Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992-2014

By Katie J. Vater

In its early transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in “cultural tourism” as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels—about artists and art historians—have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors—Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors' ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684482238

Book preview

Between Market and Myth

Campos Ibéricos

A Bucknell Series in Iberian Studies

Series Editors:

Isabel Cuñado, Bucknell University

Jason McCloskey, Bucknell University

Campos Ibéricos is a series of monographs and edited volumes focusing on the literary and cultural traditions of Spain in all its rich historical, social, and linguistic diversity. The series provides a space for interdisciplinary and theoretical scholarship exploring the intersections of literature, culture, the arts, and media from medieval to contemporary Iberia. Studies of all authors, texts, and cultural phenomena are welcome and works on understudied writers and genres are specially sought.

Titles in the Series

Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech, eds., Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema

Katie J. Vater, Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992–2014

Between Market and Myth

The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992–2014

KATIE J. VATER

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vater, Katie J., author.

Title: Between market and myth : the Spanish artist novel in the post-transition, 1992–2014 / Katie J. Vater.

Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, 2020. | Series: Campos ibericos | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: In its early transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in cultural tourism as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels-about artists and art historians-have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors-Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas-whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors’ ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019042568 | ISBN 9781684482214 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684482221 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684482238 (epub) | ISBN 9781684482245 (mobi) | ISBN 9781684482252 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Spanish fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Spanish fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Künstlerromane, Spanish—History and criticism. | Artists in literature. | Art in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ6147.K85 V38 2020 | DDC 863/.6409—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042568

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Katie J. Vater

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.bucknelluniversitypress.org

Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

1 The Weight of Fame: Memory in Two Contemporary Künstlerromane by Angeles Caso and Julio Llamazares

2 The Postfeminist Turn in the Artist Novel by Women: The Case of Almudena Grandes, Clara Usón, and Nieves Herrero

3 The Art Historian as Neoliberal Subject in Lourdes Ortiz’s Las manos de Velázquez and Paloma Díaz-Mas’s El sueño de Venecia

4 Affiliation Anxiety: Avant-Garde Identity at Documenta(13) in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Kassel no invita la lógica

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Between Market and Myth

Introduction

In 2012, author Rafael Reig published a brief piece in the Spanish online newspaper El Diario titled Desde dentro de la burbuja (From within the bubble). The title referred not to the housing or the dot-com bubbles, or any of the others of the post-2008 era with which we have all become familiar, but rather to the notion of a Spanish literary bubble whose bursting led to a crisis in the novel. In this piece, Reig posits that, just as the housing bubble had grown as a result of increased demand and overzealous, avaricious speculation, the public’s call for culture in the years following Francisco Franco’s death created a bubble, as well. The speculators—editors, publishing houses, critics, et al.—attempted to meet the public demand and profit handsomely by investing in artistic products, even when they were of dubious quality. Like potential home buyers, cultural producers were extended loans of good faith in the form of prizes, even when it was unlikely they could repay their debt with products of consistently high quality; Reig uses the metaphor of a risky subprime mortgage to describe premios literarios a locutores de la tele (literary prizes given to TV presenters).¹ He imputes blame for the growth and subsequent deflation of this bubble not only to the nebulous system or the impersonal market but also to the desires of artists and authors themselves. It becomes personal as he sums up his own writerly desire with a plea to the God of Literature: Hazme un escritor insobornable, pero no te des demasiada prisa por favor, déjame disfrutar un poco de las burbujas. (Make me an incorruptible writer, but don’t do it too soon, please. Let me enjoy the bubble a little.)² Reig knows from experience that contemporary authors want it both ways, but can they remain pure, free from external constraints on their work, and profit at the same time?

