselves. If we understand the art
object in the museum as an "ideal vision" of the modern subject,
then the museum goer is taught to assume the correct posture with
regard to a continuum of models and ideals to which she may be
compared. Like Preziosi, media theorist and historian Wolfgang Ernst
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 219

emphasizes the museum's relation to other Enlightenment institu-

tions that aspired to display not only discreet objects but a new form
of interrelatedness: "The category of the universal interrelation of
things (nexus rerumuniversalis), borrowed from Enlightenment think-
ing, became temporalized in nineteenth-century museology."' Ernst
reminds us that the radical restructuring of orders of knowledge
that occurred during the eighteenth century produced the modern
museum. He argues that the museum became a medium that orga-
nized art objects to be apprehended by the new discipline known
as art history: "The specialization and compartmentalization of arts
and sciences in the late 18th century necessitated a specific memory
appropriate to the fine arts in order to keep them distinct from other
discourses. The results were art history and the modern museum
... the museum as difference engine distinguishes the new from
the old."6
In J. Pedro Lorente's Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: The First
Museums of ContemporaryArt (1800-1930), the relationship between
museums and the construction of modern subjectivity is further
complicated by his findings on the museum of contemporary art
that emerged during the nineteenth century.' Lorente notes that it
was the anxious Restoration monarch Louis XVIII who opened up
the Luxembourg Palace to the public as the Mus6e des Artistes
Vivants or Museum of Living Artists. Contemporary art museums
were established by elites eager to legitimize their own modernity
by promoting the work of living artists: Lorente adds that "the first
museums of contemporary art, like national pavilions in universal
exhibitions, were produced as a parade ground of patriotic pride."8
Other European capitals took up the challenge of the Parisian Mu-
seum of Living Artists: in the case of Great Britain, it was private
philanthropy that funded these new galleries. Rich individuals and
self-made men such as John Sheepshanks (baron of cloth manufac-
turing) and Henry Tate (sugar magnate) "offered either a purpose-
built edifice or a large collection (or occasionally both) for the
creation of a new museum, under the condition that the public pow-
ers provided the rest."9 Lorente adds that the social history of the
founding of new museums is deeply implicated in the aspirations of
the nineteenth-century nouveaux riches for social respectability.
Museum patriarchs hoped that in their acts of cultural philanthropy
220 I CATHERINE
LUI

the "discreditable origins" of an immense fortune based on the bru-

tal exploitation of the working classes and the colonies could be either
rewritten or forgotten. In both the British and French cases, the new
museum of contemporary art played a crucial role in legitimizing
monarchy and capital while producing a new sense of urbanity and
promoting an image of citizenship within the nineteenth-century city
and state. The museums of contemporary art were explicitly nation-
alist and chauvinist in their policies:

This cult coupling nationalism and the love of the new was not a par-
ticularity of the biggest capitals: it could be observed in museums of
provincial cities as well. Art being simultaneously recent and national-
or better still, local-was the favorite hobby-horse of an urban public
of cultural consumers, with a combined interest for novelty and
parochialism. Following the doctrines of influential books like Modern
Painters, by John Ruskin, lay citizens and art-critics shared an almost
religious belief in the progress of art, which implied they unashamedly
proclaimed as the climax of art history the art of their time-and that
of their own countries in particular.0o

Lorente points out that in this spirit the nineteenth-century reorga-

nization of the Grande Galerie at the Louvre, the paintings of Ital-
ian Renaissance masters were replaced by the works of recently
deceased French artists. The sanctum sanctorum had been violated.
Perhaps this violation is what Valdry deplores when he describes
the overabundance of treasures at the Louvre, arranged in what is
for him a chaotic jumble that seemed designed to produce disori-
entation and confusion in the sensitive viewer or connoisseur.
According to Val"ry, the art objects in the Louvre can no longer
exist in "proper relation to each other" because their mother, archi-
tecture, is dead." Since they can no longer have an organic and nat-
ural relationship to one another, the art object is reduced to an object
of education and information. The "progress of art" has produced
a kind of homogenization and democratization that the true art lover
will have to reject. What Valhry is nostalgic for is the space to which
the art object belonged: the architecture of that space allegorizes the
feudal genealogy where treasures stayed in the family. In the mod-
ern museum, the forced intimacy of art objects ancient and modern
destroys their singularity by neutralizing their capacity for destruc-
tion. "The more beautiful a picture is, the more it is distinct from
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 221

all others.... This picture, one sometimes says, kills the ones around
it." If this is forgotten, Valery warns, the heritage of art that museums
were meant to conserve will be destroyed."12 His ruined enjoyment
is based on his "specialization" or his capacity for distinguishing
one particular form of beauty that might be fatal to all others.
If for Valery, looking at art is the model of an incommensurable
experience whose pleasure lies in the isolation of a dangerous and
incomparable beauty, Proust's description of looking at art recog-
nizes its fungibility with regard to other experiences of the modern
city. In fact, as Adorno points out in his reading of Proust, the
museum exists as an associative space in which aesthetic experience,
contemporary art, and everyday life are temporarily conjoined. The
sky seen through the glass dome of the Gare St.-Lazare is compared
with certain skies painted by Mantegna or Veronese: the association
of these two skies is made possible by an unnamed object in the
novel-the Monet paintings of the Gare St.-Lazare that Proust loved.
Of the glass ceiling that was built on iron scaffolding over the Gare
St.-Lazare he writes,

Over a sprawling city it stretched its wide, wasted heaven full of omi-
nous dramas. Certain skies of Mantegna or Veronese are as modern,
almost Parisian--under such a vaulting sky only terrible and solemn
things can happen, the departure of a train or the raising of a cross.13

