Scrolling retrospectively through the preceding crits, from the vantage point of the equally insecure footings of this final one, the forgoing appears to constitute a somewhat gross and incoherent morphological go at identifying arthood’s characteristics. We are still committed to identifying and organising the structure of arthood’s contradictions on the basis that - following Brecht therein lies hope - in order to help us continue maintaining our own art practice - conscious of the inherent contradiction in doing so - without, unwittingly at least, functioning as an organ of capitalist modes of production, arthood’s raison d'etre. In fact we have the pretensions of one day drawing a diagram! We don’t want to acquiesce and produce art within a social system that effectively reproduces capital while ineffectually contributing to capitalism’s dissolution. We don’t want to produce that system’s art. We don’t know what an alternative art that isn’t compliant or an alternative system that isn't coercive would look like but maybe drawing a diagram would help. {01:14} 😀 

There is a deep correlation between cultural production and profit. The monetisation of art, congealing in its alienated form as ‘arthood’ is too easily dismissed and rationalised away as constituting only the realm of a less credible, tiny elite of artists and attendant institutions floating amongst the rising scum of the far more ‘serious’ and dispersed art system. This dismissal gets concentrated down in clown-like, and bewildering figures such as Damien Hirst. This elite is not taken seriously by the real artists who have learnt to perceive themselves as operating within a distinct cutting edge, critical, challenging realm of production and consumption on the basis that it constitutes a mere irrelevance of overtly egregious, popularised, monetised, Banksy-esque stupidity. Distinct from the morally more secure majority, that are on the whole considered socialist by inheritance or default, of practitioners and the lower-middling-level institutions. There is of course an elite of conspicuously monetised practitioners bobbing turd-like amongst the ever-rising scum of arthood (Kapoor, Gormley, Emin etc. alongside their assorted masterpieces). But in reality and somewhat inconveniently, arthood pervades all levels of the art system. It is embedded as a doctrine within all artists, collectives, artist-led initiatives and art education. Thanks partly to the Turner Prize the use of words like ‘collective’ have become merely examples of a nomenclature functioning as a byword for ‘cutting edge’ or ‘avante garde’ or some other operationally meaningless jargon.{02:54}

It is all too convenient and simplistic to perceive the rising scum of arthood and its attendant bobbing turds as constituting only a limited sphere of cultural production functioning as an appendage to capital’s unrestrained and cynical production of exchange value; and of the strata of the same system below as somehow genuinely engaged in the production of social value through social reproduction. Social reproduction within the art system has inculcated intrusive capitalist activities at all levels beneath the most conspicuous surface layer of effluence. The lack of equal representation, if not outright discrimination, throughout the art system is a clear indication of capital’s perniscious ability to infiltrate the sphere of social reproduction. It is in this sense that social regulation and interventionism appear to be necessary. But this produces a bureaucratic imposition and sclerotic administration of social reproduction within the art system and the subsequent dissolution of autonomous development that already characterised arthood. Social reproduction within art education has become increasingly subjected to the capitalist logic of the professional practice module, bureaucratically inserted as opposed to the development of autonomous cultural production.{04:07}

While the system of art maintains its current hierarchical structure of failure and success (corresponding directly to freedom and domination) the higher-level will continue to shape the, ever, as yet unsuccessful lower strata beneath it. Arthood as a subsystem that echoes wider capital must be able, from the perspective of capital, to withstand the dissolution of the old and replace it with an ever renewed environment. Surpluses of capital and surpluses of production or labour are required for this purpose. Arthood by its nature as an organ of capitalist modes of production creates these surpluses in the form of a wealth of failed practitioners and as wealth over accumulated by the art loving, property loving, commodity loving capitalist class that arthood courts. Where such surfeits of surplus production exist the parasites will not be far away. Through the absorption of these surpluses the ever adaptable artworld resolves the problem, for capital, of them remaining static in terms of not producing value in the form of profit. The whole art system is constructed for this task. Development becomes an autonomous realm of capitalist operations, often involving gentrification, culture-washing and urbanisation generating profit and absorbing surpluses and devaluing what already existed or is left behind, reorganising and pricing out existing communities, or replacement by equally fatuous forms of capital. For example the micro-geographical migrations of the artworld from Cork Street to Hackney to Bloomsbury to the West End to Margate or wherever.{05:48}

The ultimate meaning of the output of arthood is of homogeneity. Whatever that thing in Maureen Paley means, it means the same as that thing in the Serpentine Gallery. That meaning, whether it has crossed the minds of the participants of arthood or not, is the production, circulation and accumulation of assets. Whatever is produced in the Cell for the graduate to rent is essentially shaped by the speculative, albeit highly unlikely public display as an asset, a capitalised property title. (The chances of public display are, by the way presumably increased if the graduate paid close attention during the professional practice module.) This is something any form of agency within the system is incapable of bypassing. The asset is calculated to second guess some as yet unrealised opportunity of revenue, happening at whatever level of the system, even possibly among the bobby turds of speculative future scarcity, such as Hirst or whoever. The system of art embraces this formulation of ‘vultures feeding off the carcass of erstwhile social value.’ The output of arthood has come to represent value as commodified, monetised and marketised, and increasingly distant from the socially productive value it once represented. Arthood (or art within the realm of commodification, monetisation and marketisation) comes to represent, through the self-describing system in which it operates, claims on social labour freed of any obligation to mobilise or engage with that social labour for productive uses. Thus the ascendency of arthood enacted within the parasitic relations of distribution.{07:23}

