I

WHEN Pierre Bourdieu coined the term cultural capital he envisaged it as being the antithesis of economic capital. The field of cultural production, he reasoned, was that of the economic world reversed: whereas the laws of supply and demand necessarily define success as occurring in an immediate present, in the confused operations of art and culture a place in history could most readily be purchased by foregoing the economic benefits to be had in the here and now. Such was the premise on which he based his sociological analysis of the cultural field, and its place within the broader structures of power.

Much of his theory remains valid, and will continue to do so despite the recent history of capitalism, which at times seems to be engaged in a coordinated effort to try and prove him wrong. The last two decades alone have seen the movements of capital become truly global ones. They have also witnessed that capital searching, inwardly, for fresh pastures with which to feed an insatiable appetite. The boundaries between art and commerce have become blurred, sometimes indistinguishably. The field of cultural production, that once had little but thinly-disguised disdain for worldly wealth, now finds itself engulfed by this avaricious other.

The extent to which these formerly distinct worlds have become inextricably linked can be discerned in any number of ways. One can start with the regulatory environment of the modern state. With the policy document Government and the Value of Culture released in May 2004, Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, attempted to define what activity the government saw as being valuable to the cultural life of the nation. Not surprisingly, cultural value and economic value were conceived as being largely one and the same thing. The extremely limited set of activities she saw as culturally valuable, even further refined in the June 2004 consultation paper Culture at the Heart of Regeneration, was that of large institutions; it was those that created new jobs, increased property prices and tourist numbers.

These institutions, supposed keepers of the nation’s cultural life, have found themselves having to adapt to this harsh new environment or risk disappearing altogether. With reduced access to government funding and under pressure to perform they’ve turned, not without reason, to the welcoming arms of industry for support. It is in many ways a mutually beneficial relationship. The museum gains access to new-found levels of economic wealth, and the corporation associates its interests with the world of high culture, helping to assuage potential doubts about its economic activities at the same time. In the process, the once disinterested repositories of a nation’s treasures have expanded their field of operations, but at the cost of becoming little more than brands: both easily marketable and good to be associated with.

They have become the ultimate stamp of validation. And when you’ve been validated by such an institution, you become an attractive proposition to the market. If nothing else the blurring of art and commerce has ensured that artists can indeed become legends in their own lifetime. The world of art is now one of celebrity, populated by an upper echelon of stars that have unwittingly achieved what must have once been thought impossible. Where the cost of posthumous fame was once a penniless present, this is no longer true. In capitalism’s overrunning of culture artists have found that critical success can easily equate with economic fortune. They are able to boast about their level of income without regretting that they may have sacrificed something to get there.

A change of such magnitude occurs not just on a structural level, but also on an ideological one. Perhaps the most telling manifestation of this wholesale privatisation of culture occurs at the heart of language itself. It is a measure of just how far we’ve come that arts graduates across the land are now advised to know their demographic, to understand their target market. They now seek advantageous product placement at the same time as they look to prevent their competition from gaining market share. Such are the priorities of those who define themselves as artists based on having paid tuition fees at an educational institution. From such a total entanglement of art and commerce there is no easy way out.

II

THE dream of eradicating the nominal boundary between art and life has existed at least since the inception of an artistic avant-garde in the mid-nineteenth century. The basis for this singular phenomenon was largely an economic one, the product of a generation that, for the first time, had recourse to independent wealth. Sons and daughters of merchants, doctors and officials they possessed the twin merits of being both well educated and under no compulsion to work. Released from the obligations of patronage, which for centuries had tied art to the interests of the ruling class, they were free to create as they please. It was the revolution of Baudelaire and Manet, which brought the news from the streets of Paris into shocking conjunction with the isolated refinement of the Salon.

As the beginning of the twentieth century came and went, a succession of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Cubists altered the artistic landscape beyond all previous recognition. The direction in which art moved however was not one of involvement with the everyday but of withdrawal, into the realm of art for the sake of art. This disengagement formed part of an unconscious pact with those in power, who legitimised the work of an artist as such in return for not having any questions asked about their social agenda. No such agreement could stand up to the horrors soon being enacted by those same powers at Verdun and the Somme. These events demanded a response, and it came almost concurrently in the diverse forms of Futurism, Dada, and in the newly Soviet Russia, Constructivism.

From the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire, Tristan Tzara would lead the most damning indictment of a society that saw the destruction of thousands as necessary for its own continuation. It was Dada more than any other movement that sought not just a new basis for art, but for life itself. This, Tzara believed, was both more important and certainly more interesting than mere polite explorations of artistic form. In Russia the avant-garde were well positioned to link art to an incipient social purpose. Initially filled with optimism by the Bolshevik revolution before its artistic agenda crystallised into the apologetics of Social Realism, the Constructivists distilled their philosophy into readily comprehensible slogans for the urbanising masses, proclaiming ‘Art into Life’ and ‘The Liquidation of Art’.

