Art Discourses: Words and Things Revisited

One way of viewing the artworld is getting a sense of the totality of discourses used to construct it.  Art and the social-economic world around it are continuously being produced in the various ways of making “art talk.” This distributed network system of ways of talking, the various vocabularies, arguments, professional fields, and institutionalized contexts for making statements we can call “artworld discourse.” (Of course, the layers and nodes of artworld discourse are not pure states, but intermingled with other macro-level institutional discourses like journalism, academic theory and scholarship, and the populist language of everyday speech.)

One way of answering the question, “what is art,” is looking at what is constructed in the universe of discourses that forms the artworld. “Art” is the net result of the multiple discourses employed within the artworld for (1) describing, talking and arguing about, and referring to art objects and (2) for “art” as a general name for a category of objects. Artworld discourse, then, is a function of the artworld’s role in defining the cultural category of art and maintaining the art/non-art binary. “Art,” used both as a name or category as well as term for specific objects named or referenced within a set of statements or argument, does not pre-exist its appearance in discourse, but is constituted as such in the multiple tiers, styles, and contexts of artworld discourse. Making statements about art, then, follows the rules for statement-making within the discursive domain of an actual practice (for example, news writing, art history, museum curatorship).

The varieties of artworld discourse are themselves both highly professionalized and normalized (note the professional careers and compartmentalization of each writing sector as a discursive practice), and are embedded in institutions that authorize and transmit them (schools, the press and the sectors of the publishing and media industry, museums, galleries and commercial market contexts). Thus, curatorial, art critical, and art news discourses co-constitute artworks as such in exhibition spaces where culturally determined, institutionally sanctioned spaces present works and objects as art works for a receiving community. What we find at work is the ongoing multiple and simultaneous objectification of works presented and constructed as art works, objects that bear no inherent signs of their function or intention as art, but are constituted as such, through the forces, processes, and activities of objectification in artworld practices.

Consider how art discourses construct "art" as an object of knowledge and analysis

Foucault taught us that objects of knowledge are constituted through discourse, especially the disciplinary and professional discourses that create and circulate authority over certain domains of knowledge (examples: law, philosophy, history, physics, and here, "art"). Objects of knowledge do not pre-exist the discourses through which they are constructed and can appear to us as objects at all.

Foucault's break-through discovery first appeared in his book Les Mots et Les Choses (literally, "Words and Things" in French; English book title, The Order of Things): "things" as we know them and talk about them do not pre-exist "words," including the rules or grammars we follow in talking about "things." He was describing a form of network or systems theory: there is no "there" "there" outside a network of relationships. For those who know philosophy, this was a post-Kantian move opened up after structural linguistics. Also, following Kant, it was a Copernican revolution in ways of thinking about culture, language, power, and authority.

The cultural category of art is reinforced in several tiers, levels, or layers of publications and domains of discourse, each with an observable set of rules, grammars, and required and excluded vocabularies (for example, newspapers and journalistic art writing follow the rules of journalism and popular media, and exclude theoretical discourses and the terminology of academic theory to maintain the illusion of "art" as being accessible and still transparent to the middle class).

Observe: A network of tiered discourses, recognized hierarchies of styles, vocabularies, rules, “language games”

• Mainstream "Press" (baseline journalese)
  • the daily and weekly news press and journalistic art news coverage, print or Web
• Blogs and quoted popular discourse
• Independent weeklies and Websites
  • leaning toward hipster-speak, younger demographic; Voice, Phoenix, City Paper, etc.
• Weekly magazines that include art "coverage"
  • The major weekly magazines: New Yorker, New York, Time, Newsweek, Economist, New York Times Magazine, etc.
• Art magazines and monthly art press (and their websites)
  • Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Art Newspaper, Artnet: there are recognized tiers of discourse differentiating these publications
• Advertising in the magazines, press, and websites
  • consider the codes and styles of advertising as a discourse that parallels written discourse in constituting art as an object
• Museums: curatorial discourse in museum publications, catalogues, and exhibition texts
• Gallery publications, catalogs, press releases
  • Draws from other discourses, notably curatorial and descriptive journalese, mixed with business PR language
• Academic and scholarly books and articles
  • disseminate the theory and professional validations of the academic tier of art discourse
  • some tiers and distinctions among these: high theory, empirical/historical research, interdisciplinary theory crossing sociology, art history, media studies, visual culture studies.

Questions:

• How does the network of art journals, magazines, and news media criticism work to reinforce or produce "art" as the object or category in the artworld?
• Is there an ideology of "art" as an object of discourses (textual and visual)? What are the hierarchies of value and structure of power in the artworld that are served by art media discourse?
• How do the ads work (both for galleries and luxury goods)? How would you talk about advertising as a type of discourse for defining art?
• Roland Barthes observed in The Fashion System that the function of fashion (that is, the "fashion world," the industry, the discourse, the advertising, the texts with the photographs, the looks and branding) is not to sell specific fashion objects but to continually install and reinstall the category of "fashion" in as opposed to "clothing" of anything else. This is parallel to the "artworld system." Is this why W magazine and Artforum now look more and more the same?
• How is art encoded in the whole context of the publications, look and feel, association with wealth and prestige?

Some theoretical background:

Foucault on discourse and objects
[From The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), trans. London and New York: Routledge, 1972]

The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse, the historical conditions required if one is to 'say anything' about it...; the object does not await in limbo in the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations.
...
These relations are established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterisation...

[I]n all these searches, in which I have still progressed so little, I would like to show that 'discourses', in the form in which they can be heard or read, are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, coloured chain of words;... I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects.... A task that consists of not - of no longer treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.

Foucault documents and texts available at Foucault.info | Primary Texts]