Faith Chong is a senior majoring in Philosophy and Economics. This piece was adapted from an essay originally written for the class Wittgenstein and Literary Studies with Professor Toril Moi.
In 1989, a photograph took the art world by storm. In the image, a sturdy, Stetson-hat-donning cowboy rides atop a galloping white horse, backgrounded by the clear blue skies of the boundless Wild West. We don’t know where he is going, just that it is certainly somewhere glorious. The photograph reflects a uniquely American mythos: the archetypical cowboy, a man who kicks down saloon doors with brazen confidence, easily wins a bar fight in a town where he knows no one, and then heroically rides off into the sunset. In a time where real working cowboys were becoming elusive against a backdrop of modernization, it is no surprise that this image of idealized American masculinity proved attractive.
But this was no normal photograph. It was a “re-photograph” by the artist Richard Prince. Cropped and resized from a Marlboro cigarette advertisement on a highway billboard, the artwork—“Untitled (cowboy)”—quickly became controversial for its appropriation of another individual’s creative property. Technically, what Prince had done with the artwork was something anyone could have done. So why was he, as opposed to the “real” photographer, getting all the attention from the art world? Was this art, or just a glaring example of artistic fraudulence?
The question of fraudulence in modern art does not begin, or end, with Richard Prince’s “re-photographs.” In an era in which the artistic conventions of the past are dissipating, audiences are often confronted with the anxiety of forming their own aesthetic judgments, in the absence of reliable authority figures who can consistently distinguish between “art” and “non-art.” Artists also experience confusion as they become insecure of their own artistic merit. In this uncertain landscape, some major questions emerge: is fraudulence inextricable from modern art? Could the risk of fraudulence ever be embraced? I will investigate this crisis of meaning through an analysis of philosopher Stanley Cavell’s seminal essay, “Music Discomposed.”
In traditional art, creativity was enabled by convention. Access to art and information was relatively limited, and so artists relied on reworking familiar leitmotifs to generate original, yet recognizable, pieces of art. In “Music Discomposed,” Cavell cites ancient Chinese paintings as an example of improvisation within tradition. Artists worked within clear frameworks; recurring motifs like “sansui” featured a small meditative figure admiring a stunning landscape. They also had clear technical goals toward which they aspired: faced with the technical challenge of fully reflecting the experience of admiring mountainous regions on a scroll, artists developed the “shifting perspectives” technique. Convention established the criteria for success.
However, specific conditions of the modern era fundamentally disrupted this relationship to art, forming the impetus for modern art. Cavell diagnoses the modern era as one endlessly inundated with “slogans, sponsored messages, ideologies, psychological warfare, [and] mass projects,” causing the way we relate to art to change. He cites music as an example: music now embeds itself as background noise in our daily lives, with contexts spanning from the romantic (“kissing”) to the humdrum (“taking a shower”), and even the grotesque (“having your teeth drilled”). With music’s ubiquity in advertising, we have ironically conditioned ourselves to tune out much of what we listen to, as we direct our focus to catchy choruses specifically designed to maximize replayability value. The fact that we might hardly blink at the incongruity of hearing Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” during a wisdom teeth extraction reveals how we have become used to treating music as ambient noise, rather than an art demanding conscious attention and acknowledgment. As modernity has made our forms of life inexorably intertwined with the commercial, our criteria for approaching music have been stripped of meaning.
Disoriented by modernity, we find ourselves stuck in a paradox: while there are unlimited resources at our disposal to create any kind of art we desire, we are utterly lost on what art should mean to us. In other words, “the problem now is no longer how to do what you want, but to know what would satisfy you.” Convention no longer serves as an inherited framework for creating meaningful art–—it now detaches meaning from art, subordinating artistic intention to mass consumption. Thus, as Cavell writes, “nothing we now have to say, no personal utterance, has its meaning conveyed in the conventions and formulas we share.” This crisis of meaning is arguably the impetus for modern art.
