9.5 Theses: Conclusions – Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen

Davis concludes 9.5 Theses with overall impressions and advice regarding the relationship between politics and art, and how art may change if the world changes.

Ch. 15: Beyond the Art World posits two facets of what it means to judge something as an artwork.

#1: HORIZONTAL. You compare the work to a history of art and current conventions in art.
#2: VERTICAL. You compare the work to the world as it exists at the time the work was made; how choices in the artwork link up to qualities of its contemporary audience.

Davis contemns the horizontal model as relatively uninteresting. The vertical model, on the bright side, puts the “history back into art history” and demands that the artwork be relevant to the social world it is a part of. Good artwork has political qualities in so far as it plays off of political realities with a contemporary voice.

Davis also reacts against the horizontal model by encouraging artists to transcend the pressures and values of the art world. “When you have learned its terms and then learned not to care about it, you have achieved a kind of state of grace, and that is where good art begins.”

What did others think of this charge? Are “art world” concerns best learned and left alone?

Ch. 16: To the Future opens with a disturbing story of Davis’ encounter with a man taken by police and accused of trespassing at the Miami Basel art fair. He’d held up signs reading “Art Needs a Home,” “Homelessness is a Condition, not a Disease,” and “Hungry not Starving.” (The man, F. Geoffrey Johnson, then produced his ticket to the fair, but was told his signs counted as art and he would be arrested if he returned.)

The rest of the chapter assesses how we can think of art produced under our specific political conditions. Davis estranges the reader from contemporary American capitalism by pointing out its bizarre imbalances:
-“America is now the developed world’s capital of social stagnation,”
-“we incarcerate a number of people to rival the Gulag at the height of Stalin’s madness, while above the rocky landscapes of foreign lands, we deploy robot planes to terrorize hapless populations—as if the ambition of our leaders is to turn the present into an approximation of some cautionary sci-fi dystopia.”
-“our profit-mad economic system will shortly convert the planet’s surface into an unlivable wasteland, left to its own devices”

As a result, Davis explains, we are witnessing the moment before an inevitable crashing of capitalism. Incidentally, it’s an exciting opening for visual artists to help enact change from their unique economical position.

In the present moment, artists are faced with corporations usurping their innovations and upper class interests defining their practices. Consequently, artists main mission according to Davis is maintaining the myth of the artist’s status as middle-class and creatively autonomous. Despite the depressingly delusional and ego-centric condition of the surviving artist, there’s an upshot: the artist must be heroic to maintain their identity, yet another characteristic that lends itself well to enacting political change.

At this point, Davis gives several examples of artist-influenced political movements, like Stuart Davis (relation unknown) support of labor struggles in the 30s through the Artists’ Union and Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Womanhouse, an influencial component of the feminist art movement in the 70s.

Davis ends the examples on a quote from John Berger, reacting to those who would accuse Marxism of celebrating the “intrusion” of politics into art. Berger says, “On the contrary, we protest against the intrusion. The intrusion is most marked in times of crisis and great suffering… [those times] must be understood so that they can be ended: art and men will then be freer.”

The book ends with a dreamier and dreamier sequence about art after capitalism, when we will look back at art made now with the historical goggles with which we look at Jesus and Mary paintings from back in the day. Capitalism gone and freedom acquired, art will be reflective of a new present, “more interesting than anything we can now even imagine.”

What did others make of this art after capitalism fantasy?

For my part, I got an implication that there will be some future in which further freedoms are not imaginable: we all have all the freedoms, humans and animals alike. This seemed outrageous. Also, perhaps it is my unconscious elitism rearing its ugly head but it seems unlikely that great art will some time no longer be rare and precious.

A response to one of Sarrita’s questions, of how to define artist as activist:
The message I left the book with is that despite the fact that art is importantly not political, and in fact politics must allow art to be separate, artists are especially well-equipped to enact political change. That artists have an ethical responsibility to recognize the lack of political efficacy of art as a medium, and so not to consider their art sufficient as a form of political participation.