There Are No Kanye Wests in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Class society limits conversations about art

Leave it to Nick Cave to always come out swinging in the name of art.

In the most recent edition of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files, a reader writes to him complaining of Cave’s continued support for the music of Kanye West. The reader, writing that West has become a “scum of a human being,” asks Cave to explain how it’s possible, given the monstrousness of this reader’s childhood hero, that the singer could still want one of West’s songs, “I Am a God,” to be played at his funeral.

Predictably, Cave doesn’t flinch.

He raises his usual Byronic pen to write one of his famous encomiums to the transcendence of the act of creation.

Art, according to Cave, is like a mining operation that extracts what he calls “the best in us.” He says, “When I make a song, I do not draw from a pocket of purity isolated from the rest of me; a song is torn from all of me, the mess of me, becoming the best of me on its alchemical journey to its realisation.”

Moreover, art has an annunciatory nature, an act of self-creation through its ability to enact the very existence of the artist himself or herself: “[A]rt,” Cave writes, “is the essence of the artist made manifest. The artist’s work proclaims, ‘This is me. I am here. This is what I am.’“

There is much which resonates with me in Cave’s spirited defense of the primacy of art. And he is right in implying that a society that cannot safeguard this elemental process, regardless of whether or not the process is attached to someone with odious views, is one that registers as barely human.

But as is usually the case in discussions of responsibility and art, there’s something missing in the way we typically debate this issue.

On one side we have the absolutists, those who believe that works of art must be judged on their own terms and not on the terms of the personality that authored them.

Though Cave explicitly calls for an understanding of the unity, not the separation, of the artist and the art (“The idea of an artist being divorced from their art is absurd“), he nonetheless falls into this category, given that he is making an absolute distinction between judgements of art and judgements of artists.

The absolutists believe that when an act of artistic production occurs, that artistic product, whether it be a painting or a hip-hop album, is fully embodied as an independent entity, as an ontologically discreet object with which any type of engagement, such as viewing that painting or listening to that hip-hop album, is likewise discreet.

Furthermore, the art object is seen as essentially walled off from the frailties and flaws of the creator. In this way, contemplation of the art object has nothing whatsoever to do with contemplation of the mortal being who created it.

In a sense, what makes this object an art object, what makes it a painting and not just a bunch of colors and shapes, what makes it a hip-hop album and not just a bunch of noises, makes it eternal, which only redounds to the lesser nature of the mortal human who created it.

But on the other side of this debate we have—let’s call them—the contextualists.

The contextualists believe that the artist and the art the artist creates cannot be separated, that they are fused together, such that the opinions, views and beliefs held by the maker of the art object operate on the actual artistic production to such an extent that engagement with the product becomes likewise engagement with the artist himself or herself.

Art is always produced in a context, and the context of creation includes the thoughts and beliefs and feelings of the creator. Art, therefore, can in theory be tainted by the creator, should that creator, for example, be of questionable character.

If an artist who has produced an art object you adore, such as some painting, or some hip-hop album, you would need to accept that you are also engaging with the creator of that painting or hip-hop album whenever you engage with the painting or hip-hop album itself.

In the case of an artist who espouses views you find unacceptable, you would then have a responsibility to cut yourself off from all of that artist’s creations, a breakup in the wake of a type of betrayal.

But there’s actually a bigger problem than anything this binary between responsibility and autonomy could ever solve.

And to understand what that is we need to understand the class dynamics in play behind the very notion of this separation.

What seems to always be missing in discussions about the role of the artist in society is an interrogation of the preexisting material conditions that permit this discussion to occur in the first place.

One might glean from Nick Cave’s writing and pronouncements over the years a whiff of libertarianism, so I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that his opinion of Marxist economics is rather dim; yet, despite his praiseworthy defense of art in his newsletter, it’s precisely this failure to reckon with material conditions which, at least in this case, makes his defense of art incomplete.

The binary between responsibility and autonomy as we know it, the way we in a capitalist economy render the debate about whether or not we should stop engaging with an artist who has become problematized in an obvious way, such as is clearly the case with Kanye West, is itself something that needs to be problematized.

This binary is actually a reification of the social relations which life in a capitalist economy imposes on the act of contemplation of art.

For in asking whether an artist may be separated from their art, what one is taking as a given is that the artist is to be understood according to the same reified constructs which capitalist society imposes on all humans; in other words, that the artist is just as alienated from their labor as Marx’s proverbial factory workers were from theirs, which they in fact are.

Conjure the ideal of a classless society and no such alienation occurs. The binary we impose as we go about our business living in a capitalist economy evaporates as the illusory construct that it is in reality as soon as we imagine the classless society and see how much bias capitalist relations force us to insert into this conversation.

This is something that is inescapable in our current state of economic relations.

Yet, it wasn’t always inescapable.

During feudalism, art was almost 100% religious, which reflected the era’s mode of production. Because God was seen as the highest authority of the economic system of feudalism, the art that was created was seen as a simulacrum of the creative act of the deity.

