JAY ISAAC

February 17, 2024 

The Aesthetics of Complicity

As the collective desire for the Neo-Manneristic attains ubiquity, it may be an indication that we are witnessing the last push of the capitalist empire and its pervasive aesthetics. We have successfully exploited the planet's natural resources to the point of collapse so it should not be a surprise that in the realm of the arts, visual art specifically, we have done the same and find ourselves relying on diminished stashes of source material. There is plenty of good art being made right now, but the question of whether good art is being produced is not the issue we are facing. In many ways, good art is the problem.

Supply and demand have been demand and supply for some time. The ruling class has requested an aesthetic where comfort and recognition usurp innovation and confrontation. Artists have complied with this request, and it is now understood that artists create for the consumers. Unfortunately, today's ruling-class consumers of the arts are some of history's most insidious, with their demands often steeped in racism and classism.

For those who are interested in resistance to these demands, there are ironies at play when objecting to the ruling class. The more information directed at the ruling class, even if it is antagonistic, provides them with insights into how a counterculture operates. The inclination to correct stupidity and ignorance is no longer an effective method of education. The liberal mind believes that truth and logic are antidotes to close-mindedness when in fact the best resistance to these violent forms of thought is ostracization. The post-liberal mind understands that truth is a deluded premise built on the notion of moral order. We know from the ongoing Palestinian genocide that there is no moral order.

Most art objects created today are created for the ruling class. There may be intentions or messaging that speak about political or social issues, but this is merely content for the ruling class to consume. No financial elite leaves a museum changed. They may be inspired, but why would anyone want to inspire someone who will use that inspiration for more destruction? It would be like a CEO taking Ayahuasca and having an epiphany…about how to maximize labour production while minimizing labour expenses.

Rich people are “bad” because there are poor people. Suffering is a by-product of the process of attaining wealth. As artists, it has been stated that our role in society is to present insights into the human condition. The current human condition is an assortment of genocide, murdered children, environmental catastrophe, addiction, inequality, racism, poverty, and suffering. If art does not speak to this current state of the human condition, then it is merely self-indulgence and decoration for the rich.

Rich people need life content just like you and I do. Our content is art, poetry, music, film, family time, walks in nature, conversations, food, pets, and so on. Rich people require the same content, believe it or not. But the difference is the relationship to the content.  I have seen rich people attempt to express themselves creatively, but the effort is either laughably self-conscious or delusionally narcissistic. Picture a millionaire dancing, rapping, or making a painting. The way they express themselves is both confident and contemptible. Unless they have made their money through the arts, a rich person does not know how to properly express themselves and that is why they look and sound grotesque when they attempt to do so. Because of this, rich people need to live vicariously through artists.

Rich people do not create, they consume. Their relationship to the content of life that we all enjoy is one of ownership vs non-ownership. I assume a rich person makes countless decisions a day about what to own and what not to own. When the possibility of ownership is not based on need but rather on psychological malfunction and inevitable complex trauma from being a member of the ruling class, then the transactions become complicated. Artists at their worst, attempt to predict the tastes of the rich. At their best, they hope that their attempts to stay true to a vision will resonate with the rich, in some miraculous intersection of the classes.

The lure of acceptance by the ruling class is tempting. Rich people are the promise of security and pleasure. Who doesn’t want security and pleasure for the rest of their lives? The promise of richness is the temptation that every person who lives will have to contend with.

We have all said, “If I was rich the first thing I would do is donate most of my money”, or, “If I was rich, I would live the way I do now but just more comfortably”. Realistically, people like us do not get rich. We do not have the imperative or the skills, and we were not born into wealth. Furthermore, if we were to become rich, our worldview would change. We would become and enact “richness”. It is impossible to avoid, and it is a fallacy of thought to believe our version of richness would somehow be more ethical. There are no good rich people and the sooner we contend with that reality the sooner we will eradicate any fantasy of becoming rich. Living within capitalism requires us to grapple with the burden of acceptance or denial of the capitalist system.  

