The Artist as Subject-Object and the Myth of Artistic Freedom

The figure of the artist has functioned as a cypher of freedom in modernity. The promise of a creative existence outside wage labour has served as a horizon of emancipation and a justification of exploitation. For Lukács, however, the artist’s freedom is no different to that of any commodity-producer, equally beholden to the rules of the market, which requires at least a semblance of freedom. The artist, is therefore, a kind of manager of their own labour. In this respect, artists are split off from the proletariat, giving rise to the kind of demands made in Walter Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” for a more reflexive engagement with means of production. Within post-Fordism, however, the creative freedom of the artist has been subsumed within labour in general, as workers increasingly become entrepreneurs of the self, managers of their own human capital. A post-Fordist productivism might indicate useful points of solidarity between artworkers and workers in other fields. Instead, we find much contemporary art, depleted of the material foundations that afforded art any special status or exemption, turning inwards. This takes two seemingly opposite forms: asserting incommunicable modes of subjectivity and seeking identification with the non-human. Both, however, reaffirm the artist’s freedom from social constraints, reasserting the subject as the locus of a privileged insight into something otherwise inaccessible. This tendency mirrors the irrationalism described by Lukács as providing comfort through an illusion of personal autonomy, while maintaining subservience to the reactionary bourgeoisie. Unlike the artist who withdraws into the pure subjectivity of intuition, Lukács understands the proletariat as possessing a unique standpoint as subjects whose subjectivity is constituted by their objectification. In this paper, we consider how including artistic labour in this standpoint might form the basis for dismantling the structures through which the artworld reifies the artist’s subservience.

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