Art, Love and Truth

By Christopher Greaves

At a time when every cultural value has been questioned, when there seem to be no limits to what can be described as ‘art’, and when doubt has been cast upon truth itself, this book argues for the fact of certain fundamental principles within the field of Art and seeks to establish their nature. Referring to many examples, 'Art, Love and Truth' is both a study in discrimination, serving to distinguish artworks which enhance our awareness from those which impoverish it, and a meditation on the power of artists to express compassion. Passionate and radical, scholarly and entertaining, it will appeal to everyone interested in art, culture and spirituality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716512575

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my profound gratitude to Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi who, in the course of a conversation about Art, first suggested my writing this book and gave me the title.

A great many thanks are also due to Richard Payment for his help in preparing Art, Love and Truth for publication, to Ruth Greaves for proofreading and overall encouragement, to Philippe Verez, Michael Falzione, and the late Roger Scruton for their responses to earlier versions, and to Raphael Greaves for the cover design.

True art makes the divine silence in the soul break into applause

•

Hafiz

1: THE OTHER DAY I WAS TALKING

The other day I was talking with a colleague about the merits of the latest Batman film. Or rather, he was talking to me of those merits, for he, as the Batman posters with which he had decorated the walls of our office in the Faculty of Creative Arts and the nature of his research into the Superhero comics of World War II suggested, had a great deal more knowledge about and interest in and enthusiasm for the subject than I did. Also I was at a disadvantage in not having seen the film. Gazing at the wayfaring tree on the lawn outside our window, I continued a little half-heartedly to hold up my end of the conversation until, fed up at last with my wry and uncertain responses, he closed the subject with the most stinging remark he could think of: i.e. that it wasn’t worth discussing the matter with someone whose artistic tastes were so inflexibly conservative.

I opened my mouth in order to make, if possible, some articulate, witty rejoinder - and then I paused. I looked back at my colleague. So fiercely was he staring at his computer screen that he might have been an actor in a film himself, not one of the Batman movies, but rather the sort of thriller that features a scene in which someone’s ‘real time location’ is being tracked down by an agent in an office like ours, only bigger and with more computers and more agents sitting at them and without the damp patch on the ceiling. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see what he was reading - some JSTOR essay or leftist blog, perhaps - but whatever it was, it was clearly absorbing him wholly. Besides, his words expressed not just his own subjective views on art but also those of the present-day orthodoxy, and to have taken further issue with them at this point would have required more effort on my part than I cared to make, and much, much more Socratic unconditioned thoughtfulness on his than seemed to be on offer. So, I did not go on.

Yet if I had gone on, I might have said something like this. In the first place, I do not think of my tastes as conservative. Nor do I think of them as political or apolitical, retrograde or futuristic, hidebound or avant-garde. What I look for in works of art is the sublime. What I look for is something ideal, something that affords the prospect of transcendence. In art, as in culture in general, I desire - indeed I long for - that which elevates, which nourishes, which expresses truth and love, which brings sublimity and offers bliss.

2: THE CONTINUUM

That isn’t to say that I don’t like relaxing with a movie or sit-com or a little light reading from time to time. Of course not. But then I don’t believe there to be an intrinsic contradiction between those arts of the everyday which we find, for example, in sit-coms and comics, in wallpapers, tea cups or maps, in industrial design, or clothes, or in thrillers, town planning or street signs, and so on - and the kind of art which can be said to be precisely that which is not mundane, not quotidian: the art which has something to do with the sublime. There is, or so it seems to me, a subtle continuum in which what is truly valuable among the minor or more decorative arts of the everyday, and what is really valuable among the more overtly transcendental works of art - such as the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the St Matthew Passion - both have their place. And it is the art of this continuum for which I long.