That these crits constitute an abortive attempt to engender an alternative mode of production does not necessarily render them entirely useless. The identification of alternative modes of production offers the potential of some resources of hope. Are they oppositional or alternative to the dominant form of culture? Which is preferable? The distinction between alternative and oppositional modes of artistic production can be characterised as corresponding to either: an artist who simply finds a different way to practice and does not want to be bothered by the prevailing dominant cultural conditions; or an artist who finds a different way to practice and wants to use it as a means of challenging and ultimately contributing to the dissolution of the prevailing dominant culture. Whether they are alternative or oppositional these resources are instantly problematic: should we maintain a practice that aims to withdraw from, or obviate arthood; or maintain an art practice that aims to preclude arthood? Is the preclusion of arthood the only means of initiating its obviation? Is its preclusion, and by implication its obviation, at all possible?{08:26}

We are in the process of producing a number of artworks [Fig.1] in the form of drawings that, as there is a conspicuous identifiable direct correlation between them as output and ourselves as having produced them as artists, we will maintain the correspondence. No good reason appears to present itself for denying the correlation between them and their authorship. It seems worthwhile making this obvious point; maybe because it isn’t the case with most commodities. Their existence is presented as an almost natural consequence of the wants and needs associated with consumption; which suggests a special case for art as functioning as producing a special type of object. But what is the legitimacy of that special status, particularly if we hold to the distinction between art and arthood; that arthood is merely a cultural sphere defined by irrationally inflated artificial or fictional exchange values? If so, why hold to the contrivance of an artwork as being distinct from a commodity such as a pair of sports shoes that have comparably succeeded in condensing their exchange value to the point of suffocating their use value? Such intangibles are contrived with the intention of having a specific brand judged as superior to others within the same market. The attempt to differentiate a given commodity becomes a means of securing a monopoly price. The reputation and public image of the commodity takes precedence over its material use value. Advertising and public relations are used to attempt to extract monopoly prices from a hitherto open and competitive situation.{09:58}

Once a drawing is produced and the correspondence between it and its authorship is accepted or tolerated, it can be retained or returned to a state of not existing. If it is documented prior to being destroyed it is essentially retained in another form. Being returned to a state of not existing is analogously something like a fish being returned to the river after having been caught. As long as it hasn’t posed for a selfie with the angler, the event remains in the cognitive purview of angler and fish and the situation can be viewed as being relatively straightforward. But the option to retain the artwork is complicated and initiates the first of countless problematic contradictions.{10:35}

The option of destroying the work is in fact likely to be imbued with the same complexity as the option to retain it - as its relations of production are likely to have been infected a priori by the relations of its contingent distribution, even though they may not come to fruition; this situation might be produced in the case of a first artwork by an inchoate Robinson Crusoe artist. The retention of an artwork opens up the potential for its engagement in various relations of distribution or the realisation of already predicated results, as it becomes part of the flow or process of arthood, which essentially constitutes art that is alienated by its direct or indirect relation to the commercial realm. It immediately becomes associated with constituting a special type of object - although without the constituents of that special status being clear. Yet its special status which presumably originates in its use value; of an artist wanting to produce it for whatever reason - and a prospective recipient wanting to engage with it is transformed into an exchange value that is susceptible to inflation. This is fuelled internally from within the system of art generating subsequent speculation on that manipulated exchange value based on vague notions such as the artist’s and gallery’s reputation and other artistic intangibles. This seems to be a foundational contradiction of arthood, that all subsequent attempts to negate or circumvent immediately initiate further multiplying problems and contradictions.{12:02}

From our own attempts to engage in alternative modes of production we’re aware of certain contradictions such as:{12:09}

a work that contains within itself a rejection of the system in which it is produced - its production is contingent on being subsumed by the same system.{12:18}

(or) a work produced and sequestered at the point of being completed in an attempt to negate its potential as exchange value within its relations of distribution, is already produced contingently within and formed by the relations of its as yet unrealised distribution - it is made in the antecedent or precursory image of the institution of art although it may never materially enter into it.{12:43}

(or) a work that attempts at restricting the relations of its distribution by being given away as if restricted to a form of potlatch - even ignoring the possibility of it entering a secondary market, thus instantly transferring the knowledge of its function as a gift (if known) and entering into and congealing in exchange value on the basis of Mauss’ distinction of the gift as always initiating some form of return, just not a return in the form of a use value expressed as money available to the artist, as may or may not transpire in an alternative mode of production.{13:21}

Whatever alternative modes of production may or may not emerge will constitute at best reform and at worst further subsumption into, and therefore strengthening of, the current system. What is required is a significant emancipatory dissolution of arthood’s institutional structures. Any subsequent alternative form of artistic production would need to be organised to negate the powers of the rentier, curator, collector, gallerist, managers, go-between etc and facilitate the continuous and secure fulfillment of basic needs for all artists. In the absence of any better ideas we defer (in solidarity) to the needs, wants and desires suggested by The White Pube, although with four of their six recent ‘ideas’, problems and contradictions inevitably emerge¹. If our regular referencing of Brecht is not erroneous and facile, it is within such contradictions that hope for a better system of art is latent and from which alternative practices might emerge, free of the domination of capital; of potential modifications of the functioning capital and anti-capitalist alternatives. At least piecemeal, prior to being reabsorbed and subsumed into the dominant and domineering practices of capital. Any realistic challenge to arthood comes down to the volition of artists and depends on their ability to not perceive the production and consumption of their output as somehow distinct, specially imbued entities. The problem for an anti-arthoodistic form of practice is that most artists can be characterised as functioning something like a farmer with a romanticised view of their activities as merely a pastoral interaction with nature who fails to accept that their annual operations are internalised within the circulation and accumulation of capital; and that the ability of them to grow a field of corn is incorporated into agribusiness and the pursuit of profit, some of which is to be reinvested in order to reproduce a new crop next year. The farmer, in fact dominates, curtails and manipulates natural processes as a form of capital accumulation and the transfer of nutrients through an ecosystem constitutes a flow of value. As with art, nature’s use values are monetised, capitalised, commercialised and exchanged as commodities. While these interventions may be considered liberating to the artist as they allow them to reproduce the relations of their own production, the result is to perpetuate the penetration of the market processes into those relations. Private individuals are freed to extract social wealth from their ownership of commodified art. It can be capitalised as monetary wealth. This creates the basis for the promotion of a rentier, ownership oriented class which delimits access to use values by way of its monopoly power as the dominant culture. If artists continue to consider their relations of production as distinct from and disinterested in relation to the potential relations of their distribution and consumption they will merely continue to reproduce the same set of relations.{16:28}

