Saturday, March 23, 2013

Prisoner X and the Letter of Mystery

Why the Alphabet’s 24th Letter Designates the Nameless

haaretz

X Marks the Spot: Why do we use the capital letter “X” to designate nameless people, especially when there is an aura of mystery around them?

By Philologos

Published February 24, 2013, issue of March 01, 2013

By now, unless you’re the type that refuses to follow the news (not that I blame you, but in that case, why are you reading this newspaper?), you know who “Prisoner X” is. Called “Mr. X” by the Israeli news service Ynet, which originally broke the story of his suicide in a high-security Israeli prison cell in 2010, “Prisoner X” was recently brought again to the world’s attention by an Australian Broadcasting Corporation report that he was in fact a dual Australian-Israeli citizen named Ben Zygier.
All this has now been corroborated by the Israeli authorities, although just what Zygier did to merit his fate remains, at the moment, an enigma.
But the enigma that interests me is of another sort. Why, I found myself wondering, do we use the capital letter “X” to designate nameless people, especially when there is an aura of mystery around them?
At first glance, this usage goes back to at least 1932, when Warner Bros. released the early Technicolor horror movie “Doctor X,” starring Lee Tracy as Dr. Jerry Xavier, a physician who investigates a series of grisly cannibalistic murders. And yet the Doctor X of this movie does have a name, which is where the X of its title comes from. “X” in the sense of “nameless” first turns up, probably under the influence of the Warner Bros. film, in 1944, in the character of The Amazing Mr. X in the British comic book series “The Dandy.”
Subsequently, this meaning of “X” began to spread. There are by now dozens of Mr. X’s in comics, films and video games, plus Ms. X’s, Dr. X’s, Professor X’s and other members of the X family, and “X” long ago entered everyday speech as a way of referring to an unidentified person or (in an expression like “the X factor”) thing.
But the history of “X” as a synonym for “nameless” is far more complicated. It probably starts with the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who in his 1637 book “La Géometrie” first systematically used a lower-case “x,” together with “y” and “z,” to signify an unknown quantity in simple algebraic equations. Descartes did this on the model of the ancient Greek geometrician Euclid, who made the Greek letters alpha, beta, gamma, etc., stand for points on lines.
(Who doesn’t remember instructions from his school days like, “Let AB be a line segment bisected at C by DE”?) Since Euclid had chosen the first letters of the Greek alphabet for geometry, Descartes chose the last ones of the Latin alphabet for algebra, and his choice was quickly adopted by other mathematicians.
We now jump from mathematics to physics and from 1637 to 1895, when the German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a new type of radiation. Röntgen, who wasn’t sure just what he had come across, named his find in German X-Strahlen, using the algebraic symbol for something unknown. Although X-Strahlen was eventually replaced in German by Röntgenstrahlen, “X-ray” has remained our English word and has also contributed, with the help of the term “X-ray vision,” to x’s ability to evoke the uncanny.
From here we backtrack slightly to 1883, when Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic children’s novel, “Treasure Island,” with its tale of buried pirate loot, popularized the expression “X marks the spot,” an allusion to the letter x’s use to indicate precise locations on detailed maps. This x has nothing to do with algebra. It is used in this way because its two intersecting lines create an easily visible point where they meet — and yet by a curious coincidence, this, too, associates x with secrecy and mystery.
Finally, we have the equally unrelated idiom “to x out,” dating from the pre-Typex days of typewriters, when printing a row of x’s over a typed line was the standard way of erasing. (X’s may have been picked for the job because they’re good at covering the shapes of other letters.)
This typewriter x was probably the inspiration for the x on your computer screen that shuts down boxes, pop-ups and programs, which is what the phrase “x-ing out” calls to mind today, as well as the source of the scrawled X with which we blot out illustrations we don’t wish to be seen, and the term “X-rated.” And so, once again, we find “x” connected with what is hidden.
Indeed, so established was the letter x as a symbol of the unknown long before the 1930s, one suspects that rather than being called “Doctor X” because his name was Xavier, Lee Tracy’s physician-sleuth was given the name Xavier because the film’s scriptwriters wished to call him “Doctor X.” Perhaps, now that we know his real name, Prisoner X should be called “Prisoner ZY.” Or as Descartes might have put it, letting “m” stand for Mossad, m(zy)=x2.