3: SOPHIATOPIA

What’s more, I don’t believe myself to be alone in this. However much it is undefined and however rarely it is stated, there is surely a collective aspiration for such an art. While the notion of the New Jerusalem - or any similar community - may first of all suggest a place of fellowship and equity, it must have its aesthetic dimension as well. There it is, in our collective imagination, with its orderly extravagance of playful art, its intimate byways and great public squares with their compostellas and fountains, its buildings in which, as Blake expressed it when describing his own sublime cosmopolis, Golgonooza:

The stones are pity, and the bricks, well wrought affections

Enamel’d with love & kindness, & the tiles engraven gold,

Labour of merciful hands: the beams & rafters are forgiveness:

The mortar & cement of the work, tears of honesty: the nails

And the screws & iron braces are well wrought blandishments

And well contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten,

Always comforting the remembrance: the floors, humility:

The ceilings, devotion: the hearths, thanksgiving...

[Blake, 1967: 632]

its innocent revels, its adornments and music. It is somewhere where the forms and mediations, without which life cannot be lived, are graceful, grace-giving. It is somewhere where children’s attention is enhanced, not spoiled, by the entertainments set before them. It is somewhere where art’s transforming aspect is expressed. It is somewhere where matter is used to communicate love, with all the poetics that that entails.

Not that that envisioned, ideal place is a city of art per se, for I would not want to claim that art is the be-all and end-all of things. Nor is the idea that it is a city anything more than an image. Sophiatopia might be a better name. A place where holy wisdom is expressed - which is to say, from our perspective here, expressed artistically. In any event, the point is not to be fixated on an image. The point is to construct, somehow, a collective work-in-progress of the compassionate imagination.

•

4: WHAT I FIND WHEN I LOOK

What I find when I look at the art of our time, however, is something rather different. When I look at, read, or hear that art which is generally thought of as expressing the zeitgeist by those who can be said to regulate our culture - the talking heads, producers, critics, agents, publishers, arts managers, gallery owners, magazine editors, blurb-writers, celebrity artists, art teachers, and so forth - what I find are cans of human excrement, gigantic rusting eyeless ‘angels’, empty rooms and unmade beds, speeded-up films of rotting animals, or piles of bricks, or straight lines painted on strips of paper 20 metres long, or untitled snaps of people taken by the light of computer screens, or silent movies of artists urinating at the camera - or the portrait, made up out of children’s drawings, of someone infamous for torturing and murdering children - or a music which relies upon an unremitting 4/4 beat to make its point, or a highly technocratic style of building which has spread and continues to spread across the world with the force of a pandemic, or books and comics, computer games and films which not only describe but also construct a sprawling dystopia, at once emotional, mental and actual - from which the sense of the sublime has more or less been banished absolutely. When Keith Jarrett remarks that ‘the world does not seem a place where joy and transcendence can thrive anymore. Aspiring to greatness seems a thing of the past. Imitation is all we know. Marketing is all we see. [...] Money and fame, alone, are motivations. What is integrity to this world? What is meaning?’ it is hard not to go along with him. [Jarrett, 2003] Indeed, it can seem as though that judgement on the present age or Kali Yuga in the Matsya Purana: that in such days, among other things, ‘the will to rise to supreme heights’ will fail, has been completely realised.

5: I’M NOT DISPUTING

I’m not disputing that those latter works - the empty rooms and unmade beds and so forth - are ‘art’. How can I, when they are claimed by their makers as art, are presented by producers, publishers, gallery-owners and the like as art, are discussed by academics and art critics and literary critics and architecture critics as art, win prizes as art, and - which would seem to prove the point for once and all - are bought and sold as art? How can I, when, in a statement attributed to Andy Warhol but which could have been said by almost any contemporary artist, ‘Art is whatever you can get away with’? How can I, when, after all, any given thing can be accounted ‘art’, so long as somewhere, in some little corner, either in actuality or in somebody’s imagination, it has attached to it a label saying ‘art’? How can I, if something such as Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece (1969) - which came with a statement that read: ‘During the exhibition, I will try to communicate a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image’ - is considered art? [Felshin, 1996: 19] For that matter, how can I if, according to Collingwood in his Principles of Aesthetics, ‘every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art’, whether it has a label of some sort or not? [Collingwood, 1965: 285]

But is that to say that all such works necessarily have any value as art? Or that there is no difference, however fuzzy it might be at the edges, between what on the one hand is merely called a work of art, and what on the other is a true work of art, a work of art in which, to one extent or another, truth is given form?