The domination of the artworld’s rentier class as a form of extractive agency (galleries, collectives, curators etc) allows it to produce and manipulate scarcities and to speculate on the value of the assets they control. Artists need, if they are to transcend the merely cosmetic and ameliorative operative function of arthood to explore anti-capitalist alternatives.{16:53}

Arthood, like capital, is constantly moving and changing, emerging in different forms. Capital continuously flows as value, transforming from one form into another, functioning at times as money or at other times as various material forms of means of production, such as property, resources, or as working people. Likewise arthood flows as a form of capital; and as a form of capital its labour is involved in producing commodities in which unrealised value is harboured. When the artwork is sold, then capital re-emerges, as its value is realised in the form of money. Arthood like capital is a process engaging with material things. It flows between artists, artworks and institutions; continually emerging in innumerable transformations such as bubblewrap, emulsion paint, Frieze art fairs, websites, documentaries by Alan Yentob, books by Grayson Perry, and Ryan Gander’s hubris.{17:53}

Regarding attempts to engage with alternative modes of artistic production we will consider one now in order to dismiss it straightaway in favour of considering another afterwards. We dismiss the former on the basis that its implied potential as an alternative mode of production, distinct from arthood, appears to be entirely erroneous.{18:14}

In its nascent form the artists’ studio/gallery outfit has the appearance of community self-organisation and association: an alternative sphere of modes of artistic production and distribution distinct and opposed to the wider, higher alienated manifestations of the art system. Not long after the water supply has been reconnected the artists’ studio/gallery outfit begins to resemble something more familiar. If the purpose of the artists’ studio/gallery outfit is still essentially the production and realisation of exchange value as it appears to be in the CELL FOR GRADUATE TO RENT structure, the capacity of some private individuals to appropriate social power comes to the fore, then the artists’ studio/gallery outfit either fails on its own terms or becomes complicit in its own low-level exploitation. The artist’s studio (the Cell) functions as a means of the realisation of exchange value; and the gallery (the incentive) as a means of artistic indoctrination on the basis of the production of use value through an artifice of a diy or community or associating ethos.The, what might well have been, original, laudable intention to establish conditions for (un)alienated artistic production falls flat. The latent entrepreneur opportunistically emerges and hastily joins the rentier class. Professionalisation and administration construct the means of reproducing the inchoate institution. The genuine potential of sustaining one’s subsistence through some vaguely creative activity; under the pretext of facilitating opportunities for emerging artists jargon, one is subsumed, as a bureaucrat in professionally replicating the relations of the institution as an administered functionary of the institution of art. Look who can read a spreadsheet! The unsuspecting artist enters this realm after their first bout of indoctrination at art school to the echoing sound of the Cell door slamming behind them. As stated, if the artist initiative such as the artists’ studio/gallery outfit constitutes the best means of instituting an alternative form of artist modes of production, it is only going to be effective if contingent on the dissolution of the institution and system of art as it currently exists.{20:38}

The artists’ studio/gallery outfit’s attendant exhibition space offers the pretence of anti-bureaucratic, anti-administrative sentiment and the vague misleading implication of credibility. The bait set by potential opportunities subdues criticism. The following self-convinced pragmatism follows: ‘in the dark corners of arthood at least the shadows cast over the sphere of failure, are actually those of the institution and not the local library’s felt display boards.’ In the shadows cast by the light of the institution - stands the artists’ studio/gallery outfit. There is just enough hope here to justify paying the monthly rent, even if the studio remains unused 250 days of the year. The studio renter, who financially props up the exhibition space by an undisclosed surplus extracted from their own rent, will never show in the connected space. It’s almost there for their edification. A reminder of where the main thrust of arthood is going whilst they work the day job. Behold! There’s always the Open Studio opportunity, that long summer weekend where the studio is emulsioned white and a modesty curtain hung to disguise the distended storage space!{21:49}

In the artists’ studio/gallery outfit, as in the institution, the division between private and public space is strictly observed. All eyes are turned from the studios towards the sacrament of distribution; all lips expectantly parted, a little spittle to help receive and consume the communion’s tropes of display in the form of a eucharist-like object of contemplation. The artists’ studio/gallery outfit evokes more the authoritarian organisational structures and strictures of the high church as opposed to the mutual informality of the dissenting Friends meeting house.{22:25}

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INTERMISSION

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Try this: The system of art is constitutively organised around a primary distinction: that of arthood and; that which constitutes everything else within the parameters of the system, that is somehow distinct from arthood. Arthood proper is characterised as those works and practices (although generally functioning as careers) that engage in relations of production - of a kind that is indeed production for the sake of production. These relations of production are autotelic but they have been reduced to nothing more than an instrument of some other goal. The content of that ‘other goal’ being capitalist modes of production coerced and orchestrated by art’s various institutions (superstructure): galleries, museums, universities, publications, arts media etc., all of which constitute organs of corporate capitalism. Arthood constitutes an organ of capitalism if it coheres with a social formation in which processes of capital circulation and accumulation are hegemonic and dominant in providing and shaping the material, social and intellectual bases for social life.{23:37}

The agents and objects associated with the sphere within the system of art that falls outside the parameters of arthood are wide-ranging and include work and practices that, in arthood’s terms, have failed its criterion of association and selection; including those that are deliberately and purposefully sequestered and restricted from engaging in arthood’s various relations of production and distribution, such as the creative output of hermits and anchorite monks, amateurs, sunday painters and hobbyists.{24:06}