The Bias Against Creativity

Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas

+ Author Affiliations

¹Management Department, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
²Organizational Behavior Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
³School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University

Jennifer S. Mueller, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Locust Walk, Ste. 2000, Philadelphia, PA 19104 E-mail: jennm@wharton.upenn.edu

Abstract

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt and that is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. In two experiments, we manipulated uncertainty using different methods, including an uncertainty-reduction prime. The results of both experiments demonstrated the existence of a negative bias against creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty. Furthermore, this bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.

Do people desire creative ideas? Most scholars would answer this question with an obvious “yes,” asserting that creativity is the engine of scientific discovery and the fundamental driving force of positive change (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Furthermore, creativity is seen as being associated with intelligence, wisdom, and moral goodness (Niu & Sternberg, 2006; Sternberg, 1985). However, although people strongly endorse this positive view of creativity, scholars have long been puzzled by the finding that organizations, scientific institutions, and decision makers routinely reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as an important goal (Staw, 1995). Similarly, research has documented that teachers dislike students who exhibit curiosity and creative thinking, even though teachers acknowledge creativity as an important educational goal (Westby & Dawson, 1995).

We offer a new perspective to explain this puzzle. Just as people have deeply rooted biases against people of a certain age, race, or gender that are not necessarily overt (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), so too can people hold deeply rooted negative views of creativity that are not openly acknowledged. Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancement, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary.

Creative ideas are both novel and useful (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010), and novelty is the key distinguishing feature of creativity beyond ideas that are merely well conceived. Yet the requirement that creative ideas contain novelty can also promote a tension in evaluators’ minds when they judge whether to pursue an idea. Indeed, evaluators have a hard time viewing novelty and practicality as attributes that go hand in hand, often viewing them as inversely related (Rietzschel, Nijstad, & Stroebe, 2009). There are several reasons why. Practical ideas are generally valued (Sanchez-Burks, 2005). However, the more novel an idea, the more uncertainty can exist about whether the idea is practical, useful, error free, and reliably reproducible (Amabile, 1996). When endorsing a novel idea, people can experience failure (Simonton, 1984), social rejection (Nemeth, 1986), and uncertainty about when their idea will reach completion (Metcalfe, 1986). Uncertainty is an aversive state (Heider, 1958) that people feel a strong motivation to diminish and avoid (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008). Hence, people can also have negative associations with novelty—an attribute at the heart of what makes ideas creative in the first place.

Although positive associations with creativity are typically the focus of attention among both scholars and practitioners, negative associations may also be activated when people evaluate a creative idea. For example, research on associative thinking suggests that strong uncertainty feelings may make the negative attributes of creativity, particularly those related to uncertainty, more salient (Bower, 1981).

This evaluative process is not necessarily overt, which makes the bias against creativity potentially insidious. In fact, there is often strong normative pressure to endorse creative ideas (Flynn & Chatman, 2001) and a strong social desirability bias against expressing any view of creativity as negative (Runco, 2010). This resulting state is similar to that identified in research on racial bias: There is a conflict between an explicit preference toward creativity and unacknowledged negative associations with creativity (much as there can be a conflict between explicit and implicit attitudes toward a specific social group; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986). In other words, uncovering a bias against creative ideas requires a method more subtle than simply asking directly. Therefore, we decided to employ a measure that assesses explicit attitudes in addition to implicit attitudes, which are less susceptible to self-presentation biases and normative pressures (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009). In two studies, we tested whether uncertainty measured and manipulated in two different ways promotes a greater bias against creativity relative to practicality. In the second study, we investigated whether this bias deters peoples’ ability to recognize creative ideas.

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Experiment 1

Method

Participants and design

Participants (N = 73) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: uncertainty (n = 28) or baseline (n = 45). Fifty-one percent of the participants were men, and 49% were women (mean age = 22.74 years). Each participant took both an implicit and an explicit attitude test to assess his or her bias against creativity relative to his or her bias against practicality.

Procedure and materials

Participants in the uncertainty condition were told that they might receive additional payment, but this would be determined by a random lottery rather than by their performance. Participants in the baseline condition were not given the opportunity to receive extra money. A pilot study (N = 82) verified that the uncertainty manipulation evoked significantly higher uncertainty feelings than did the baseline condition. All participants completed the Openness to Experience subscale of the NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992), a trait that is highly related to creativity (Feist, 1998).

