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Title: The Refusal of Art
Author: Bob Black
Date: 1989
Language: en
Topics: alienation, art
Source: Retrieved on October 5th, 2009 from http://www.inspiracy.com/black/refusal.html][www.inspiracy.com]].  Proofread text from [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3900, retrieved on December 5, 2020.
Notes: Originally published in “Artpaper” volume 9, number 4, 1989. Later published in Bob’s book “Friendly Fire”

Bob Black

The Refusal of Art

Art abstracts from life. Abstraction is deletion. When the first artist

painted an aurochs on a cave wall, the first critic saw it and said,

“That’s an aurochs!” But it wasn’t an aurochs, it was a painting. It’s

been downhill for art criticism ever since. Art, like science, is

illumination through elimination. Artists remove in order to improve. In

this sense, minimalism is not just another school of art, but its

evolving essence, and all of modern art can be seen as a process of

progressive self-destruction. Artists often destroy themselves,

occasionally each other, but it was left to a relatively unknown German

artist, Gustav Metzger, to give this artistic impulse its most succinct

articulation when in 1959 he announced his theory of “auto-destructive

art.” It’s not surprising, then, that Metzger also anticipated the

proposed Art Strike 1990 — 1993.

On January 1, 1990 — if they comply with the directives of the PRAXIS

Group — all artists will put down their tools for three years. There

will be no openings, no showings, no readings. “Cultural workers,”

unless they scab, will also walk out. Galleries, museums, and

“alternative” spaces will all shut down or be converted to serve more

practical purposes. According to the Art Strike leadership, everybody

benefits. The artists, by stepping out from under their burden of

specialized creativity, get not only a breather but a chance to get a

life. And the plebeian masses, no longer cowed by “talented bullies,”

are in turn expected to rush into art like fresh air into a vacuum.

Although appearing at first as the suppression of art, the Art Strike is

in essence its realization — the ultimate work of art, the culmination

of its telos. In the Art Strike, artistic abnegation achieves its final

expression: art, having become nothing, becomes everything. If art is

what artists don’t do, what isn’t art now? The Art Strike thus becomes

an exercise in imperialism. After all, everyone else has been on an Art

Strike all along. With the Art Strike, the leaders are given a chance to

catch up with their followers, who weren’t previously aware they had

leaders, let alone needed any.

Ostentatious renunciation is greed in its most warped and insidious

form. By their noisy refusal of art, the Art Strikers affirm its

importance and thus their own, not unlike alcoholics whose AA meetings

testify to the power of the drug and thus to their own power in

collectively renouncing it. But there the analogy ends. The Art Strikers

liken their strike to the syndicalist General Strike so as to

appropriate the glamor of this obsolete tactic. But a Particular Strike

is not a General Strike; and the Art Strike, since it doesn’t include

the refusal of work by waged or salaried workers (artists being

generally self-employed freelancers or independent contractors), is not

a strike at all.

What remains after artists forswear art? Artists, of course. The Art

Strike magnifies the importance of artists even as it eliminates their

toil. Disencumbered of the obligation to create, the artist no longer

must try to inform or agitate or even entertain. All pretense to being

useful to other people can be dropped. But that’s not to say artists are

about to disappear into the crowd — if they did, nobody would ever

notice there even was an Art Strike. No, artists must instead make a

production out of their refusal to produce, they must clamor for

attention over what they don’t do, even though their credentials for

inactivity are precisely their previous art. This is what makes the

refusal of art elitist. The Art Strike is a vanguardist notion: only

artists can refuse art, an only artists can flatter themselves that they

stand in the way of an outburst of popular creativity.

Actually, the reason the hoi-poloi don’t create art is not because

they’re intimidated by “talented bullies,” but because their creative

power has been so suppressed — above all, by work — that they devote

their leisure hours to consumption not creation. School, work, the

family, religion, rightism and leftism — these thwart creativity. The

sort of “art” created by the Art Strike leadership, its various

predictions and pronouncements, is much more opaque to the proles than

the representational art of pre-modern times, and no less so than modern

art, which is too remote from everyday experience for anybody to be

bullied by it, unless by its reputation, which, of course, will grow

during the Years Without Art.

Art Strike theorists are ambiguous about the scope of the strike. If it

represents the refusal of “creativity” by specialists, it is only for

artists. But if the Art Strike seeks to close down museums, libraries,

and galleries, it must include the workers for whom it would then be a

real strike, the employees of the cultural apparatus unable to refuse

their creativity since nobody has ever called for it in the first place.

The janitor would as soon mop up the museum as a nuclear power plant,

especially since the activist intellectuals will hound him out of there

too if they can. Such workers already know firsthand what artists

require outlandish antics to comprehend — working for the cultural

industry is still working. Only for the artist is the Art Strike a work

of art. Others who get involved would be but the paint the striking

artists apply to the canvas, props in a performance-art piece. Human

lives and livelihoods as the stuff of art... What artist in his or her

deepest inwardness hasn’t longed to echo Nero’s cry, What an artist dies

in me!

Since the Years Without Income hold no appeal for the art industry

proletariat or its bureaucracy, they will no doubt remain on the job.

The impact of the strike will be very uneven. Curators and librarians

will be glad to be rid of the hardest part of their task — keeping

abreast of new artworks and conjecturing which ones will pass the test

of time. Art has been piling up since before the Bronze Age; three years

will not be time enough to reassess and rearrange and redistribute the

existing inventory. Still, budget pressures may ease. Music, already all

but completely given over to “classic hits,” will be living in the past

too. In lieu of live music, disco will come back — it pretty much

already has. Most people watch TV, not stage plays; now everybody will.

Are the artists going on strike so that, after three years we beg them

to come back? If theirs was a place of privilege before, how high then

will their seat be in 1993? The real inspiration for the Art Strike is

not, as is pretended, the general strike of the proletariat, but rather

something already depicted in a work of art — the general strike of the

capitalists in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

But artists won’t have to wait three years to profit from the Art

Strike. Returns will be immediate and they will increase like compound

interest. The Art Strike cunningly acts upon supply, not demand.

Existing art will appreciate in value since there won’t be anything

coming into the market to compete with it. In addition, there’s the

surcharge conferred by the mystique of extinction; subsequently, recent

art will lead the price rise as the last of its kind. In fact, it will

stand not as the last but as the culmination, since the ideology of

progress so sways the Western mind that it regularly mistakes the latest

of anything for the final form of a supposed evolutionary process. The

last shall be made first, or at least it’ll be priced that way. No

wonder some of the less commercially successful contemporary artists are

leading the Art Strike, and no wonder others follow them. They don’t

propose exactly to destroy artworks (although, if done selectively, that

would have nearly the same effect as an Art Strike). The Years Without

Art will include nothing of the kind, even if everybody joins the

strike. Instead, the Art Strike will create a cartel — its inspiration

isn’t the IWW or the CNT, but rather OPEC.

The Art Strike is not, for all its proletarian posturing, in any way

indebted to the workers movement, except for the theft of what you’d

expect artists to steal — its imagery. It enables artists to invest

their exhaustion with importance. The refusal of art only certifies

artists as the expert interpreters of what nobody but artists do. The

art of refusal, on the other hand, acts against what everybody does but

nobody once did, against work and submission to the state. The art of

refusal is the art of living, which begins with the general strike that

never ends.