cultural sociology 2012 rothenberg 177 200

8/13/2019 Cultural Sociology 2012 Rothenberg 177 200

1/26

http://cus.sagepub.com/Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177Theonline version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/1749975511404851

2012 6: 177 originally published online 3 August 2011Cultural SociologyJulia Rothenberg

Art after 9/11: Critical Moments in Lean Times

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

British Sociological Association

can be found at:Cultural SociologyAdditional services and information for

http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

at Flinders University on April 20, 2013cus.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177http://www.sagepublications.com/http://www.britsoc.co.uk/http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://www.britsoc.co.uk/http://www.sagepublications.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177http://cus.sagepub.com/


2/26

What is This?

- Aug 3, 2011OnlineFirst Version of Record

- May 9, 2012Version of Record>>

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://cus.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/07/05/1749975511404851.full.pdfhttp://cus.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/07/05/1749975511404851.full.pdfhttp://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177.full.pdfhttp://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177.full.pdfhttp://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://cus.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/07/05/1749975511404851.full.pdfhttp://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/2/177.full.pdf


3/26

Cultural Sociology

6(2) 177200

The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission: sagepub.

co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1749975511404851

cus.sagepub.com

Art after 9/11: CriticalMoments in Lean Times

Julia RothenbergQueensborough Community College, City University of New York, USA

AbstractThis article presents fieldwork that I conducted on the response of several New York artists

to the events of 9/11 and the representation of these events in the mainstream media. Through

interviews, analysis of works of art, and the development of a theoretical framework derived from

both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, I argue that the work of these artists constituted

a critical response to historical events. I explain how Adornos argument concerning the critical

dimension of aesthetic experience is useful for understanding this response. In addition, I invoke

Adornos dialectical understanding of arts dual-character in order to explain how critical art is

possible within an art world dominated by market concerns. I also explore Walter Benjamins

contentions concerning the democratizing capacities of new media and the withering of the auraas an important corrective to Adornos narrow focus on modernist formal development.

KeywordsTheodor Adorno, artists, Walter Benjamin, media, political art, public sphere, September 11

terrorist attacks, sociology of art

Since the onset of modernity, cities such as New York have been incubators of avant-

garde developments in the arts. With the triumph of neoliberal policy, over the past sev-

eral decades federal funding for the arts, along with affordable work, living, and

alternative exhibition spaces, has rapidly dwindled. At the same time, the art market has

become increasingly inflated (at least until recently)1as works of art take unprecedented

value as sources of financial investment and social prestige. While this situation mili-

tates, in general, against the production and exhibition of socially critical works of art,

some artists manage both to negotiate the pressures of the market and to produce works

of art that are critical of existing social conditions. Such works provide alternatives to the

ways that mainstream media sources frame social and political events, and are especially

important in light of the increased domination of the public sphere by corporate interests

Corresponding author:

Julia Rothenberg, 341 West 24th Street, Apartment 3D, New York, NY, 10011, USA.

Email: [email protected]

404851CUSXXX10.1177/1749975511404851RothenbergCultural Sociology

Article

http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/


4/26

178 Cultural Sociology6(2)

(Habermas, 1992; Klein, 2002; Low and Smith, 2006). In what follows I will discuss

several New York City-based artists whose work took on themes suggested by the per-

sonal trauma and political context of 9/11in a manner which diverges from what James

Scott (1990) called public transcripts of the event presented by the mainstream media.

I account for the existence of these reflective and critical works of art within the contextof current market conditions through Theodor Adornos assessment of arts dual-character

and, to a lesser degree, Walter Benjamins understanding of the democratic possibilities

of new media.

By way of categories developed by Adorno, I will examine the manner in which the

experience of aesthetic reflection that these works of art evoke stands in (critical) con-

trast to commercial media sources that actively promoted an unreflective interpretation

of 9/11, which supported the political agenda of the Bush administration. In response to

some important limitations presented by Adorno in the context of postmodern art, I will

also resurrect Benjamins contentions concerning the critical capacities of mechanicalreproduction and the withering of the aura. Benjamins optimistic reading of new media,

while not without problems, helps to explain the critical dimension of some of the work

I will discuss. My central goal in this study is to establish a theoretical and empirical

basis on which to claim that the sphere of artistic production, though dominated by com-

mercial interests, still maintains the capacity to contribute to a public sphere of expres-

sion and experience. The case of New York artists response to 9/11 provides a unique

opportunity through which to develop such a basis because of the public visibility of both

the New York art world and the traumatic attack on human life and US authority. Less

central, but also important, to this study is my desire to make a case for the continuedrelevance of the work of both Adorno and Benjamin to the sociology of art and culture.

Adornos dialectical understanding of arts dual-character is especially significant in

that it provides a way to think the possibility of autonomy within heteronomy. In addi-

tion, his historical and social account of artistic form and aesthetic experience helps to

get around the narrow notion that art must be explicitly political in order to express

social resistance or critique.

Methods Deployed

After September 11, I was commissioned to study the impact of this event on artists

communities in New York City.2I was well positioned to find informants for this project

because of my prior career as a practicing artist and actor in the art world. I located my

sample of informants through art-world contacts that I had maintained, others that I

renewed, and some to whom I was newly introduced. Based on my snowball sample, I

interviewed and visited the studios of at least ten New York City artists whose lives and

work had been directly impacted by 9/11 and its economic, social, and political after-

math. I also interviewed directors and staff from an array of New York City galleries,

ranging from blue-chip commercial venues (galleries that exhibit the top-selling artists)

to experimental galleries showing riskier artists whose work had not yet achieved or

because of its non-commercial nature was unlikely to achieve much market success.

These interviews took place over a six-month period in 20023, during which time

I repeatedly visited artists studios and galleries, sometimes dropping by for a chat,

http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/http://cus.sagepub.com/


5/26

Rothenberg 179

sometimes for scheduled interviews, and sometimes for gallery openings or other public

events. Although the art-world actors whom I interviewed for this project were aware of

my current status as a sociologist, my job was made much easier because of my past

status as an insider.3I am somewhat fluent in the vocabulary and discourses that matter

in the art world, and was able to provide commentary on works of art and various artistsas they came up in conversation, and to easily discuss artistic goals, influences, and

media with artists. Indeed, the analysis that I offer here was developed in part through a

collaborative process in which the artists and I together worked to arrive at an interpreta-

tion of their work. Thus, my attempt to bring to light the social meaning and significance

of the works of art that I discuss also reflects the intent of the artists.