Of course there is a difference. What could be plainer, more obvious, than that there is a difference? A child could see that there’s a difference. What’s more, I know there to be a difference. Notwithstanding the fact that, according to the arbiters of intellectual manners, there can be no greater solecism than to say ‘I know’ about anything, I do not have the slightest doubt that there is a difference between that art which belongs to the subtle continuum and that art which does not. That isn’t to say that I can tell every time what that difference is, that my taste is infallible, and so forth - of course not; but that there is a difference, that there is a definite distinction between the kind of art which, to one or another degree, articulates sublimity, and the kind of art which corrupts our awareness and impedes our evolution - of that I am perfectly sure.

The question, then, is not that staple of philosophy, ‘What is art?’ - which is really an empty question, a question concerning how we go about defining things and not a question regarding art as such; a question to do with category, not quality; a question which, even if it were answered to the satisfaction of all parties, would alter nothing. The real question is: ‘What truly is art? What is the art of truth, and how does it differ from art that is merely art?’

That there is such a difference is our premise, and what I want to do here is give a rough description of that difference. I want to speak of the continuum: its components and limits, its basis, structure, and effects. I want to speak about the qualities of art, real art; I want to speak about the principles of art, true art - which is also to say: the art of the Spirit. I want to speak of the sublime.

6: A ZHDANOVSCHINA

But how to talk of such things? For whenever I read the reviews of works of art on websites, in magazines or newspapers, or listen to pundits discussing art on the radio or TV, or glance at new academic writing on art, aesthetics, literature, architecture, media, and so on, or leaf through the pages of Icon or INview, Artforum, Wallpaper, Flash Art or Frieze, or whenever I speak with art teachers in schools or universities, I cannot but admit to myself that there’s nowhere, no place, no agora or forum, no unconditioned intellectual space, nowhere at all for the things I would like to express to be said. Or maybe it is still just possible to talk or write about love, truth, and true art if you don’t mind having your work relegated to some far-flung outpost of the blogosphere or placed on the ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ shelves of bookstores alongside ‘Teach Me How to Feel: a Guidebook for the Emotionally Impaired’ and ‘Star Signs for Cats’, etc. - in short, if you don’t mind being exiled to the margins of the public realm. But if you wish to say that this subject is a central, not a tangential one, if you wish to say that this is a topic of vital importance which concerns the whole way we live at this time and the world we are making for our children, and that it isn’t merely something to be discussed by postgraduates in Art History seminars or dilettantes in their leisure hours - if you wish to occupy the intellectual mainstream and not some stagnant backwater - then it is a different matter. Absurd though it seems, the task of speaking of true art, the art of the Spirit, the art of the truth which loves, has become so difficult under contemporary cultural conditions that it is as though a Zhdanovschina has been issued, forbidding anyone to use the word ‘truth’ under pain of losing their cultural standing, their academic reputation, and - if they happen to have one - their intellectual livelihood.

7: THE REFERENT

Why is this? Why isn’t it easy to talk about art, true art, its fundamental principles and subtle possibilities? Why isn’t it a simple matter: to talk about the spiritual continuum of real art?

In a nutshell: because our contemporary culture does not use the Spirit as its reference point. Nor does it refer itself to the notion of ‘truth’. Nor, for that matter, does it use the concept of love as a referent. Instead, the stress is entirely on agency. It’s on the agent, the subject, the ego: I am. ‘Free’, individual choice is privileged; while, by contrast, the you are of deference towards something greater than the I am, the you are of beliefs, traditions, fixed conditions, fixed conceptions of space, of time, and personal identity, the you are of rootedness in place, the you are of a sense of right and wrong, of good and bad, the you are of an awareness of Divinity - has been eroded to the point where very little of its substance remains. And in such a culture, a secular, consumerist culture which is premised upon and addressed to the ego, we all of us - including those who make, distribute, and consume art and those who place it in a structured intellectual understanding - are so positioned that the way in which we conceive of and relate to things must be in terms of I am, I like or I don’t like, I want or I don’t want. It’s simply not normal to think that there is something else, something more important than this I-ness - such as, in this case, a continuum to which real art belongs and unreal, anti-spiritual, destructive art does not belong.

