Kolja Kohlhoff / Michael Lüthy
February 2003
“In front of a photo showing the hands of an
old lady, the more deprived express a more or less conventional emotion,
or moral sympathy, but never an aesthetic judgement as such: ‘Well,
you know, she’s got these weirdly deformed hands ... This old
lady, she’s had to work hard’ (Labourer, Paris). As one
moves higher up the social ladder, the statements become increasingly abstract. They acquire something of the neutralisation,
the distancing, which are assumed by and constitute the bourgeois
discourse about the social world: ‘I find this a very beautiful
photo. It thoroughly symbolises work. It makes me think of the old
servant of Flaubert. ... It’s a pity that work and poverty cause
such deformity’ (Engineer, Paris).”
Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction
In all its aspects, life is steadily succumbing to the aesthetic perspective:
from our attitudes to our bodies through to the ways we plan our lives and
convey political ideas. It is not so much that reality itself is rendered
aesthetic, but rather that access to the world increasingly assumes aesthetic
forms. It is not the usefulness or utility value of an object or an action
that is of primary importance. What is decisive is the quality of the experience
that is offered. According to the cultural sociologist Gerhard Schulze,
Western society has become a society of experience, which judges the world
in terms of its capacity to provide stimuli. Products are no longer regarded
as means to ends, but as ends in themselves. They should provide satisfaction
for what they are, independent of their practical features, which are regarded
as secondary in importance, or merely adventitious. It is now several years
since the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch concluded from his own observation
of this development, that, once every area of life has been embraced by
this aesthetic perspective, and once reality itself has acquired the appearance
of an aesthetic construct, then thought and action will also be rendered
aesthetic. What he claims we gain from this advance of aesthetics into the
domains of reason and pragmatism is the plurality, complexity and flexibility
of the aesthetic: in Welsch’s view, “aesthetic” refers not
so much to beauty, as primarily to the malleability of the various circumstances
of our lives. What we tend to ignore, however, in these designs and vicissitudes,
is not only the practical dimensions of our situation in the world, so much
as the social reality and the economic structures that condition, enable,
or hinder our (in)capacity for experience.
This aestheticising of the world has immediate consequences for art. It
becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between art and non-art, for
instance between photographic art and advertising, or between events of
whatever kind and artistic actions, between classic and artistic service
industries. We can even imagine the complete disappearance of art: a world
that has become through and through aesthetic would be a world without art.
The dissolution of the distinction between art and life would imply the
disappearance of art itself. But this lack of clarity also offers opportunities
for a massive expansion in the appeal and range of art – far beyond
its traditional spaces. It becomes possible for art to intervene directly
in political, economic or social discourses, or conversely, to assimilate
them. When it addresses the micro-phenomenologies of contemporary societies,
spaces and cultures, then the fuzzy boundary between artistic and non-artistic
actions is perceived not as a disadvantage, but as something full of creative
potential, as a point in itself. The powerful contemporary urge to move
art out of the studio, the gallery and the museum is no longer driven by
the desire to erect boulevards of sculptures. What we see is not the production
of artefacts, but the initiation of open processes in which the public become
directly involved. These participatory, interventionist and collaborative
art concepts are also distinguished from the kind of art that used to be
created for the public sphere in being less concerned with public conflict
than with constructive cooperation. Art is assuming the role of a service
industry, making offers that are attractive and easy to accept.
The extent to which we can make out a critical, reflective potential depends
on the individual process. daily services combine two different strategies.
For them, the neo-Duchampian gesture of simply declaring a certain consumer
service to be art is not enough. They couple this approach with a transfer
between very distinct social and cultural contexts. There is no straightforward
way to render the pulling of a rickshaw, or the shining of shoes aesthetic. For the social and economic
hierarchy between producer and consumer is in a sense inscribed into these
activities, and this exposes how the aesthetic perception – the enjoyment
of having one’s shoes polished as an event – involves the suppression
of the social factor. The fuzziness of the distinction between art and non-art
becomes embodied as a sense of unease; the enjoyment becomes a matter of
ethics.