While I interviewed almost a dozen artists for this study, I chose artists who were

and still are active players in the New York art scene and art market, but at the same

time are not among the top tier of commercially successful artists (this is no longer the

case for Paul Chan, who has since achieved star status). The artists in my sample allrely, or would like to rely, on the market and/or commissions and grants to earn their

daily bread. In this sense they are professional artists. On the other hand, none of

them had achieved the celebrity or name recognition of top-ticket younger contempo-

rary artists (at least during the time period in which I was conducting my interviews

undoubtedly the names have now changed) such as Mathew Barney, John Currin,

Cicely Brown, and Vanessa Beecroft. Thus, while their work maintains some level of

visibility, at least in terms of the New York City art audience, they are not bound by the

constraints of a market and collectors who expect them to produce a signature product.

Unlike top-selling art stars, they were relatively free to explore new themes and mate-rials in their work in direct response to historical events.4Indeed, I do not claim to have

collected a random or exhaustive sample of contemporary art or contemporary artists

response to 9/11. On the basis of my educated observation of the current art world,

however, I will claim that the work that I discuss does not represent an anomaly in

terms of style, technique, or content. What links these artists is that they all, in different

ways, presented complex, nuanced, and critical viewpoints of the events leading up to,

during, and after 9/11, especially in comparison with the mainstream medias treat-

ment of the disaster and ensuing events.

By incorporating interviews with artists and taking, more or less at face value, theclaims of subjects regarding the intention and meaning of their work in an analysis that

borrows much from Adorno, I risk running afoul of his ghost. Despite Adornos forays

into survey research under the auspices of both the Princeton Radio Project and studies

of anti-Semitism (see Jenemann, 2007, for a discussion of both), he was a vehement and

consistent critic of what he saw as a fetishization of positivism and empiricism in the

social sciences (Adorno et al., 1976). While I agree with many aspects of Adornos cri-

tique of mainstream social science, I do not follow his dismissal of the accounts that

subjects provide concerning their lives and the meaning that they attribute to cultural

objects as mere effects of dominant ideology. Unlike Adorno, I do not believe that it is

only critical theorists who are capable of providing insight into social conditions. Indeed,

the contradiction between Adornos claim that the subject has been rendered all but inca-

pable of resistance and the very existence of his own work has been pointed out by a

number of critics5and remains unresolved.



6/26


Central to my study are the works of art themselves. Although the meaning attributed

to these works by artists and other viewers plays an important role in my interpretation

of the work, I also engage a critical analysis of the works of art which issues in part from

a reconstruction of ideas from both Adorno and Benjamin that I will present below.

Through the lens of this reconstruction, the works of art will be treated as data in theirown right capable of rendering meaning that may dovetail with, but is not completely

dependent on, the accounts offered by artists and other art-world actors.

Theoretical Orientations

The sociology of art (Becker, 2008; Bourdieu, 1987; Zolberg, 1990) has contributed much

to our understanding of the social processes by which works of art are produced and con-

secrated; the networks, hierarchies, and power relations that characterize art worlds; the

manner in which the aesthetic sphere serves to legitimize class domination; and the impor-tance of art worlds in the development of post-industrial urban economies. However, at

least in the United States, the sociology of art has done little to develop a framework which

can account for the production of socially critical artwork within a cultural landscape domi-

nated by the logic of globalized capitalism, and through which such works of art can be

interpreted.6I argue that the basis for such a framework can be found by readdressing the

work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom analyzed the complicated

relationship between works of art and social processes, and sought to explain arts status as

both commodity and site of social critique. In what follows I will re-examine several of

Adornos and Benjamins key concepts in an attempt to understand the terms on which theproduction of socially critical artwork after 9/11 was possible within a market-dominated

art world, and against the background of a public permeated by commercial media which

continually reinforced a politics and social strategy of fear. My aim, however, is not to call

for a return to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as an end point for social analysis.

The conditions for the production and consumption of works of art (and what critical the-

ory termed the culture industry) have been dramatically altered since Adornos death in

1969, as has the relationship between these two spheres of cultural production and the

nature of the objects produced. Nonetheless, through a reappraisal of some of Adornos and

Benjamins key categories in particular those which address the possibilities for auton-omy within heteronomy we might begin to forge concepts, categories, and frameworks to

understand the complicated position of art in our own time.

Why the Return?

Modernism generated a plethora of discussion concerning arts role in society and its

potential to express social criticism or even to act as a catalyst for social change. Between

the 1930s and the 1970s a number of scholars associated with the Frankfurt School pro-

duced important works exploring the social position of art from the perspective of critical

theory. Habermas (1992), for example, chronicled the significance of works of art, music,

and literature in the development of the public sphere and bourgeois subjectivity. Both

Herbert Marcuse (1972) and Ernst Bloch (1989) discussed the relationship between aes-

thetic experience, freedom, and utopia in late capitalist society, and Walter Benjamin



7/26

Rothenberg 181

(1986) sought to understand the complex interplay between aesthetics, fascism, and

democracy. Adorno, the most prolific of the Frankfurt School theorists on the subjects of

art and culture, considered works of art to be some of the most significant documents

of modernity, because in these objects, semi-protected from the market and the logic of

instrumental reason, the contradictions and complex dynamics of late capitalist societywere revealed. A particularly important conversation on the relationship between art and

social critique between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno began in the 1930s and

continued for almost a decade. Benjamins, and to a lesser degree Adornos, thoughts on

arts relationship to critical theory and praxis, and the possibility for the tools of new

media to contribute to arts potential as a critical sphere of social activity, had real reso-

nance for artists and critics all the way to the 1980s.