There is though a conspicuous sphere of artistic production and distribution within the system of art that is peripheral and distinct in its relation to arthood. It is not easily distinguished, particularly in terms of appearances, from comparable examples of arthood, something akin to the same sentence translated twice. Looked at generally it is perhaps more conservative, superficially at least, in being bound more directly to certain established traditions and conventions of art production, such as paintings, drawings and sculptures; and less manifested in forms that are for arthood more ubiquitous: installations, videos and performances. Clearly though arthood also contains innumerable examples of paintings, drawings and sculptures. Arthood proper could be distinguished from this alternative variant by its assimilation to an upper-class, bourgeois ethos whereas the alternative arthood appears to correspond with mercantile petit bourgeois conventions and attitudes. Alternative arthood exists in an equally diverse range of examples of producers and means of production including galleries and websites. These seem, from an admittedly half hearted and cursory survey of the sphere, to range from boutique art and craft galleries² situated on the well heeled high streets and shopping arcades and local town hall arts clubs of affluent, conservative, middle-class towns and villages; to the pop up rentable gallery spaces of gentrified urban city quarters, such as the type located in London’s Brick Lane included in The Apprentice.{25:44}

This distinct sphere of artistic production does consist of output that you would be hard-pressed to identify what distinguishes it from output that does constitute arthood. It seems to form a partial or pseudo or quasi-sphere of production that is somehow distinct from, but mirrors, arthood proper. Its means of distribution are similarly an extensive network of galleries and attendant websites that are again, distinct from those associated with the realm of arthood yet function comparatively. These distinct spheres are indistinguishable but for certain immaterial social relations that are at play beneath arthood’s tissue thin facade but it is only on the back of a material surplus in society that it is possible to produce a professional elite of artists, cultural bureaucrats and administered functionaries. Is this ersatz arthood distinct from arthood proper in being less professionalised, bureaucratic and administered?{26:40}

It is tempting to think that this ersatz version of arthood is distinct from arthood proper simply by being art as opposed to arthood. The question ‘What is art?’ is answered by Nelson Goodman’s prosodic counter question ‘When is art?’ which acknowledges arthood’s acceptance that anything can become art given the right situation, context, conditions etc. Perhaps it will be more productive instead to identify distinctions within what is accepted as art. Or to ask instead “What is not arthood but might still be art?” or “Can an art object be identified and confirmed as art on the basis that its status can be established that it does not constitute an example of arthood?” There is arthood and there is everything that has not attained that status, the stuff that may still be art. A large portion of that stuff circulates in galleries that do not attain access to arthood. Arthood is highly and peversely selective and exclusive in its apparent diversity. The output of arthood, although superficially in terms of its diverse appearance, has become increasingly sclerotic. It more or less constitutes the same object but its ability to produce exchange value is evermore adept and adaptable.{27:57}

Any work associated with, exchanged by, engaged within relations of distribution with commercial galleries is arthood. Nothing associated with such galleries is going to operate in ersatz arthood. Equally any work associated with the type of gallery engaged in the exchange of ersatz arthood is not likely to cross the line into arthood proper not, at least without some significant shift of indoctrination. Although, the kind of relations or means of distribution work circulates in and around is not a defining factor of the status of the object. Our work, for instance, has not and very probably will not be associated with the likes of arthood’s most celebrated institutions, yet our work is likely to be arthood. Ha! A recognition that our indoctrination has been long since self-inflicted.{28:49}

The evidence that arthood operates as an organ or self-interested agent of capital is conspicuous. In its most excessive manifestations it is cosy with capitalism’s heaviest discharge - advertising; also sponsorship permeates the relations of its distribution; it “subscribes to perhaps the widest and most rampant fundamental capitalist formation - competition.” [T. Atkinson The Turner Prize: Ordering the Avant-Garde (2002)]; it concerns itself with selection, with being selective and with scarcity . By what measure are selected works exhibitions, publications, competitions selected? Arthood’s selectivity seems to reside in the ‘right’ institution or ‘right’ artworld attendee doing the selecting. The attributes of ‘right’ being ambiguous. None of these oracles can offer a convincing explanation of the rationale behind these choices, but they somehow appear to have accrued the requisite level of authority for their selections to appear acceptable. Even the fruit and veg competition at the local country fair follows an accessible and publicly documented set of criteria for identifying one prize leek as superior, in their terms over another. Diversity of range is not always a good thing, as with prize carrots and fascist political parties. It is not clear, it is never clear as its absence is perpetually celebrated, on what basis arthood’s selections distinguish between what it selects and by implication what it rejects as failed.{30:26}

Arthood incorporates selection as a normalised constituent within its top-down, drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures, bestowed upon it by the institution as a means to promote an idea of scarcity. The artificial propagation of scarcity is another conspicuous indicator of arthood’s function as merely one more agent of capital. There is clearly no shortage of art objects. Tuition fees and global pandemics have done little to curtail the intake of art school degree courses. If an articice of qualitative discrimination was not contrived the art marked would be flooded and increasingly devalued. By promulgating selection and competition an artifice of a qualitative hierarchy is established and with it the notion that the very best, prestigious cream of exclusive examples are scarce and rationally reflect an increase in their exchange value.{31:26}

But in order to successfully promote the notion of a system that internally, organically identifies a limited dearth of its best examples making their way to the top, a surfeit of a decreasing range of increasingly inferior examples, of the same type must constantly be expanding. What is required for any given system committed to the capitalist mode of production to be successful is a general, consistent growth to feed an increase in value. This would be difficult to achieve if an attainable criterion for establishing how the best examples rising and circulating at the top of the system existed such as a criterion for establishing how a thing can attain a given level of achievement. Artisanal, pre-industrial notions of skill and improvement are not particularly helpful for cultivating capitalist modes of production. Therefore arthood develops as a system that is predicated on a notion of plurality, diversity and avoiding qualitative discriminations as logical, established and accepted factors.{32:29}

