"Culture"
On the April 21st 2025, I delivered this essay at Clearnet, a reading put on by Weatherproof Gallery and Airing Out The Archive Podcast at New Wave Coffee in Chicago.
For us in modernity, art is at odds with culture. It is an antagonism from within. For those in antiquity this would be total nonsense. In antiquity, art was simply an appendage of culture, used for religious or magical ritual, only one outgrowth of antiquity’s great parade. Art existed for something outside of itself. It was only in our society — the society of the third estate, of labor, bourgeois society, the historical break from antiquity — that art came to exist for itself, becoming a value in itself. Ironically, it did so by becoming an equivalent. Art’s commodification freed it from being mere culture. Mozart’s The Magic Flute freed him from making art merely for the court or merely for the church. It was art for the people, and in so doing, was a signal of art’s transformation into a commodity.
Traditional culture was the proliferation of particularity. It was this culture that allowed 19th century historiographers to write of 'the character of such and such an ancient people' in a way that is now foreign and offensive to us. Rather, the people has become the stand-in for our society’s universalism — the third estate, those who work. But there is no character of a people today. But in fact, there once was, once upon a time. In antiquity, culture appeared as an appendage of Nature — as Man as Nature. Ancient culture, like Nature, was for all time, and totally incommensurable. It existed to continue itself as is. Language, the medium for the transmission of tradition, was only capable of describing change for other peoples. There was no means to describe self-transformation.
As bourgeois society, we overcame the existence of culture qua culture by overcoming non-reducibility. Bourgeois society sought a universal culture, a culture which could change itself — cosmopolitanism. This was not a demand for a culture of sameness but a culture which embodied the unity of difference. It wanted to make good on all the cultures of the past by allowing them to play in concert. This speculative unity was founded upon labor as society's universal mediator. This was a transformation of the category of culture, really its sublimation into society. Culture is the transmission of tradition. But our “culture” has emerged by a revolutionary tradition — the tradition which throws off the yoke of tradition. However, the emergence of capitalism from within bourgeois society performed a reversal, turning our culture into a culture of sameness — mass culture.
We still employ the word culture, but what’s now meant by it? What people refer to as culture has become identical with what Adorno and Horkheimer referred to as the Culture Industry — more accurately translated, the Industry of Culture. The Industry of Culture is a registration of contradiction — if culture is something that is now produced industrially this is at odds with the traditional concept of culture, because it turns culture into an assemblage of equivalents. Culture per se is the qualitative, it cannot be registered as an equivalent with any other culture, it is the superabundant overflow of particularity. A quantitative culture cannot exist, yet that is precisely our culture.
Art was able to become art by becoming a commodity, which actually meant becoming more than mere culture. But in capitalism its social existence as a commodity comes more and more in contradiction with its existence as art qua art, as an object of aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, the latter sustains itself within the lacerated subjectivity of those still willing to see. The artwork that is simply conformable to culture seems to lack that really creative energy which seems to give great works of art a life of their own, spontaneous and constructed at the same time. It’s in this internal contradiction of art as a commodity, and art as experience that art rails against homogenized culture from within it. It does so not by subversive deployment of our cultural material — the mischievous rearrangement of signifiers, “culture jamming” — as culture itself does this. This is culture’s fashionability. On the contrary, art's protest is a formal one, it gives form to an integrality that so-called culture in fact lacks. Great works of art seem to “come together.” They give an image of an integral life, not unlike when we imagine the cultures of ancient peoples.
But those who emphasize “culture” today would have it that art is simply an appendage of culture, no different from the ancient world. These are our "culture critics" — they are both the institutions and the dissidents, from Hypebeast.com to the Academy, from the lamentation on the Right that the world is no longer beautiful, to the peons on the Left who never cease to demand a “political” art, from new art magazines like Manhattan Art Review and Diva Corp who still believe that criticism is a good-bad distinction, to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs which legitimates “good” art with hundreds and thousands of dollars. These critics have even become part of the new political administration, contra the old institutionalized cultural criticism of the ‘60s. This is in part, surely welcome: it will mean the decalcifying of the NGO industrial complex and artist welfare state, and will perhaps fund more interesting work in the process via the America250 initiative. But we should still be clear, no matter who’s running it, the state does not fund art as art, but as culture.
The halcyon days of The Magic Flute are over. Art can apparently no longer rely on society for its continued existence, so as in other spheres of life, the state steps in to mediate the crisis. Before, the artist might have had to cater to the taste of a patron, which, while individualized, still stood in for the universalism of society at large. This taste of an individual could be developed by an aesthetic education. The state meanwhile, has no such capacity, and knows no such thing as art's freedom. The committee approval of what to fund does not actually stand in for the accumulated taste of a swath of society, but for real particular interests. The state funds art as culture, not art, and thus demands art to submit to something outside of itself. But as Trotsky said: "Art cannot tolerate orders" — art’s freedom is its freedom to follow its own demands to the end. Demands from the outside will not do, and an art which submits to demands heterogeneous to itself will ultimately fail as art.
Many of you might find yourself in a new position to receive funding from the state via this shake-up. This opportunity should of course be exploited. But it should be remembered that those who today would make an identity between art and culture are the enemies of art. Art is the dissatisfaction with what is merely identical — culture. Art is the promise of freedom. “Culture” is the enemy of freedom, it would have us turn art into artifact, not something that speaks for itself, but a piece of a whole, a whole which is in fact not whole at all. It would have art legitimate something illegitimate. Culture is the false assertion of particularity masking a “universal” which never ceases to fail to be universal. Meanwhile, the great work of art reminds us that our society could still make good both on the universal, and on the wholeness of antiquity without reverting to its limited scope.