Today, however, despite the relatively recent acceptance of the sociology of art as a

legitimate area within mainstream sociology, there is a dearth of literature from within

the social sciences addressing arts critical or utopian dimensions. There are severalexplanations for this lacuna. First of all, any discussion of arts possible critical or

emancipatory capacities inevitably speaks the language of immanent critique or, what

Paul Jones (2007), writing in Cultural Sociology, referred to as sociological-emancipatory

hermeneutics. Contemporary social theory, both in terms of conventional sociology and,

as Jones (2007) points out, in terms of the more critical work of post-structuralists such

as Foucault and Bourdieu, is deeply suspicious of the sort of normatively immanent

analysis typical of the Frankfurt School. And, while the discourse of immanence charac-

teristic of the Hegelian Marxist tradition has become unfashionable, Durkheimian func-

tionalism has attained a strong presence in the sociology of culture through the mainstreamreception and use of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Indeed, Bourdieus unparalleled influ-

ence on social studies of art worlds has led many researchers to the foregone conclusion

that arts social role can be adequately explained through an account of what Herbert

Marcuse (1968) once called its affirmative function.7

Social and cultural theorys current lack of interest in the capacity of art to provide a

site for social criticism and utopian longings may also be due to the nature of the object

itself. While modern art was always linked to bourgeois economic and social interests by

what Clement Greenberg (1965: 8) called an umbilical cord of gold, the ideal or stance

of independence and creative freedom was fundamental to artists self-perception and tothe audiences understanding and experience of modern art. Today, the role of art in the

accumulation of capital and the promotion of economic interests seems to eclipse the

critical, creative, or utopian functions once attributed to art and artists in part because

of their marginality within the market economy. Currently, the tourism industry relies on

public and privately funded museums to provide blockbuster exhibitions, value is

accrued to real estate because of a neighborhoods real or mythic association with artistic

production and its bohemian accoutrements, and gallery districts such as New Yorks

Chelsea are the sites of multimillion-dollar global financial transactions (Caves, 2002;

Deutsche and Ryan, 1984; Florida, 2003; Hackworth, 2002; Smith and DeFilippis, 1999;

Zukin, 1982). While most art producers economic position is tenuous, the symbolic

value occupied by what Bourdieu (1993: 75) referred to as the disavowal of the

economy is lost in the contemporary environment. As the art critic Jerry Saltz (2008: 1)

recently observed:



8/26


The market is now so pervasive that it is simply a condition as much a part of the art world as

galleries and museums. Even if youre not making money as is the case with most of us

thats your relationship to the market. To say you wont participate in the market is like saying

you refuse to breathe the air because its polluted.

Indeed, arts relationship to commercial interests, along with the shrinking of public

funding for art works (and the growing importance of corporate funding) and work

space, suggests that conditions for the production and distribution of work that is

critical of social conditions (particularly the social condition of market primacy) are

hindered. In such an environment Bourdieus insights concerning the role of art in

providing the ideological legitimation for class stratification seem at first glance

sufficient to explain the cultural logic of contemporary artistic production. At the

same time, as my research concerning the impact of 9/11 on New Yorks artists indi-

cates, complicated and critical works of art continue to be generated from within theofficially sanctioned art world. I do not wish to deny the changes in the cultural,

political, and economic environment that postmodernism has wrought. However, a

more comprehensive understanding of arts social position today is gained through a

rethinking of some of the questions raised by both Adorno and Benjamin almost 80

years ago. Their work is particularly useful for thinking about the relevance of art as

symbolic representation and expression which is semi-autonomous from culture that

is generated by corporate concerns and produced directly for the market (with televi-

sion as the most significant instance). Adorno and Benjamin had a number of disa-

greements about arts loss of aura, mechanical reproduction, and the possibility ofsocial resistance activated by collective cultural experience. However, they did share

a belief in arts potential to act as a tool in the aid of critical consciousness, the ulti-

mate goal of which would be radical social change. In what follows I will be able to

touch on only a few of the points raised by Adorno and Benjamin, and will address

these points with only the broadest of strokes. My intent here is not to provide a

systematic elaboration of the work of these two thinkers. Instead, my goal is to

remind social science of the precedent for analyzing works of art as meaningful,

complex, and critical social signifiers, and to suggest some strategies for building on

this precedent.

The Commercial Media Responds to 9/11

The artists whose work I encountered during my post-9/11 research are not marginal (at

least not intentionally) to the art worlds symbolic or money economy. Each of them, in

different ways, has had to come to terms with the impact of the market on their produc-

tion and identity as artists. However, during a period in which mainstream sources of

public communication and representation provided an account of events that served to

legitimize the administrations push to military intervention and the revoking of basic

civil liberties, these artists created work that represented the emotional and political com-

plexities of the event and thus contributed to a critical public sphere of experience.

Before moving on to a more extended discussion and analysis of specific works of art, I

would like to take a brief look at how the mainstream media framed the events of 9/11,



9/26

Rothenberg 183

and particularly the war on terror which ensued, in order to highlight more clearly the

alternatives presented from within the art world.

On the local level, the media recorded the event in ways that connected the tragedy

with the loss of individual lives. Directly following the disaster, the local television,

radio, and newspapers provided information to citizens about volunteer opportunities,and lauded the bravery of the New York City police and in particular the rescue missions

of the fire-fighters. In the following days, weeks, and months the media highlighted the

pain and suffering experienced by those who had lost loved ones in the disaster.

Nevertheless, the commercial nature of mainstream media dictated that the events be

narrated according to the conventions of the human interest story, and the visuals and

accompanying commentary soon became clichd and repetitive, while images of griev-

ing and tearful family members exploited suffering in the interest of spectacle.8TheNew

York Times, CNN, and the major network news programs helped to market and justify the

ensuing wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq.As media scholar Daya Thussu (2006: 3) notes, in addition to reporting facts, the

task of the media, and television in particular, is also codifying and circulating myths.

Thus, the media complied with the Bush administrations attempts to present the war

in mythical terms and in a highly moralistic language (Thussu, 2006: 3). Thussu

goes on to point out that, in the post-Cold War era, the mythic representation of com-

munism as radical evil and as the pre-eminent threat to national interests has been

replaced by an equally powerful narrative about radical Islam exemplified by shad-

owy networks such as al-Qaeda, with its alleged links to rogue states such as Iran

(Thussu, 2006: 6). In this narrative Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are all linked together, and the United States once again (as during the Cold

War) is the hero on the white horse, delivering the bounty of democracy and human

rights to the rest of the world. In this mythic presentation of reality, no mention is made

of the role of the US in bringing both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein to power, and

little is said about the suffering of Palestinians who have lost their homes and lives

during Israels expansion or the loss of countless Afghan and Iraqi civilian lives in the

wars that followed 9/11.