That an artist’s views would be considered separate from the art they created under this mode of production would be considered ludicrous, for the artist who created the art, say, a bas relief or a concerto, was seen merely as a vessel of God’s word, not an independent mind in need of consulting. Logos, the ideas the artist contemplates, and Eros, the feelings that go into the creative act, were fused together.

But this changed after the advent of capitalism.

The mode of production shifted to socialized relations created by commodification. Among all these relations was the basic element of the commodity, which contained a surplus value which the creator of that commodity could not take part in.

This alienated labor, chiefly in the form of wage labor though also including other kinds, was disbursed throughout the system of capitalist economic life, through mediation with the market, and subsumed the relations between the artist and his or her art, along with the artist and his or her public.

The artist was no longer a vessel of God’s Word, as they were under feudalism, but rather a producer of a commodity.

Though this social relation took much longer to fully take hold, by the 20th Century, with the advent of mass media and pop culture, the commodification of art reigns supreme.

Because now artists are producers, not acting in the name of God, but acting as producers of commodities from which they are alienated—something that happens to any successful artist due to the necessity of engaging with the market—Logos, what the artist thinks, and Eros, what the artist creates, become separate.

Our latter day debate about the distinction between the artist’s product and the artist’s belief system needs to be understood within the context of this class dynamic.

The problem with, on the one hand, emphasizing the sacrosanctity of artistic creation and, on the other, limiting the autonomy of the art object to a context is that from neither viewpoint is there a reckoning with the integral component to all contemplation of art in a capitalist economy which is consumption.

Without consumption there is no contact with art in the first place. In a capitalist economy, contact with the art object is mediated by the market. On either side of that mediation, both poles, artist and contemplator, or producer and consumer, are themselves limited by the market which is imposed on their relation. This is inescapable.

But we are further along in capitalism than even this foregoing stage.

Late capitalism, which may include the notion of the society of the spectacle, imposes a further mediation, the metatextual, or parasocial, content to the act of consumption that requires the consumer to not only consume the artistic product but also to engage with the artist himself or herself as well in some form.

An artist like Kanye West must engage with the market as a producer in order for his music to be contemplated by what in effect turn out to be consumers.

But in the society of the spectacle, in order for that act of consumption to occur, what must also be consumed is the phenomenon of Kanye West himself.

In a way, this is similar to the notion of the “consumption of the media” which Fredric Jameson talked about in his book, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. According to Jameson, consumption of spectacular commodities like TV shows and music in late capitalism involves the consumption of the media itself which transmits those shows and music to us.

So, by a similar token, when I listen to a Kanye West album, say, Yeezus, I not only consume the art object known as Yeezus, which was created by Kanye West, but I also consume the phenomenon known as Kanye West.

This is inescapable in a capitalist economy, particularly so in late capitalism, where the mediation of the market on one level and the invocation of the spectacle of the producer on another level insure the impossibility of discreet engagement with the art object on its own terms, separate from any and all considerations of the artist himself or herself.

Nick Cave is correct in calling for the sacrosanctity of the art object, its indemnified nature in comparison to the personhood of the artist himself or herself, however flawed or noble he or she may be.

But his reader is also correct in pointing out the context of the act of consuming the art object—though I doubt that reader recognizes the kind of context I believe is essential, the mediating effect of the market in the social relation between producer and consumer.

The controversy over Kanye West’s antisemitic and misogynistic online ranting may be understood as a debate about free speech, but this only obtains if one essentializes the material conditions that permit a Kanye West to exist in the first place. Kanye West as a free actor capable of spewing hate speech is itself a reification of capitalist life because, without the mediation of the market which intervenes between West and his audience, there would never be any Kanye West to know about, there would only be his art.

The mediation of the market that is essential in the transmission of West’s art—and, for that matter, Cave’s art, as well—is too often ignored when attempting to reconcile Gordian Knots like the debate about the separation of art from artist, about autonomy and responsibility. In a capitalist economy, these considerations come loaded with the reifications upon which capitalism relies.

The market which intervenes between the consumer and the producer, between the contemplator and the artist, places the consumer-contemplator in a double-bind.

On the one hand, the consumer-contemplator understands full well that in listening to an album like Yeezus one is listening to a masterpiece which loses meaning the more it is contextualized with the mortality and ephemerality of the creator, one Kanye West.

On the other hand, the consumer-contemplator also knows full well that the fusion of Kanye West’s art with the phenomenon known as Kanye West, with all of the problems that come loaded with that latter phenomenon, is inescapable, so long as the mediation of the market intervenes between West and the consumer-contemplator, which, in capitalist life, is foreordained.

If we are to accept Marx’s notion of capitalism as a system loaded with irresolvable contradictions, as I believe we all should, the debate between autonomy and responsibility in the engagement with artistic production should be understood as yet one more example of capitalism’s irreconcilable contradictions.

Let’s throw this one in the pile, shall we?—with gusto.