Considerations on the usefulness of art.

A few questions with no conclusion.

Daniel Villegas
Art & Design Department
Universidad Europea de Madrid
daniel.villegas@uem.es

Abstract
The present work is focused on the research
on the Contradictions in contemporary political art in connection with
the increasing phenomenon of subsumption of culture under capital.
Under the appearance of Counter-hegemonic positions, many artistic
practices had operated as reinforcement of a model, dominates by
the capitalistic principles of subjective construction and the diffuse
Cynicism spirit, which they expected criticize it and/or opposed it. It is
essential, in this context, review the relationship between art, politics
and society.

***
Is useful art possible? Useful for what and/or for whom? Despite appearing
to be central to this matter, perhaps these are not the questions. Rather,
contradicting Oscar Wilde's renowned statement, the question would be:
Can art stop being useful? The history of the use, even of the
instrumentalization of artistic productions in the service of different interests
or beliefs there are not as many differences between the way the two
operate as John Stuart Mill claimed is not exactly new. The propagandistritual usefulness or function of art has been present throughout history in a
more or less explicit manner.
Then why call a certain type of artistic production associated with social
action useful, as opposed to the alleged lack of function of other type or
proposals? The establishment of this distinction probably gravitates in the
great misunderstanding with regard to art's ideological neutrality, which
tried to impose a certain modern notion of autonomy. Thus, at a certain
point of the nineteenth century, coming from the counter-hegemonic
opposition to these aesthetic proposals, someone like John Ruskin or William
Morris could defend the idea of a useful art in the service of society and of
the improvement in the life conditions of the working class as opposed to
the self-referential stance of l'art pour l'art. However, today it seems to have
been sufficiently demonstrated that all cultural production from its
execution to its reception, passing through the currently essential phase of
distribution and mediation is subject to strong ideological determinations

and contributes to the general social submission. Among these, those

deriving from the demo-liberal capitalism are of course included. The
question is that when the revolutionary bourgeoisie managed to impose its
view of the world and its way of life, aspects of its ideological make-up
which include the concept of art's autonomy, and along with it, its lack of
function were naturalized. That is, they turned into mechanisms
belonging to a presumed human nature. Therefore, from any point of view
[ideological, religious, social], art answered only to its own internal logic,
to its clear lack of usefulness, to the development of its own natural
essence. Marx explained this phenomenon with respect to the construction
of history:
The bourgeoisie's concept of history is that all the means of production and
all the relationships among men prior to its hegemony were false, not in line
with human nature. Now its means of production, based on the
appropriation of the workforce, is the only natural one, the only one in
accord with human nature. Marx says that according to the bourgeoisie,
there has been history, but there is no longer any. On eliminating the
antagonism, history is eliminated, as history is opposition and struggle.
Before Fukuyama did so, Marx had already seen that according to the
bourgeoisie, history ends with it, given that its dominion eliminates all
opposition, all antagonism.1
With this new logic, art prior to the triumph of the bourgeois system might
well have been characterized by being useful, even instrumental and,
therefore, from this point of view be considered false to a certain degree, as
it was submitted to the dictates of the political and religious powers. Art has
no usefulness, they tell us, and therefore, it has no ideology. End of the
antagonism, art has started on the path of its self-realization. However, it is
already clear enough that this is also an ideological position, in contradiction
with its pretension of being a natural law. And it is precisely with the
development of modernity when, despite having originated the notion of the
autonomy of art or precisely because of it, the ideological aspects of art
shown themselves in a more intense manner, as Terry Eagleton points out:
[] the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in
modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks of these matters too
[the liberty and the legality, la spontaneity and the necessity, the selfdetermination, the autonomy, the specificity and the universality, among
others], which are at the heart of the middle-class's struggle for political
hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact
is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms
of modern class society, and indeed from a whole new form of human
subjectivity appropriate to that social order. It is on this account, rather than
because men and women have suddenly awoken to the supreme value of
1

Eduardo VSQUEZ, La filosofa postidealista (materialista) de la historia, in: Reyes

Mate [Ed.], Filosofa de la historia, Trotta, Madrid, 1993, p. 132. The quote from
Marx comes from: Karl MARX, Escritos de juventud, Universidad Central de
Venezuela, Caracas, 1965, p. 355.