The news media in our society has been analyzed by more than one generation of

social theorists, and much of the critical work on media and television confirms therole of dominant corporate and political interests in shaping the nature and ideologi-

cal messages disseminated by television (Bagdikian 1987; Chomsky, 1989; Herman

and Chomsky, 1988; Kellner, 1990). Artists, at least those who hope to gain commer-

cial success, are bound by some of the same constraints as the commercial media in

that they have to function within a competitive market marked by the interests of a

dominant class. In addition, they may compete for public funding in a politically con-

strained environment. However, as I hope the examples employed will demonstrate,

artists work (in part because of the persistence of western notions of artistic license,

the autonomy of art, and the artist as socially marginal genius) is not wholly con-

strained by these forces. Thus, works of art can be embedded in the market and sancti-

fied by conventional cultural gatekeepers such as museums, critics, and commercial

galleries, while at the same time acting as repositories of critical thought and complex

collective emotions.



10/26


Artists Respond to 9/11

September 11 was a profoundly visual event. Thousands of New Yorkers watched the

Twin Towers, symbols of New Yorks dominance on the world financial stage, erupt in

billowing smoke and fire. Millions more watched the event repeated endlessly on televi-sion, along with non-stop footage of rubble and city streets covered with white dust, and,

most eerie of all, bodies tumbling down the sides of the towers. In addition to watching

in fascination, New Yorkers assembled mementos and bits of visual detritus in the form

of shrines, memorials, amateur photographs, and videos. Meanwhile, we were urged by

social workers to avail ourselves of arts healing power and to attend performances and

cultural events in order to aid the citys economy and send a message of defiance to the

terrorists. Much of this popular visual outpouring echoed the medias tendency to senti-

mentalize the event, and much of the imagery we saw around us in windows, in public

spaces, and again on television made copious use of symbols of nationalism, patriotism,and Christianity.

Not surprisingly, many artists in New York also responded visually to the event, and

these responses often represented the events, the subsequent political situation, and the

medias interpretation of both in surprising and provocative ways. Much, but not all, of

the work that I viewed made use of photography, video, and other forms of documentary

media even, interestingly, when the artists usual medium was painting or sculpture.

One artist with whom I spoke, Lee Songee, is an architect and film, video, and computer

artist, originally from Taiwan. She described her sense of urgency to represent both her

subjective reaction as an artist and a New Yorker, and her desire to communicate with an

international audience. Her video WTC RIP(see Figures 14), which was shown at the

2002 Venice Biennale, attempts to do just that.9

Construction of the World Trade Center had begun the year that Songee (Rothenberg

and Kornblum, 2005: 256) first came to New York from Taiwan to study architecture,

and despite the critical reception that its design had among her colleagues and professors,

for her the towers were evocative and meaningful because they represented her birth in

America. Then, she took to obsessively filming their construction with her video cam-

era, thus endowing these icons to the excesses of modernist rationalism with an intensely

personal and impressionistic identity. After the attacks, she returned to the site with her

Figure 1. Film still from Lee Songee, WTC RIP, 2002. Image provided by artist



11/26


12/26


many of the intellectuals and artists with whom he had spoken suggested that somehow

Americans deserved this because of their arrogance in the global political arena and in

particular their support of Israel. This conversation acted as a catalyst for Songee to cre-

ate a piece from the footage she had recently collected and enter it in the competition for

inclusion in the Venice Biennale. The aim of the video, according to Songee, was tohumanize Americans and to rupture the common conflation of citizens of the United

States with the policies of the Bush administration. On a more universal note, Songee

(Rothenberg and Kornblum, 2005: 256) wanted to express her conviction that no human

beings can deserve this sort of catastrophe. The video, which includes images of devas-

tation along with the various responses of New Yorkers, including anti-war rallies in

Union Square, candle-lighting vigils, and the assembling of shrines and memorials,

explores questions of community, nationalism, and loss. Songee explicitly set out not to

make a political tract but rather a tribute or portrait not sensationalistic. Just show-

ing, not shaping it is a personal tribute. It humanizes. Its a personal piece to representNew Yorkers. I try to capture the moment and how New Yorkers felt, as a New Yorker

(Rothenberg and Kornblum, 2005: 256).

While the images in the video record New York City directly following the attacks,

Songees motivations for making the video are also related in complex ways to her own

experience of racism against Japanese people as a young child growing up in Taiwan,

and her own encounters with racism as a Chinese woman in the United States. Songees

thoughts concerning nationalism, racism, and hatred in a global world do not result in

any clearly articulated theories or conclusions. Neither are her intentions explicitly polit-

ical, nor is she representing herself as some sort of cultural ambassador or apologist forthe United States. But she does succeed in both humanizing and universalizing these

historical events in ways that are uniquely available to art.

Tina La Porta, another artist with whom I was in contact after 9/11, also used new

media, including film, video, photography, and the Internet, to create work that responded

to questions raised by 9/11 and, in particular, the mainstream medias representation of the

Arab world. La Porta was influenced by the emergence of media criticism and postmod-

ern feminism in the 1980s, and, like artists such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, she

had dealt with themes concerning gender, the body, advertising, and the ideological role

of language in some of her earlier work. While Songees work addressed the images ofAmericans and New Yorkers that were created and consumed by the rest of the world, La

Portas work focused on the way that the western world mystifies and demonizes Arabs

through visual representation and through the gender coding of these representations.

After recovering from the shock of the attack, La Porta began obsessively watching televi-

sion news. She was viewing channel 25 with news broadcasts from all over the world and

started to take Polaroids from the television. Then she decided not to use US television

because it goes too fast. European television, she noticed, holds images longer. She also

noticed that the object of most of her photographs was masked or veiled Middle Eastern

women and men. At this point La Porta had no conscious plan as to how she would even-

tually use these images. Then she was invited to do a residency in Istanbul during which

she created an installation based on these images (Rothenberg and Kornblum, 2005: 257).

The project La Porta finally completed in Turkey is called Total Screen(see Figures 5

and 6) and is based on the Polaroid photos she took from TV news images after 9/11. The



13/26

Rothenberg 187

piece consists of a series of six of the Polaroid photographs of men and women in various

kinds of veiling. These images have been blown up to larger than life-size and installed

in a sunlit gallery with large windows overlooking the street, and are thereby made vis-

ible to passersby. In her press release La Porta explains how she became interested in the

way the news media constructed our experience of events in Afghanistan and the Middle

East region from a distance, and how she decided to pay special attention to representa-

tions of gender via the veil, hijab, burka, or chador. An additional reading of her work

might consider her use of the media as an analogy to the veil. The media acts as a veil,

masking critical dimensions of the social and political world: La Porta attempts to unveil,

or expose, these dimensions, while also exposing the mediating or obfuscating role of the

media even as it claims to provide a comprehensive account of the world.