8: THE ARTISTS

Take the artists themselves. In a consumerist, I-am-based culture, art has come to be above all a form of self-expressive creativity. Artists consider themselves beholden to no-one but themselves, and while of course the idea of editing their work is accepted, the notion of censorship on moral grounds, including self-censorship, has come to be regarded as taboo. Take the case of J.K. Rowling, author of the popular Harry Potter series of children’s books. ‘It may be a while before we’re accustomed to reading phrases like that miraculously unguarded vagina in a Rowling book,’ noted Ian Parker when interviewing Rowling on the subject of her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, ‘and public response to [it] will doubtless include scandalized objections to the idea of young Harry Potter readers being drawn into such material. [But] There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher, Rowling said. I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write. [Parker, 2012] Of course, there is no reason why Rowling shouldn’t have written a book for grown-ups, but what is telling here is Rowling’s assertion of the artist’s independence of any responsibilities (other than artistic ones) to the reader, his independence of all moral constraints and external limits: nothing, she is saying, can be more important to the practice of art than free creative expression.

Hence, artists are not going to be too bothered about the use of words like ‘real’ and ‘true’ when art is spoken of, since, after all, they would like to believe that in making their art they are really and truly expressing themselves. Moreover, most artists would be likely to claim that in one way or another their art is a ‘spiritual’ thing. Even that most rational of modernist architects, Mies van der Rohe, asserted this; even Gilbert and George, well known for using images of faeces and urine in their photomontages, have said this about their work. While as for those artists who don’t wish to claim in so many words that their art is a spiritual process or a spiritual product - they are not going to jump up and say no, nothing doing, their art isn’t spiritual.

But if someone should say that this use of the terms ‘the Spirit’ or ‘spiritual’ is far too vague, too bland and sentimental to have an actual meaning; or that truth, or the Spirit, is what it is and can have nothing to do with opinion or ‘choice’; or that truth is beyond the individual ego with its individual likes and dislikes, whims and notions; or that truth must have a certain character, a certain protocol attached to it, a certain way of expressing itself and a certain way in which it does not express itself - then the first thing the artists are going to say is: ‘Wait a minute. Just wait a minute. What are you talking about? We don’t want any more rules - no, not at all! Conditions and limitations, prescriptions, proscriptions, moral or spiritual dos and don’ts - we’ve had enough of them.’ The very idea of a subtle continuum based on the ‘principles’ or ‘qualities’ of truth is simply anathema to most present-day artists, since it implies a list of negatives as well as of positives, the classification of certain effects or procedures as illicit, ‘immoral’, untrue, or ‘wrong’ - these in turn suggesting an attack on the artists’ freedom of self-expression - which, in contemporary culture, is the one thing that is absolutely sacrosanct.

9: THE MEDIATORS

As for those who distribute or mediate art - the gallery owners, publishers, arts managers, and so on - the bottom line is that the art in which they deal must achieve commercial viability. Achieving that is their job. For them, the question of the relation between art and truth is neither here nor there. Or, to put it another way, what they subscribe to is the popular thesis that all art is true art, is real art, no matter how slapdash or crude it might be and regardless of who has produced it - be they adults or children, chimps, horses or robots.

Consider, for example, The Public, an interactive exhibition space in Sandwell, West Bromwich, which resembles ‘a magenta fish, cost £52 million, and closed before it opened,’ although it has since opened again. [Sudjic, 2006]. ‘Public Gallery is all about taking part,’ its website’s mission statement reads; ‘each time you visit, you can change the art, your views can shape the programme, and the experience can change you.’ And while you’re there you can make digital art, take and exhibit your own self-portrait, create ‘vivid textile artworks, amazing decoration and funky jewellery’, and place yourself in a flip-book cartoon while experiencing ‘stop-frame animation on a human scale’ - the list goes on. In effect: you too are an artist; what you create is art. It’s true that The Public also offers exhibitions of the work of ‘internationally renowned artists’, but the difference between their works and those of the average visitor must presumably be one of degree, not of category. While the works of the former may be a little more vivid, amazing and funky - and, of course, better known and more expensive - they can’t be more true. They can’t be more real. The whole point of The Public is that all art is real art - and if that’s the case, what more is there to say? The subject is closed. No continuum to which true art belongs and false art does not can possibly exist.