To Adorno, the museum and the train station are both associated
with death, but death managed in a modernized and rationalized
way. In these spaces, the subject is submitted to chronological order
and timetables that, in the first case, define the rationalization and
historicization of the art work that Valery deplores, while, in the sec-
ond, she is interpellated as a passenger whose individual and par-
ticular journey is determined by railroad schedule.14 Both museum
and train station are also places inhabited by the nineteenth-century
crowd. The crowd is also encrypted in Proust's descriptions of the
"museal" art object and the train station. Proust was certainly not
alone in his love of the Monet paintings; he gave himself to their
popularity. According to Lorente, "public displays of contemporary
art enjoyed the highest success amongst lay citizens. That popular-
ity is difficult to imagine nowadays, because our museums of con-
temporary art rather intimidate popular crowds .... Indeed, before
222 I CATHERINE
LUI

the popularization of cinemas, public displays of the latest art were

one of the most highly attended urban amenities."'"
The museum and the train station were disciplinary sites where
the modern subject had to orient herself with regard to the intimate
stranger, to long-distance travel, to leisure time, and to the urban
crowd seeking distractions and temporary escape from the infernal
rhythms of working life. From Proust's point of view, the traveler
has to accept the tragic potentiality of this new temporality. After
hearing from Swann about the remarkable beauty of the little Persian-
Norman church at Balbec, Marcel studies the train schedule from
Paris to Normandy, investing the one twenty-two train from the
Gare St.-Lazare with the power to cut a groove and mark the very
contours of his world.16 The miraculous quality of train travel has
less to do with the distance covered than with the radical difference
it can call up. For Proust, the rail lines connect two distinct indi-
vidualities that are the place names one can read at the train sta-
tion: these names are separate from the cities they serve insofar as
they are containers of the essence of the place. Adorno points out
that it is following the paragraph about the one twenty-two to Balbec
that Proust's own itinerary takes us into the museum by drawing
an analogy between the placards of train stations and the signage
of museums.
Proust writes "terrible and solemn things" can happen under
skies perceived through the immense glass rooftops of the Gare St.-
Lazare.17 Between the train station and the traveler's experience lies
the association between the skies in the paintings of Mantegna and
Veronese and the skies perceived through the modern iron frame
and glass ceiling of the Gare St.-Lazare, the skies of "Parisian moder-
nity": in this network of associations appears the concept of tragic
modernity, a crystal image or prism in which what is made visible
is Monet's painting. Beneath the glass ceiling of the train station,
Marcel takes leave of his mother, and this terrible event gives him
an intimation of a future when the woman whom he adored would
become a stranger to him.'s The radical particularity of Marcel's suf-
fering appears as one moment in a series of associations between
place names, timetables, paintings, museums, and train stations.
According to Adorno, Valdry mourns the artwork reduced to
relic because he clings to a craftsmanlike relationship to writing. In
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 223

work, he retreats into the "studio" where he can mourn the loss of
art's immediacy with regard to life: he takes refuge in the concept
and refuses to attribute to poetic language any representational qual-
ities. Pure aesthetic experience is guaranteed by such a retreat. For
Proust, there is a pleasure particular to the museum as a space for
viewing art. A masterpiece can only be properly viewed in a mu-
seum, and not in a collector's home where one might be dining. The
hostess will have been too concerned with doing research about re-
constituting (through interior decor) the artwork's original milieu.
For Proust, only the museum's austerity can transport us into the
"espaces interieurs" into which the artist disappears, "s'abstrait" or
abstracts himself in order to create the art object. In fact, it is the
public gallery that best evokes the artist's ability to disappear into his
work. The self-abstraction, or self-subtraction, that defines Valery's
particular understanding of poetic modernism that he inherited from
Mallarme is spatialized by Proust's apprehension of museum space
as allegorical of the artist's disappearance act. As Didier Maleuvre
puts it,

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The museum represents the absence of a place .... Proust's critique

avoids the trapof a second-ordercontextualismby saying that the art-
work only belongs to the museum because the museum represents the
least amount of context: artworks belong to museums because there
they are most free from belonging.19

Maleuvre also points out the logical consequences of Valery's rejec-

tion of museums: if the art object is deprived of its original context,
it loses its distinctive power. This implies that the art object itself is
"subsumable" as one element among others of contextual ground-
ing. If Valery plays on the singular pathos of orphaned art objects,
abandoned to places they do not belong, Proust situates Marcel's
painful separation from his mother in the midst of a teeming train
platform and its infernal crowd of Benjaminian and Baudelairean
associations. Proust's view takes in the historical landscape that Don-
ald Preziosi and J. Pedro Lorente lay out for us. As Adorno pointed
out, Proust's "mode of perception" endows him with an ability to
perceive "history as landscape": in fact, for him names are as vivid
as individuals.20
Just as we learn how to be in the city from our visits to the
museum, we learn how to be in relationship with others by travel-
ing on the train and identifying with the individuality of places.
Adorno ends his essay with the following sentence: "In the Jeu de
Paume, where the "Gare St.-Lazare" now hangs, Proust's Elstir and
Valery's D6gas live peacefully next to each other in discrete sepa-
ration."21 It is, of course, a great historical irony that Monet's Gare
St.-Lazarehangs today at the Musee d'Orsay, a former train station.
The abandoned station was remade into a museum by architect Gae
Aulenti to house the Impressionist works that once hung in the Jeu
de Paume, the handball courts where the Third Estate declared the
founding of the National Assembly in 1789.22 Aestheticization of his-
tory takes place as urban renewal.

ART LOVER

Museums are ambiguous and tragedy-bound features of the land-

scape of urban modernity where difference, distance, and names are
 ARTESCAPES
CRITICISM
225

displayed in such a way that the museum goer can recognize in

them the spatialization of his own experiences of temporality and
everyday life. Proust's understanding of the novelistic enterprise
was deeply informed by its history as an optic through which the
bourgeoisie could explore new forms of being in the world and being
in history that had everything to do with learning how to be around
art.23
Proust is able to liberate himself from the fetishism of art objects
as such; he is not invested in art for art's sake or other homilies re-
peated by outraged snobs. For him, art has lost its immediacy to life
only because it exceeds its aesthetic qualities. In this way, novelistic
language overturns hierarchies of taste and order and is related, as
Bakhtin insisted, to linguistic reversals of the carnival and the feast:
"Proust the novelist, virtually begins where Valery the poet, stopped-
with the afterlife of works of art."24And what follows is Adorno's
extraordinary analysis of Proust's attitude of "admiring consumer-
ism" that allows him to anticipate the attempted negation of his own
critique of the culture industry. Adorno sees in Proust the unleash-
ing of hyperbolic admiration or fandom as an infernally productive
and authentically innovative position with regard to the commodi-
fication of culture.