Cavell suggests three possible responses to this crisis of meaning in modern art, each with their own drawbacks. First, there is the choice of silence. For example, John Cage’s famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) composition “4’33”” is a work of deliberate silence, in which musicians are instructed not to play their instruments for the titular amount of time (in three “movements”). In recordings of “4’33”” the only sounds come from whatever ambient noise happens to be emitted by chance during the performance. Cage cheekily turned ambient noise into music as a reaction to an era in which music is turned into ambient noise. A second response is a sort of nihilism—“deny[ing] the value of shared meaning altogether.” An instance of this is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Klavierstücke,” in which Stockhausen surrenders control over the final product to the performer by providing him or her nineteen musical fragments to spontaneously choose from during the performance. Finally, a third group creates hyper-personalized art, attempting to “communicate without the support of convention” and even to create a new kind of convention. For instance, Arnold Schoenberg eschewed traditional tonality to create his own twelve-tone system.
If we choose either of the first two responses, securing shared meaning seems difficult, if not impossible. Yet without this, the experience of art appears empty, almost like the cynical mass-messaging of modernity. How, then, can modern art escape a fate of isolation and nihilism? The path of hyper-personalization that Cavell suggests offers the only remaining way forward, for it at least preserves the possibility of communication to achieve shared understanding.
Hyper-personalization offers us hope, because it allows us to create our own kinds of conventions, reshaping our relationship with convention itself. Convention becomes no longer a “firm inheritance from the past, but a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand.” Now that the challenges of modernity have deprived us of the crutch of convention as we once knew it, convention must take on a new use for us: it must now be a way to continuously forge our own uncertain path ahead. Improvisation has been turned on its head: where it once operated strictly within the bounds of convention, it now must continuously rework and even transcend them, if we are to secure any meaning within the impulses of the modern era. Hyper-personalization entails the ultimate improvisation, a kind where we do not know what to expect, even from ourselves, but we must go on anyway.
While hyper-personalization presents itself as our main viable option for meaningful creation through improvisation in the modern era, it is not without risk. When an artist commits to any form of radically personal expression, she is essentially making a leap of faith that anyone will acknowledge what she has to say at all. The nature of this “acknowledgment” is profound, for it entails the recognition of the artist’s personhood, and her experience of human consciousness. If her artworks are overly alienating, however, she may fail “even to seem to communicate.”
This danger can also be interpreted as the risk of fraudulence, which is characterized by Cavell as “endemic” to contemporary music, and consequently modernism as a whole. The question of fraudulence begins when we wonder if anyone could have made a particular piece of art, and if it truly qualifies as art in the first place. It entails the question of whether a piece of art can be exposed as imitation, as opposed to an imitation. To elucidate this distinction, take for example the aforementioned piece “Untitled (cowboy).” It is certainly an imitation in the sense that it basically reproduces another artist’s work, with minimal editing. However, whether it is imitation is precisely the concern that strikes at the heart of the debate on whether Richard Prince is an artistic impostor. Unlike the process for detecting whether something is an imitation or a counterfeit, when it comes to detecting imitation, “there is no one feature, or definite set of features, which may be described in technical handbooks, and no specific tests by which its fraudulence can be detected and exposed.” The risk of fraudulence therefore mirrors one of the key existential issues of modernity: we no longer possess established criteria with which we may determine aesthetic success or genuineness.
Neither is exposing fraudulence a matter of formal logic: “there are no such proofs possible for the assertion that art accepted by a public is fraudulent.” The risk, and determination of fraudulence, is therefore wholly a problem of judgment. We cannot simply make these judgments by blind rule-following, because there are no such rules, and because the very nature of the endeavor requires that we open our eyes to the world. Exercising judgment is a matter of practice and experience through forms of life. Moreover, we must secure agreement in these judgments for a shared use of fraudulence and genuineness to be established, which in turn also require shared forms of life. Given the fluid nature of reality and human experience, there is thus no guarantee that we can come to a conclusion on fraudulence at all. Thus, our criteria surrounding fraudulence are precarious, like a thin veil over an abyss.
