80s Theory

Michael Bérubé named Douglas Crimp as an admirable practitioner of cultural studies. In the spirit of the controlled rant against the half-baked nature a certain kind of “80s Theory,” I beg to differ: I would say that Crimp’s critique represents yet another failed attempt to confront the cultural politics of the past two decades. In his influential 1993 book, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Crimp actually declares that “theory” would change the world. He wrote that the kind of AIDS activism in the art world that demanded “and end to the AIDS crisis” married practice and theory. Crimp really does insist that “post-modernist practice” and AIDS activism were critical antidotes to the institutionalization of an "exhausted" aesthetic. In the midst of the 80s and 90s theory euphoria Crimp writes, “It is as if the creative powers of modernism had migrated into theory and come to full self-consciousness in the poststructuralist text—the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the fall of dusk. Poststructuralism offers a theory of modernism characterized by Nachträglichkeit, both in the psychoanalytic and historical sense.” (Crimp, p. 23).

Wow. Can THEORY wash out stains and keep my colors bright? Leave my hair feeling shiny clean?

Crimp’s argument had a certain appeal in academia and as the discussion on Bérubé’s blog reminds me, to would-be leftists, tired of unfulfilled promises of the rebellion of the masses: BUT Crimp’s account fails to confront the way in which the modern museum has always been an institution involved with nation building, urbanism and most recently financial speculation. Right under his nose, the museum was morphing into yet another arm of financial speculation and business triumphalism. Museums such as the Tate, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York welcomed a class of new trustees onto its boards as Reagan and Thatcher cut public funding in order to promote government financed private donations in the form of tax cuts for the very rich. Museums became places where companies like Phillip Morris (today known as Altria) could improve brand appeal as their CEOs received insider tips on their collections. The new class of the very wealthy was entrepreneurial, interventionist and used to financial speculation. I’m getting this from Chin-Tao Wu’s fantastic book on the corporate sponsorship, museum culture and market speculation during the Reagan and Thatcher years. Chin-Tao Wu does the dirty work of understanding how the eighties and nineties saw the fading of the semi-feudal model of art patronage and state sponsorship and the rise of the government financed and backed marriage of art and finance.

Theory, as Crimp understood it, could do little to understand the kinds of forces at work in the new “synergy” between museums and business. And the AIDS crisis moved to sub-Saharan Africa.

I’m not blaming Crimp and Act-up for not putting an end to that crisis, I’m just wondering if in setting up such high expectations for both theory and direct action, Crimp, like many 80s theorists, completely lost sight of the bigger picture of history, economics as well as politics. (This is a very modified, blog-ready excerpt from a forthcoming article, “Art Escapes Criticism or Adorno’s Museum” to be published in Cultural Critique.)

More on this later.