For Proust's primary relationship to art is the precise opposite of that

of the expert and producer. He is first of all an admiring consumer, an
amateur, inclined to that effusive and for artists highly suspect awe
before works that characterizes only those separated from them as
though by an abyss. One could almost say that his genius consisted
not least of all in assuming this attitude . . . so completely and accu-
rately that it became a new type of productivity, and the power of
inner and outer contemplation, thus intensified, turned into recollec-
tion, involuntary memory. The amateur is incomparably more com-
fortable in the museum than is the expert. Val ry feels himself at home
in the studio; Proust strolls through an exhibition. There is something
extraterritorial about his relation to art and many of his false judg-
ments, as in questions of music display traces of the dilettante to the
end.25

Although Adorno recognizes the significance of Proust's enthusias-

tic dilettantism and the value of his bad taste or "false judgments"
(at least in music), he does not suggest that we can dismiss Valdry's
226 I CATHERINE
LUI

condemnation of the museum's "barbarity" and his pleas on behalf

of the art object. In contrast to Valery's quixotic campaign against
museums, Adorno condemns Proust for a capacity for adaptation to
the inevitable. Adorno points to complementary blind spots in both
Valery's and Proust's positions, which exist in homeopathic sym-
pathy with each other:

For it is only in museums, where paintings are offered for contem-

plation as ends in themselves, that they become as absolute as Valery
desired, and he shrinks back in terror from the realization of his dream.
Proust knows the cure for this. In a sense works of art return home
when they become elements of the observer's subjective stream of
consciousness.26

It is only by injecting a small amount of superficiality and dilettan-

tishness into the "deadly seriousness" with which we must treat
both world and art that we can arrive at a rigorous relationship to
aesthetic experience. Finally, Adorno writes, "Works of art can fully
embody the promessede bonheuronly when they have been uprooted
from their native soil and have set along the path to their own de-
struction"27Nothing could be more dangerous and more threatening
to the singularity of the art object than the commodity: hence the
exhilarating fearlessness of those art objects that recklessly mimic the
high production values and diabolical attractiveness of commodities.
The assertion of art for art's sake was a form of modernism that
was apotheosized in the Cold War programs of American cultural
institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art.28Valdry's position
on art's objective autonomy from history as well as social and eco-
nomic forces has also become institutionalized wisdom. More re-
cently, however, when confronting declines in public funding and
public attendance, there has been an acknowledgment that the "elit-
ist" attitude consigns art and museums to a gilded obsolescence in
the age of the spectacle. Elitism has become the ground of critique
against the academy as well as the museum.29 Proust can hardly be
considered the populist here, but his radical subjectivism has been
appropriated by educational initiatives and community outreach in
the hope of "empowering" the amateur, which for museum educa-
tion departments entails integrating new communities of museum
goers into its constituency.30 One could say in the perpetual crisis of
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 227

the museum, its contemporary incarnations have tried to resolve the

contradictory purposes into which it was born as indoctrination by
entertainment.31
Museums participate inevitably and fatefully in the "dialectic of
enlightenment." By rationalizing and organizing art objects, muse-
ums distinguish the arts from the sciences while providing spaces
for modern and urban recreation. On the one hand, the subject of
modernity must learn to experience the correct amount of reverence
with regard to a cultural history increasingly institutionalized and
rationalized along the lines of mnemotechnics and its various media.
On the other hand, he or she must also assume the burden of an
individuality formed along the lines of a radical subjectivism. Ratio-
nalization and individuation produce specific forms of backlash or
reaction. If Max Weber has shown that capitalism is dependent on
the internalization of a certain disposition with regard to both renun-
ciation and experience, Freud took very seriously the price that this
vexed and difficult process exacted upon psychic life. He identified
a wellspring of "Unbehagen" or discontent and discomfiture that was
produced by the exigencies of "Kultur," but, in so doing, he dem-
onstrated that reactions against "Kultur" or civilization often took
the form of a regressive group psychology. In 1930, the year Freud
published Das Unbehagen in der Kultur or Civilization and its Discon-
tents, the reactionary movements were gaining momentum in Ger-
many by speaking to the discontentment of a large part of the
population against its liberal and parliamentarian government. Adorno
shared Freud's critical view of Massenpsychologie:the regressive aspect
of popular culture would dominate Adorno's study of the culture
industry, with its impoverished pleasures and cynical promises of
happiness.

ELITISMIN THEORY

In the United States, the accusation of elitism has a special reso-

nance. It echoes a powerful refrain in the language of insurgency
dating from the heyday of the Populist movement of the 1890s, when
the label was reserved for the enemy in an American-style class
war that eventually gave birth to radical, governmentally imposed
228 j CATHERINELUI

reforms on robber-baron capitalism. Whereas the original Populists

of the People's Party denounced the economic oligarchs of the East
Coast, in recent years, culture has become the battleground upon
which a self-styled right-wing insurgency wanted to wage war
against liberals and their effete tastes. The Populist movement was
an authentic revolt of small farmers and Midwestern laborers against
the oligarchs and was the most successful attempt to establish a
third party in American history. The Populist movement preached
rebellion against the elites of the East Coast: it was made up of self-
styled "producers," farmers and laborers of the Midwest who were
saddled with debt and struggling to survive during the economic
crises of the 1890s.32In St. Louis, the People's Party gathered in 1892
to battle the corruption of the "moneyed aristocracy" or the venal
plutocrats who were sapping the economic and moral strength of
"rural and urban labor alike."33 Membership in the People's Party
was based less on one's actual economic standing than on one's
moral and political probity: this was class consciousness with an
American and Evangelical twist. The producers of the Midwest lay
claim to higher moral ground than the corrupt East Coasters.
William Jennings Bryan, the Christian fundamentalist from Ne-
braska, became the presidential candidate upon whom the progres-
sive insurgency pinned its ardent hopes for change. Bryan lost the
election, but the energy of Populist insurgency only swelled into the
twentieth century, eventually sweeping Franklin Delano Roosevelt
into office.
In the 1980s and 1990s, backlash politics staged a revolt on behalf
of the people against "elitism" by reinvoking the moral outrage of
the People's Party, but all the issues upon which they focused were
cultural rather than economic affronts to the Moral and Silent Major-
ity. The Right spoke in the incendiary language of outraged moral
rectitude calculated to resonate with the average American or the
common people, who were more often than not, white, working
class, and struggling. As Thomas Frank has shown, "elitism" was used
to describe dissent with regard to what he calls "market popu-
lism"-a volatile cocktail of free-market capitalism and antigovern-
ment libertarianism. Elitists could be anyone from critics who did
not believe that the stock market would set us free to trade union-
ists and "Keynesians,"-or worse yet, they could be liberals who
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 229