10: THE CONSUMERS

As for the ordinary consumers of art - the audience, spectators, and readers - for them it is more or less axiomatic that anyone who talks about ‘true art’ or ‘real art’ is merely expressing their own subjective, first-person taste, and that while it might be different from other people’s tastes, it cannot, by definition, be any ‘more true’ than theirs. For them, the consumption of art is simply a matter of individual choice; general principles are not involved. This becomes very clear when you read through the comments on websites like YouTube or Amazon. Whatever the artwork, no matter how cheesy, inept or disgusting you might find it, no matter how impoverished its content or feeble its form, there is always going to be someone out there for whom it is ‘major’, ‘life-changing’, ‘a must-see’, ‘a masterpiece’, one of the hundred books you have to read or films you have to see before you die, and so on. In short, according to this way of thinking, anyone is perfectly entitled to say about such and such a work that it is a ‘true work of art’ - though only insofar as it is clear that what they are expressing is just a personal opinion; they are not trying to elevate that opinion to the level of a general law. Indeed, a problem only arises if we come along and say: there is a continuum of true art. From Joe Public’s perspective, our efforts to relate individual works of art to such a continuum - to suggest, in a manner of speaking, that this work is true and that one is not - only show us up as having a less ‘truthful’ point of view than that of the average consumer, since it is so much more ‘illiberal’, ‘undemocratic’ and ‘judgemental’ than their own overtly subjective one.

11: THE ACADEMICS

As for the intellectuals, like my Batman-admiring colleague, with their theoretical objections to the notion of ‘true art’: for them there is neither such a thing as ‘truth’ nor are there any ‘supreme heights’ to be aimed at. How can there be, if - as current thinking has it - our reality is entirely a culturally constructed or, alternatively, but with the same effect, a cognitively constructed one? If only such a reality exists, fashioned out of language and our always-already acculturated consciousness, or out of our own inherent processes of cognition, then there can’t be anything in the way of absolute, unchanging, transpersonal, transhistorical, and universal values - including something like ‘truth’ - because they would have to exist independently of what are actually our relative, impermanent, historically specific and continually contested values. They would have to have their basis in some realm outside our everyday, culturally and/or cognitively constructed actuality - which is impossible, so the argument goes, since that actuality has no ‘outside’. There isn’t anything else. There is no real reality beyond our culturally apprehended, culturally and/or cognitively produced one - or if there is, it is argued, we can’t know what it is. In point of fact, it is said, all those supposedly ‘absolute’ or ‘transcendental’ or ‘sublime’ values are nothing more than historical inventions - and not only historical ones, but also ‘gendered’ ones and, of course, class-based, power-related ones as well.

For precisely the same reason, the argument continues, there can’t be any essential qualities either. In other words, there can’t be anything like an essence of beauty, or an essential moral goodness, or an essential spirituality, in the sense of fixed qualities independent of history and culture, because nothing is independent of history and culture.

Hence the contempt with which a contemporary critic such as John Carey can dismiss the Kantian notion of an absolute realm or ‘supersensible substrate of nature’ - to which art was long thought to have access - as a ‘farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion’. Hence, too, the short shrift which he gives to notions such as the ‘sacred’ and the ‘spiritual’, when it comes to discussing works of art. [Carey, 2005: 6-8] Not only are they too woolly to serve as tools of academic enquiry, but also they smack of the hierarchical view that ‘great art’ is at a ‘higher’ level than ordinary culture.