The risk of fraudulence is shared by both artist and audience. In fact, “the artist himself may not know” whether his work is fraudulent. It is not uncommon to hear of artists suffering from impostor syndrome, in which they question their own artistic merit. Cavell describes this experience as “the difficulties in a contemporary artist’s continuing to believe in his work, or mean it,” highlighting the sustained effort required on the artist’s part. Indeed, facing this risk requires a belief in one’s creations that could even border on delusion. Furthermore, in order to create in spite of this danger, artists must be able to accept that they may not be acknowledged by others, and “give up… the belief and response of his audience.”
Members of the audience themselves face the risk of fraudulence in an equally unnerving manner. When experiencing modern art without the crutch of shared conventions for aesthetic judgment, anxiety is almost inevitable. The responsibility for judging whether something is or is not art is now squarely pushed onto the viewers, and “the situation demands an explanation.” Yet, who, and how, are they to judge? Even the supposed authorities on the subject are lost themselves: “these professionals themselves do not quite know who is and who is not rightly included among their peers, whose work counts and whose does not. No wonder, then, that we outsiders don’t know.” Traditional artworks had clear metrics for technical mastery that the layperson could try to adopt, but when it comes to modern art, there is a dearth of guidance. Audiences begin to interpret the judgment of the art as a judgment of themselves, and thus “do not know which is on trial, the object or the viewer.”
As terrifying as the risk of fraudulence may be, what if both artist and audience embraced it, instead of trying to evade it? One must consider what the possibility of fraudulence itself could add to the experience of art. Firstly, by taking the risk of fraudulence seriously, audiences can develop a kind of shorthand, or know-how, for engaging with pieces of art outside their comfort zones. Since the nature of the “new” constantly evolves with the march of time, if audiences consistently defer to institutional validation, they are no different from previous generations. In other words, it will turn out that “the philistine audience cannot afford to admit the new; the avant garde audience cannot afford not to.” There is no real aesthetic judgment, for both groups are unhealthily dictated by the fear of fraudulence: where one group automatically rejects the new, the other automatically accepts it; where one group fears being duped by impostors, another fears exposure as an impostor. As a result, “no artist can test his work either by their rejection or their acceptance.” Such attitudes close an essential feedback loop between artist and audience, and perhaps more importantly deny the agency of the audience. What is essential from the audience instead is a degree of personal engagement, or “a willingness to trust the object, knowing that the time spent with its difficulties may be betrayed.” Therefore, the goal of confronting the risk of fraudulence is not to eliminate questioning, but to integrate it as an important part of the aesthetic experience.
On the artist’s part, the risk of fraudulence is part and parcel of the arrogation of voice. Technically, we only can speak for our own immediate experiences, and going beyond that inevitably risks fraudulence. That is why Cavell observes that “the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.” Yet, if we seek any hope of true acknowledgment, we must take the brave step of conferring ourselves the right to speak, even though we are clueless if what we say will resonate with others. While this intensely vulnerable act paradoxically requires us to free ourselves of the need for others’ approval, it is essentially our only chance of achieving shared meaning.
“Untitled (cowboy)” reflects the courage required of artists in taking on the risk of fraudulence. Richard Prince certainly knew that his method of “re-photographs” would attract, and even warrant, controversy. However, the risks he took ultimately paid off, as he succeeded in communicating without the support of convention. By replicating cowboy imagery from a cigarette advertisement, Prince made a statement on the insidiousness of mass replication itself, and so the very conditions of modernity that catalyzed the art he had created. Like how music is reduced to ambient noise via slogans and jingles, the gallant cowboy’s adventure was reduced to a picture on a highway that bleakly promoted tobacco, the very substance that caused the model in the photo to pass away prematurely. Cropping away the logo, while controversial, freed the cowboy from the constraints of the commercial context, and invited the audience to meditate on what the imagery of a cowboy meant to a changing America. Put differently, Prince embraced the risk of fraudulence to establish a new convention, thereby demonstrating the value of the arrogation of voice.