believed in the integrity of democratic institutions such as public

education but did not believe in Jesus Christ.34
In academia, the enemy of the common people's popular enjoy-
ments was, more often than not, Theodor Adorno. Adorno bashing
seemed to have become the preferred way in which the art critic or
philosopher could reassure an expanded readership that he was not
a coddled snob. Frank has shown that recent revolts against elitism
dress themselves up in the revolutionary outrage of Populist in-
surgencies past: Ann Coulter and David Brooks have appropriated
the jargon of authenticity in their pseudoheroic forays against the
supposed corruption of the liberal elites.35 The tactics of reactionary
politics make use of the language of insurgency in order to ventril-
oquize the "voice of the people." The appropriation of revolution-
ary rhetoric by the forces of reaction is described in Karl Marx's tour
de force of political journalism, The Eighteenth Brumaireof Louis Bona-
parte. Marx analyzes this counterrevolutionary strategy of usurpa-
tion by showing how Napoleon Bonaparte's power-hungry nephew,
Louis Bonaparte, seized power after the revolution of 1848.36
Through a combination of rabble rousing, illegal parliamen-
tarism, and sheer terror, he seized power for himself in 1852. The
French revolutionaries of 1848 had gotten rid of the Restoration mon-
archs only to see their newly minted government and National As-
sembly usurped by a strongman opportunist who claimed to have
a direct connection to the "people." Marx's critique here was directed
both at Louis Bonaparte's opportunism and at the blindness of bour-
geois parliamentarians who were so busy storming from victory to
victory that they did not notice that the National Assembly along
with universal suffrage were conjured away before their very eyes.
When Ronald Reagan swept to power in 1980, the Democratic Party
and the American New Left were stunned to discover that the Right
had successfully appealed to the white working class by appropri-
ating the language of populism and using it against a liberal agenda.
Even as Ronald Reagan was undoing the very moorings of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, he professed in his honey-voiced
tones his deepest admiration for his predecessor. Using culture to
mobilize the so-called Moral Majority, the right wing succeeded in
rallying the working class to its side in wars over culture and val-
ues. Again and again, the liberal Left allowed itself to be waylaid
230 I CATHERINE
LUI

by battles increasingly defined by their conservative opponents. By

neglecting the economic issues that were the core of the Populist move-
ment, the American Left ceded its base of support to the Republican
Party, which conjured up the phantom menace of elitism whenever
it needed to cement its consensus. The Right was engaged upon a
relentless campaign of cultural criticism that threw its adversaries
increasingly off balance.
Reinhart Koselleck's genealogy of criticism as an Enlightenment
institution is a trenchant critique of the institution of criticism itself:
the conclusions he draws lead to an affirmation of the liberal and en-
lightened state and casts in stark relief the danger of cultural criticism
that takes the moral high ground. For Koselleck, the institution of
criticism denies its own compromised and complicitous status with
regard to the state. Koselleck puts this complicated situation best:

Just as the Masons, by virtue of the secret, kept aloof from the State,
initially in order to elude its influence but later in order, through that
very separation, to occupy the State seemingly non-politically, so crit-
icism initially kept aloof from the State so that later, through that very
separation it could, seemingly neutral, extend its reach to the State and
subject it to its judgment. Criticism, as we shall see, became the vic-
tim of its ostensible neutrality; it turned into hypocrisy.37

The subject of absolutism accepted submission to the state in order

to be protected from the threat of Civil War, only to reemerge as
the citizen who would begin to question the legitimacy of all insti-
tutions. Hobbes's subject is metamorphosed into Rousseau's critic,
and it is here that Koselleck finds the ground of criticism most shaky,
for it is on the basis of a personal, interior, higher order of morality
and justice that the citizen dissents and demands a relegitimization
of all categories. That higher moral order is generally associated with
religious experience, or what has been called "the higher Father,"
whose counsel and will trumps all political institutions and actual-
ities. It is on the grounds of a secret genealogy of criticism that Kosel-
leck builds his critique of a political aberration that seeks to legitimize
itself and its own judgments by declaring a state of emergency in which
the moral prerogative of rule would devolve to the delegitimators. When
critics on both Left and Right skirmish to take the moral high ground
in political debates, politics suffers: delegitimization of democratic
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 231

institutions of dissent is the eventual outcome of such strategies of

engagement.
During the eighties, hypnotized by the success of going for the
moral high ground, Leftists in the academy began to cast its own
enemy within: "elitism" emerged as one of the most damning crit-
icisms. In the world of museums, elitism became identified with
modernism itself and museums were criticized by a new generation
of art critics who found themselves armed with "theory" or some-
times "poststructuralist theory" or "postmodernist theory." Douglas
Crimp was among the most prominent of these critics: in trying to
demonstrate the ways the curatorial practices of museums contin-
ued to propagate oppressive modernist myths, he wanted to heal
the famous divide between art and life. In his deft historiography
of the criticism of museums, Didier Maleuvre has shown that the
modern museum has had to face such charges from its very birth
in the violence of the French Revolution.38 The very existence of a
museum in which are housed the treasures of a deposed ancien
regime betrays the ruin of art itself. For Crimp, however, "post-
modernist practice" and AIDS activism were presented as a critical
antidote to the steady institutionalization of an exhausted aesthetic.39
In this vision of intellectual history, theory arrives like a messianic
force that will liberate the art critic from the contradictory demands
of contemporary practices and academic disciplinarity. In addition,
theory would abolish the difference between high and low cultures,
between art and politics, between art and life. Crimp writes,

It is as if the creative powers of modernism had migrated into theory

and come to full self-consciousness in the poststructuralist text-the
owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the fall of dusk. Poststruc-
turalism offers a theory of modernism characterized by Nachtrdglichkeit,
both in the psychoanalytic and historical sense.40

For Crimp, the "poststructuralist text" arrives like the Absolute

Master when the winged owl of Minerva takes flight. Jean-Michel
Rabat6's The Future of Theory takes a rather sanguine and therapeu-
tic view of this kind of overinvestment in the power of theory: he
does so by analyzing its haunting by Hegel. For Rabat6, theory in
the United States inspires an excessive devotion: it hystericizes phi-
losophy, calling us to confront the challenge that Hegel threw down
232 I CATHERINE
LUI

in Phenomenologyof Spirit regarding the thinker's relationship to Ab-

solute Knowledge.41
In her critique of museological practices, Abigail Solomon-Godeau
draws conclusions that are dependent upon criticism's "aloofness"
or neutrality: legitimacy devolves only to the critic, and the post-
modern, feminist critic at that. Her indictment of the Museum of
Modern Art's photography department and of John Swarowski for
canonizing Eugene Atget's work as art photography resounds with
passionate outrage:

Specifically, the increased emphasis on blockbuster exhibitions, the

structural changes in museum financing, the new importance of cor-
porate funding in lieu of individual private support, all contributed to
a heightenedneed to createan artisticstarsystem.A canonicalfigure,
in addition to everything else, was now expected to generate a certain
box office.42

What Solomon-Godeau identified in 1986 as the museum's designs

upon blockbuster shows is even more evident today. In such an envi-
ronment, criticism has become unmoored from its "normal" posi-
tion as a mediator between the "frenzied pluralism" of the market
and the sacralizing rituals of the museum.