Participants’ automatic mental associations with creativity and practicality were assessed using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). This measure relies on test takers’ speed of response to determine the strength of their mental associations. The IAT measures participants’ reaction times when categorizing stimuli from four categories. In this experiment, the categories consisted of two attitude objects (creativity or practicality) and two evaluative dimensions (good or bad). In the computerized version of the IAT, participants press a key on the left of the keyboard in response to items from two paired categories (e.g., creativity + bad) and a key on the right of the keyboard in response to items from another pair (e.g., practicality + good). The categories assigned to the same response key vary between blocks. The speed of response in the blocks with one category pairing is compared with the speed of response in the blocks with the opposite category pairing, and this comparison is used to derive an index of the subject’s implicit bias.

Our IAT used words related to creativity (e.g., novel, creative, inventive, original) and practicality (e.g., practical, functional, constructive, and useful), as well as words that named good things (rainbow, cake, sunshine, laughter, peace, heaven) and bad things (vomit, hell, agony, rotten, poison, ugly). Block order was counterbalanced such that half of the participants performed the creative + good component first, and the other half performed the creative + bad component first. The IAT score was calculated by subtracting response latencies for the creative + good blocks from response latencies for the creative + bad blocks; higher values indicate more bias against creativity relative to practicality. We scored the IAT using the D statistic (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003), a method less influenced by procedural variables, such as order or counterbalancing, and cognitive ability than standard scoring methods for the IAT are (Cai, Sriram, Greenwald, & McFarland, 2004).

Participants also explicitly rated their positive and negative feelings toward creativity- and practicality-related words on 7-point scales (1 = strongly negative, 4 = neutral, 7 = strongly positive). Words associated with creativity included creative, inventive, original, and novel (α = .77), and words associated with practicality included practical, functional, constructive, useful (α = .88). Participants indicated positive associations (i.e., above the scale midpoint) with both creativity-related words (M = 5.37, SD = 0.75) and practicality-related words (M = 5.43, SD = 0.91). Explicit-bias scores were calculated by subtracting ratings for creativity-related words from ratings for practicality-related words (M = 0.06, SD = 0.91). (See the Supplemental Material available online for additional details regarding Experiment 1 and a pilot study.)

Results and discussion

Table 1 shows descriptive statistics and correlations among all major variables. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) controlling for openness to experience revealed no significant differences in explicit bias between the uncertainty condition (M = 0.02, SD = 0.83) and the baseline condition (M = −0.11, SD = 0.96), F(1, 70) = 0.07, p = .78. However, a second ANCOVA that also controlled for openness to experience revealed that participants in the uncertainty condition showed an implicit bias against creativity relative to practicality (M = 0.15, SD = 0.54); this finding significantly differed from the results of participants in the baseline condition, who showed an implicit bias in favor of creativity relative to practicality (M = −0.23, SD = 0.47), F(1, 70) = 13.13, p = .001; condition accounted for 11% of the variance in implicit bias.

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Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Among All Variables in Experiment 1

The results of Experiment 1 show that people hold ambivalent attitudes toward creativity. Although participants in the baseline condition evidenced positive implicit associations with creativity relative to practicality, participants in the uncertainty condition exhibited an implicit bias against creativity relative to practicality. In Experiment 2, we wished to extend these findings to show that people’s motivation to reduce uncertainty when solving a problem can activate the creativity bias. Specifically, scholars propose that effective and creative problem solving includes both generating many novel options and subsequently reducing uncertainty by identifying the single best option from the set (Cropley, 2006). We propose that this latter orientation toward identifying the optimal solution may prime an uncertainty-reduction motive or intolerance for uncertainty and thereby evoke the creativity bias. Additionally, we explored whether the creativity bias might also deter the recognition of a creative idea.

Experiment 2

Method

Participants and design

One hundred forty undergraduate students (55% female, 45% male; mean age = 20.66 years) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: high tolerance for uncertainty (n = 70) and low tolerance for uncertainty (n = 70).

Procedure and materials

Before exposure to the experimental manipulation, participants took the Openness to Experience subscale. Participants in the high-tolerance-for-uncertainty condition were then told to write an essay supporting the statement, “For every problem, there is more than one correct solution.” Participants in the low-tolerance-for-uncertainty condition were asked to write an essay supporting the statement, “For every problem, there is only one correct solution.” After being exposed to the experimental manipulation, each participant took the same implicit and explicit creativity versus practicality bias tests used in Experiment 1.