Other artists responded less directly to the media or the political situation. Susanna Heller

is a Canadian painter based in Greenpoint who works in a semi-abstract painterly style, and

whose drawings and paintings draw on her experience of the motion and ephemerality of

Figure 5. From installation by Tina La Porta, Total Screen, 2003, at Whitebox Annex, New York.

Image provided by artist

Figure 6. From installation by Tina La Porta, Total Screen, 2003, at Whitebox Annex, New York.Image provided by artist



14/26


urban space. She was an early recipient of one of the CityScape residencies organized by the

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and much of her work reflected the view as seen from

her studio on an upper floor of Tower Two of the World Trade Center. In several of her

pieces from that period she plays with the strange, distorted perspective of Tower Oneafforded to her through her studio window. In the days and weeks following September 11,

Heller went back to the site and created a series of drawings of rubble and building struc-

tures in various stages of collapse. These drawings were pinned to her studio wall and would

form the starting point for a new series of paintings, as well as a companion piece to Tower

One a portrait of the wreckage of what had been Tower Two (see Figures 710).

Although Heller is a person of firm and outspoken political beliefs, her work does not

adopt a didactic or even a discursive attitude. It rather affirms the practice of reflection

and contemplation that art has traditionally demanded. Her explanation, however, implies

that such contemplation can itself become a political act. Im not addressing it [the attacksand political situation] in a political way. Its about the power of stepping back and look-

ing. If you take time to step back and look you might see that something is going wrong.

Then she adds, women are watchers. Were made for making art. We have always had to

watch to see what power is doing (cited in Rothenberg and Kornblum, 2005: 259).

Paul Chan is another artist whose work on 9/11 is open-ended and evocative. Although

I did not interview Chan for my 9/11 research, since I became aware of his work after the

9/11 project was complete, he deserves mention in the present context. One piece that he

produced in the wake of the tragedy echoes Hellers convictions that stepping back and

looking, especially during a time when the administration has called for unreflectiveaction leading to disastrous results, is itself a political act. Alongside his career as an artist,

Chan has also been committed to political activism. His engagement includes work with

Voices in the Wilderness, a group of non-violent activists working to end the military and

economic warfare in Iraq. (Chan spent an unsanctioned month in Iraq with Voices in the

Figure 7. Susanna Heller, drawing, 2002. Image provided by artist



15/26

Rothenberg 189

Wilderness.) He also participated in the creation of thePeoples Guide to the Republican

National Convention(an agitprop map of New York City for use by protestors in 2004).

Nonetheless, he insists that his artwork is not explicitly political. On the other hand, like

Heller he points to the relationship between aesthetic engagement and political critique:

Doesnt honest learning require a leap that disengages what we know and engages us inwhat we dont? And doesnt this leap call for a kind of escape from ourselves? Isnt escape

actually a kind of radical engagement? (cited in McClister, 2005).

In 2005 Chan created a video installation called 1st Light, which was eventually

shown at the Whitney Biennale (see Figure 11). In this video projection loop, dark sil-

houettes of debris and human figures fall through space while birds appear and reappear

on a light pole. While the constant replay of these falling figures evokes the media loop

on our televisions of towers burning and figures falling, the blurred and unstable quality

of the imagery suggests that we are not seeing the full picture. At the same time the pace,

luminosity, and visual delicacy of the piece invite a kind of engagement which must be

called, for lack of a better term, aesthetic.

I now turn to the work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in order to illuminate

how arts dual-character, or the possibility of autonomous cultural expression within

heteronomous cultural and market conditions, can be understood.




16/26


A Temporary Return to Origins: Adorno and Benjamin

A fundamental tension exists between Adorno and Benjamin concerning what we call

today new media, on the one hand, and high modernism, on the other. Adornos per-

spective on the former, as we will see, is particularly difficult to reconcile with the work

of several of the artists I have discussed above and is, indeed, antiquated, at least in an

unreconstructed form. His attempts to grasp the underlying critical impetus of artworks

that fall within modernist parameters of aesthetic quality, however, still provide a fruitful

starting point for understanding at least some contemporary art, including the work of at

least two of the artists mentioned above.

Adornos adherence to a critical appropriation of Hegelian dialectics allowed him to

understand art in terms of its fundamentally contradictory social position. This position

in which works of art can at the same time be both repositories of exchange value and

critical of a system that reduces all value to that of exchange he termed arts dual-

character (Adorno, 1997: 225).10Arts dual-character, which it acquired along with the

development of capitalism, reflects, for Adorno, the contradictory nature of capitalism

itself: because market-based society severs the fetters of religious and paternal traditions,




17/26

Rothenberg 191

it offers the promise of individual autonomy and rational social development. At the

same time, according to Adorno (following Marx), exploitation and domination are the

hidden mechanisms that fuel the law of exchange under capitalism, and the fetishized

commodity form exerts a new irrational and homogenizing force on the social subject.

Thus art, like the social subject of capitalism, expresses the promise of autonomy and is

at the same time constrained and produced by fundamentally exploitative and irrational

market relations. Works of art, then, confront society autonomously but are themselves

social and thus caught up in heteronomous reality (Adorno, 1994: xi). The dual-character

that Adorno (1975: 13) ascribes to works of art is typically, for him, contrasted with

products of the cultural industry, which are no longer also commodities, but are com-

modities through and through.Adornos dual-character explains, for example, how it is that works of art as diverse

as Pissarros landscapes and Duchamps readymades can oppose their own transforma-

tion into exchange value, while also offering themselves up as commodities on the

Figure 10. Susanna Heller, Ruin, oil on canvas, 2003. Image provided by artist



18/26


marketplace. This, according to Adorno (1984: 236), is not symptomatic of their failure,

but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production.