[T]he art critic normally functions as a kind of intermediary between

the frenzied pluralism of the marketplace and the sacralized judgment
seat that is the museum. Recently, however, even this mediating
process has been bypassed; artists such as Julian Schnabel, to take one
particularly egregious example, have been propelled from obscurity to
the pantheon without one single serious critical text ever having been
produced in support of their work.43

Criticism was once the site of rational and disinterested judgment,

but the critic is now reduced to playing the servant to both market
and museum. What emerges in the ruins of criticism is the nimbus
of the art star. As a way out of the contradictions of art criticism
and museological practices, Solomon-Godeau describes a process of
"putting into question traditional conceptions of political correct-
ness, of determinate and fixed positions of address, or exhortative
and didactic modes of critique." This has been "exclusively the pro-
ject of feminism and a part of the Left."44Such a statement, while
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 233

explicitly antididactic, is primarily proscriptive. Nostalgia for private

philanthropy casts Solomon-Godeau and John Swarowski in a strange
battle: the latter is the futurist and the populist (if even in a reac-
tionary way), the former the traditionalist, still holding on to an idea
of critic as mediating visionary.
Solomon-Godeau's own rhetoric breaks down at crucial mo-
ments and leaves us with a few shiny kernels of mystification. The
last essay of Photography at the Dock ends in the following way:

To the extent that photography has been a particularly effective mas-

ter's tool, it is incumbent upon feminist art practice to try to use it in
different-critical-ways. As a feminist and a critic, wearing, in this
instance, a curatorial hat, I would less wish to assert a dubious author-
ity than to affirm a collective solidarity with the project of claiming
the camera for more humanly satisfying ends.45

Reclaiming the camera for "more humanly satisfying ends" is a sen-

timental and irreproachable gesture, and here she would seem to be
in agreement with Dave Hickey, whose own writing is explicitly
antiauthoritarian and whose work has had as its goal the destruc-
tion of institutionalized wisdom and stultifying curatorial practices.
Of humanness, Hickey writes,
Human art and language (as opposed to institutional art and language)
always cite the exception, and it was Norman Rockwell's great gift to
see that life in twentieth-century America, though far from perfect, has
been exceptional in the extreme.46

But this is a critical odd couple, even less compatible at first glance
than Valery and Proust. Solomon-Godeau's critique of MOMA and
Swarowski is based upon her intellectual/critical capacity to see the
conservative museological practices for what they are: attempts to
monopolize the reception and understanding of Atget's photography
as "art photography," i.e., products of artistic genius. Hickey's rumi-
nations on Rockwell arise from a childhood memory of accom-
panying his father to a jam session in post-World War II suburban
Dallas and his various attempts at describing the beauty of art and
life reconciled on that exceptional afternoon. Solomon-Godeau's crit-
icism of patriarchy and Hickey's criticism of institutionality depend
on restoring the dignity of human experience: they are not so far
apart after all.
234 CATHERINELUI

BACKLASHES

High Noon is Dave Hickey's favorite image of heroic confrontation:

in his showdown, he is the righteous cowboy, taking down the high-
brow mandarinism of theory-addled, bean-counting academics and
curators. His plea for the legitimacy of aesthetic pleasure was made
on behalf of the studio practice of artists, but what he defended with
great fervor against the career bureaucrats and party apparatchiks
of "theory" was nothing more than the democratizing powers of
money itself. His writing, with its populist twang, its Baroque in-
flections, its storyteller's seductions, is celebrated by those looking
for a homegrown antidote to fancy-pants theorizing. All the essays
in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy are attacks on the figure
of the bureaucrat, the bean counter, who Hickey describes as the
very incarnation of the demonic-all-powerful, lazy, deceitful, hys-
terical, puerile, punitive, useless, but also pretentious, condescend-
ing, ignorant, and perverse. What cuts through the haze of the
bureaucrat's fog of war against creativity? Money. Culture vultures
visiting Las Vegas were hopelessly disoriented by the stunning
absence of all forms of distinction produced by cultural capital. Only
money talked and walked in the desert city that had abjured taste
in the name of only two rules, "1) Post the odds, 2) Treat everyone
the same. Just as one might in a democracy!"47 In an interview with
zing magazine in 2000, Hickey tells the history of art and theory's
unfortunate relationship in the following manner:

And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging muse-
ums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in
the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art
world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have
curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureau-
cracy-you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a
non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really
destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because
like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically
at the destruction of sibling society-the society of contemporaries.48

Hickey's authentic animosity to bureaucracy is enormously appeal-

ing. His timing is perfect: he takes a strategic position in the culture
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 235

wars by defending marketplace values against the putative corrup-

tion of university and museum, the twin towers of liberal elitism
gone mad. Who could possibly argue for the managed dissemina-
tion of aesthetic theory? Indeed as incarnations of the spirit of
bureaucracy itself, university and museum appear on the range as
the twisted enemies of the righteous dynamism of both democracy
and the art market.49 Just as the original Populists described the
exploiting class as a parasitic group of oligarchs living off the labor
of the "producers," Hickey's art professors and curators are a bunch
of insecure charlatans, fending off with tweedy elbow Hickey's
attempts to engage them on the merits of TristramShandy while run-
ning to suckle at the teats of an ever-bountiful bureaucracy, bloated
by an infusion of hard-earned, public dollars. His eloquent condem-
nation of museum curators and tenured professors as petty tyrants
of aesthetic experience and social justice are underwritten by his
inimitable outsider's innocence. Public funds and bureaucracy pro-
duce not only generations of lazy welfare queens but, in Hickey's
world, also sunder art from life itself by supporting a bevy of spoiled,
tenured professors with sweaty hands extended for their yearly
merit raises.50 Hickey makes an impassioned plea for the "frenzied
pluralism" of the market as a form of frontier justice against the
enemies of creativity itself.
For Hickey, museums ignore the experience of life and the judg-
ment of the market; for Solomon-Godeau, they are slaves to it. And
yet both critics share a desire for reconciliation and elevation in art
through something called humanness. Hegel called this kind of aes-
thetic elevation "spiritualization" and traced in its dialectical move-
ment a sign of the end of art itself. For Hegel, Romantic art remains
estranged from and indifferent to sensuous immediacy: this has the
unexpected effect of liberating the aesthetic. Everyday objects are
susceptible to aestheticization because the locus of intensity has been
displaced from the material nature of art to the inner experience of
the aesthetic. So Hickey's love of custom cars actually illustrates
Hegel's art history: in classical art, the focus is on the objective mate-
riality of the thing as sensuous manifestation of the immutable dis-
tinction of the gods. In Romantic art, it is the intensity of individual
experience and the inadequacy of external forms that creates aes-
thetic effects."5
236 I CATHERINE
LUI