Subsequently, participants were asked to rate a creative idea (a running shoe with nanotechnology that adjusts fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters). We pretested this idea using a different sample of undergraduates (N = 36), who rated this idea as being highly creative (M = 5.82, SD = 0.80), novel (M = 5.62, SD = 1.02), and practical (M = 5.85, SD = 0.92) on 7-point scales ranging from 1, not at all, to 7, extremely so. Participants in the main experiment rated the idea using the creativity scale, which employed the same six words related to creativity used in both the implicit and explicit bias tests (M = 5.41, SD = 1.05; α = .78).

In addition, a three-item manipulation check assessed participants’ uncertainty when evaluating the running-shoe idea (e.g., “I feel uncertain about this idea”); the response scale ranged from 1, not at all, to 7, very much so (α = .78). Participants in the low-tolerance condition were significantly more uncertain (M = 4.36, SD = 1.23) than those in the high- tolerance condition (M = 3.87, SD = 1.33), F(1, 133) = 5.14, p = .025. (See the Supplemental Material for additional details regarding Experiment 2, a pilot study, and one additional study.)

Results and discussion

Table 2 shows descriptive statistics and correlations among all major variables. An ANCOVA controlling for openness to experience revealed that participants in the low-tolerance-for-uncertainty condition were not significantly different in their level of explicit bias against creativity (M = 0.20, SD = 0.81) compared with participants in the high-tolerance-for- uncertainty condition (M = 0.22, SD = 0.94), F(1, 133) = 0.14, p = .71. However, a second ANCOVA controlling for openness to experience revealed that participants in the low-tolerance condition were more implicitly biased against creativity relative to practicality (M = 0.07, SD = 0.43) than participants in the high-tolerance condition were (M = −0.16, SD = 0.46), F(1, 133) = 7.87, p = .007; participants in the high-tolerance condition exhibited positive associations with creativity relative to practicality. A third ANCOVA controlling for openness to experience identified that participants in the low-tolerance condition rated the running-shoe idea as less creative (M = 5.06, SD = 1.06) than participants in the high-tolerance condition did (M = 5.76, SD = 0.93), F(1, 137) = 15.48, p = .000.

View this table:Table 2.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Among All Variables in Experiment 2

A hierarchical regression showed that the relationship between experimental condition and creativity ratings, β = −0.64, t(134) = −3.81, p < .001, became less significant when implicit bias was included in the model, β = −0.56, t(134) = −3.30, p < .01. A bootstrap analysis of the indirect effect of condition on creativity ratings through implicit bias yielded a 95% confidence interval of [−.24, −.02], which did not include zero; this result demonstrated partial mediation (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). Mediation analyses controlling for both explicit bias and openness to experience at each step indicated that relatively lower levels of uncertainty tolerance led to higher levels of implicit bias, which in turn contributed to lower ratings of creativity when controlling for participants’ explicit bias and general openness to experience.

The results of Experiment 2 both replicated the finding that uncertainty promotes negative associations with creativity relative to practicality and extended this finding by showing that the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea.

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General Discussion

Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket propulsion, endured ridicule and derision from his contemporary scientific peers, who stated that his ideas were ludicrous and impossible. This example is not unique, but it would puzzle creativity theorists, as research shows that expert raters who are themselves creative are even more likely to accurately recognize and assess creativity than expert raters who are less creative (Hennessey, Amabile, & Mueller, 2011). Our results show that regardless of the degree to which people are open minded, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty (either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty or they feel uncertain generally), they may experience more negative associations with creativity, which results in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Our findings imply a deep irony. Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas (Audia & Goncalo, 2007), yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes people less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when they need it most.

Beyond merely having a preference for the status quo or for familiar ideas (Eidelman, Crandall, & Pattershall, 2009; Zajonc, 2001), people appear to have ambivalent feelings toward creativity. On the one hand, participants in the baseline condition of Experiment 1 and the high-tolerance-for- uncertainty condition of Experiment 2 demonstrated positive implicit associations with creativity relative to practicality. Additionally, 95% of participants in the uncertainty condition of Experiment 1 and the low-tolerance-for-uncertainty condition of Experiment 2 rated their explicit attitudes toward creativity-related words as positive—higher than 4, the midpoint of a 7-point scale; these ratings were statistically equivalent to the ratings of attitudes toward practicality-related words.