The common contemporary view is expressed by Stuart Hall when he says: ‘I no longer believe we can resolve the questions of aesthetic value by the use of [...] transcendental, canonical cultural categories.’ [Hall, 1996: 448] Or, as Joughin and Malpas put it when introducing what they call the New Aestheticism:

Critical theory, of whatever variety, presented a fundamental challenge to the image of the old-style academic aesthete sitting in his (it was always his) ivory tower and handing down judgements about the good and the bad in art and culture with a blissful disregard for the politics of his pronouncements. Notions such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art’s intrinsic spiritual value have been successfully challenged by successive investigations into the historical and political bases of art’s material production and transmission. Theories of textuality, subjectivity, ideology, class, race and gender have shown such notions of universal human value to be without foundation, and even to act as repressive means of safeguarding the beliefs and values of an elitist culture from challenge or transformation. [Joughin and Malpas, 2003: 1]

True, no-one very much pays attention to such theorists who, in any case, only ever arrive at the scene after the crime has been committed, as it were, and not in time to prevent its happening. Nevertheless, this way of thinking does express something fundamental about our present-day culture, not only because it represents the current intellectual orthodoxy but also because it signifies an absolutely unprecedented relativism. The concept of ‘eternal values’ is, or would seem to be, an exploded notion. A general relativity prevails.

And that is what makes it so difficult to talk of the sublime in art, or of spiritual art, or of morality in connection with art, or of the art of the ‘New Jerusalem’, or of the art of a Sophiatopia. It makes it difficult in the extreme to talk about underlying, universal principles of art. It makes it almost impossible to talk of art in relation to truth - for what is truth? The most common view today, I would say, is something like that of Foucault: that truth is simply an aspect of discourse. A discourse consists of all the things that are spoken or written or thought about a given topic (say, present-day art), where those things have a degree of coherence. There will usually be other discourses around the same topic - minor discourses associated with less ‘empowered’ social groups - and all of these discourses will have their own internal ‘truth’. That is to say that they will be true as far as their adherents are concerned, but only as far as they are concerned, for, according to this conception, there cannot be any objective truth beyond discourse.

And so - it would be nice if you could simply refer, for instance, to the Gospels with their talk of an absolute principle, of a Way and a Life, and, incidentally, a Last Judgement - as in Doctor Zhivago, when Lara listens to Professor Afanasyevich read the Beatitudes and concludes - as though it clinched the matter, as though its truth were undeniable and that were an end to it: ‘That was what He thought. That was Christ’s opinion of it.’ [Pasternak, 1997: 39] But to do so would be to be met with incomprehension, if not even out and out derision, in the secular intellectual circles in which I move. For both artists and consumers, not to mention distributors, Christ’s opinion would be seen as just another individual’s opinion. For the reasoners, the intellectuals and academics, it would be seen as, at best, an expression of one discourse - and a largely outdated, pre-Queer Theory one at that. Even those in sympathy with Christ’s injunctions would say, ‘Yes, yes, but in strictly academic terms, who is Christ? What are his qualifications? As far as present-day rational thinking goes, with its intellectual rigour and recognised range of methodologies, what’s his authority?’

12: THE POLITICAL CRITIQUE

In short, it has become all but impossible to talk about art and works of art in terms of truth, or reality, or value. Of course, we can and do make value judgements still. We say ‘I like x’ and ‘I don’t like y.’ In other words, the relativism which obtains today is not in fact, as Richard Rorty explains, ‘the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other,’ about which he adds that: ‘No one holds this view.’ [Rorty, 1982: 166] If it were, then it really would be pointless saying anything. But judgements of value have become so relativized that it does indeed seem relatively pointless to say anything. In spite of the intellectual contortions which Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Malcolm Budd or Richard Shusterman et al have put themselves (and their readers) through in order to establish a solid basis for relative judgements of value, such judgements have scant coherence or foundation. How can they, when they’re no longer underpinned by collectively accepted moral and aesthetic principles, by ‘transcendental guarantees’? The adjectives used, the terms of disfavour or praise, convey no weight.

