The quest for socialist equality has always been confronted by the singular problem posed by the artist. The artist, after all, is an individual who possesses conspicuous talents that are, according to conventional wisdom, either the gift of biological endowment or the equally idiosyncratic result of personal effort. No other member of society so readily illustrates the popular notion that an individual's value is determined by the individual alone, and that any social claims upon an individual should be resisted on the grounds of elementary private property.That the artist has posed ideological problems for socialism can be demonstrated by Emerson's anecdote about the great utopian community Brook Farm:
The country members [visiting] naturally were surprised to observe that one man ploughed all day, and one looked out of the window all day---and perhaps drew his picture, and both received at night the same wages.(1)
In bourgeois culture, of course, the artist would most likely receive many times more than the ploughman for exercising his or her artistry. This state of affairs would be readily defended by claims that the artistıs talent requires more dead labor (training), and thus time, to produce than the ploughman's, or the ostensible claim that the talents of artists are scarcer than the skills of ploughmen.*
The artist has served the detractors of socialism well. Libertarian Robert Nozick has used the artist as an example to disprove Marx's labor theory of value (predicated upon the concept of 'socially necessary' labor time) by pointing out, '[i]n comparing Rembrandt's skill with mine, the crucial fact is not that he paints pictures faster than I do.'(2) Establishment 'liberal' economist Lester Thurow asked: 'Is there any difference between the individual who inherits $1 million and the individual whose athletic talents will earn him the same lifetime income?'(3) This question, and Nozick's observation, both refute (in classic style) the socialist's claim that all labor relations, however competitive, are tied together by a vast interacting network of production in which all members of society participate.
The Artist as 'Autonomous Man'
In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner proposed that the popular notion of an individual wholly independent of social determination was a flattering myth, and one that supported a prevailing (and exploitive) ideology that maintained people (as responsible agents) 'deserved' what they got---either for better or worse. The 'autonomous man' of libertarian ideology is, in essence, the creative mind. A characteristic representation of the artist's freedom from social relations, can be found in these words of Oscar Wilde:
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that its author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment the artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman. Art is the most intense mode of individualism the world has known. (4)
The artist, in this romantic (and pre-industrialized) view, is an individual who has taken from society nothing and owes society nothing; their possible interactions will only be one of mutual free trade, one of exchange between equals. It is as Ayn Rand once suggested:
Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolable capacity to see through one's own eyes---which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.(5)
But this is far from accurate. To claim that producing coal is as individualistic as writing a symphony is, of course, ridiculous. But to insist that producing a symphony is as individualistic as writing one is equally so. Presuming that producing a symphony is having people hear it, production of a symphony is contingent upon the manufacturers of instruments, the printing of scores, the building of concert halls, the transportation of musicians, the selling of tickets, etc., etc. The question 'but are these tasks as important as the music heard?' is a meretricious one. To determine the importance of each task by categorizing them into subdivisions is to fail to admit that without integration it would not be possible to hear---let alone weigh the merits---of the symphony's composition.**
Skinner's insistence that all individuals are integrated members of their social environment is a behavioral restatement of Edward Bellamy's socialist axiom that '[e]very man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity.'(6)
The Artist As Ascendant
The artist has also served the prevailing ideology well by demonstrating (in quite ostentatious fashion) that class ascendancy is possible in bourgeois society. Like the peasant maidens of Chaucerian rhyme, the artist is often an individual who begins his or her life poor but enters royal society through the sheer inventiveness of rare artistic ability. An especially apt example is The Beatles, originally publicized as 'working class' Liverpool 'lads' made good, one of whom was knighted years later. Other notable examples---Sinatra, Monroe, almost all black athletes---also 'worked their their up' to 'the top' from their 'humble origins.'
It is also a significant idiosyncrasy of the entertaining profession that formal education is usually unnecessary. Most popular singers and athletes not only have no college education, but their rebellious images are quite incompatible with the quiet and studious stereotype of the scholar. Although it is common knowledge that higher education results in higher income levels, entertainers are notable for earning extravagant incomes without receiving---or at least using---any formal education whatsoever. Salient examples of this are the incredible discrepancies between the incomes of, say, Michael Jordan or Jim Carrey compared with the incomes of Supreme Court Justices or college professors. One could easily point to such spectacular success stories and infer that education was not (entirely) necessary for financial or positional success.
Another variation is the 'unknown' artist, the 'ahead of his or her time visionary' who lives in abject poverty and complete lack of recognition, only to be dramatically vindicated at a later point. (Classic representatives of posthumous ascension include both Nietzsche and Shelley who had painfully anonymous literary careers, yet whose 'immortal' works survived them much in the manner that virtuous souls receive the gift of ever-lasting life in heaven.) Like religion, much of an artist's fortune is contingent upon being 'discovered' (in the future) by such powerful figures as the savvy gallery owner, the hip A & R agent, or the insightful editor or coach. The unappreciated artist's fantasy ('wait until I hit the big time') often shows the deluded desperation of the gambler---or the devout. Yet equally cogent are the exceptions that prove so satisfying to those who hope.***
The Artist As Ideology
The artist is frequently portrayed as a sort of biological or intellectual aristocrat. When movie critic Libby Gelman recently asserted that '[g]orgeous movie stars prove that there is no justice, and that this is a good thing,'(7) she is merely making a common point that has been made more eloquently in the past. An enlargement of such an aggrandizement of the artist can be found in these words of 'literary outlaw' Henry Miller:
There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off.(8)
The natural aristocracy of artists was demonstrated by Shakespeare, who, in this famous exchange, allowed a court jester the singular ability to act as royal peer:
Fool: Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet one?...
