I don\u2019t see that \u201ccelebrations of contemporary art\u201d in their \u00adexplicitly celebratory incarnations (openings, launches, inaugurations) are any different than the events by which works of art are brought forward. Considering the millions, public and private, that are regularly spent on the biennial and triennial packaging of contemporary art throughout the world, on foundations, on exported museums\u2014the Louvre to Abu Dhabi, the Mus\u00e9e national d\u2019art moderne\/Centre Pompidou, also to Abu Dhabi, and soon to Shanghai\u2014, and of course on the transparently named Fairs, little money ever goes to the authors, journals, editors, and emerging \u00adartists, the very substance and life force of the art world. And for good reason, since the court celebrations these generosities are given to\u2014think of the Jeff Koons exhibition, among others, at Versailles\u2014are so much more important and magnificent than any alternative venue or \u00adsmall-time publisher. Are these financial liberalities actually useful or effective?
For indeed, the problem must be cast in terms of utilitarian \u00adphilosophy. With respect to contemporary art, father of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham\u2019s famous phrase may take a peculiar and unexpected turn: the greatest aesthetic good for the greatest number of people. By this reasoning, maximizing the aesthetic well-being of those who already possess a comfortable dose of it can have beneficial effects on those who have less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The computation of pleasure and pain within contemporary art \u00adpropels mass culture and the great festive congregations to the very edge of this sought-after aesthetic well-being, such that an increase in \u00adpleasure will always be more advantageous for the one with access to it while \u00addiminishing pain for the one on which this will end up having an effect. If a good number of people benefit from the celebration, such \u00adbenefits will gradually accrue to the majority. It is a delusion coupled with a lie. The celebration of art isn\u2019t as democratic as one might think. It makes \u00adrational attempts to maximize aesthetic well-being for the \u00adgreatest \u00adnumber without ever really intending to do so. In the dissemination of mass culture, indeed designed for the greatest number of people, it isn\u2019t the latter\u2019s \u00adwell-being that is being sought so much as its \u00adstupefaction, so as to increase the material well-being of the owners of capital. We know \u00adperfectly well, to take a well-known example, that the Rio Carnival has become a staged spectacle of the poor for the benefit of the rich, who return from it all the richer as they will have maximized their \u00adaesthetic well-being, while the poor, remaining in their favelas, will not have \u00adbenefited in the least. People will come back the next year for a parade still more beautiful and festive. All the more beautiful and festive that it will be led by those who have absolutely nothing and still manage to be festive. As long as they remain poor. As every tourist knows, the Brazilians are perennially merry and have samba running through their veins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A deeply-rooted idea in contemporary art\u2014in fact, an extremely tenacious remnant of the bourgeois ethos\u2014assumes that, because it is art (the more so that it is contemporary), it is automatically a source of \u00adpleasure, happiness, joy, and well-being. Contemporary art is, in every sense of the term, the celebration of body and mind, though the claimed and clearly represented hedonism isn\u2019t always the most \u00adstraightforward path toward this new form of Buddhist awakening. Art is useful to our \u00adaesthetic well-being even when it shocks, repels, or offends our \u00adsensibilities, since its amorality and immorality are accepted as \u00adfestive transgression in the archaic sense. We are no longer in the Stone Age, however, but in the age of ultra-liberalism. Art is nonetheless most \u00adanachronistically understood as the sole locus of transgressive celebration, which explains why a growing number of creative people of all types, with backgrounds having nothing to do with issues of art and aesthetics, claim an artistic prerogative to broach that enviable territory of the \u201cart world.\u201d One surprising quality of this world is that while it is overflowing with \u00aduseful resources and processes for maximizing one\u2019s well-being, it is itself useless. It has no end, no ending, no ultimate goal, and no defined form\u2014a pretty faithful materialization of what the reveller seeks: celebration for celebration\u2019s sake. Regardless of the means and the people involved, one must disrupt the senses, transgress to transgress, overcome every limit that presents itself. These festive transgressors forget that \u00adtransgression itself is already conceived as its own innocuous overcoming, and thus the exact opposite of the transgressive action thought to be engaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In presenting itself as a mammoth celebration open to all, in that art\u2014like celebrations of old\u2014is said to allow what is prohibited elsewhere, the latter is steered away from disinterestedness and its attendant \u00adautonomy, not to improve your psychological well-being so much as to channel the pleasures into a veritable arithmetic of hedonism that serves to \u00adcommercialize practices that were meant to be immaterial, \u00adunquantifiable, immeasurable. The implementation of contemporary art is most subtle: intermingling symbolic value, use value, and exchange value, its utility is in no way free (in the monetary sense), since it always arises from the egotistical computation of pleasure and pain whose promised profitability through maximization speaks for itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The subjectivism and relativism of aesthetic tastes and preferences prevailing today are just another facet of rationalist utilitarian \u00adbehaviour: I basically pursue whatever maximizes my aesthetic well-being and nobody can prevent me from doing so. That which appears to be the voice of \u00adpluralism and democratic reason, culminating in the quasi-communion of everyone with everyone in celebration, is another version of Adam Smith\u2019s free-trading \u201cinvisible hand\u201d: as everyone pursues their own pleasure and aesthetic maximization, without realizing it, so to speak, it is \u00adinvariably beneficial to the community as a whole. Once the individual is \u00adaestheticized, aestheticization may be extended to groups and thus to all of society. As they say, \u201cthe more the merrier.