Diversity and plurality, thanks not least to arthood’s full-blown inculcation into postmodernist doctrine, are taken and accepted as corresponding to some vague notion of artistic freedom and achievement. For arthood, that anything, given the right conditions, could be art constitutes freedom. This is confirmed by the idea that plurality and diversity constitute irrefutably positive approaches and are accepted within arthood as dogma. But societies can cultivate a diverse range of bad entities such as forms of negating an individual’s liberties including examples as diverse as indeterminate prison sentences and waterboarding. Clearly not all examples of diversity are good. What arthood considers to be artistic freedom, in fact becomes increasingly class-orientated, institutionally sexist and racist, and prioritises privilege the higher up the system one rises. Any artist, of any background attaining any level of so-called success within this system is complicit. Artistic freedom only goes so far, as it supports the capitalist mode of production and is increasingly diminished, becoming evermore autocratic further up the system, ultimately producing social oppression beneath it.{33:49}

For a system functioning as an organ of capitalism, down the pecking order distinctions are negated, hierarchies are churned up and diverse entities mix promiscuously together. In this sense nothing is more diverse than capitalism. When it comes to who can be exploited the system is inherently open minded to the point of being egalitarian. When it comes to the commodity form the system does not discriminate. This is evident in arthood’s overriding uniformity of an appearance or aesthetic of plurality. Above this cesspit power and money are concentrated in a small minority.{34:26}

It might be argued (as stated at the beginning of this crit) that the real artistic production is the stuff that is less conspicuous and more grassroots, that doesn’t engage directly in these forms of capitalist modes of production; and are therefore operative within a distinct and separate sphere, and do in fact constitute a free, unfettered form of, in Marx’s terms ‘production for production’s sake’. These morally superior works are held as autotelic and simultaneously intellectually aloof from having been subsumed into the art system as defined by capital. This is having one’s (theoretical and academic) cake and eating it. The fact of the matter is these so-called alternative forms of artistic production would not exist without the system that maintains the authority of art’s institutions, an authority constructed on capitalist modes of production. The means of production of arthood are far too established to be bypassed thus. Such alternative agency merely replicates the conditions further up the food chain. These conditions are assured by dogma propagated within the art education system, along the lines that ‘art is always a good thing’, ‘better some art than none’, 'better to propagate and display your work than not to’ etc.{35:45}

For Marx ‘production for production’s sake’ is, like arthood and its ersatz form, defined by a distinction between being either artistic or economic. Arthood’s form of autotelic production falls squarely on the economic side of the distinction; whereas its ersatz version is artistic. Arthood, like capital in relation to the consumer, requires that the artist is reduced to a ‘fragment of an artist’. They are needed to be isolated, individualised and alienated from each other by competition, alienated from any sensual, meaningful relation to their own production. (recent collectivisation-washing by the Tate makes no difference) Artists are rendered as deprived of creative possibilities. They become mere appendages to arthood and its vacuum of meaning. Marx was a stern critic of reducing human production to exchange, but the art system of today is not what it was in his day. Ersatz arthood is a mirror image of arthood, but like any mirror image it can be curtailed with a blanket or hammer, it is therefore susceptible to being kept in check and not alienated or exploited. Marx held that in fact most production that goes on is not ‘true’ production, but rather that humans only really produce when it takes place freely for its own sake. He believed this kind of production would only be attainable within a functioning communist society; but meanwhile he believed we have a taste of this form of production for its own sake in the productive form of art. For Marx art was an image of non-alienated labour. Although this may or may not be true for art today it surely is not for arthood which constitutes by far the largest, most conspicuous sphere of the current art system. The question as to whether arthood offers an alternative mode of production to capital, or that it constitutes, in Marx’s term ‘real’ production is an open one. But arthood, as a sphere appears to be seriously askew from an anti-capitalist perspective because it merely deepens the penetration of monetisation and commodification into the subjectivities of artistic production rather than using cultural expediencies as a lever to try decommodifying as many forms of social activity as possible.{38:07}

Arthood facilitates the dominant class that can appropriate wealth without concern for production. The ownership and commodification of art and its ‘natural’ scarcity as a special type of object allows an unproductive extractive class to extract wealth parasitically from productive capital. Arthood is functionalist, engineered and technocratic. It is privatized, commercialised and monetised, and oriented to maximising the production of exchange values through the appropriation of use values. What gets destroyed is the capacity of the artist to produce in any other way than that which capital requires and dictates.{38:45}

Ersatz arthood’s form’s value, in terms of the prices it exchanges for as opposed to some sense of aesthetic value, may be a rational measure of value judgement including aesthetic value, as it attains and maintains a more consistent and stable exchange value than arthood proper. Therefore if an example of ersatz arthood sells and the same artist supplies a new piece to the market which again sells, so forth and so on, thereby reproducing the artist’s relations of production, Orwell’s comment responding to Tolstoy responding to Shakespeare regarding literary judgement as applied to the art context stacks up, at least for ersatz arthood: “Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.” Whereas arthood proper is always capable of bursts of hyperinflation initiated by speculative factors external to the commodity such as art market, art world intangibles, for example artist Ryan Gander’s property grab in Saxmundham, Suffolk results in corporate landed power which results in an increase in sale prices for his feckless output. Any given example of ersatz arthood will not cross the boundary into arthood proper and so speculation in inflation is curtailed a priori.{40:09}

The artists, institutions, administrative functionaries, bureaucrats etc., that operate within arthood can collude in order to increase the symbolic capital and reputational status of any given artist in order to inflate the corresponding monetary value of their output. For example anonymous street-entrepreneur Banksy’s shredded painting selling in 2018 for a meagre one million quid and again in 2021 for eighteen million.{40:40}