To illustrate this tension, and to present it as a timelessly human trait as old as literature itself, Reig cites the Roman poet Persius’s Satire I, in which the ancient stoic harshly chastises other poets for coveting fame and giving in to trends to achieve it. In this critique of the unnamed others, Reig contends, Persius actually gives voice to his own contradictory desires: [Persio] se desdobla para expresar sus dudas y temores. Se pide a los dos y así nos da un magnífico retrato psicológico de una burbuja vista desde dentro. ([Persius] splits himself in two to express his own doubts and fears. Drawing on both, he offers us a magnificent psychological portrait of a bubble seen from the inside.)³ Very little has changed since Persius’s time, Reig suggests. On the one hand, contemporary authors and artists want at least the appearance of the purity that has defined the autonomous, and therefore authentic, artist for centuries. On the other hand, the changing conditions for producing cultural work have presented more tempting opportunities for material success than ever before. Reig summarizes this inconsistent position with another rhetorical question that illustrates the conflict between autonomy and opportunity: ¿Quién no quiere ser un escritor ajeno a las modas, independiente, al que no le importe el aplauso de los lectores ni el de la crítica? ¡Nadie, por favor, pero si todos queremos eso, precisamente eso! (Who doesn’t want to be an independent writer, unaffected by trends, and who doesn’t care about applause from readers or critics? Nobody, but come on, that’s exactly what we all want!)⁴

Reig’s question is one that the protagonists of the eight artist novels studied in this book are all searching to answer. In their depictions of the labor of artists, art historians, and even a writer asked to moonlight as a performance artist, each of the novels discussed in Between Market and Myth offers its author’s perspectives on the aesthetic and political dimensions of creativity. These novels also reflect and respond to changes in the field of cultural production that occurred as a result of Spain’s rapid embrace of neoliberal practices and economic policies in the early transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. In just a few short years, the country experienced swift commercialization of its art and literary markets at the same time that both the national Spanish government and the regional governments of autonomous communities began investing in cultural tourism infrastructure that positioned culture as a tool for economic growth, urban renewal, and job creation. The authors explored here—Julio Llamazares, Angeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—have crafted texts about artists and art historians whose central conflicts revolve around questions of autonomy and artistic identity formation that stem from the shifting relationship between art and commerce. In their largely realist narratives about the life and work of creatives living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, these Spanish authors reveal the changed conditions of production and accelerated distribution for art and literature alike, but the function of the novels is more than documentary. Often, the novels represent a clash between the myth of total artistic freedom that has long been a hallmark of the artist novel and artists’ willing recruitment or co-optation by market forces or political interests. As these authors critique a system in which they themselves are deeply embedded, their responses to this clash are unsurprisingly ambivalent. Often, they vacillate between heralding autonomy as the artist’s defining aspiration and suggesting the fundamental impossibility of achieving it in the current conditions. For centuries, the depiction of creative practice in the artist novel has been bound up with the notion of autonomy, reflected in the belief that the artist, when free from external constraints, is able to create work that is unique and therefore valuable. For that reason, the artist novel proves ideal, even today, for examining Spanish authors’ notions of their own creative practice in an era when political patronage and private-sector investment complicate belief in that autonomy.

The artist novel saw a veritable revival in the 1980s and 1990s, when it began to proliferate for the first time in Spain since the turn of the twentieth century.⁵ Every major Spanish press has published art-world novels in the past several decades—not only about artists but also about art dealers, gallery owners, museum curators, and art historians. Yet, as a category, these novels have received very little critical attention that goes beyond the enumerative and descriptive.⁶ The transformation of the artist novel shows how authors interrogate the ambivalence of cultural producers’ identities today, but I argue that the study of contemporary artist novels is useful to understanding broader questions about the way we conceptualize work, especially cultural work, that, as Mark Banks describes it, is often banally perceived as more self-expressive, creative, and fulfilling than conventional work.⁷ I read these novels, at times explicitly and other times against the grain, to contextualize and historicize the myth of the individual creative genius long represented as the radically autonomous bohemian artist who works differently and with singular motivations that set him apart from the average worker. Examining this myth as a discursive construct facilitates understanding of the way cultural industries and artists themselves have been able to mobilize this construct for their own varied ends. These novels are set in the age of cultural industries, the age in which, simultaneously, neoliberalism has become an inescapable norm. Therefore, their study also allows us to form questions about the impact of neoliberalism’s market-oriented logic on subjects’ identity formation as professionals (and especially as artists), as well as its effects on the formation of their class, gender, and national identities.