\u201d Art\u2019s first use, or \u00adusefulness, then, would be to function as a liberating celebration, though we should be asking ourselves if art must be useful for anything at all, and if so, if it should be taking over the age-old uses of celebration, in \u00adparticular that of at least temporarily upsetting values. Rather, \u00adcelebratory \u00adcontemporary art \u00adreinstates repressive values, for, by definition, its \u00adhedonistic \u00adutility cannot be rendered without generating a material and symbolic \u00adsurplus value that is returned to the cultural industry\u2014which has never so \u00adeffectively earned its name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Art, as such, is antithetical to quantification, calculation, and the computation of pleasures. To say that one work of art affords more<\/em> \u00adpleasure than another is either a triviality of everyday language, or does indeed reveal that one can quantify the surplus value it is supposed to contain. This poses no problem for those who hold to the maximization of aesthetic well-being, since it is individual pleasure that is logically self-measured by the individual undergoing the experience. For those who hold that aesthetic judgement hinges on the immaterial value of art, things are very different. Conceived and experienced as immaterial, it \u00adcannot be quantified by anything or anybody at all. The essential tenor of art is thus its immateriality, even if the object that bears this aesthetic value is, as any object would be, concrete, purchasable, resalable, \u00adperishable. This object has a price, but the work of art born by this object has no price, in the literal sense. How do you quantify the aesthetic value of the works of a Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, or Daniel Buren? Aesthetic value \u00adcannot be reduced to the material and tangible characteristics that make up these works. It would be absurd\u2014and indeed futile\u2014to attempt it. Art, as the field of the immaterial, implies an entirely \u00addifferent rapport between receivers and the works, and between the receivers themselves, with respect to the destination of these works. Art may be considered a \u00adcelebration, provided one changes the aesthetic relationship. Not the \u00aduseful and utilitarian aesthetic of our societies, but what I call an \u201c\u00adaesthetics of the gift.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This aesthetics of the gift has yet to be developed. The more so in that Marcel Mauss\u2019 celebrated Essai sur le don<\/em> (\u201cThe Gift,\u201d 1923-24) says deliberately little about its aesthetic implications, and these issues are scarcely touched upon in the work of researchers at MAUSS (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste en Sciences Sociales<\/em>, or Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Science), founded in 1982 by sociologist Alain Caill\u00e9. The framework of an aesthetics of the gift is built around the primacy of the processes of giving, receiving, reciprocating found in other social forms. Here, it isn\u2019t individual exchanges but collective ones that prevail, and, as it is a matter of cultural productions, emphasis is placed on their \u00adimmaterial, or symbolic value. With the gift, one no longer maximizes individual \u00adwell-being but freely (and gratuitously) addresses the Other, the others, in a \u00addisinterested manner, the work of art essentially being an address to the Other \u00adcomprising an obligation to reciprocate that is fulfilled by the critic. An artwork having no critical attention does not exist. Rather than be part of the process of production, transaction, consumption, the aesthetics of the gift proposes one of presentation, reception, critique. A true \u00adcelebration of art or of aesthetic relationships would not derive profit, interests, or uses other than those of its immateriality, what Kant called \u201cfinality without end.\u201d If the finality of art, or its function, is not to have any, why address it to the Other as a gift through a gesture that implies reciprocity? Do we not risk playing on words and actions, in as much as \u00adpresenting-receiving-critiquing is still a means of \u00adacquiring benefits, though they be immaterial, aesthetic, artistic, and have no end at all? But, as with the gift in its other forms, the aesthetic gift is a \u00adcommitment ensuring human freedom. No-one is constraining me, \u00adno-one imposes this action against my will; I choose to act with and for the other, and this is conditional on nothing but establishing the immateriality of our aesthetic interactions and thus ensuring art\u2019s freedom of action, its autonomy. Yet this autonomy is impure, it must grapple with society while, \u00adsimultaneously, the immaterial value seeks to maintain its autotelic nature, without which no free aesthetic thought could exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the extent that art is this gift and this immaterial rendering, it is simultaneously interesting and disinterested. It also engages a moment of ethicity, in that the works are not neutral, they still signify. As one may observe at every contemporary art event, great and small, revellers \u00adreadily drop the semantics of the artworks, their socio-political and ethical ramifications, to more fully give themselves over to celebrative abandon. Sometimes the reverse occurs, in a perfectly false reconciliation: on the pretext that the work is shocking, it is said to be more liberating. \u201cMore liberating\u201d? How does one calculate that? Going to see works to liberate oneself is proof manifest that freedom cannot be found in practical and moral existence\u2014otherwise, why seek it in art? But here too lies a bitter disappointment: the majority of those attending art shows are not even looking at the works, unless they are actively engaged in understanding and interpreting them; consequently, they are not returning to the world of art what the works had freely given. One is free to not appreciate a \u00adparticular work and to criticize it in the negative sense, with supportive arguments, but this fulfils at least the return address to the Other. One would be overly naive to think that an aesthetics of the gift could mend each and everyone\u2019s artistic, aesthetic, and ethical deficiencies, or that it might be the vector for a connecting bond between individuals. The gift cannot be made instrumental without immediately being reduced to nothingness. Art as celebration, if it is an unconditional and selfless gift between human beings, would thus still be deceptive, not only because everything in art is not of equal value and all celebrations are not of the same calibre, but especially because celebrations themselves have a \u00adnegative dimension: art is not just pleasure and happiness. One gives in order to assert the freedom of the human community, not to use that community to serve one\u2019s personal celebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Translated from the French by Ron Ross]<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/67_DO01_Lageira_Koons_michael-jackson-and-bubbles-scaled.jpg\")
Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles<\/em>, 1988.
photo\u202f: Laurent Lecat assist\u00e9 par | assisted by Ruy Ribiere \u00a9 Jeff Koons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n