If both Solomon-Godeau and Hickey actually yearn for the re-

investment of humanness and dignity in the experience of art, it is
Adorno who occupies, from beyond the grave, an authentically dis-
senting position with regard to "elevation." About Kafka, he writes,
"Instead of human dignity, the supreme bourgeois concept, there
emerges in him [Kafka] the salutary recollection of the similarity
between man and animal."52 How does Kafka remember our bes-
tiality? Kafka's writing endlessly restages the tragicomic agon of
heroic individualism facing down an inscrutable, arbitrary, and mas-
sive bureaucracy.53In Kafka's narratives, the individual demand for
justice or truth degenerates into senselessness. While feminist and
populist rage against the infernal museum in the name of a better
life and better art, the position of the individual and the outsider is
endowed with all the imaginary dignity of fairytale protagonists.
Kafka's fiction denies this to his powerless heroes, which is why, in
his portrait of bureaucracy, "It is not the powerful, but the impo-
tent who appear superfluous."54

HAVINGFUN

In the United States, the demand for the reconciliation of art and
life takes place as a demand for a democratization of pleasures.
Richard Shusterman's essay in the catalogue of the Walker Art Cen-
ter's Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures exhibition is a call to
arms in the very name of pleasure. This exhibit, organized by Phil-
ippe Vergne, featured a pragmatic but ambivalent affirmation of Guy
Debord's society of the spectacle as a space of relentless and end-
less entertainment. If for Debord the spectacle is the apotheosis of
the commodity form, entertainment is its ubiquitous, inescapable,
and miniaturized progeny. Vergne abjured the use of the term
spectaclefor the more banal term entertainmentin order to avoid asso-
ciations with the Situationists' political ambitions. From Dara Birn-
baum to Jeff Koons, from Martin Kippenberger to Damian Hirst,
from Dan Graham to Leigh Bowery, the exhibit provided a dark and
dizzying vision of contemporary art's para-entertainment values.
Vergne's conversation with Olekumi Ilesanmi published in the exhi-
bition catalogue takes place in the Rainforest Cafe at the Mall of
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 237

America. In it, they reflect on art, Minneapolis, the artist formerly

and once again known as Prince, and the broken dreams of the
avant-garde.55
Shusterman's essay hopes to participate in this provocative con-
versation about both art object and the commodity: the mimicry of
the language of advertising promoting the transgressive and addic-
tive pleasures of cigarettes lets us in on the complicity between the
author and the culture industry as Shusterman exercises his hip-
hop-powered agency and "appropriates" Madison Avenue's creative
genius.56 Shusterman's "Come Back to Pleasure" offers nothing less
than the redemption of visual pleasure for the masses. Shusterman
blames the near death of aesthetic pleasure on almost "two centuries
of modernity's sacralization of art." He offers us his philosophical
training as ammunition against the enemy of unmediated aesthetic
experience--Hegel and his dialectic:
However different the aesthetic philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer,
Adornoand Danto,what they all share,besides their antihedonism,is
a common heritage in Hegel. It was Hegel's ambitiously metaphysical
idealism that displaced the classical connection of art and pleasure.
Founding the fatal modern tradition that makes fun the enemy of true
art, Hegel instead subordinated art's role to the quest for spiritual truth.
This quest, he argued, leads us beyond art to the higher realm of reli-
gion but ultimately culminates in the spiritual pinnacle of philosophy.57

For Shusterman, there is no difference between commodified and

aesthetic/sensual pleasure. He argues for the consideration of dif-
ferent kinds of enjoyment but refuses the most important distinc-
tion that can be made. Shusterman may counter that this is because
he does not want to ascribe to a hierarchy of pleasures promoted
by the elitist crypto-Hegelian gang, but like Dave Hickey, Shuster-
man joins his voice to that of the market populists who want us to
enjoy popular pleasures most: the condemnation of hierarchy is their
exhortation to enjoy the pleasures that can be most easily purchased.
Shusterman uncritically affirms the notion of "fun" because fun is
a uniquely American, democratic, and mass-produced notion of
enjoyment that is by definition accessible to everyone. In his essay
on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Adorno describes the ratio-
nalization of sexual pleasure as being founded on "having fun" with
an equally "fun-loving" partner.58In proposing to put the "fun" back
238 CATHERINELUI

in art, Shusterman has to perform the ritual sacrifice of noncon-

formists who are just no fun. Not only are they not fun, they have
prevented us from having fun ourselves. For Adorno, the intellec-
tual 6migre had to eradicate himself in order to survive in the relent-
less sunniness of 1940s Southern California: in Shusterman's case,
he wants to go after the intellectual in order to receive an invita-
tion to the Rainforest Cafe. Shusterman's dismissal of "the fatal
modern tradition" is reassuring in a way that flatters our most re-
gressive, group-psychological tendencies. Shusterman's work has
been distinguished by a commitment to the reconciliation of aes-
thetic experience and an expanded notion of philosophical activity
and democratic participation. John Dewey's claims for politics and
art are crucial to Shusterman's argument for the connectedness of
aesthetic experience and political participation, so it is all the more
surprising that he cannot resist Hegel bashing in the name of fun.59
Fun is about survival and self-preservation: it is focused only
on objects and is without any relationship to transgression, extrem-
ity, or even other people, except in group-psychological formations.
While Adorno gives Huxley credit for anticipating the American-
ization of sex, he also insists on the insufficiency of Huxley's cri-
tique because of its dependency on the category of the individual.
Fun is the miniaturization not just of pleasure but of experience in
general. Adorno was trying to redeem something of the notion of
pleasure in the age of its mass and mechanical reproducibility. But
Shusterman makes the same claim: instead of the culture industry,
however, he has discovered that it is actually idealist philosophy
that neglects and flattens out our notions of sensuality and pleasure.
In the Aesthetics, Hegel writes,

The sensuous aspect of a work of art, in comparison with the imme-

diate existenceof things in nature,is elevated to a pure appearance,
and the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensu-
ousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but despite its
sensuousness,it is no longer a purely materialexistent either, like
stones, plants, and organic life.60