The notion of artistic autonomy has informed understandings of creative work since the Romantic era. Banks defines autonomy in cultural production as the freedom from the particular demands and constraints of the commercial world.⁸ Of course, most cultural work is not radically autonomous. One of the few places where that radical autonomy could exist is in the fictional world of the artist novel, which also has its literary roots in Romanticism. Outside of its pages, cultural work has always been characterized by a socially embedded, compromised, or ‘negotiated’ autonomy.⁹ At least some level of creative autonomy underpins all practices—painting, writing, et cetera—that we understand as cultural work today. Works of art are differentiable from standardized, mass-produced commodities and are appreciated as unique because they bear the imprint of an individual and original creator. However, as Banks asserts, the same autonomy that allows for the creation of unique works of art has become a structural precondition for effective capitalist cultural production.¹⁰ In other words, a shared belief in autonomy and its value both allows artists to express their individual creativity and lets creative industries successfully commodify their work. Therefore, when an artist signals distance from the market, his or her work may actually become more valuable within that same market.

Cultural industries—defined by Banks as commercial activities that involve the production of aesthetic or symbolic goods and services—first became a topic of both academic and policy-making debate in the 1970s.¹¹ As a result, many thinkers began to question the existence of artistic autonomy as a foundational normative principle of cultural work, with Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer leading the charge in different ways.¹² A thorough review of these critical approaches is outside the purview of this book, and it is something that both Justin O’Connor and Banks have cogently undertaken.¹³ However, one of these critiques of autonomy has informed my own understanding of the art world as it is depicted by the Spanish authors I study: Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology of art that claims that cultural workers’ own status-seeking behaviors undermine the possibility of radical autonomy.¹⁴ Bourdieu’s work can be understood as a vigorous argument against the concept of autonomy, also defined as disinterestedness in his parlance. In this book, I do not take the stance that some mediated autonomy is utterly impossible, but Bourdieu is still a useful starting point for understanding how the concept of artist has been socially constituted and how the concept of the Great Artist came to be.

Bourdieu’s work in The Rules of Art (1992) and The Field of Cultural Production (1993) examines the social processes of differentiation, commodification, and classification of culture in late capitalist societies that result in the emergence of cultural economies.¹⁵ It can be situated within a branch of sociological critique that sees the cultural industry as a collective project that requires a contextualization of individual artistic practice.¹⁶ Bourdieu explains that the very terms art and artist have meaning because of a collective belief in the notion of autonomy.¹⁷ Throughout this book, I use the term charismatic myth of the artist, derived from Bourdieu’s lexicon, to refer to that discursive construction of the individual creative genius. Using Bourdieusian parlance, Sigrid Røyseng, Per Mangset, and Jorunn Spord Borgen define the charismatic myth as the belief that artists are people with extraordinary talents possessing the ability to create unique and sublime works of art … [, which] should be carried out in a disinterested manner with a pure aesthetic vision as the only guiding light.¹⁸ In other words, the charismatic myth sees artist as an inherent category, a subject position inhabited from birth and irreducible to any condition or conditioning.¹⁹ Bourdieu posits, however, that artists are recognized as artists because they are embedded in and legitimized by a larger social framework. He calls the structure of the field in which artists’ work is produced and legitimated, especially the elite or restricted field of cultural production, an economic world reversed. It is dominated by a winner-loses logic, which means that the artist who enacts the most autonomous behaviors is the most successful, and so those who enter it, even those who appear most disinterested, actually have an interest in disinterestedness.²⁰ In Bourdieu’s words, performing the most anti-economic and visibly ‘disinterested’ behaviours in no way excludes their authors from even the ‘economic’ profits awaiting those who conform to the law of this universe, and, in fact, it often encourages it.²¹ Performing freedom and disinterestedness can ultimately lead to pecuniary gain, and the disinterestedness that characterizes the charismatic myth can be adopted as a long-term commercial strategy.²²

