I want to talk about a habit in contemporary art writing that I keep running into, especially in Marxist-inflected theory, where interpretation is substituted with citation and judgment is treated as an embarrassment. The pattern is familiar: the artwork becomes an occasion to rehearse a framework, the framework becomes a moral sorting machine, and the writer’s proximity to a canon starts to stand in for engagement with the work itself. The result is a discourse that can get very elaborate while remaining strangely indifferent to the phenomenological experience of art, and strangely confident about what art is allowed to be.
This is not just an art-world problem. It is part of a wider left tendency toward doctrinal security, where self-identification with a belief system as truth becomes a psychological dependency. Benjamin Studebaker’s Substack post is useful here, because his section on “Determinism” clarifies the macro-scale mechanism: the way a theory of causes gets reified, turned into a closed conceptual shelter, and then defended as though uncertainty were humiliation and revision were betrayal. That structure of epistemic reassurance is not identical to what happens in art criticism, but it produces a similar posture: the appeal to authority as protection, and the evacuation of lived experience as a sign of seriousness.
To very briefly lay out my feelings towards Marxism as a general category, my interest is entirely materialist inasmuch that I’m confident the Marxist understanding of economics is more accurate than what they tell you at Harvard Business School, but I’ve never cared much for the rhetorical left’s zealotry because caring about alleviating human suffering so often seems to lose out to self-righteousness and theoretical squabbles. In other words, I’m drawn to art because I find the drudgery of politics intolerable; if art has been integral to forming my political convictions (in the manner of, say, Bicycle Thieves), the organized left has been integral to convincing me that I’d rather stick to art. I’m not not a Marxist, it’s just that I no longer want to identify myself with the term because I don’t want to be associated with most people who do identify themselves as Marxists, which is not for political reasons but because of social tendencies within that group towards ideological dogma and a stubbornly Hegelian desire for objective systems.
What Studebaker makes so clear is the psychological dependency created by self-identification with one’s belief system as truth.
What might be the central issue here is a perennial one for the analysis of art, namely the avoidance of the complexities and ambiguities of judgment. There are a number of nested tendencies in this:
The attempt to conform judgment to Marxist values, where one artwork/artist is good or bad depending on whether the viewer/commentator interprets it as according with or violating their framework. (This is a particularly banal and widespread phenomenon found across the political spectrum, but it’s a foundational one.)
The understanding of art history in strictly Marxist terms, generally to the detriment of any premodern art or any art since modernity that has not been canonized by earlier Marxist theory.
The tendency to cite thinkers from the Marxist canon on art as if all of their statements are inherently correct, with little concern or apparent awareness that, for instance, Kant, Hegel, and Adorno cannot be invoked at will as absolute authorities on the nature of art because their positions are often at odds with one another and cannot be automatically assumed to constitute a cohesive system.
All of the above functioning as justifications for writing about art while remaining entirely insensitive to the phenomenological experience of artworks.
That insensitivity leading to a system for addressing art, often a complex and involved one, that is incoherent by refusing to make qualitative differentiations regarding art or theories of art. Instead of an attempt to articulate the activity of perceiving art, or to develop a familiarity with that experience to then attempt to develop an understanding of art in general, the writer only makes a chain of appeals to authority, hence “citationalism.”
This all amounts to a condescension to experience, which is implicated in any approach to art that tries to do without criticism. The ostensible goal, to “suspend the bourgeois individualistic fiction of taste” with a more objective/rational/scientific analysis can quickly become farcical, as this aforementioned faith in Marxist determinism actually creates an alibi for an inflated self-regard once removed; if a writer considers historical materialism to be an unimpeachable science, and considers their writing to be an employment of that science, then they consider their writing to be, on some level, unimpeachable.
There are plenty of writers, such as social historians of art, who work off of rigorous research instead of subjective judgment, so this isn’t to say that valuable art writing without judgment is at all impossible. But social historians of art are clear about delineating the specificity of their discipline, whereas Citationalism often takes it as fact that any approach that does not share their totalizing insensitivity towards art is reactionary or otherwise invalid. This insensitivity is my target, not Marxism as such. T. J. Clark and Adorno himself, for instance, are both extremely sensitive observers of art, but many orthodox leftist art academics often treat their own frigidity towards as a point of pride without considering the consequences. (Indeed, almost all of what I’m criticizing is already contained in Adorno’s critique of identity thinking.) Attempting historical materialism by these means more often leads to an ironic ahistorical idealism, where the complex contingencies of historical events/artists/artworks are suppressed by the assumption of the ideological truth of a given narrative. Moreover, Citationalist writing not only obfuscates the artistic phenomena of art but is also a self-consciousness of the writer’s own literary subjectivity, which need not be wholly unique and individualized but should at least attempt to account for the limited particularities of one’s perspective and understanding of their subject, or a concern for clarity and articulateness, etc.