One tactic used by the ruling class and the indoctrinated creative class to suppress dissent is to frame any form of protest as bitterness that we are not rich ourselves. There is indeed much bitterness amongst artists, and it would be best described as anger or frustration that one’s expressions were not chosen as appropriate by the ruling class. Some artists function to criticize and deconstruct systems that are flawed and propose better ones. The historical urgency of experimental artists to subvert accepted forms of art and the people who consume them has disappeared. The aesthetic dissenter has become rare, if not extinct. The current consensus is that being anti-establishment, subversive, and anarchistic is childish.

Another tactic used by the ruling class to maintain artist subservience is the promise of legacy and the importance of reputation. Measures have been put in place to qualify an artist's stature and success. Museum exhibitions, collections, monographs, and retrospectives are all components of a system that sets out slow progress milestones that serious artists are meant to work towards in a lifetime. What better way to keep potentially dissenting views suppressed than a promise of reward for a lifetime of service? Artists may scoff at a middle-class worker who sacrifices their best years until the age of 65 working for a corporation with the promise of retirement, but there is no difference in what an artist does. There can be no deviation from the assigned program, or a legacy will be disrupted and potentially destroyed. If an artist acts accordingly and provides content for the rich and its institutions, they might be rewarded a place within its institutions.

When we consider what an outsider artist is, it is someone who works outside of the ruling class framework of aesthetics and ideologies. It is often assumed that an outsider artist simply does not understand the access codes but in fact, their exclusion is a result of gatekeeping by the ruling class. The ruling class can accept and consume certain types of outsider art in the present because they no longer pose a threat to their power. A disabled artist such as Maud Lewis, or a Black artist such as Bill Traylor were kept outside because their very existence as talented artists contradicted the narrative the ruling class had put into place; an artist is to gain accreditation from learning academies and make objects within a particular phase of modernism. To work outside of this is revolutionary.

The aesthetics of the outsider artist are unpredictable. This is unsettling for the ruling class because predictability is the premise on which a ruling class is built. It is essentially one of the most distinct characteristics of whiteness. In the Western art world, the idea of the unexpected is reminiscent of the idea of unpredictability but is very different. Within the walls of a white cube space, an artist speaking the accepted language is allowed to use unexpected combinations of words and phrases, even invent a few new ones if it is recognized that the entire language is not being thrown out. Outsider artists present unpredictable new languages while Western canonized artists work within established languages.

A question that resurfaces for me is how does a Western “educated” artist become non-complicit in oppression? One cannot make objects of consumption for rich people and say they understand the injustices of the world. To make an object of desire for a member of the ruling class to experience, relate to, and gain from, requires a temporary removal of one's ethics if you say you believe in worker's rights, anti-racism, decolonization, and financial equality.

Homelessness exists for the sole purpose of reminding the working and middle class to get to work and is a promise of destitution if you do not adhere to the rules. The ruling class makes the rules, and you follow them. Or you will be living in a cardboard box. The ruling class could wipe out homelessness tomorrow, but then what would convince people that commuting 3 hours a day makes sense, or that your passions must be muted until you retire? Everyone has passions. A middle-class worker puts theirs on hold and then turns it into a hobby that they pursue in old age.

The already determined is much easier to digest than an unsettling present. It is infinitely preferable for the ruling class to have pre-established criteria that allow for clear consumption of art than for there to be obfuscation. Confusion makes a ruling class feel impotent and ridiculed.

Therefore, one tactic of resistance is to create confusion. If a member of the ruling class cannot decipher the codes and language of an artwork, then it is successful in the sense that it cannot be consumed by them. This tactic attempts to reverse the phenomenon of gatekeeping. The concept of style has been encouraged by the ruling class to maintain predictability. If there can be an investment with predictable returns, it is much better than to risk an investment in an anti-style artist. Artists like Fritz Brandtner and Marian Dale Scott are two of Canada's most experimental and interesting Modernists with no recognizable style. You most likely have not heard of them. Francis Picabia is the world's great anti-style artist who prolifically created antagonistic aesthetics throughout most of his career. Picabia was a wealthy man and had the means and security in which to create a lifetime of disruption. He is a contradiction and an anomaly. It is admirable what he proposed aesthetically, even if it turns out he was a self-destructive elite.