My approach to the eight artist novels chosen for this study is informed by this notion that performing autonomy can be marketable. This is represented diegetically in many of the novels as artist protagonists mobilize disinterested strategies that lead to symbolic consecration and financial reward. In some of the authors’ public statements about their work, the same kind of performative disavowal of honors and financial reward can be seen. It is undeniable that cultural production has responded increasingly to market demands in recent decades, but my own position aligns more with Banks’s assertion (and less with Bourdieu’s) that it is never reducible to those demands.²³ Even if artistic autonomy is employable as a commercial strategy, cultural industries will never completely standardize artistic output if they wish to remain economically viable, because the culture-consuming public continues to demand original products made by a unique creator. Those who work in the cultural industry, like authors, editors, and publishers, understand that the consumers of art and literature find a use value in cultural products that are defined as authentic and unique. Profit is generated from marketing novels to a contemporary readership that Sarah Brouillette describes as inclined to disavow instrumental goals as secondary to, or as inhibitors of, immaterial goods like self-knowledge, authenticity, originality, and happiness.²⁴ However, in contemporary society, where materialistic motivations increasingly exist in tandem rather than in tension with the desire for self-expression, the search for artistic authenticity does not have to lie only in radical autonomy from the market.²⁵ Rather, authenticity is often expressed in these literary texts as a mediated search for some kind of autonomy within capitalist confines.

I argue in this book that the post-Franco rise to prominence of the artist novel is related to a desire to market authenticity, but this can only be understood by taking into consideration the ideologies of authorship, often informed by the charismatic myth of the artist, that make artistic expression a topic interesting to readers. As Brouillette has shown, whether one is a proponent or critic of the market’s impingement on artistic practice, the idea of the artist’s special position vis-à-vis capitalist value has been structured into the field and by now thoroughly permeates all its parts.²⁶ This can be seen reflected in two different points of view she describes: either the artist is so special that capitalist processes will annihilate his or her creativity or those same capitalist markets will offer the artist the opportunity for a creative career and liberate him or her from financial constraints that might prevent independent creation. The recognition that the discursive construct of autonomy is fundamental to generating profit from culture is key to understanding the way artists—both the authors of the novels studied and the artist protagonists they create—participate in the new cultural economy.

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The revival of the artist novel after 1992, with its narratives about individual creativity and artistic autonomy, cannot be separated from the definitive implantation of neoliberalism in Spain. All of the artist novels studied in this book were published in what Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith call neoliberalism’s ontological phase, during which neoliberalism became no longer a set of ideological beliefs but rather what we are, a mode of existence defined by individual self-responsibility, entrepreneurial action, and the maximization of human capital.²⁷ To understand neoliberalism this way is to see beyond actual economic policies and understand market-based thinking as having infiltrated every aspect of human life, including the art world and the university. As Wendy Brown explains it, neoliberalism in the contemporary age is a pervasive and agentic governing rationality that has the power to organize states and shape subjects.²⁸ Taking this context into account, one of the central questions of this book is how authors represent or negotiate the concept of artistic autonomy when there is no longer an outside the market.

Spain implemented a neoliberal economic program nearly immediately after Franco’s death as part of the same modernizing and integrating impulse that motivated its embrace of culture as a political tool. Helen Graham and Antonio Sánchez explain that, after decades of ostracism, the Spanish government’s desire for symbolic European integration meant incorporation into a specific political and economic entity which has at its center (both ideologically and economically) the market.²⁹ Though some progressives had hoped that the dictator’s demise would usher in a sort of anticapitalist program of the Republican era, when the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party; PSOE) took over the first democratically elected government, it surprised and disappointed its hard-liners by embracing neoliberal economic policies. David Harvey defines neoliberal practices as those that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.³⁰ From a set of economic policies in the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism was transformed into a political ideology, and later, as Huehls and Smith suggest, it suffused the sociocultural landscape until it [became] a post-ideological mode of existence.³¹ One of the hallmarks of the Transition was the endurance of certain Francoist institutions, values, and leaders, whose presence in the government continued for years after the dictator’s death. Despite this continuity, there was little support for Franco’s state corporatist economic model.³² As Paul McVeigh notes, neoliberalism was embraced by leaders and the public alike in this context because it enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with European integration and with the related and highly prioritized goals of democratization, modernization, and an end to Spain’s isolation.³³

So important was the realization of those goals that the anti-Francoist progressives, represented largely by the Partido Comunista Español (Spanish Communist Party; PCE) and the democratic socialist PSOE, abandoned in the name of pragmatism the idealism that had fueled their resistance through the Franco years. A version of the liberal democracy they envisioned, in which modernization and normalization would be achieved, needed to be palatable to the still deeply entrenched Francoist establishment, and this reality led to a fundamental deradicalization of both parties’ platforms.³⁴ When the PSOE came to power in 1982 as the first democratically elected government of the post-Franco era, its business-friendly economic policies earned it the