A careful consideration of this and other passages in Hegel would

prove that the philosopher does not subordinate art to philosophy;
he tries to deduce what it is about the art object that makes it
 ART ESCAPESCRITICISM 239

radically different from both thought and immediate existence. What

Hegel introduces in his Aesthetics is an account of art as one part
of a larger culture steeped in history and riven by contradictions:
the space that art occupies in this larger culture is decidedly non-
empirical. The sensuality of the art object vibrates between "imme-
diate sensuousness" and "ideal thought," evoking the relationship
between the two but refusing to reconcile with or subordinate itself
to either. Maleuvre writes, "That the work of art is an expression of
the intellect seeking to be one with the sensuous does not mean that
it achieves such fusion. The work of art does not merely dwell in
being, in the sensate, but raises it to a reflective level."61
Finally, Shusterman's account of pleasure is based on a notion
of self-improvement and "profit": aesthetic pleasure can "intensify
our active concentration on the work, thus enhancing our percep-
tion and understanding."62 In the end, Shusterman instrumentalizes
aesthetic pleasure even as he appears to be rescuing it from "trivi-
alization" in the hands of Hegelian pessimism. For Shusterman, aes-
thetic experience is a concentration enhancer, a kind of Viagra for
the mind: this is why he relies in the end on evolutionary biology
to prove the importance of pleasure in the functioning of the human
brain. By implicitly accepting enhancement and profit as final val-
ues, Shusterman offers philosophy up as a slave to actuality. This
is, and has been, the problem with pragmatism. Few of Shuster-
man's readers will bother to prosecute him for misreading Hegel;
they will trust him to have given a fair representation of the philoso-
pher's thinking. His distortion of philosophy is an apologia for
thinking, and his critical stance cannot actually account for the aes-
thetic experience of viewing the art in the Let's Entertain exhibition.
I would argue that the work of Dara Birnbaum, Martin Kippen-
berger, or Mike Kelley should not and cannot be reducible to "fun,"
although it revels in its flirtation with the culture industry and its
sometimes cuddly, sometimes shiny supplements. In this sense, con-
temporary art is able to produce an experience of the "new" as
described by Adorno:

The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction with its promise
of undiminished plenitude. Baudelaire's poetry was the first to codify
that, in the midst of the fully developed commodity society, art can
240 1 CATHERINE
LUI

ignore this tendency only at the price of its own powerlessness....

Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only
thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become elo-
quent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous.63

Contemporary art mimes the "hardened and the alienated" not in

order to "entertain." It has to take a risk with regard to commodi-
ties and spectacle, or else it becomes "innocuous." Although Crimp,
Solomon-Godeau, Hickey, and Shusterman seem to occupy extraor-
dinarily different positions with regard to both museum and aes-
thetic, there is a deep consensus here: all of these critics want the
gap between art and life to be closed, and all propose that hierar-
chies of judgment should be overturned in favor of a more plural-
istic and democratic order. Whether they make their pleas in the name
of poststructuralism, feminism, populism, or pleasure, each one seems
assured of his or her righteous oppositionality to an enemy who is
interfering with aesthetic pleasure. Adorno thought that Hegel's
prophecy about the end of art was actually a cynical confirmation
of the status quo. Spiritualization does indeed contribute to the de-
struction of art: Shusterman was correct about that aspect of Hegel.
According to Adorno however,

Spiritualization becomes a counterforce to the gypsy wagon of wan-

dering actors and musicians, the socially outcast. Yet however deep
the compulsionmay lie that art divest itself of every trace of being a
show, of its ancient deceitfulness in society, art no longer exists when
that element has been totally eradicatedand yet it is unable to pro-
vide any protectedarenafor that element.64

If art is to be rescued from its spiritualization or its transformation

into "objects of sensual gratification," a certain amount of mediation
is necessary. In fact, the two processes are related: spiritualization
wants to reduce art to pure sensuous intuitability, but nonsensu-
ousness restores what is singularly resistant to apprehension in the
concrete muteness of the art object. To insist that mediation is nec-
essary to any reflection on the crisis in art and the crisis of the
museum is to take seriously both pleasure and critical thinking as
vital elements of aesthetic experience and democratic process. Art
is indeed related to the sideshow, the carnival, and the whole array
of popular and folk culture's most fantastic and cruel entertainments.
 ARTESCAPES
CRITICISM 241

A mindless celebration of the museum's and contemporary art's

familial relation to megamall or dancing bear produces the same
result as the rationalization of art object as a vehicle of a message
of reconciliation: to defend either position by excluding the other is
to render criticism inane and art, innocuous.

Notes
1. Theodor Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in Prisms, translated by
Samuel and Shierry Weber, 173-86 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 176.
2. Ibid., 175.
3. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 12.
4. Donald Preziosi, Brainof the Earth'sBody:Museums and the Phantasmsof
Modernity(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 39.
5. Wolfgang Ernst. "Archi(ve)textures of Museology," in Museums and
Memory,edited by Susan Crane, 10-35 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2000),20.
6. Ibid., 18.
7. J. Pedro Lorente, Cathedralsof UrbanModernity:TheFirst Museumsof Con-
temporaryArt (1800-1930) (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1998).
8. Ibid., 36-37.
9. Ibid., 37.
10. Ibid., 36-37.
11. Adorno, "ValeryProust Museum," 177-78.
12. Ibid., 177.
13. Ibid., 178.
14. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch's TheRailwayJourney:TheIndustrializationof
Timeand Spacein the NineteenthCentury(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1987).
15. Lorente, Cathedralsof UrbanModernity,38-39.
16. Marcel Proust, "Place Names: The Name," in Swann's Way,trans. C. K.
Moncrieff, (New York:Vintage, 1982).
17. Emile Zola explored the analogization of the human instincts to the rail-
road itself by situating all of the drama of La BeteHumaineon the Gare du Nord-
Le Havre line.
18. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way,493.
19. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories:History, Technology,Art. (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 65.
20. Adorno, "ValeryProust Museum," 181.
21. Ibid., 185.
22. The Gare d'Orsay is where French prisoners of war disembarked from
the trains that brought them home from the German camps after the Liberation of
242 I CATHERINE
LUI