The most direct inheritor of the Dada spirit, from which many of its original members were drawn, was Surrealism. Like its immediate predecessor it was concerned with the restrictive limits of convention imposed by a capitalist society on the artistic imagination. Unlike Dada, it sought in the unmediated play of thought and in the power of dreams the mechanisms for solving the principle problems of life. Influenced by Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, and their increase in popularity through the 1920s, Surrealism desired more than anything the liberation of the imagination as an act of insurrection against society; one that was becoming increasingly structured and unrelenting in the demands that it made.

Surrealism helped spur a renewed mid-century interest in Dada that was partly responsible for convincing many artistic groups that art must be removed from its abstracted position and replanted within the realm of everyday experience. One of the first was the loose collective of artists that came to be known under the umbrella of Fluxus. Like Dada the name served as a rallying point for a wide variety of individual agendas, all of which embodied a similar ethos. In the political atmosphere of Vietnam and the American civil-rights movement, the group as a whole made numerous attempts at breaking down the distinction between artist and audience, and democratising the art experience with their Fluxus ‘Concerts’ and ‘Events’.

Most radically of all those groups with a newfound social conscience, it was the Situationist International that would see their task as superseding that of art altogether, subsuming artistic production as a distinct activity into an expanded vision of everyday life. In this they consciously saw themselves as completing the work started by Dada and Surrealism, but their main influence proved initially to be a political one. It was largely Guy Debord’s critique of capitalist society that would inspire Les Enragés at Nanterre University to action in May of 1968, resulting in rioting in Paris and the closure of the Sorbonne. ‘Art is revolutionary or it’s nothing’, went Debord’s motto, a concept that’s hard to imagine from the distant viewpoint of our own image-conscious age.

III

WE now live in the very midst of Adorno’s culture industry, where even art magazines fail to see the irony in running articles like How to Cultivate the Art Market, and The Market for Sales Explored. Of course this should come as no great surprise. They do after all exist, along with galleries and museums, within the tightly knit web of complimentary activity that comprises the market for contemporary art. As the self-appointed mouth organs for this market, the sole concern of such magazines has long-since ceased to be one of producing comment and criticism, and has instead become one of how best to maximise income within the capitalist system. Any idea of questioning the social conditions of art’s production and consumption has been forgotten.

It is only in the context of a world in which the remnants of the bourgeoisie look to culture to justify their position in society, that reports like Right to Art can be published by the cultural think-tank, Demos, in June 2004. It seems fitting that at the very time in which art seems to have become invisible amidst the surrounding thorns of commerce, a document can be produced in which the fate of the invisible artist is bemoaned. This is apparently not, as one might expect, someone who is pressured into conforming to a market ideal, but instead someone who is seen as missing out on the rewards of the economic activity that they help to generate. The same report decries the government’s definition of creative industry, in which the effectiveness of artists as ‘micro-businesses’ is supposedly overlooked.

All of which must have surely sounded like anathema to the Situationists, with their assumption of the avant-garde’s responsibility to integrate art making with cultural and political criticism. However, with their provision of the term invisible artist, the people at Demos may have unknowingly presented us with a rare opportunity. In a climate where the Debordian spectacle has grown to be omnipresent, the only apparent hope of breaking the firm hold that capital has on art seems to lie with an art that is invisible to the recuperating power of the art gallery; that exists beneath the radar of capitalism. It is precisely because capitalism has ceased to concern itself with the quotidian that makes this fertile ground, on which art can grow to become an inseparable part of life.

By taking art out of the rarefied atmosphere of the art gallery, an invisible art can hope to communicate with more than an extreme minority of the population. From a position amidst the workings of everyday life it is also free to provide a critique of the capitalist state without risk of censure. To be truly effective however, any such art must continue to manifest a level of complexity normally associated with work that exists inside the gallery system. The work that capitalism sanctions outside the gallery such as public or socially engaged art is most often at best, purely simplistic. A newly commissioned public sculpture or a freshly painted community mural might look attractive, but they also serve to take people’s minds off the conditions of their everyday lives.

This is not to say that an invisible art should be overtly pedagogical. ‘The heresies we should fear’, said Borges, ‘are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.’ Ultimately, such an art must be a stumbling block over which people unexpectedly trip, the snag on which the fabric of everyday life catches momentarily to reveal the inner-workings of the spectacular society, in the process forcing people to question for themselves both their immediate environment and the nature of their present existence. It must eschew the displays of ego favoured by many who comprise the art establishment, for actions that become an inseparable part of the everyday, the purpose of which is the disruption of the illusion generally known as progress.

In existing outside the gallery system, in refusing to be co-opted by the dominant political ideology, an invisible art would remove cultural production from capitalism’s sphere of influence and return it to its primary purpose. It would not exist for the purpose of providing a section of society with evidence of their own uniqueness, but as both the stimulus for questioning the true nature of the reality that surrounds us, and the means for effecting change in those conditions. As such, an art that is ‘invisible’ in conventional terms is nothing less than the concrete realisation of the historical avant-garde’s dream of an end to the distinction between life and art.