On the other hand, the implicit measure showed that participants in each high-uncertainty condition (i.e., the uncertainty condition of Experiment 1 and the low-tolerance condition of Experiment 2) associated words such as “vomit,” “poison,” and “agony” with creativity more than with practicality. Because there is such a strong social norm to endorse creativity, and people also feel authentic positive attitudes toward creativity, people may be reluctant to admit that they do not want creativity; hence, the bias against creativity may be particularly slippery to diagnose. The implicit measures may have picked up negative associations with creativity under conditions of uncertainty because the methodology is more resistant to social desirability bias (Greenwald et al., 2009).

If people hold an implicit bias against creativity, then we cannot assume that organizations, institutions, or even scientific endeavors will desire and recognize creative ideas even when they explicitly state that they want them. This is because when journals extol creative research, universities train scientists to promote creative solutions, research and development companies commend the development of new products, and pharmaceutical companies praise creative medical breakthroughs, they may do so in ways that promote uncertainty by requiring gatekeepers to identify the single “best” and most “accurate” idea, thereby creating an unacknowledged aversion to creativity. In addition, our results suggest that if people have difficulty gaining acceptance for creative ideas, especially when more practical and unoriginal options are readily available, the field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identifying how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity. Future research should identify factors that mitigate or reverse the bias against creativity.

Markart

Anton Vidokle

Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art

“Perhaps contemporary art is an art to survive our contemporaneity as an artist.”

—Boris Groys

Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations. One result was that some of the most influential modernist artists, from Paul Gauguin to Mondrian and Rodchenko, died in abject poverty, not because their work was unpopular but because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, whether under capitalist or communist regimes.¹ While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.”² It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work.

Here I am not particularly interested in the power relations between artists and the art market, a cyclical conversation that seems to dominate much of art writing today. Historically, art and artists have existed both with and without a market. Important art was produced in socialist countries for most of the twentieth century, in the absence of an art market. Much of art production today occurs in places without a market for art, or in countries where a capitalist market system is not the dominant form of social and cultural organization. Art can clearly exist without a market, but artists fundamentally rely upon a certain economy in order to live and make art in the first place. Furthermore, it’s important to note that “economy” and “market” are not synonymous terms: a market is just one facet of the economic sphere, coexisting with many other forms of exchange, from barter, debt, and favors to a gift economy.
The term “political economy” is more or less synonymous with “economy” in our contemporary lexicon: both designate the distribution of goods and services under a certain political regime—be it capitalist, feudal, or communist—along with all the regulations, laws, and conventions governing such distribution. According to Aristotle, however, “economy” is the way to arrange things within a household (“oikos” means “house”), and “politics” is the way to arrange things between households—between “polites” or citizens, within the polis. So political economy combines both things. At some point in the late nineteenth century, the adjective “political” was dropped in English-language writing, and we ended up with simply “economy.” In one of the first studies of the economy of art—a book called Political Economy of Art published in 1857—the critic John Ruskin laments the confusion regarding the interpretation of the word “economy,” emphasizing that economy does not automatically imply money, frugality, or expenditures, but rather taking care of a household and managing labor. This would later becomes an important point in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of work and labor in the Human Condition.³

_{_{William Powhida, Untitled, 2012. Graphite on paper.}}
Ruskin’s book is based on two lectures he gave on July 10 and 13, 1857, in Manchester—a city whose labor conditions had been central to the work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx just a few years earlier (a fact of which Ruskin claimed to have no knowledge, citing only some writings of John Adams he had read long before). The lectures and the book look at the value of artistic work through a framework of education, collecting, patronage, accessibility to the public, and artistic genius. Ruskin argues for a childlike, innocent position for the artist, who should not get involved in the business of art. Ruskin believes that it is the patron (be it the state or a private collector) who is the patriarchal head of the household of art and whose responsibility it is to find and train artistic geniuses, to tell them what to do. Ruskin wants the prices for art to be low, preferably pegged to the actual time spent by an artist on the production of a specific work. In other words, Ruskin wants art production to be a form of wage labor.

_{_{James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), circa 1875. Oil on panel. Detroit Institute of Art.}}
In 1878, the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler took Ruskin to court for libel. Ruskin had written a rather positive review of an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery—a privately owned space exhibiting works that had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Ruskin singled out Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, accusing the artist of charging too high a price for what Ruskin thought was a hastily made painting:

For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.⁴

Whistler was outraged and sued Ruskin for a thousand pounds and the costs of the trial. The trial became a public spectacle, the first of its kind. It also became a public seminar on art. Whistler’s case was based on his argument that a painting is about nothing but itself; Ruskin’s case was based on his belief that art should have moral value. The court heard arguments about the duties of art critics and the role of labor in art. Ruskin was too ill to attend the trial and was represented by lawyers who asked Whistler how long it had taken him to make the painting. Whistler replied that it was completed in a day or two.