In contradistinction ersatz arhood’s value is likely to be closely related to accessible factors negotiated between artist and gallery, taking account of cost of materials, scale, labour time and popularity, saleability calculated on previous experience, essentially far more tied to social value. These factors that contribute to determining the exchange value of examples of ersatz arthood are far more consistent and reliable than those factors determining the fictive exchange value of arthood proper.{41:17}

This form of commodity that ersatz arthood constitutes remains straightforward, in that its value remains anchored to its production and purpose, as long as it is tied to its use value which is related to its status outside of the parameters of arthood. This form of commodity remains tied to its material use, its reality, like a piece of wood turned into a chair by human labour. Its value remains more relative, in terms of its greater commitment to use value than arthood proper which seamlessly succumbs to exchange value, potential inflation and speculation. If this commodity form were to transform into a commodity that transcends its material use, as in a chair as ready-made arthood, its connection to its human production is disrupted and its use value or social value discarded through its relation to distribution becomes tied to money value or exchange value that is no longer connected to its initial purpose but fetishised as some esoteric form of value inhered in the commodity itself, as opposed to value tied to the means of its production: studio space, labour, time, materials, experience etc. The superficial appearance of exchange value dominates the evermore sequestered use value of social relations, such as the art system; throughout its education system, institutions and collusions in media outlets and public relations schemes, the ideology of encouraging the ‘natural’ entrepreneurial spirit to precipitate its natural hunger to participate in the market system. What is essentially a social relation between people (between artists and functionaries within the artworld’s relations of distribution) becomes a relation between things. Art, as in the arthoodistic sense, increasingly functions and exists for the capitalist class, like gold or Bitcoin as representations of value, as the incarnation of all human labour congealed into nothing more than one of Ryan Gander’s or whoever’s gestemkunstschaftwerks. People are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. The distinction between arthood and its ersatz cousin is analogous to the shift from the feudal to capitalist society; like feudal societies, ersatz arthood depends on relations of personal dependance, there is no need for commodities to assume a special, distinct form alienated from the reality of their production. Arthood proper has emerged concurrently with the growth of the art market as a field of capital accumulation (which sucks in all its participants) performs an ideological function of providing distribution use values that might be tied to the intentions of the artist to make art, though exchange value mechanisms, obviating the artist’s control and abetting the market’s dominance, which results in arthood constituting a sphere of reproducing capital.{44:23}

In contradistinction, ersatz arthood has a self-regulating, rational aspect. It is more probable that the exchange value of its output, being a more reliable measure of judging something from a qualitative point of view - as being used as a criterion for judgement that ‘this work is in a sense better than that work’ as it remains in demand at a prevailing or at least reasonably increased, in accordance with rising cost and overheads, exchange value. On the other hand the exchange value of arthood proper is manipulated to inflate - yet even some vapid bourgeois art collector can’t be stupid enough to suppose that a work he purchaced two years ago for one million is now eighteen times better an example of a work of art.{45:08}

Regarding social systems such as art, Marx considers that the forms of thought they perpetuate are determined by social realities. Artists “invariably enter into definite relations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises” a superstructure of institutions, authority etc. [ Look we’ve read R. Williams on the Base and the Superstructure] It is the superstructure that corresponds to artists’ social-cultural consciousness. In Marx’s view the function of these institutions is to support the foundational “economic structure” the “base” - the predominant capitalist class system. Meaning that institutions such as the Tate maintain the purpose and ideology of reproducing ideas that legitimate the system. Those who control material production, control through organs of capitalist reproduction such as the Tate, control the reproduction of artists’ ideas as well. Such higher institutions, and through their dominance, also middle-level institutions, facilitate the function of artists as complicit (if unconsciously and unwittingly) agents of the prevailing system.{46:30}

If indeed art ever constituted some form of “free spiritual production” it has since then been, and continues to be, diluted with evermore ideological production. This constitutes another definition of arthood - art reproducing capitalist ideology. It is axiomatic that the base and the superstructure coexist most offensively and conspicuously in the like of atomised arch-capitalists such as Gander, Gormley and Kapoor but the way material production or the base is organised effects and shapes the way most artists think - and in turn continue to maintain and reproduce the superstructure through their own relations of distribution and production. Because the prevailing system involves exploitation, it gives rise to conflicts. The role of institutions is to control those conflicts. If exploitation did not exist we would have art and culture that did not serve its current disreputable, compliant ideological function, but be closer to some free, unfettered production, such as that which Marx saw in contrast to alienated production through exploited labour. The distinction between Ford Maddox Brown’s relations of production and those that Work (1852–1865) for example depicts.{47:50}