France. Marguerite Duras's The Wardescribes the "terrible and solemn" waiting,
and finally the devastating reunion with her deported husband who arrives back
in Paris from the German camps, on the brink of death by starvation. For Stephen
Greenblatt, Gae Aulenti's renovation of the Musee d'Orsay "remakes a remark-
able group of highly individuated geniuses into engaged participants in a vital,
immensely productive period in Frenchcultural history.The reimagining is guided
by many handsomely designed informational boards-cue cards, in effect-
along, of course, with extraordinarybuilding itself" ("Resonance and Wonder,"in
ExhibitingCultures:ThePoeticsand Politics of MuseumDisplay,edited by Ivan Karp
and Steven D. Lavine, 42-56 [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991], 54).
23. The Proustian perspective on culture and aesthetics has been success-
fully framed by Alain de Botton as an ironic self-help manual. See de Botton, How
Proust Can ChangeYourLife(New York:Vintage, 1998).
24. Adorno, "ValeryProust Museum," 180.
25. Ibid., 180-81.
26. Ibid., 184.
27. Ibid., 185.
28. Serge Guibaut was the first to point to this in his How New YorkStole the
Idea of ModernArt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). More recently,
since the declassification of many Cold War archives, Frances Stonor Saunders's
TheCulturalColdWar:TheCIAand the WorldofArtsandLetters(New York:New Press,
2001) presents a fascinating and chilling vision of how the CIA influenced cultural
intellectual life in the post-World War II period by sponsoring and promoting
conferences, journals, and exhibits. The whole notion of consensus has to be re-
thought when confronted with the ways in which the government actively sought
to shape intellectual debates and intellectual arguments by funding the journal
Encounterand promoting the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
29. See Pierre Bourdieu and Alainn Darbel. L'Amour de l'art: les musies
europdenset leurpublic (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1966).
30. See Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer,and Steven Lavine, ed. Muse-
ums and Communities(Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1992).
31. See Michael Kimmelman, "New York's Bizarre Museum Moment," New
YorkTimes,July 11, 2004, Al.
32. For a compelling account of the history of the Populist movement, see
Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion:An AmericanHistory (New York: Basic
Books, 1995).
33. Ibid., 29.
34. Thomas Frank, One MarketUnder God:ExtremeCapitalism,MarketPop-
ulism, and the End of EconomicDemocracy(New York:Doubleday, 2000), 30-31.
35. Thomas Frank considers the transformation of his home state of Kansas
from a hotbed of radicalism into a "red state," one that will reliably fall into step,
in every election, with the agendas of the right wing. Frank writes, "the backlash
itself has been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America
that even the most diabolical of stringpullers would have had trouble dreaming it
 ART ESCAPES CRITICISM 243
I

up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against the 'establishment' that has wound up
abolishing the tax on inherited estates" (What'sthe Matterwith Kansas?How Con-
servativesWon the Heart of America[New York:Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt
and Company, 2004], 7).
36. Karl Marx. The EighteenthBrumaireof Louis Bonaparte(London: Interna-
tional PublishersCompany, 1984).Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1852/ 18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.
37. Reinhart Koselleck, Critiqueand Crisis:Enlightenmentand the Pathogenesis
of ModernSociety(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 98.
38. See Maleuvre's analysis of Antoine-Chrysostome's criticisms of the
establishment of museums by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic governments,
published during and after the Restoration of 1815 (MuseumMemories,15).
39. Douglas Crimp, On theMuseum'sRuins(Cambridge,MA: MITPress, 1993).
40. Ibid., 23.
41. Jean-Michel Rabate, TheFutureof Theory(London: Blackwell, 2002).
42. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Canon Fodder:Authoring Eugene Atget," in
Photographyat the Dock:Essays on PhotographicHistory, Institutions, and Practices,
28-51(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 37.
43. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Living with Contradictions: Critical Prac-
tices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics," in Photographyat the Dock:Essays on
PhotographicHistory,Institutions,and Practices,124-48 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), 124-25.
44. Ibid., 148.
45. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Cam-
era," in Photographyat the Dock: Essays on PhotographicHistory, Institutions, and
Practices,256-280 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 280.
46. David Hickey, Air Guitar:Essays on Art and Democracy(New York:Art
Issues Press, 1997), 38.
47. Ibid., 22.
48. http://www.zingmagazine.com/zingl4/hicey/03.html.
49. Hickey admits that there was a reason why he was driven into the ranks
of the cowardly: the health insurance crisis of the late eighties, which made free-
lance work increasingly hazardous to one's health. The health insurance crisis
may have contributed as much to the lack of dissent in our democracies as any-
thing else.
50. Strangely enough, Hickey's arguments are compatible with those of
Valery's. Disgust with museums proves to be a profitable line of argument. In
1931, Valery was named to the Conseil National des Mus6es. In 2001, Dave
Hickey was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.
51. G. W. E Hegel. Aesthetics:Lectureson Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Hegel's Aestheticsare also available on-line at
http:/ //www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/.
52. Theodor Adorno, "Notes on Kafka,"in Prisms,translated by Samuel and
Shierry Weber,243-71 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 270.
244 I CATHERINE
LUI

53. See Stanley Corngold's "Adorno's 'Notes on Kafka': A Critical Recon-

struction,"Monatshefte94, no. 1 (2002):24-42.
54. Adorno, "Notes on Kafka,"256.
55. Phillipe Vergne and Olekumi Ilesanmi, Let'sEntertain:Life'sGuilty Plea-
sures (Minneapolis, MN: WalkerArt Center, 2000), 18-28.
56. Richard Shusterman, "Come Back to Pleasure," in Let's Entertain:Life's
GuiltyPleasures(Minneapolis, WalkerArt Center, 2000), 33-47.
57. Ibid., 35 (emphasis added).
58. Theodor Adorno, "Aldous Huxley and Utopia," in Prisms, translated by
Samuel and Sherry Weber,95-118 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 103.
59. In an essay in which he seems less eager to please his popular-culture
masters, Shusterman writes, "Unlike facile pleasure of the subject, 'real aesthetic
experience,' for Adorno, 'requires self-abnegation' and submission to 'the objec-
tive constitution of the artwork itself.' This can transform the subject, thereby
suggesting new avenues of emancipation and a renewed promessede bonheurmore
potent than simple pleasure" ("The End of Aesthetic Experience," Journalof Art
and Art Criticism55 [1999]:29-41). This proves that his essay "Come Back to Plea-
sure" is not based upon a misreading of Adorno, whom he understands quite
well, but a willful distortion of Adorno's work.
60. Hegel, Aesthetics,1:38.
61. Maleuvre, MuseumMemories,38.
62. Shusterman, "Come Back to Pleasure," 48.
63. Adorno, AestheticTheory,21.
64. Ibid., 94.