At root, this is an attempt to rationalize art, and as such it mutilates the comprehension of art. The rational impulse is far from useless outside of art, of course, but rational-mindedness can only lead to misunderstandings when it comes to the immanent subject of art. As Jameson said of Lukács (somewhere, I wrote down the line but not where I read it), “his mistake was believing there were absolute errors in the sphere of art and culture,” and Citationalism makes the same mistake by persisting in this assumption that right and wrong is something that can and should be legislated in art. If art is right or wrong, as opposed to good or bad, then the terms of that evaluation move away from the sphere of art to something else, like political action or a critique of society. This is a contradictory attitude already in the sense that it presumes an authoritative knowledge of art while seeking to address art as a mere symptom of more important things, or claiming to understand art by condescending to it, which is simply philistinism and identity thinking. As Adorno puts it, “[dialectics] seeks to say what something is, while identarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself.” (Negative Dialectics, p. 149.)
Having laid down the initial polemic, we can move to our specific example, Keti Chukhrov’s “Art and Emancipation in the Gaze of Political Eschatology”, which was published in e-flux last month. This is far from the strongest work of Citationalism one can find, but the gaps in its logic are so symptomatic that it works as a good example (and I thought of the term while thinking through what was wrong with the piece). For instance, Chukhrov relies heavily on Boris Groys, who I don’t like and is still symptomatic of Citationalism, but he at least attempts to put together his sources into an insight; to the degree that Chukhrov seems to be taking a stance in her essay it is mostly cribbed directly from Groys, and there apparently only because he is her most contemporary cited source. On top of that, one of the most obvious peculiarities of the essay is that, in a piece that purports to outline the scope of modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary art, she in fact only makes specific reference to two artworks, both semi-arty mainstream films from the last 15 years. Even then, her mention of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is only incidental to her citation of what Groys says about it. The other is Joker by Todd Phillips, of which she has this to say: “A more recent example of nihilist revolt is the film Joker (2019). This kind of revolt targets social injustice but is more destructive than constructive.” That is the closest she gets to discussing any art specifically.
Such a method of addressing art should already give one pause, no matter the content, but her assertions themselves are simply comical: modernist art under capitalism is negative tout court, which means it is nonsensuous tout court. She also starts out by claiming that negativity is “often verging on nihilism,” without explanation, before later sliding into a position where she assumes the direct equivalence of modernist negativity with nihilism. All of these views are stated with little to no elaboration. On the other hand, she also takes for granted that the early modes of Soviet avant-garde art successfully subsumed art into a novel form of societal building, assuming that invoking the names of Boris Arvatov, Sergey Tretyakov, and Alexey Gastev is enough to prove her point. She never overtly says so, but it seems she is a totalizing cynic about the value of artistic production outside of this laughably idealized conception of early Soviet art. I’m no expert on the era, but the Lissitzky chapter of Clark’s Farewell to an Idea makes a convincing claim that, at the very least, the Soviet avant-garde worked in a frenetic, confusing, and fraught social context where cause and effect was much harder to determine than it already is at the best of times. Besides that, whatever one might want to affirm about the early Soviet Union, it seems fair to say that nothing about it is objectively clear and uncomplicated. At any rate, it’s difficult to critique her position on this because it simply isn’t articulated in her essay, but my impression is that she takes the ideals and writings of those Soviet artists without questioning how these things played out in reality. This is in line with Citationist literal-mindedness, where the ideas of others are simply invoked and stacked on top of each other as an accumulation of factual blocks, as opposed to quotations that are chosen for their articulation of a thought that connects with the author’s own argument.
Her more serious and central claim is about modernist art under capitalism, which she associates with a number of expansive positions. Aside from the aforementioned nihilism and nonsensuousness, she considers it a failed sublation of art into philosophy, which is held back because avant-garde critical art is always reintegrated into the bureaucratic/institutional system of validation. She associates this with the old ideas of autonomy and self-referentiality in modernism, which she again considers inherently nihilistic. Separated only by a paragraph that shrugs at the ‘60s through the ‘00s, she leaps directly from this sketch of early modernism into the 7th Berlin Biennale and Jonas Staal’s “The New World Summit,” both of which are from 2012 and therefore just old enough to be unhelpfully dated (there have been five Berlin Biennales since then, which she does not acknowledge). Her argument is that those exhibitions try to bridge her dichotomy of “capitalist autonomous/nihilist art versus Soviet social art” by turning these institutional exhibitions into showcases for post-conceptual (i.e. western modernist-influenced) but politically-oriented activist art, which she condemns because “such political agendas do not truly encourage the desertion of the territory of art in favor of real political work. […] As an (sic) result, art discourse follows two incompatible paths: it doubts its capacity for democracy—as it departs from art’s negativist (nihilist) modernist genealogy—and, at the same time, it pretends to incorporate public aspirations as an embodiment of direct, non-parliamentary democracy.” (Italics in original.)