painting or poetry, that aesthetics plays so obtrusive a role in the

intellectual heritage of the present.2
Purpositive activity, as Hegel3 would say in relation with reason, or better
yet, acting/thinking for an interest as Marx might have said, associated to all
human activity. Any cultural production encloses a conglomerate of interests
that determine it. It is true that such circumstances are, to say the least,
problematic. If certain artistic practices are defined as useful from Ruskin
to the most recent ties of art with social issues, including the old avantgarde formula of the dilution of art in the vital praxis it is owing to the fact
that at a certain time, there was an attempt to impose one version as
unique and true and, as a consequence, there was a reaction against these
founding principles of the bourgeois Art Institution. As it has been stressed,
this does not mean that the supposedly autonomous and neutral aesthetics
really were that, and that they did not foster a certain way of understanding
and regulating the world and, therefore, also turned out to be useful for
obtaining benefits for a concrete dominant class. In any case, the culture of
suspicion to which the unmasking impulse coming from a Marxist analysis
leads which finds its precedent in the programme of the Enlightenment
and which tries to expose the interests, the usefulness that the production
of any type has for certain hegemonic groups does not free it of an
equally functionalist nature, which turns it into the object of such mistrust.
As it has been said earlier with respect to the usefulness of art as an
inseparable agent of artistic productions, it is true that the type of
relationships that are established are, in the majority of cases, complex. In
fact, often the reasons that underlie this instrumental use of art - in Marxist
terms, beyond the determinations imposed by the false consciousness - may
well be situated in the area of the psychosocial. In this sense and as an
example, let us here remember the school scene narrated by Witold
Gombrowicz in his book Ferdydurke4. During a class, a teacher is determined
that the students understand the greatness of the Polish poet Slowacki,
because it should captivate them. Faced with their resistance, particularly
that of a student determined not to admit the poetic charm of the abovementioned author, the teacher ends up not without previously using
different arguments, among which he includes, in a preferential way, the
principle of authority that places the students on the plane of insensitive
ignorance begging the audience to realize that his wife and son's
livelihood was depended on the appreciation enjoyed by poets such as
Slowacki. Who would want this child's plate to be empty?

Terry EAGLETON, La esttica como ideologa, Trotta, Madrid, 2006, p. 53. The
translation quotes from Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), 9.
3
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HEGEL, Fenomenologa del espritu, Fondo de Cultura
Econmica, Madrid, 1966, p.17. [The translation quotes from
http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page_files/Phenomenolog
y%20of%20Spirit%20%28entire%20text%29.pdf ]
4
Witold GOMBROWICZ, Ferdydurke, Edhasa, Barcelona, 1984.

Nevertheless, Theodor W. Adorno was convinced that genuinely autonomous

art was possible. Of an authentic stock, resistant to the process of
rationalization and reification. This art, the function of which was precisely
to lack function, would nevertheless end up having the usefulness, so to
speak, of introducing chaos in this order. 5 In sum, of resisting, assuming a
negative dialectic with respect to society and, particularly, against the
situation of art subsumed by the Cultural Industry. Then, Adorno accuses
socially useful art precisely of being a support of the capitalist leisure
society, placing it in the territory of heteronomy. 6
Can a supposedly autonomous art not yield to utilitarian interests? Leaving
aside the much discussed problem of the possibility of true autonomy, in a
period defined by cynicism and utilitarianism, it seems that it is not very
likely, given the swallowing capacity demonstrated by
demoliberal
capitalism through its Cultural Industry. Neither is it easy to understand that
the interests of a useful art respond solely to the social and/or political
principles and objectives, which they aim to defend from their positions. Is
its social usefulness associated to the development of the interests of the
above-mentioned institution in increasing the resources to be exploited, as
Adorno claimed? Does not a certain utilitarian cynicism hover over many of
these attitudes? In sum, according to Peter Sloterdijk, we live in a cynical
environment that is nothing but the false enlightened consciousness. In this
context,
Psychologically present-day cynics can be understood as borderline
melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and
can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in
modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work in spite of anything that
might happen. The key social positions in boards, parliaments, commissions,
executive councils, publishing companies, practices, faculties and lawyers'
and editors offices have long since become a part of this diffuse cynicism.
For cynics are not dumb, and every now any then they certainly see the
nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic apparatus has become
elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about
their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because,
in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for selfpreservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them
that it has to be so. Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. 7
It is possible to include artists, too, within the spheres of production to which
these words make reference. But, having come to this point, are those who
advocate for a useful art naive, with the consequent aptitude of
5

See Theodor W. ADORNO, Minima Moralia. Reflexiones desde la vida daada

[Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life], Taurus, Madrid, 1999, p. 224.
6
See Theodor W. ADORNO, Teora esttica [Aesthetic Theory], Akal, Madrid, 2004, p.
334.
7
Peter SLOTERDIJK, Crtica de la razn cnica, Siruela, Madrid, 2003, p. 40. The
translation quotes from: Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason. Minnesota
University Press, 1987:5

instrumentalizing their productions, or cynical utilitarians, who knowingly

exploit those areas still fertile for the cultural industry, with the conviction
that if they did not do so, others would inevitably do it, surely in a worse
way, if that is possible? For an art that declares itself to be useful in the
social sphere, does any other option exist that breaks with this binary
approach? These are difficult questions for a period in which we have
become accustomed to suspect everything and everyone, in sum, a
decidedly cynical and utilitarian time.