Because of its references to Hegelian/Marxist categories, Adornos account of arts

dual-character proves somewhat resistant to appropriation by mainstream sociology.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that arts dual-character must be problematized in order to

understand and account for the complexity of arts relationship to dominant social pat-

terns and structures. In order to understand the position of the works of art that I havediscussed above, some kind of robust explanation of arts ability simultaneously to

embrace the market, and provide legitimation in the form of cultural capital to actors

whose social status and power derives from the market, and to oppose the political,

social, and economic conditions that sustain the status quo. It will not do to reduce works

such as those produced by Heller, Chan, La Porta, and Songee to the simple binary of

political art vs. affirmative culture (to borrow the term from Herbert Marcuse, 1968). I

do not wish to repackage Adorno in order to make him palatable to contemporary cur-

rents in sociology. However, I do believe that a productive notion of dual-character could

be developed by thinking about Adornos category in terms of, for instance, more recentattempts to understand the ambivalent, equivocal nature of popular culture.

Two Halves of a Torn Whole

Adornos analysis of modern art is always dialectically connected to his critique of mass

culture, or the culture industry. He saw in both of these moments of bourgeois cultural

production capitalisms inability to make good on its claim to provide the conditions for

freedom on the levels of the individual and the social. While both reflect societys fail-

ures, Adorno particularly indicted the culture industry for its role in turning potentialsubjects into the passive consumers (masses) necessary for the reproduction of capitalist

society. The culture industry, for Adorno (1975: 12), transfers the profit motive naked

onto cultural forms. Through standardization, mass production, and the reduction of

individuals to consumer-preference groups, the culture industry drains both cultural

Figure 11. Paul Chan,1st Light, 2005, digital video projection, 14 min. Courtesy of the artist andGreene Naftali Gallery, New York. Photo credit: Jean Vong



19/26

Rothenberg 193

objects and consumers of these objects of individuality and uniqueness. Even more insid-

ious, for Adorno (1975: 19), than the culture industrys cultivation of consumerism is its

obstruction of the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and

decide consciously for themselves. In other words, the culture industry actively prohib-

its the production of the kinds of citizens that are necessary to maintain a democraticsociety. For Adorno, art alone was capable of resisting late capitalisms drive to annihi-

late subjectivity and critical consciousness. Deeply entrenched in the aesthetic program

of modernism, Adorno understood arts critical potential to lie in its refusal to use con-

ventionally accessible symbolic means to communicate. For Adorno (Horkheimer and

Adorno, 1972: 131), readily intelligible language be it verbal, musical, or visual

language had already been appropriated by the culture industry, where, stripped of any

critical authority, it was instrumentalized in order to create a false sense of a unified

culture. Indeed, he claimed that for works of art to avoid surrender[ing] to pure propa-

ganda they must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhapsmake themselves accessible to the public (Adorno, 1997: 243). In so doing, he asserted

[a]rtworks exercise a practical effect not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehen-

sible transformation of consciousness (Adorno, 1984: 243).

Art, especially modern, formalist art, was able to act as a refuge for critical and even

utopian thought precisely because its social content was veiled by its difficulty, negativ-

ity, and self-referentiality. Inside the special languages of aesthetic form, the suffering of

the individual in an unfree society could find expression, and indeed a model of a differ-

ent kind of society and individuality could be worked out. As Adorno explains in his last

work,Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1966, three years before his death: As a musi-cal composition compresses time, and as a painting folds spaces into one another, so the

possibility is concretized that the world could be other than it is (Adorno, 1997: 138).

Adorno here is valorizing the modernist tendency toward abstraction and the exploration

of the formal languages or particular mediums as opposed to the direct representation

and narrative content that characterizes so much contemporary art. However, his reflec-

tions are important in that they suggest ways of interpreting seemingly abstract or her-

metic works of art as important social statements. The development of analytical cubism,

for example, in the first decades of the 20th century may seem to be a purely formal

exercise, but in fact can be interpreted as a critique of subject-centered reason andEnlightenment rationalism and, by extension, the devastation wrought by industrializa-

tion and the impending global war. This critique, however, is not leveled in the language

of representation, but rather by evoking alternatives to linear perspective and a rejection

of realism.

In a similar fashion the artist Susanna Heller was intensely aware of the dangerous

implication of the medias account of the situation after 9/11, but chose to challenge and

represent the events through a highly personalized and formal painterly iconography.

Likewise, the art of Paul Chan, whose political convictions have taken the form of social

activism, is often contemplative, lyrical, and ambiguous, inviting the viewer to engage in

an aesthetic, visually layered, and seemingly apolitical experience. In contrast to com-

mercial media, in the work of Chan and Heller the viewer is invited to slow down the

pace of reception and to make use of their imagination to imbue the layers of imagery

with meaning. An internal relationship between the particular moments that constitute



20/26


the work of art is implicit in the fact that the works constitute singular pieces, but the

viewer is allowed to relish each color, shape, and movement as both individual moment

and as part of a larger whole. The work of Chan and Heller invites reflection not action,

and thus models a different response from the call for war and immediate crackdown on

civil liberties issued repeatedly by the government. And both Chan and Heller, in theirrefusal of transparent communication and in their use of evocative but ambivalent

imagery, seem to reaffirm Adornos conviction that everyday communication had been

reduced to jargon and clich (think of shock and awe, axis of evil, and so forth)

through its deployment by the government via the mouthpiece of the media. Instead,

these artists intend to foster an aesthetic experience which reminds the viewer that the

reality cultivated in both everyday life and through the mass media is embedded in a

particular ideology, and that, as Adorno (1997: 243) reminded us, the world could be

other than it is.

Walter Benjamin and the New Media

Adorno, with his notion of dual-character and with his understanding of the social and

political implications of aesthetic languages, has provided a perspective from which to

understand those works of art that fall within modernist aesthetic norms. However, in

light of much of the work produced today, including many of the examples I have dis-

cussed, Adorno seems hopelessly stuck in another era. Born in 1882, Walter Benjamin

was a decade older than Adorno; however, Benjamins thoughts on the importance of

techniques of mass reproduction and his embrace of the breakdown of arts sanctifiedstatus were much more in line with the thinking of avant-gardists in both his day and our

own. The two men voiced their disagreements over the role of the aura, mass reproduc-

tion, democratic access, and the implications of collective reception in a series of letters

and essays written from the mid to late 1930s (Jameson, 1995).

Adornos judgment regarding products of mass culture and the techniques used to

create these products was uncompromisingly negative. At the same time, while acknowl-

edging that modern art bears both the marks of and some of the responsibility for the

damaged society from which it comes, he by and large embraced its canonical works.

Benjamin, like Adorno, understood that the culture industry performed a central socialfunction of repression and indoctrination. However, he also argued that the technical

means and modes of reception cultivated by the culture industry contained latent demo-

cratic or even revolutionary possibilities.

