![\"85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Sherman_Studio](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Sherman_Studio-in-a-Trunk_Celebrating-Monogram.jpg\")
Studio in a Trunk, <\/em>collection Celebrating Monogram<\/em>.
Photo : \u00a9 Louis Vuitton Malletier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Let us be clear about the matter at hand, which we feel that even the signed statement initiated by the French online opinion journal Mediapart<\/em> misses entirely. Early in 2015, Mediapart<\/em> issued a petition bearing the title \u201cL\u2019art n\u2019est-il qu\u2019un produit de luxe?\u201d (Is art just a luxury product?). The petition was signed by many people, including Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Georges Didi-Huberman. But the argument presented and supported by these signatures evades the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is the danger that art continues to pose to hegemonic power.<\/em> Art is dangerous and terror-inducing precisely because it calls attention to the shabby constructedness of what is promoted as real, natural, true, or inevitable. Even Plato\u2019s respectful fear of art\u200a\u2014\u200athe \u201cdivine terror\u201d that he chose to acknowledge but banned from his ideal republic\u200a\u2014\u200ais motivated not because art transcends or flees the world, but because it immerses you in its very fabric, in the funk, viscera, and sinew of another world\u2019s becoming.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - See Donald Preziosi, Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity<\/em> (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).<\/span> The paradox remains that far too many people believe, or are led to believe, that art is impotent. But the very desire of the moneyed classes and institutions to co-opt and neutralize it in advance belies that assumption of impotence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The intensive financialization of culture that we are witnessing now is certainly a severe form of patronage, replete with its attendant patronizing attitude. It is severe because it consoli\u00addates power by reducing everything to the single fiction that it is the 1 percent who deign to keep the \u201carts\u201d alive, or not. So, as the circle closes, let us\u200a\u2014\u200athe multitude\u200a\u2014\u200aremember why art is the target. It is not its impotence, but its potency, its very power as Kunstgriff<\/em>: the unexpected turn, trick, or reversal that art creates when imagination becomes action, when what is given or \u201cnatural\u201d becomes another actuality, right before our eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We borrow the concept of Kunstgriff<\/em>, the \u201cturn\u201d or \u201creversal\u201d that art enacts, from Walter Benjamin. We see it as an aesthetic concept linked to Benjamin\u2019s famous historiographic concept of \u2009\u201cthe turn of recollection\u201d(die Wendung des Eingedenkens<\/em>), which is an inversion, an immanent about-face.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - See Jae Emerling, \u201cAn Art History of Means: Arendt-Benjamin,\u201d Journal of Art Historiography<\/em>, vol. 1 (December 2009), http:\/\/arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/02\/media_139138_en.pdf.<\/span> It is defined as a point at which there is an unexpected\u200a\u2014\u200ayet, in retrospect, not unmotivated\u200a\u2014\u200aturn of events, a reorientation that one can now see is neither wholly consistent nor inevitable. It is this power or force that we must recollect and fight for in real terms. For us, an example of such real terms would be how and why art and beauty remain inextricable. The beautiful is the act of touching an outside, beyond all value, beyond good and evil. It is the decisive movement wherein what was, fortuitously becomes what will have been.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Art is our commonwealth, our most-honed weapon, our Spinozist joy. As such, art is a measure of our affective capacity, our capacity to affect and be affected by bodies (forms) and forces outside of ourselves. Art produces affects, not values. Its most vital affect is joy\u200a\u2014\u200aa Spinozist joy that \u201ccannot be excessive, but is always good\u201d because \u201cit is a pleasure which, in so far as it is related to the body, consists in the fact that all parts of the body are equally effected.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics<\/em>, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 257\u200a\u2013\u200a58. Gilles Deleuze explains and amplifies the importance of joy in Spinoza and in all of our encounters, especially those with images and artworks; see especially his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy<\/em>, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 48\u200a\u2013\u200a50.<\/span> Spinoza reminds us that \u201cthe body\u2019s power of acting is increased or helped\u201d by what it encounters in the world. To touch an outside, to sense the immanence of being, temporality, and life as such: this is the joy that art offers. Why lay this power down? Why cede our ontological, affective, durational power to the nouveau riche and the curators of high-end cool that consume only logos, brand names, and capital?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Isn\u2019t something similar going on in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri\u2019s latest work Commonwealth<\/em>? (Such an apt title for this series of discussions.) Toward the end, they discuss art and revitalize art historian Alois Riegl\u2019s complex notion of Kunstwollen<\/em>, reminding us that it has nothing to do with the financialization of culture but with only the productive desire of art to survive clandestinely even intense periods of crass deluxe ostentation.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth<\/em> (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 375.<\/span> It survives in order to preserve its capacity to affect and our capacity to be affected by something wholly outside of ourselves yet wholly within life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of these untimely repetitions\u200a\u2014\u200aeven the current resurrection of the aristocratic patron in new\/no clothes\u200a\u2014\u200aare openings for critique created by art-work<\/em>, what Gilles Deleuze calls \u201ccrowned anarchy.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - On \u201ccrowned anarchy,\u201d see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition<\/em>, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37, and Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia<\/em>, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158 and the entirety of the remarkable tenth chapter.<\/span> This is art as event. As such, it is pure immanence, abiding no transcendent law, economy, or authority. Nor does it make \u201cany distinction at all between things that might be called natural and things that might be called artificial\u201d because \u201cartifice is fully part of Nature, since each thing\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. is defined by the arrangements of motions and affects into which it enters, whether these arrangements are artificial or natural.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Deleuze, Spinoza<\/em>, 124. On art and immanence, see Jae Emerling, \u201cAn Art Historical Return to Bergson,\u201d in Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film<\/em>, ed. John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 260\u200a\u2013\u200a71.<\/span> An event is owned by no one. It is no one. It only moves immanently. It only runs between things and people, complicating them. It is the actualization of a life, a becoming-other (even becoming-indiscernible, shared and open) that is at once sensible and intelligible, aesthetic and epistemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So let us not concern ourselves with luxury goods, which are only the sallow death masks of art. Let us concern ourselves with events, which often take place when it seems as if nothing is happening or could be happening at all. Let us remember and muster the strength to create a new mode of relationship with this beautiful movement\u200a\u2014\u200athe very event of art<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ano matter how exhausted we have become. <\/p>\n![\"85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Sherman_Camera](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Sherman_Camera-Messenger_Celebrating-Monogram.jpg\")
Camera Messenger, <\/em>collection Celebrating Monogram<\/em>.
Photo : \u00a9 Louis Vuitton Malletier
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Buren_Photos-souvenirs](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_DO01_Emerling-Preziosi_Buren_Photos-souvenirs-au-carre.jpg\")
Photos-souvenirs au carr\u00e9<\/em>,
La Monnaie de Paris, Paris, 2010.
\u00a9 DB \/ SODRAC (2015).
Photo : \u00a9 Monnaie de Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n