Ersatz arthood seems potentially significant as a means of continuing to maintain our own practice in that it seems to offer a liminal sphere, a view from a bridge in which to evacuate arthood by the backdoor, as it were; a means of exiting the boundaries of arthood proper. From this point of view, arthood proper is analogous to a category A high security prison whereas ersatz arthood to a category D open prison. This form of alternative arthood in being unacceptable to arthood itself is to some extent cut loose from arthood and permitted to operate beyond the parameters of arthood’s self-describing social system. Arthood is not interested in describing or reproducing that which does not belong within its autopoetic boundaries. A rejection of arthood produced within arthoods parameters is subsumed a priori into arthood, transforming what once may have been intended as - and fleetingly existed as - a rejection into an acceptance and subsequently a celebration of arthood. Anything that functions within arthood celebrates the system by default and is acceptable to it. Conversely we suppose that what arthood rejects is more likely capable of sustaining a reciprocal rejection of arthood. From this view are alternative modes of production to arthood possible? Arthood constitutes the dominant, emergent culture of what, in its earlier forms, was termed ‘art’. Art constitutes its progenitor and is a residual culture in the sense that arthood needs to maintain a connection between itself and residual forms of the earlier culture as a means to justify and validate its own status. These residual cultures are subsumed as a part of the emergent corporate organisation. The dominant culture also needs to maintain and to allow just enough of the residual culture in as part of the dominant, emergent culture; if it did not the residual culture may reform independently as an alternative mode of production itself, as has happened, to a certain extent, in the sphere of ersatz arthood. This sphere it might be argued is closer to the residual, progenitor culture than arthood proper - the emergent form - and goes some way to explain the belittling and contemptuous opposition the emergent culture holds it in. The distinction between arthood and some erstwhile progenitor of ‘art’ would have to be established, in effect that it is no longer possible to produce art in current conditions. Then a distinction within arthood between itself and its ersatz interloper would likewise have to be established. If these distinctions could be established they might form the basis of an alternative mode of production. The exodus from arthood to ersatz arthood (the great cultural migration from Fitzrovia to Farnham) could only be maintained if ersatz arthood retained a mode of production consistently tied to its use value and a committed rejection of speculating on potential exchange value, and maintained a criterion of success and failure on terms connected with social value. Artists, take a long march through the galleries of Southwold. {51:04}

(exeunt) {51:05}

1
Idea 001 specifically calls for the “removal” of a mural by Rex Whistler that is situated somewhere public in Tate Britain on the basis that it contains racist imagery. Does the work's removal’ naturally imply its destruction on the basis that it is physically part of the fabric of the building? Possibly but ‘removal’ in itself does not logically imply destruction. If it’s removal is possible in such a way that keeps it intact, what should the Tate do with it once it is removed? Would carefully boarding over the mural constitute its removal? Essentially putting it in storage, in situ. The White Pube do not call for the work’s destruction, but for its removal. They also point out that the Tate don’t appear to care much about the offensive content of the picture, evinced by their inertia. Is The White Pube willing to tolerate the existence of an institution that doesn’t much mind if some of its assets are racist, just as long as they remove them from public view? The institution of the Tate was founded on capital accumulated through the sugar industry which depended on colonial exploitation, in the form of both chattel slavery and later the destructive legacies of land ownership, subjugation of a landed or landless peasantry and wage slavery often retained in service primarily in domestic servitude to the colonial aristocratic plunder or to merchant capitalist and geopolitical power, the vast majority of which was based on racial subjugation and inequality. On that basis isn’t the Tate franchise (Modern, St Ives etc) every bit as much a material (architectural, institutional) image of racism as their, admittedly more pictorial, racist public artworks? Presumably the Tate owns photographic reproductions of the mural, what is to become of these? (Just curtail their distribution?) Or is the original work unacceptable simply in terms of public display, whereas its reproduction is acceptable? It’s possible that at some future point the reproduction might contribute to some useful and edifying analysis of racist artworks, without its author requiring access to the original, having obtained the reproduction, rendering the physical existence of the original obsolete to some extent. More problematically, is all art being predicated on the basis that it constitutes a distinct and special type of celebrated object that is inherently worthwhile? So an example of it that contains explicitly racist imagery is by implication a celebration of racism, whereas its reproduction as ‘secondary material’ is acceptable on the basis that documentation does not constitute art, unless an artist or curator says so? Although responses to racist imagery (statues of slave traders etc.) have become conspiciously less tolerated in recent years, the status of art itself has remained historicist, conventional and peremtory. It seems reasonable to suggest the Tate should remove its racist paintings but it seems unreasonable that the Tate should continue ad infinitum. On this basis The White Pube’s first idea seems reformist and functions counterintuitively as a call for the Tate to maintain the relations in which it currently functions, bolstered by conservative, piecemeal socially-engineered reform.

The White Pube states that their idea 002 is a “soft suggestion”. But in conflating the notion of a Universal Basic Income with art and artists, it could be interpreted more like a hard-edged call to reproduce exchange value en masse and for all artists (including the rising numbers it would apparently engender) to function unapologetically as an ever-increasing organ of capitalist modes of production. The White Pube’s argument is that UBI would initiate better productive conditions therefore increasing the potential for non-artists to become artists and for all artists to produce more art, on the basis that more art is good, as it “enriches everybody’s lives”. More artists and more art is clearly possible and a UBI may indeed produce an increase in both, but why is more art and more artists accepted to be a good thing by default and without question? On a very general level it seems axiomatic to say art enriches people’s lives but it is far more difficult to determine how the contents of the Frieze fair tent improves anybody's life other than those extracting a monetary profit from their transition from social or use value into exchange value. More artists means more diversity of artworks which is apparently a good thing; that a plurality of art ever-increasing and ever more diverse is automatically accepted as indubitably positive. But The White Pube’s idea 001 already established that some art is racist, and we would confidently assert that a diversity of racist art would constitute a bad idea. Is that racist Tate mural inert in terms of improving peoples’ lives? Also the whole premise of art criticism implies some art is worse than some other art. Is some art bad? Does bad art improve people’s lives? Conversely and rationally it makes more sense to maintain an art practice from the point of view that art isn’t necessarily a good thing; which would constitute a critical art practice, as opposed to one defined by celebration and blind acceptance. If it turns out art does in fact improve people’s lives (which people?), people need to access it in order to get the benefits. This implies it is only the accessible art (meaning literally being able to find it) that will improve people’s lives. The system of art is structured hierarchically, to quote The White Pube “there are so many things to factor in” but very generally let’s say the art system is divided between two spheres, one defined by the art system’s own terms, as ‘successful’ and another, again defined by the art system’s own terms as ‘failed’. The successful sphere coheres with greater distribution and exposure whereas the failed sphere coheres with obscurity and wage slavery. It doesn't require much fieldwork to know that the size of the failed sphere is significantly larger than the successful sphere. More art produced as a result of more artists is not necessarily going to result in more artists occupying the successful sphere. On the contrary it is likely to increase the numbers occupying the sphere of failure; supplying for the system, and specifically for those successfully extracting a profit from exchange value, a reserve of surplus labour that does little more than establish further the sphere of success as valid and self-important. An increase in art and artists is not going to improve anybody’s life as it won’t be found very easily. An increase in art and artists, by this logic seems to merely increase the ability for institutions such as the Tate to exist and function in the way they currently do, which includes not being much fussed about its racist pictures and promoting Anthony Gormley’s high-octane career.