Let’s try to unpack this somewhat. First of all, there are two worthwhile points: One, that the activistic turn in contemporary, post-conceptual institutional art is indeed ineffectual and incoherent, doubly so because it represses the alienating criticality of that lineage by attempting to make it legible to the general public. Two, the stated avant-garde aspirations towards autonomy and criticality are continually thwarted by the validation of art institutions, which avant-garde artists nevertheless require to sustain an art career. Her interpretation, however, is that these are the fault of art’s inability to sublate itself into theory or politics, roughly in the manner of Hegel’s end of art. My response would be that art did not fail to sublate but that Hegel’s ideas of the sublation of art are a mistaken imposition on art’s nature, and that institutionalization, while it is a problem, is not first and foremost a co-option of radicality by bureaucracy but more fundamentally the inevitable aestheticization of radical “anti-aesthetic” art once it becomes historicized, and therefore an inevitable function of temporality. (I won’t dwell on this, but it suffices here to say that, when we look back at it historically, an anti-aesthetic movement like Dada clearly has an identifiable aesthetic sensibility.) Beyond this, the rest of the essay is essentially an unqualified mess.
Finding the justification for discussing art as something inherently nonsensuous, no matter how tenuously, is a precious asset for Citationalism because it acts as an alibi for the writer’s own adamant avoidance of sensuous experience, which amounts to a barely-concealed contempt for art itself. This is obvious enough in the essay, considering the total absence of direct engagement with artworks and the curt flippancy of her arguments. The inner circle of October may have sought adamantly to defend this theory-forward, anti-aesthetic outlook (if not the outer circle, Thomas Crow and Stephen Melville, etc.), but they could only do so by tracing out an extremely narrow and idiosyncratic canon of Cubist collage, Surrealism, minimalism and postminimalism, particular slivers of Pollock and Warhol, and basically anything that could be read to reject the conventions of traditional painting. I may not accept that canon and have serious issues with it, but a sizable amount of the serious art scholarship done in the last fifty years has been done along those lines and shouldn’t be dismissed entirely. Still, it’s an enormous and fatuous leap for Chukhrov to consider it simply factual that all modern art is, by definition, nonsensuous, critical, and nihilistic. I could enumerate examples, but it seems unnecessary to make that argument to anyone who has ever had a memorable experience of an artwork made since the emergence of modernity. (Here’s one, Albert York.) The tunnel vision speaks for itself: there is essentially no mention of the art market, or the possibility that any artist since modernism may have not pursued this extremely specific theory-oriented form of critical art or that any art might not be an uncritical proponent of institutional social engagement, or that art’s mimetic faculty, in Adorno’s sense, is irreducible to theory about art, that artists might make good artworks by different criteria than hers or may make bad work while adhering to her criteria (although her criteria does not seem to abide the possibility of successful art outside of the early Soviet Union). This pile-up of rationalizations is the crux of Citationalism; the totalized suppression of the idea that art itself has anything to offer beyond what the Citationalist author has read about it, and inevitably the condemnation of art to not live up to those theoretical standards that take art’s failure as its starting point.
Her critical “eschatology” is grounded in an extremely selective and misguided interpretation of Adorno, which ignores Adorno’s repeated criticisms of political-instrumental art in the Soviet Union and does not engage with his dialectical (and far from nihilistic) conception of as art as “the social antithesis of society.” The equation of negativity=autonomy=nihilism is, frankly, so bluntly indefensible that it would be a waste of time to refute it, so I’ll just offer this essay by Robert Pippin that’s too Hegelian for my tastes but at least doesn’t steamroll Adorno’s aesthetics into stupidity. I suppose Chukhrov would claim her idealized early Soviet artists are exempt from his critiques of politically instrumentalized art, but I would say her romanticization of those artists is bad historical materialism, an ostensible concern for history that actually serves to obfuscate and oversimplify it. She’s free to disagree with Adorno, but claiming him as a citation for turning art into a fatalistic dead end is ridiculous and borderline dishonest.