Lawyer: The labor of two days, is that for which you asked two hundred guineas?
Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.⁵

Whistler won the case but received only a symbolic settlement: a quarter of a penny. Ruskin’s friends covered his legal expenses; Whistler went bankrupt covering his own.
Ruskin did not single-handedly invent positions and notions popularized through his book and lectures on the economy of art; rather, he articulated existing Victorian attitudes regarding the role of artists and culture, which themselves reflected the British and Dutch art systems of the time, emphasizing a certain element of commerce in art. A somewhat different system of cultural organization existed in France, where in 1648 a royal decree established a government-funded Art Academy. The Academy removed painting and sculpture from the control of artistic guilds, which emphasized craft, and instead created a centralized institution that treated visual art more like the liberal arts, such as literature. While poets and writers like Baudelaire were often compensated per line of text for publishing their work (Baudelaire’s rate apparently was 0.15 francs per line), as far as I know, no one in France proposed subjecting them to wage labor.

Early modernist poets like Baudelaire were extremely influential in shaping the attitudes of artists towards commerce and business. Implicit in the way of life of “bohemian” artists and writers in the Latin Quarter was a rejection of bourgeois professional and commercial pursuits, as was a rejection of industrialization and emergent capitalism. Baudelaire was actually rather critical of the bohemians, being very much a radical dandy, an aristocrat who despised the squalor of bohemian life. Nevertheless, he spent much of his life in this milieu and immortalized it in his work: “In murky corners of old cities where everything—horror too—is magical, I study, servile to my moods, the odd and charming refuse of humanity.”⁶ Despite the marginality and political insignificance of bohemia, its cultural impact was absolutely enormous. It remains ever-present, a specter that reappears in various times and places.
Andy Warhol’s Factory is fascinating in this respect: both a murky, magical corner for misfits and eccentrics, and simultaneously the workplace of the first self-proclaimed Business Artist. Warhol’s artistic position is very interesting insofar as it combined stances that were thought to be diametrically opposed: he was at once a dandy, a bohemian, but also someone who did not disguise his interest in business and commerce. His interest in business did not only extend to sale of his artwork; he also pursued the publication of a commercial magazine, film production, a television show—what amounted to his own media industry. To my mind, Warhol’s position was much more honest and productive than that of artists who pretend that the artist can or should stay innocent by delegating (or appearing to delegate) business-related activity to gallerists or other agents, and who maintain that this is the only condition in which critical or culturally significant art can be produced. By turning his art into a kind of a business, Warhol managed to achieve independence, though not independence from the art market.

_{_{A hundred of Andy Warhol’s 610 Time Capsules shelved. Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.}}
But since his time, Warhol’s economic independence seems to have been misunderstood. The independence that came from his bridging of the bohemian sphere and the sphere of day-to-day commerce has been converted into a vast proliferation of so-called artistic practices that treat art as a profession. But art is not a profession. What does being professional actually mean under the current conditions of de-skilling in art? We should probably be less concerned with being full-time, art-school-trained, professional artists, writers, or curators—less concerned with measuring our artistic worth in these ways. Since most of us are not expected to perfect any specific techniques or master any craft—unlike athletes or classical musicians, for example—and given that we are no longer tied to working in specific mediums, perhaps it’s fine to be a part-time artist? After all, what is the expertise of a contemporary artist? Perhaps a certain type of passionate hobbyism, a committed amateurism, is okay: after all, we still live in a reality largely shaped by talented amateurs of the nineteenth century, like Thomas Edison and so many others.⁷ I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art: sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials. Ilya Kabakov supported himself for decades by being a children’s book illustrator. Marcel Duchamp worked as a librarian and later sold Brancusi’s work to make a living, while refusing to be dependent on sales of his own work.
It interesting to note that this emphasis on professionalization emerged simultaneously with the disappearance of bohemia, which is usually described as a shared creative space that allowed for fluid communication between poets, artists, dancers, writers, musicians, and so forth. The notion of bohemia as something to aspire to went out the window a few decades ago; it vanished at the same time as the visual art sphere was becoming more segregated from other fields of art. “Bohemian” has become a primarily derogatory term that seems to imply a kind of uncommitted, naive dilettantism, but within the history of art it has a greater significance. According to T.J. Clark, bohemia refers to a movement by a group of artists, writers, and poets who apparently renounced the normative bourgeois society, a move that, unlike the gestures of the avant-garde, was not a calculated temporary tactic intended only so that one could return to the salon of art in a more advantageous position, but a more permanent departure.⁸ The bohemian artist would absolutely reject the notion of professionalism in the arts—this was something for lawyers, accountants, and bankers, not artists.⁹