The art system reproduces itself as relativistic, pluralistic, indistinct, unfettered and diverse. The distinction between artists and curators is unclear; the distinction between curators and managers is unclear; consequently the distinction between artists and managers is unclear. It is from this perspective that The White Pube’s third idea (003) is offered, that “curators should ask the public what they want” as opposed to pursuing their own curatorial programs. In the innumerable ambiguities surrounding the question as to who produces art, this could easily mean ‘artists should ask the public what art they should be producing’. Managers are already invidiously adept at pretending to ask the public what they want. Regarding culture more widely than the self-contained, self-describing system of art, we should bear in mind that some peoples’ conception of culture results in them blowing themselves and other people to pieces; or in watching the Kardashians. The forms most adept at producing in-line with what the public wants, such as the music industry which is similarly bifurcated between success and failure, is what ultimately results in atrocities such as the reformation of Abba, Adele and Mumford and Sons. One wonders if some limiting criterion would be necessary; which begs the question of who arbitrates - the audience? An elected committee? The reintroduction of selection. Is it not the case that most people interested in art constitute some form of producer (manager, collector, artist) and what they would want would constitute some version of self-interest? The White Pube asserts that curators “should want to be of service to the surrounding art scene” but the surrounding art scene constitutes a model of the wider and higher system of art, in the sense that they have been shaped by the institution that they want to access. Essentially this idea constitutes being vicariously at the service of the institution. The White Pube wants curators to ask their audiences what it is they’d like to see, which immediately places the curator in a position of authority, as the one doing the asking; if she asks the audience, and gets snowed under with suggestions, who selects? And anyway does this richly diverse audience particularly want to be subjugated by the patronising questions of “white, straight, cis, non-disabled, middle class and just fucking boring” curators? As ‘white, straight, cis, non-disabled, middle class’ men, we haven’t got a clue, but we know we don’t want to be asked; primarily because the question is bound to be predicated on the institution of art as it currently functions. Galleries, whether publicly funded or otherwise reproduce the conditions enabling the means of production of the institutions higher up the chain. While the relations of distribution of art are maintained by institutions, intertwined with the capitalist class they serve, arthood and this quaint, and in many respects archaic notion of art (for whatever audience) doesn’t come into it. The system of art, whatever it is, is not fragile; whatever attempts are made to make it fair, democratic and equitable merely bolster its domineering control.

The White Pube’s idea number 004 encourages artists to publicly declare if they grew up in wealth, particularly if their “rich parents helped them get where they are today”. Presumably ‘where they are today’ refers to the art system’s own terms of success (not down a back alley sucking on a crack pipe), terms The White Pube do seem to adhere to, to some significant extent. Eddie Peake and his mum Phyllida Barlow are offered as examples par excellence. We’re not avid followers of the contemporary art scene but even we know of this maternal connection. It doesn’t appear that Eddie (or for that matter Phyllida) has tried to keep it under wraps. Unless she’s still got him ‘on the breast’ why would he? What appears then to matter in idea number 004 is the declarative gesture itself. That public acknowledgement of inequality within the art system should fall squarely on the shoulders of those not holding the shitty end of the stick. Again, it has been some time since we attended a commercial or publicly funded gallery’s opening reception, but we can remember when we have in the past, that no one appeared to be hiding the light of their wealth and privilege under a bushel. The White Pube writes of a “disconnect between the exhibition and myself [sic], the artist and me [sic]” with regard to an old exhibition by Eddie Peake. They are right to identify a disconnect but in reality it is far more pervasive and foundational than being simply between well-off artists and struggling ones. Within the sphere of arthood that ourselves, The White Pube and Eddie Peake occupy, the foundational disconnect operates between all artists; and the fetishised objects they produce, from which they are alienated. Struggling artists are no more or less alienated from artworks than privileged ones, such as Eddie Peake, it’s just that he enjoys his alienation with a big fat grin on his face. The real problem that The White Pube’s idea 004 inadvertently raises, is that failed artists want to function like Eddie Peake. Not necessarily to have Phyllida Barlow for a mum but to be successful in the terms orchestrated and maintained by the institution. The White Pube asks how an artist might cross the “chasm” between failure and success, but why would an artist want to access the ‘successful’ sphere of a system they deplore? On the individual level the problem may appear to be about inequality but in terms of culture considered more broadly, the problem is about what exactly passes as art. The problem for artists is they have no control over the work they produce once their work engages in relations of distribution, and those relations are premonitory and already infiltrate the artist’s relations of production. It is this chasm between all artists and all artwork that constitutes the gestemkunstschaftwerk and the most significant disconnect to be overcome.

Ideas 005 and 006 consist of axiomatic suggestions… “the art world should not replicate the capitalist structures of other industries and instead should set a better example with a horizontal approach to decision-making and pay” and that all “[...] museums[...] give back all stolen objects” respectively.

The White Pube (2021) ‘Ideas for a New Art World’, Rough Trade Books

2
Messum’s [both], Catto, Thompson’s, John Martin, Jonathan Cooper, Pontone, Abermarle, Brian Sinfield, Browse and Darby, Flowers, Purdy Hicks. Thanks to CT for the starting, provisional list.


[Fig.1]