Benjamin tied these themes together in his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin, 1986). Ultimately, in an eccentric appropriation of

Marx, he believed that new techniques of cultural production could be harnessed in the

interest of social transformation. Mechanical reproduction (including prints, photography,

film, techniques of sound recording today we would also have to consider computer-

generated images, text, and sound and video) destroys the aura that surrounds classical

and modern art. Mechanically reproduced works are neither unique nor irreplaceable.

They do not (or did not in Benjamins time) hang in museums, churches, or official build-

ings. Rather, they are produced in bulk, can be bought and owned by the average citizen,

and can be held close, inspected, and manipulated at the viewers will. Consequently, they



21/26

Rothenberg 195

no longer function as symbols of authority but instead are potential instruments of libera-

tion insofar as they challenge traditional culture (Benjamin, 1986: 221).

Benjamin was also interested in the distracted mode of aesthetic experience character-

istic of mass society. Now, rather than being absorbed by the work of art, the distracted

mass absorbs the work of art (Benjamin, 1986: 240; emphasis in original). Benjaminpoints to architecture as a prototype for this mode of distracted reception. Buildings, he

points out, are appropriated by use and by perception not so much by attention as by

habit (Benjamin, 1986: 240). It is this mode of appropriation, not aesthetic contempla-

tion, which, for Benjamin, is most likely to lead to progressive social transformation. Art

that is perceived in a state of distraction, like architecture, is integrated into everyday life

and activity, and thus can act as a catalyst, in the habits of consciousness that it cultivates,

for the transformation of everyday life. Painting (and other forms of art that demand a

purely aesthetic form of perception) is restricted in its effect to the aesthetic sphere,

which is one of contemplation.Adorno contested Benjamins assertion that techniques of mechanical reproduction,

because they lend themselves to perception in a state of distraction, represent a revolu-

tionary advance over traditional techniques. Adornos argument concerning arts eman-

cipatory qualities hinges on its ability to reflect society in its totality, rather than as

fragmented or isolated moments. For Adorno, it is only when we reflect on society in its

totality that we can recognize the contradictions and unfulfilled promises of our present

social forms. The effectiveness of the culture industry lies, in part, in its ability to frag-

ment reality into seemingly unrelated bits and pieces storylines in which, as individual

moments, contradictions can be satisfyingly resolved. In addition, products of the cultureindustry fit neatly into the work habits demanded of subjects by modern society. The

modern worker (presumably both industrial and white-collar) returns home from a day

of exhausting yet meaningless and repetitive activity, too tired to concentrate on demand-

ing forms of entertainment. The worker is presented instead, through radio, television,

and film, with entertainment that both mirrors work activity in its mindless repetition and

is easily consumable in the state of distraction in which the worker is left by a days labor.

Such distracted habits of perception, as encouraged by the same technologies lauded by

Benjamin, actively prohibit the kind of critical consciousness required in order to appre-

hend the real nature of social existence (Adorno, 1994: 228).Benjamins work on mechanical reproduction has proved extremely prescient. Since

Andy Warhol it has been common practice for artists to base their work on the deploy-

ment of images and signs derived from commercial media and techniques of mass repro-

duction. Many artists in the 1980s, such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy

Sherman, experimented using images, techniques, and language derived directly from

Hollywood and advertising to explicitly subvert the messages disseminated by these

industries. Their work was socially critical, but also appealing to a mass audience because

of its popular-culture references and its irreverence toward traditional forms of art and,

by implication, traditional culture. These artists created work that affected audiences on

a variety of levels (aesthetic, emotive, cognitive) and raised important issues concerning

the culture of consumption and the objectification of sexuality.

By the beginning of the new century the political focus that characterized 1980s art

was long gone from the commercial art world, and in-your-face political messages such



22/26


as those disseminated by Barbara Kruger had fallen out of fashion with the mainstream

art-worlds gatekeepers. However, like an earlier generation, after 9/11 La Porta and

Songee reacted to, and acted upon, the material disseminated by the media, capitalizing

on the immediacy and recognizability of commercial imagery. The ease of reproducibil-

ity and availability (Benjamins democratizing tendencies) provided through the Polaroidallowed La Porta to claim imagery that had been generated by the mainstream media to

construct a particular narrative or reading of the events and geopolitical situation fol-

lowing 9/11. She was able to re-narrate, or de-narrate, these events through a deploy-

ment of mechanical means and aesthetic dispositions available to her as an artist who

came of age in a thoroughly technologized society. La Porta fixed the speedy spectacle

of fragmented images delivered to the television screen, and reassembled these images

in a meaningful manner and in a context (the gallery space) which invites mindful aes-

thetic contemplation. In so doing, she was also able to subvert the medias tendency to

produce or stimulate a state of distraction in its audience by providing the viewer withthe opportunity to experience her own subjectivity through the experience of an aesthetic

totality. In this way, her work harnesses the democratizing potential of publicly available,

non-auratic imagery that Benjamin recognized. At the same time, her re-presentation of

these images in a context of aesthetic contemplation resurrects through aesthetic experi-

ence the sense of totality that Adorno demanded of critical art.

Through her use of film, Lee Songee is able to claim public images, including images

of a privatized public landscape, as well as the fragility of technocratic modernism rep-

resented by the World Trade Center. Like Benjamins (1986: 230) cameraman, Songee

used her equipment to deeply penetrate the reality of life in New York City before anddirectly following 9/11. At the same time, in contrast to the immediacy of the filmed

image celebrated by Benjamin, like La Porta, Songee imposes a distance and coherence

on her subject matter through her restriction to black-and-white film and editing guided

by formal and aesthetic considerations. Thus, her work also represents a totality in

Adornos sense of the word. Rather than mimicking the two-second sound-bite, frag-

mented approach dictated by the television industry, Songees work can be viewed as a

whole, unfolding in time and offering the space for creative reflection. At the same time,

her choice to work with film (which is generally viewed collectively) and her explicit

aim to respond to public opinion suggests a refusal of modern arts hermetic and soli-tary tendency. In this sense she also reaffirms Benjamins conviction that, in an age of

mechanical reproduction, works of art become more public and democratic.