_{_{Image from catalog Marcel Duchamp Graphics, Kyoto Shoin, 1991.}}
These days it’s becoming more and more difficult to imagine the production of significant art without a training system that educates future producers of art, its administrators and, to some extent, its consumers. However, until only a few decades ago, many if not most artists, curators, and critics, never attended masters programs or studied curatorship and critical writing in specialized training programs. The field of art is becoming professionalized in a very, very narrow way. There’s still the old problem that professionalization is really about a division of labor, and a division of labor produces alienation.¹⁰ It’s a contradiction that a lot of people go into the arts because they want to be a little less alienated from what they do in life, even as what is increasingly imposed on artists, curators, writers—and it comes both from the market and public sector—is the professionalization and precarization of their activity.
The problem of professionalization is connected to the proliferation of MFA programs, which have become a prerequisite for young people entering the arts. In a sense, universities and academies have created a perfect economic feedback loop that perpetuates their own existence: most artists depend on having a teaching position. This is because, as Walid Raad recently pointed out, the average life-span of financial success in the art market (in places where there is such a thing)—a period during which a successful artist’s work is in active demand by collectors—is a mere four years.¹¹ How do you support yourself when your work does not sell anymore? You teach—and to qualify for a teaching position, you need an MFA degree. This means that most artists who aspire to a life-long practice have little choice but to enroll in MFA programs and often pay astronomical fees and go into debt in order to have a chance of teaching in the future or selling their work in the lucrative art market. But unlike other fields, such as law or medicine, where graduates can reasonably expect a job upon graduation, there are no guarantees that an artist with an MFA degree will find a teaching job. With recent shifts in hiring policies at most universities—towards part-time, untenured, adjunct labor—very few artists ever get a tenured, secure position. To me, this resembles a kind of pyramid scheme or institutional blackmail in which money is extracted using false promises, with the benefits going to very few—primarily the institutions themselves.¹²
I attended graduate school in the ‘90s. I did all of the coursework and the final exhibition, wrote the dissertation and submitted it. I thought I was all done, but then suddenly I found out that in order to get the degree itself, I needed to package my dissertation and photographs in a very specific type of a black plastic folder, which could only be purchased at one stationery store located in Manhattan near Canal Street. The secretary at the art department told me that the Chairman kept the folders in a closet in his office, and that the folders had to conform exactly to the dimensions of the closet’s irregular shelves. No other folders would be accepted. I was idealistic and thought that the Master of Fine Arts degree had something to do with the acquisition of knowledge … but it came down to a surreal formalism. I never got the folder or the degree!
It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs. At the center of the problem is the black plastic folder: at the school I attended, the folder itself became the goal of the program—both the framing and the ultimate content of graduate studies in art. A folder, identical to hundreds of other folders arranged on a shelf, became a tool to valuate and legitimize artistic practice through a forced standardization. My school was not very different from how most museums, art centers, and galleries operate today, whereby systemic and logistical needs often demand legibility according to predefined terms. In the process, the folder replaces art itself.
The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors. Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a wide range of activities and occupations including training, research, development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing, promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. For a few years now I have experienced a certain sense of déjà vu while walking through art fairs or biennials, a feeling that many other people have also commented on: that we have already seen all these works that are supposedly brand new. We are experiencing the impact of contemporary art as a globally traded commodity that is produced, displayed, and circulated by an industry of specially trained professionals. The folder that replaces the art has undergone only a slight modification: into an investment portfolio.