And when we make our evaluations, not only do we construct them on the sand of relativity, but in addition those judgements, whether we know it or not, must be biased, class-based ones, according to Pierre Bourdieu in his influential study, Distinction. Subtitled ‘A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’, Bourdieu’s work was an attempt, in Jim McGuigan’s words:

to dethrone Kantian aesthetics once and for all. There is, according to Bourdieu, no pure judgement of art that can be sustained on ‘disinterested’ philosophical grounds. Art and culture only exist socially and they are caught up in struggles for ‘distinction’. In effect, Bourdieu replaces aesthetics, the philosophical judgement of art, with the sociological categories of distinction and taste. For Bourdieu, taste is a marker of class, mediated through a dispositionary ‘habitus’, deriving from differential socialisation in the family and schooling: it is deployed partly consciously and partly unconsciously for socially strategic purposes. [McGuigan, 1996: 32]

And if that is the case, then what can we actually say ‘in innocence’, so to speak, when according to Bourdieu our eyes and our minds are far from innocent in their judgements of taste? That is, those judgements are not really disinterested aesthetic judgements at all, as we like to think, but ones that are formed from a very early age by class assumptions, and which we mobilize, albeit without necessarily realizing it, in order to establish our social status and distinguish ourselves from other, lesser members of the social hierarchy.

And so, as John Storey notes while asserting that his own discipline of ‘Cultural Studies is not impressed with demands to pay homage to the timeless text of fixed value,’ and that current postmodern thought ‘has disturbed many of the old certainties surrounding questions of cultural value’: there can be no ‘return to the standard terms of axiology: intrinsic, objective, absolute, universal, transcendent.’ [Storey, 2001: 166-7] What there can be, however, is a consideration of works of art in terms of political value. And so, the ‘way to think about matters of cultural value is to begin with power,’ John Storey goes on. [Storey, 2001: 167] Indeed: ‘It is impossible now to argue that aesthetics is anything other than thoroughly imbricated with politics and culture. And this, without doubt, is an entirely good thing,’ say Joughin and Malpas. [Joughin and Malpas, 2003: 3]

Thus, we can investigate the questions of how power is articulated, established, and sustained through works of art and cultural texts in general. We can analyse the ideological content of chosen texts. We can see which ‘discourses’ they support. We can see how they advance ‘hegemony’ - by which is meant, loosely speaking, the political domination by one class over others through cultural influence. We can examine the processes by which certain kinds of art are selected as part of ‘the canon’ of ‘classic works’ considered worthy of study, while others are ignored or considered insignificant. We can look at the matter of taste: at how the appreciation of certain kinds of art helps us accrue what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, affording us intellectual and social status. Overall, we can analyse artworks ‘for their symptomatic political content, including especially: latent or repressed sexism, racism, classism, imperialism and so forth.’ [Carroll, 2001: 180] We can pay particular attention to difference, for ‘the notion of difference - whether it is thought of in terms of gender, the postcolonial, historicism or deconstruction, to name but a few approaches - provides the structure for enquiry in the contemporary humanities.’ [Malpas, 2003: 89] We can look at the politics of art’s production, since, as Mark Vallen argues: ‘It is an ironclad fact that an artist must eat and pay rent, and so it is also an irreducible fact that we [the artists] are bound to political arrangements.’ [Vallen, 2004] Moreover, not only can we do these things but in a way we must do them if we are to have anything to say at all - since, as Stuart Hall says, ‘once you abandon essential categories, there is no place to go apart from the politics of criticism.’ [Hall, 1996: 448] And in fact it is just this kind of analysis that the Humanities in general have been conducting for the past few decades.

Ironically, however, there has been nothing in all the allegedly ‘radical’ re-evaluation of cultural texts undertaken by critical theory that has really called into question the aims and premises of advanced consumer capitalism. Feminism, ‘Queer Theory’ and their attendant notions of hybridity have served the purposes of a flexible labour market; gay rights have helped the ‘pink pound’ to flourish. The deconstruction of rigid social hierarchies has helped the economic system move faster, perform more efficiently. The decline of an older, more censorious culture has helped the proliferation of information regardless of content, the rapid expansion of media at all levels, in all directions. If critical theory were really as radical as it thinks it is - if it were really so critical - it would have been banned long ago, instead of having been allowed to