Conclusion

Contemporary visual art, especially as it manifests in global centers such as New York City,

has reached an unprecedented level of public visibility through the growth of cultural tour-

ism, the proliferation of international art fairs and biennials, and the explosive growth of

the art market. These factors both inhibit and enhance the possibility for art to provide a

critical perspective on contemporary social and political events: on the one hand, people

pay attention to contemporary visual art; on the other, artists are constrained by the increas-

ing importance of the market (as opposed to public funding) to produce works of art that

are commercially viable. As the preceding study of a handful of New York based artists



23/26

Rothenberg 197

responses to 9/11 demonstrates, the art world, as opposed to commercial media, still con-

stitutes a site of relative autonomy from which to launch social critique. In the examples

that I have offered, this social critique issues not from an explicitly political agenda on the

part of the artist, but through the activation of aesthetic experience.

In order to conduct a critical reading of the work of La Porta, Songee, Heller, andChan, I have reconstructed key categories from the work of Theodor Adorno and Walter

Benjamin. Both Adorno and Benjamin longed for radical social change. In different

ways, they both believed that art had a key role to play in the possibility of such change.

Notwithstanding the failures of each to come to terms with the blind spots in his own

arguments, and not withstanding societys failure to make good on the radical possibili-

ties that each proposed, their understanding of arts complex and potentially critical

social role can act as a starting point for reflection in an immeasurably different (but in

some ways similar) historical moment. The work I have discussed, and its position within

larger social forces such as the market, does not harken revolution. But it does suggestthat works of art, as communicative and symbolic contexts, can provide an alternative

framing for experience, history, and politics.

At the same time, as I hope I have demonstrated, my aim is not a simple grafting of

an Adornian or Benjaminian analysis onto current forms of art. The historical condi-

tions including, but not limited to, the current market-driven nature of the art world, the

increased capacity and sophistication of commercial media, the significance of postmod-

ernisms critique of the high art/mass culture distinction, and other factors too numer-

ous to list render such a grafting neither feasible nor desirable. New language, ways of

seeing, and critical categories that are adequate to current conditions need to be devel-oped (and indeed have been developed) in order to shed meaningful light on contempo-

rary cultural objects. More significant, however, is my rejection of Adornos assumption

(or prediction) regarding the degree to which the contemporary subjects critical capaci-

ties have been diminished by mass culture. As I hope my examples make clear, contem-

porary subjects continue to possess the capacity for critical meaning-making activity. At

the same time, works of art operate as a locus of meaning which is dialogical, inexhaust-

ible, and subject to a temporal flow. Meaning is produced in the relation between the

work, the intention of the artist, the community of interpreters, and the historical moment.

Notes

1. Earlier versions of this paper were written before the art-market crash of 2008. For an account

see A. Peers, Crash Goes the Art World, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/

story/0,28124,24684093-5018055,00.html.

2. The results of this study can be found in Rothenberg and Kornblum (2005). Much of the dis-

cussion of works of art that responded to 9/11 in the present article is based on research that I

conducted for the earlier study.

3. I have written elsewhere in more detail about the relationship between art and ethnography

(Rothenberg and Fine, 2007). 4. My argument that more well-known artists are constrained in their ability to spontaneously

reflect on immediate social concerns because collectors expect them to continue working with

the themes and methods with which they have already been identified is supported by inter-

views conducted with dealers at the blue-chip galleries such as Gagosian and Mary Boone.



24/26


5. See, for example, Habermas (1985, 1987) and Honneth (1996).

6. This claim may seem unjustified to readers outside the United States, especially those in

Great Britain, for whom the critical tradition of cultural studies looms large in current social

studies of art and culture. However, as Janet Wolff (1999), writing on just this question,

notes, American sociology of culture has distanced itself from (and is indeed hostile to) cul-tural studies and maintains that most sociologists of culture and the arts base their work on

pre-critical, sometimes positivistic, premises [and that the] tenacious social-scientific com-

mitment to objectivity, even in qualitative (rather than quantitative) work, blocks such

scholarship from addressing certain questions of interpretation, representation and subjectiv-

ity. It is to this tendency, most egregiously (but not only) manifested in the United States, that

I direct my criticisms of the sociology of art.

7. In a significant interview with the explicitly political and critical conceptual artist Hans

Haacke, Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Haacke, 1995) implicitly revokes his earlier, more function-

alist position as he discusses the possibilities for intellectuals and artists to develop an open

realm free of symbolic domination. 8. For literature on the mainstream media response, see Grewal (2003), Li (2007), Torres (2008).

9. For more information about the works of art reproduced here, please contact the author.

10. Robert Hulott-Kentor translatesDoppelt-Charakterin AdornosAesthetic Theory(1997) as

double-character. Although I am using this translation as reference, I prefer to use the term

dual-character, a translation of Doppelt-Charakterthat seems to me to better capture the

dialectical dimension that Adorno intended.

References

Adorno T (1975) Culture Industry Reconsidered,New German Critique6.

Adorno T (1984)Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: Verso.

Adorno T (1994) On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening, in

Arato A and Gebhart E (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York:

Continuum, 270300.

Adorno T (1997)Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Adorno T, Dahrendorf R, Pilot H, Albert H, Habermas J and Popper K (1976) The Positivist

Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann.

Bagdikian B (1987) The Media Monopoly. 2nd edn. Boston: Beacon.

Becker H (2008)Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Benjamin W (1986) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations.

New York: Schocken.Bloch E (1989) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

Bourdieu P (1987)Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press.

Bourdieu P (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York:

Columbia University Press.

Bourdieu P and Haacke H (1995)Free Exchange. Cambridge: Polity.

Caves R (2002) Creative Industries: Contact between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Chomsky N (1989)Necessary Illusions. Boston: South End.Deutsche R and Ryan C (1984) The Fine Art of Gentrification, 31 October.

Florida R (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class and How Its Transformed Leisure, Community

and Everyday Life. New York: Basic.



25/26


26/26


between feminist performance art and Theodor Adornos aesthetic theory, abstract expressionism

and the Cold War, New Yorks art scene after 9/11, and the special issues that confront ethnogra-

phers of art worlds. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Social Justice, Telos,

Ethnologie Franaise, Cultural Sociologyand forthcoming in Visual Studies. She recently com-

pleted a book manuscript, which explores changes in the art world from the 1950s to the present,drawing on and critiquing categories developed by Adorno. She is currently working on an intro-

ductory text for the sociology of the arts. Julia is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Queensborough

Community College, City University of New York.

cultural sociology 2012 rothenberg 177 200

Documents