_{_{Image from the catalog Marcel Duchamp Graphics, Kyoto Shoin, 1991.Marcel Duchamp Graphics, Kyoto Shoin, 1991.}}

This is not a new observation: I think Marcel Duchamp already fully understood this danger a hundred year ago. There are, of course, so many aspects of his work that could be mentioned in this essay, from his Standard Stoppages to his peculiar refusal to make a living by selling his artworks. In a way, one can understand much of Duchamp’s work as a repeated act of offering the folder back to the art establishment: whether in the shape of a valise, a box, a collection of notes and photographs, a literal folder, or even an elaborate gesamkunstwerk like his Etant donné, containing all the indexical references to his work. However, the folders he provided contained a bomb: they were capable of bringing down the shelf they were stored on.
Today it would be rather futile to try to reconstitute bohemia—the free-flowing, organic creative space—because it never really existed within the constellation of institutions of art, the art market, and the art academy. If Warhol’s Factory was an entry into art that enabled a group of people of very different backgrounds to enter a certain kind of productive modality (both within and in spite of the surrounding economy), it was a space of free play that no longer exists. Instead, what we have now are MFA programs: a standardization not even of bohemia, but only its promise. Just to be clear: I am not advocating that artists should remain innocent, childlike amateurs; a certain mobilized dissidence wielded by young people engaging in specialized study in art structures can amount to something quite powerful. What I mean is that if one is really looking to produce a different kind of art, it is necessary to step through the standardization and professionalization it promises, and discover a way to access whatever may be on the other side—even if what one finds does not resemble art as we currently understand it.

_{_{Natascha Sadr Haghighian, What I Do For A Living/What I Really Do?, 2007. Binders with vynil letters.}}
This supposes that, somewhere close to the center of what we all know art to be, there is a kind of open, undefined quality. And this is something I feel to be increasingly difficult to develop and maintain both in art and other areas of life, when there are so many pressures in the market-driven economy to divide labor, to professionalize. As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism. For emerging artists and curators there is an ever-increasing number of well-intentioned programs that essentially indoctrinate them into becoming content providers for an art system whose values and welfare are wholly defined by its own logic of supply and demand.
Being a professional should not be the only acceptable way for us to maintain our households, particularly when most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three fields that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. I feel that we have cornered ourselves by denying the full range of possibilities for developing our economies. In fact, the economic dimension of art is more often wholly suppressed under the specter of bohemia, condemning artists to a precarious and often alienating place in the day-to-day relations that hold other parts of society together. While artists like Warhol took some pleasure in operating a frontier economy that produced value and new economic protocols—much in the way a government might manage an economy—this is not the concern of most other artists, who would prefer to have a more straightforward connection to society without at the same time having their work regarded as mere craft. Unless hard-pressed by circumstances, we still think that the proper thing to do is to wait for a sponsor or a patron to solve our household problems and to legitimize our work. In fact, we don’t need their legitimacy. We are perfectly capable of being our own sponsors, which in most cases we already are when we do other kinds of work to support our art-work. This is something that should not be disavowed, but acknowledged openly. We must find the terms for articulating what kind of economy artists really want. This can be quite complicated, since not addressing this question implicitly reinforces the simplistic myth of the artist as an isolated and alienated genius. Without a captivating alternative, artists will always defer to this myth out of habit, in spite of how complex and interesting their real household economy may be. I suspect that if affirmed fully and radically, this condition could lead to a fluid, liberated state close to what Marx envisioned for humanity—the messianic promise at the heart of communism.¹³ After all, we are never one thing at all times.
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© 2013 e-flux and the author

1 Gauguin died in a charity clinic on Tahiti, apparently due to poor treatment. He was broke and could not afford a proper hospital. While his work was selling relatively well in Paris, his dealer was not sending Gauguin’s share of the money. Rodchenko’s pension was stripped away after he was expelled from the artists’ union in the USSR. Mondrian died in poverty of pneumonia.
2 For the website of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), see →.
3 This point regarding Arendt is also discussed in my essay “Art without Work?”, e-flux journal 29 (November 2011). See →.
4 Quoted in James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). See →.
5 Ibid.
6Charles Baudelaire, “The Little Old Women,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1982): 94.
7 This was recently pointed out to me by Shuddhabratha Sengupta.
8 T.J. Clark, The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): chapter 1.
9 Martha Rosler suggests that such attitudes toward professionalism were common among artists throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s as well.
10 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. See →.
11 This was part of Walid Raad’s lecture performance at documenta (13). He got the figures from Artist Pension Trust.
12 What I am describing here is the dominant US and UK art school model, but there are other problems, and also other potentials, with nation-state type academies or pure neoliberal non-degree commercial “schools,” like the ones tacked on to museums and art spaces.
13 “… in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845): chapter 1. See →.

Anton Vidokle is an editor of e-flux journal.