Consensual Art (i)

The question of gaining access to art for those who don't have it is much discussed. This series considers one species of the obverse scenario: those so exposed who don't necessarily want to be.

It is one thing to lament barriers to access from the perspective of the self-centered, self-interested practitioner/specialist and quite another to frame the access question more broadly as a social justice issue. The latter is by far the more socially graceful position, but it strains credulity in a few important ways. Practitioners have the rhetorical advantage of building their case on a specific metier with recogizable markers, whereas extracting the salient features of The Arts broadly often results in language so vague as to be ill-suited to any aim so fraught as social justice. Similarly, there is an inescapable tension between the absolute conception of access to art as a basic human need/right and the concurrent difficulties in defining boundaries and quality quite so absolutely. What does it mean to guarantee access to such an ephemeral resource? What does it mean to assert that all people need something without being able to define what exactly that something is?

The time-honored maneuver here, rhetorically as well as materially, is to escape into firmer boundaries and more objective standards. A unified Arts front can earn broad political currency this way, but only at the expense of reproducing formerly external barriers as internecine meta-politics within the coalition itself, where the staggering diversity of practices inevitably fit unequally into the framework.¹ The Way Things Are becomes ensconced in rubrics and syllabi simply because it is tractable enough to lend itself to the task, whereas The Way Things Might Be has to win acceptance the old-fashioned way in a marketplace of ideas that is overregulated and gerontocratic.

No such abstract ideals as social justice are realized any other way than through particular people and actions, and so in the end art and artists must proactively make good on the lofty rhetoric of access rather than merely clinging to a blind faith in it. Here I want to draw attention to the old saw about "freedom to..." and "freedom from...", to the question of whether a right to do something is also a right not to do it. Can political processes be both compulsory and democratic? Your answer might be different regarding large-scale, top-down processes like federal elections than it is regarding the smaller-scale, bottom-up, day-to-day goings on of the neighborhood or the subway. Impositions which are expensive, fraught, visible, and issuing from centralized authority have a way of sucking up all the discursive air on this point; yet big-city dwellers pass through myriad subtler gradients of latent/potential power every day. We can allow other drivers to merge or we can stubbornly hang them out to dry; we can use headphones on the bus or we can treat the entire ridership to our latest virtual mixtape. This is the Long Tail of decentralized power which in absence of broadly-shared standards of comportment can easily add up to a mosaic of repression and discontent. It is the type of thing that led Lewis Mumford to compare us to lab rats in psychological experiments on overcrowding. Those of us firmly inclined towards city living so as to be undeterred by such alarmism have many good counter-rationalizations at our disposal: the case is overstated; humans are not rats; dispersion, like density, can be maddening; good design can redeem or doom either modality; the rat race can be invigorating in both its best and worst moments. We can thereby problematize the master narrative of Garden Cityism, but we can't deny that there are bound to be moments in every city dweller's life when the walls indeed close in and latent potentials for conflict are actualized in an instant. If this is not quite as serious as living under an authoritarian regime (or in a rat cage), neither is it quite as good as democracy can be; and if artists more so than almost any others must accept this baseline level of social friction as an unavoidable tradeoff for gaining a foothold in our native habitat, then we are also social actors in real-life cities who have a role to play in the habitability of those cities. How our work fits (or doesn't) into this balancing act says more about us than aesthetics or poetics ever could.

I insist on treating the issue of art in public space as an "obverse" of the access issue (Art in Political space, if you will) not because that is the best or only way to approach it but because of this particular connection between democracy and abstention, between centralized and dispersed repression. The right to impose artistic standards and boundaries inheres at the individual level; projected to the institutional level it becomes disenfranchising. And even before the individual judges, s/he must consent to the experience. Art which is less-than-fully consensual in any of these respects is less-than-fully democratic. This is as true of street-level transactions as it is of Ivory Tower ones.

I hope this makes clearer that the differences among The Arts matter as much as do the similarities; that getting more art into public space is not the same as more music, more sculpture, more theater, etc.; that getting "good" art into public space is a task which confounds democratic processes, since democracy requires some bedrock of objectivity on which to build a consensus; and that such grounding in soft-scientific objectivity is deeply at odds with how the artistic ecosystems of free societies sustain themselves. When art enters public space it does so as a byproduct of blunt majoritarian compromise, be that process formal or informal, macro or micro. I see this bluntness as very much at odds with the professed altruism of so many art and artists, and I see potential resolutions of this tension hiding in plain sight.

1. For a prosaic instance of said meta-politicking, see section heading "Defining The Arts" here. For a rather chilling effort at total quanitification, see here. Of course music can come out ahead by virtue of its technical complexity, or it can be summarily dispensed with for its weakness as a vessel for the delivery of narrative. As Marv Albert said, "You fake the call."