There are many historical examples of movements that successfully, for some time, created aesthetics that imposed sanctions on the bourgeoisie and critiqued their sensibilities in effective ways, such as Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus. These movements became part of a historical lineage that attracted the ruling class eventually. That is how the ruling class operates. They are capitalists and colonizers and can sniff out opportunity.

Another possible tactic to create outside of the ruling class framework is to create an aesthetic that is based on non-compliance and self-reliance. One of sustainability and purpose outside of creating luxury objects. How this aesthetic might manifest and how practices might become economically sustainable is up for debate. To create a system of operations that is self-reliant, we need to recognize all the components of the current system that have failed. We need to understand how beauty has been manufactured. Form, content, context, narrative, and composition are all aspects that need to be questioned. If the current system is compared to cancer, then all malignant cells need to be removed from the body for it to be healthy again.

The current proliferation of painting is no coincidence concerning the post-capitalist reality. Just as peak oil has produced more new drilling licenses during the onset of the climate catastrophe, the thousands of artists making paintings for Instagram have seen an opportunity for sales and have acted accordingly. Furthermore, the current proliferation of painting that looks as though it could be from another time, is no coincidence in the face of growing anti-racism and decolonization. What better way to assert white supremacy than to demand (in the supply and demand sense) artworks that harken back to a time when Black and Brown people were not getting closer to power? Artworks that look like contemporary renditions of Bonnard, Avery, Vuillard, or Redon are numerous. They exist because they are made in compliance with the demands of the ruling class who are fighting a changing world.  A Gauguin facsimile sounds nice right about now if you are a closeted racist. Many artists of colour have used the language of the oppressive system as critiques of the system and their exclusions from it, such as Salman Toor or Matthew Wong. This is valid and valuable as a relevant trajectory. However, to be completely free, there can be no dressing up like the oppressors. There must be reinvention. Sun Ra got the closest.

In these situations that feel as though they may be impossible to solve, it is important to remember a trite and annoying piece of information, and that is, it is meant to feel impossible. Why would the ruling class want it to seem impossible to reinvent systems of art production and dissemination? Because the ruling class is obsessed with the acquisition of luxury items and the art world provides rich people with a sense of excitement without having to take any real risks. When the rich have run out of non-art items to buy, art is a thoroughly enjoyable way to pass some time and feel involved in a community that needs them. Imagine the sense of importance of walking the aisles of an art fair, knowing that your choices could keep an emerging gallery in business. Unless a member of the ruling class is coddled, the art world is a potentially disposable lover in their real life of mergers, stock markets, and family.

The inertia of capitalism is too strong to stop. If it was a locomotive, the only way to stop it is an intentional derailment. Cut the railway ties. Kill the engineer. Kill all the engineers, all the people who know how to fix the tracks. Kill everyone who knows how to build another train.

These collected thoughts and observations outline a problem that has been stewing for a long time. I sense that every ethical person is thinking similarly right now. As artists and working-class people, it needs to be understood that the rich are not our friends. Without the rich, we need to figure out how to modify the current system into something sustainable for the working creative class. We need to be able to not only create exactly what and how we like but also protest how we like. The ruling class can not cherry-pick. If they want art to hang on their walls, and museum galas to dress up for, then there is no dictating how the people who make this content are allowed to act. Genocidal Western powers are murdering Palestinians. Our moral integrity depends upon how we act in these moments and where our allegiances are aligned. Shifting our priorities to manufacturing new aesthetics of non-complicity may be the most urgent issue for artists right now.

Jay Isaac, February 2024