Hence we can see why such acts of radical self-expression are so powerful – they demand “absolute attention to one’s experience and absolute honesty in expressing it.” Prince’s work reflects that he is not just a passive consumer of mass media, but an active critic of it. It demonstrated vulnerability. As a result, some members of the audience may become able to perceive an aspect of their lived experience that they might not have fully paid attention to before, creating a genuine thread of connection between them and the artist.
In such a case, the question of fraudulence answers itself. Indeed, even a child could have done it, in the sense that merely cropping a photo is not difficult. The result from this is but “absurdly trivial,” and is in and of itself insufficient for determining fraudulence. Yet, as Cavell reminds us, “the problem is no longer how to do what you want.” Instead, “the problem is… of determining how a man could be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or satisfactory, how he can mean this.”
In this way, modern art foregrounds the intentions of the artist in a way traditional art does not. Without traditional convention nudging us toward technical analysis, the audience can fully focus their attention on what the work means both to themselves and the artist, and thereby determine if the two connect. The simplicity of Prince’s method thus is not in itself proof of fraudulence, even if such a notion were to exist. Rather, it is an invitation to the audience to ask pressing questions about meaning.
Furthermore, it should be noted that even as we investigate the meaning of Prince’s artwork, there is never a guarantee that we are not being overly charitable with his intentions (that we are putting clothes on the emperor, so to speak. The risk of fraudulence cannot be fully eradicated within a work of art—there is always a possibility, and sometimes a probability, that we are being fooled. Yet this does not negate the value of the search for meaning. Therefore, in order to adequately respond to the vulnerability of the audience, it is also the responsibility of the artist to approach her art not just with bravery, but with sincerity. Without traditional convention, a significant degree of shared meaning hinges upon the authenticity of the artist’s intentions. Notably, this is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for genuineness; Cavell does not suggest that “sincerity proves anything in particular.” After all, an artist may with full sincerity produce an artwork that utterly alienates any member of the audience. Moreover, the artist must also possess the self-awareness to recognize when he is not being sincere, or cannot find a subject to be sincere about. For example, the line between imitation and an imitation may finally be crossed if a different artist decides to emulate Prince’s exact idea with the sole intent of copying (though depending on the statement she wishes to make, perhaps the line may not be crossed at all). Nevertheless, without using sincerity as a starting point, the experience of shared meaning may be rendered impossible. That is why Cavell states: “The task of the modern artist, as of the modern man, is to find something he can be sincere and serious in; something he can mean.”
In many ways, “Untitled (cowboy)” reflects the uncanny experience of modern art. Both the cowboy and art must assert their own existence in the face of modernity that threatens to reduce them to mere imagery. Just as the mythological cowboy must venture forth into uncharted territory, the experience of modern art requires both artist and audience to make a brave step into the unknown. Similar to how a cowboy kicks down saloon doors in a town where he is nothing but a stranger, artists must draw upon the arrogation of voice to facilitate acknowledgement by their audience, to whom they are mostly unknown. Akin to how the cowboy experiences intense danger on his path, both artist and audience risk fraudulence, being exposed yet unacknowledged. Finally, to ultimately have any chance at riding off happily into the sunset, improvisation – both within and beyond old conventions – and sincerity are pretty much required.
Where we had once lost sight of the artist’s intentions and the audience’s direct engagement in the whirl of modern mass media, we now find an opportunity for genuine connection in modern art, therefore revealing the reason for art’s existence. Indeed, as Cavell finely summarizes, “modernism lays bare the condition of art altogether.” While this pursuit is not without risk, it is worth taking that bold step forward.
By Faith Chong