Lear: Dost thou call me a fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away, that thou wast born with.(9)
In many cultural hierarchies, the artist has held a high position. However, the artist also acts to substantiate the practice of hierarchy itself. The existence of the artist**** has imposed the following claims upon almost all cultures in the history of the human race:
1. Society should produce a surplus.
2. Specialization is necessary in order to bring certain talents to their highest potential.
3. Particularly talented individuals should be allowed access to society's surplus without having to participate in the day-to-day production of this surplus.
These three claims are compatible with these two current ideological predicates:
A. Anyone can achieve wealth without education, capital, property, or the labor (coerced or voluntary) of others (equal opportunity).
B. The social division of labor (stratification) is necessary to provide this equal opportunity.*****
Art Without Ideology?
Thorstein Veblen posited that art is the hypostatization of society's surplus. In his classic Theory of the Leisure Class, he compared two spoons, one a hand-made silver spoon and another a machine-made spoon composed of a base metal. Both were equally suited for drinking soup, yet one was costlier because it was more difficult and time-consuming to make. He concluded that '[t]he superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.'(10) From this observation, he observed that '[h]and labor is a more wasteful method of production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability.'(11)
This has a direct bearing on art as well as on artists who, as already mentioned, cannot be reduced by the process of division of labor in the workshop (detail work). Because artists cannot be (as yet) industrialized, they 'command' the aristocratic incomes of an earlier age. They also act as a personification of the social surplus (only surplus societies can afford artists)---as well as the appropriation of it (the cultivation of their talents requires a strict observance of the social division of labor, which frees them from participating in the production of social necessities). This aristocratic atavism carries with it strong but useful ideological implications in an mass-production age where distribution remains highly selective.
The early Marx and Engels, observing that 'artistic talent in particular individuals...is a consequence of the division of labor,' envisioned a society in which 'there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting.'(12) Would then such a society produce an art freed from ideological constraint? If ideology is, as some suggest, the values of a culture that the culture transmits to its members, then there can be no art without ideology---and a socialist world where everyone was, at times, an artist would simply transmit a different kind of value than has been transmitted by cultures thus far. Utopia 2000 submits that there are artistic forms, but without ideology art would be little more than meter, harmony, plot resolution, composition, and so on, bare technique that awaits a 'message.' Art is ideology made attractive (and all cultures, even non-hierarchal ones, will produce art).
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* This last claim, of course, rests on the assumption that artistic talent is a biological asset, not a social one. If it was social, then society could use both education and reinforcement to make artists common (upsetting the social mode of production, admittedly). If this was possible, then the first claim (training) would also be jeopardized. The apparent need for specialization (life-time mastery, and so on) in such areas as athletics and the arts infers that the development of these talents, far from being strictly biological or intellectual (which is simply another way of saying biological), are socially contingent.
** The artist's value is considered greater than, say, the value of the artisan who makes the seats in the symphony hall. This might seem illogical, for the artisan must make many seats and the composer need only write one symphony in order to produce a performance in a symphony hall. However, this initial problem is overcome by demonstrating that only the composer's skill cannot be reduced by the division of labor or supplemented by additional composers (working on the same project), whereas the artisan can either be supplemented by many others (their equal skills acting to lower their value through competition for work) or by sub-dividing the steps necessary to produce a seat (requiring less skill and thus earning less). This is not necessarily the same as claiming that the composer can naturally 'drive a harder bargain' and receive more payment than artisans because of talent scarcity---for many composers would, like all workers, compete for the assignment of a symphony and compete each other's wages down; only because so many individuals are required to become furniture makers and so few are needed to become composers (in order to produce an 'affordable' performance in a symphony hall) does the 'impartial' mechanism of supply and demand necessitate that more individuals become trained as artisans and less as composers. (Presently this process is effectuated through the supply and demand of education, reflected in prices, which sees to it that industrialized societies have ample populations of low-skilled workers available to perform the great many low-skilled jobs necessary for industrialized production.) The difference is not in 'talent,' nor natural scarcity, but in the exigencies of industrialization.
*** It is helpful to note that, according to U.S. government data, artists comprise only 3% of the American population---and that figure includes all service personnel of 'amusement and recreation facilities,' i.e. ushers, strippers, and ticket collectors. See the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997, table 645, p. 412.
**** What Veblen termed as the 'priestly class' may be seen as the incunabular artist class of primitive society.
***** It may seem contradictory that, as noted above, the artist resists the division of labor in the workshop (detail work) while supporting the hierarchal social division of labor. This contradiction merely emphasizes the preindustrial, aristocratic role that the artist has played---and continues to play as capitalism seeks to annihilate all vestiges of precapitalist privilege while remaining tethered to the practice of privilege itself. The industrial (technological) tendency, if allowed to fully develop and spread into all fields of expertise, logically would reduce all work eventually---even management and ownership---into unskilled work, thus eradicating all claims upon the social division of labor and its concomitant hierarchy.
Notes:
1. Emerson, quoted in Lindsay Swift's Brook Farm (Macmillan, 1900), p. 52.
2. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), p. 258.
3. Lester Thurow, Generating Inequality (Basic Books, 1975), p. 28.
4. Oscar Wilde, Epigrams and Aphorisms (John W. Luce, 1905), p. 94.
5. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (Signet, 1961), p. 113.
6. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000---1887 (Modern Library Edition), p. 105.
7. Newsweek Extra: The 100 Best Movies, Summer 1998, p. 44.
8. Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, (New Directions Edition), p. 169.
9. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, scene iv (Verplanck Edition, vol. III), p. 19.
10. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Modern Library Edition), p. 128.
11. Ibid., p. 159.
12. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (International Edition), p. 109.