Chukhrov persists in indictments like “Artworks no longer have the capacity to be artistic in terms of aesthetics—demonstrating that art has ended, and that whatever remains exercises its quasi-bureaucratic arrogance, its new institutional power, through ironic conceptual maneuvers. This condition—when art turns into playing with theory—is a consequence of a paradigmatic cultural shift that recodes artistic practice in nihilist terms.” This is a feeble enough argument considering she hasn’t considered it necessary to actually give examples or prove definitively that all art is post-aesthetic and concerned with theory (Is anything other than this to be considered worthless kitsch, as differentiated from the worthless nihilism of theory-art? Is Melancholia a post-aesthetic film? What is a painting by Albert York? It’s unclear.), but, in addition to condescending to the possibility of art continuing to mean anything to anyone else, such as artists, there’s a raging bad conscience at root here: what’s her point? There’s a strange circularity in being a theorist scolding art for being theoretical instead of reinventing society firsthand, since her critique is exactly a recapitulation of the ineffectuality she is imposing upon art in her diagnosis. Her own indictment of art throws its weight behind a fatalism that refuses the possibility of art playing a part in her anti-capitalist social democratic ideals, leaving her no recourse except for a lame final paragraph about, of all things, “care” and even “self-care,” as if this is supposed to offer more possibility than the art she condemns wholesale. In calling care “important existential work, like love and friendship,” she ends up hoisted by her own petard, taking recourse in the last moment to affect and feeling after adamantly denying the possibility of it in art.
If one were to simply deny the foundations of her argument, and I see no reason why one shouldn’t, it becomes possible to consider the immanent function of artmaking, what artists are actually up to, how these modernist/conceptual developments are not simply some theoretical self-sublation but the results of a material process that can never been so clearly systematized as a Citationalist wants it to be. The Soviet Union was a failure and a ruin, as was premodern culture, and modernity, and now the present. To conclude from this that art is wholly devoid of feeling and intrinsically failed, no matter how strained and embattled the conditions of artmaking may be today, is the hubris of theory dictating to reality, which is Citationalism. Society has always been brutish and reprehensible, but art preserves the idea that it may not always be. The danger is to unconsciously idealize past windows of possibility as definitive, as if our chances for the future can only be divined by examining the wreckage of a brief period from a century ago is our only hope.
My point here, to spell it out, is only to defend art against deterministic and over-rationalized attempts to deny the artistic within the field of art. What Citationalism cannot abide is the literary, emotive, enigmatic remainder in art that cannot be analyzed away by the systems it takes to be objective. This, in essence, is the refusal of the realm of phenomena itself, a phobia of experience that hides behind a tradition of self-justifying dismissals of subjective feeling. But if art has any purpose in the first place it is through felt experience, whether that feeling is political or critical, or in the creation of empathy towards a character or a sense of the world in historical fiction that articulates an experience of life that is beyond what we have experienced first-hand in the present. To elaborate what I mentioned in the beginning about Bicycle Thieves, art does have a political value, it just so happens to be political on the level of subjectivity, not social influence. I may not believe in art as a vector for directly instituting social change, but Allan Sekula and Straub-Huillet were integral influences on my political consciousness. As were, in their way, Manet and Jasper Johns and Fra Angelico and Kafka and Tolstoy and Godard, because art has taught me how to navigate and make sense of the world in every sphere of life, far more than political theory has. Citationalism becomes fatalistic towards art because it refuses to acknowledge art has a function for the individual, even the individual Communist, that it can teach us and expand our understanding in important ways that are intrinsically different from what one learns in a Capital reading group, and that as such the material of art, culture, experience, space, time, history, are constants that cannot be exhausted. Finally, a collective politics consists of the grouping together of individuals, and if any basic consciousness of or concern for the intelligence, competence, and moral sense of those individuals is put by the wayside, then no properly successful collectivity has any chance of emerging.
Citationalism, which is finally just a form of vulgar Marxism, is uncomfortable with the granular complexities of mediating phenomenological experience in relation to society, or simply the complexity of living, so it attempts to suspend subjectivity for an ostensibly systematic science of art that takes no part in experience. Whatever else that system may be, it is not engaging with art or thinking about art, and as such is a poor grounds for understanding it, let alone finding in it the grounds for political emancipation. The coldness of Citationalism is a frigidity towards life and death, to colors and flowers and children. That should already be disconcerting, but it becomes reprehensible when it postures as if that pitilessness towards life is for the sake of life. There’s a central, dazzling contradiction in this: the peremptory demand for insensitivity acts as if only that can save sensation, but in the same move it banishes that entire sphere of phenomena to neglect and insists on its presumed death to circularly justify that same insensitivity. This relegates reality to an inferior position below the values of ideology, and thereby comes dangerously close to the authoritarianism that should be the left’s opposite: the cruel stupidity of absolutes in the absence of any nuance, blaming “the Other” (outsiders, political opponents, competing factions) for the failures of what is otherwise immutable law. Any politics worthy of the name, let alone political art, should be able to dismiss such crudity out of hand.