malcolm bull

THE DECLINE OF DECADENCE

Violet: Have you chosen a topic for your paper?
Fred: Uh, The Decline of Decadence.
Violet: You think decadence has declined?
Fred: Definitely. Big time. Major, major decline.
Whit Stillman, Damsels in Distress (2011)

as fred right? Take a look at Figure 1, below. It is a

graph showing the frequency of the occurrence of the
words decadence or decadent in editorials and letters
in The Times of London by decade, from the 1840s to
2009. It is a potentially useful data set, not only because it permits likefor-like comparisons across almost two centuries, but also because it is
in these columns of The Thunderer that one might expect to find writers railing against the decadence of the age in which they live. The graph
shows that the incidence rises steadily from the mid-nineteenth century
to the 1890s and remains high until the Second World War, when it
descends to a lower plateau, only to fall again in the 1980s.

Figure 1: Decadence or decadent in The Times, by decade

100
80
60
40
20
0
1840s

1860s

1880s

1900s

1920s

1940s

1960s

new left review 94 july aug 2015

1980s

83

2000s

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A year-by-year analysis of the data since 1900 (Figure 2) provides some

revealing detail. There are peaks before the First World War, in 1910
and 1913; at the time of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and again in
1939, immediately before the Second World War. A testimony to the
prescience of leader-writers and readers alike? Not necessarily. In 1939,
there is much discussion of British national decadence, but in 1929
it is the decadence of the tin industry, of fishing, agriculture, the telegraphic service, the design of postage stamps, the music on the bbc,
the national football teamnot to mention the decadence of learning in
the fourteenth centurythat preoccupies both editors and readers. Even
in 1913, talk is of the decadence of the Chinese, of the London theatre, of
modern art and poetry, of sport, of the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless,
in retrospect, the collective vocabulary of The Timess editorial and letters
pages seems to indicate something that individual contributors never
seek to statesome sense that things may be falling apart, that the
centre cannot hold.
If so, what are we to make of the fact that after the Second World War,
decadence is never as salient again? Theres an upturn in the chatter in
the late 60s and early 70s, but after that it drops to a murmur. The Times
was not published for a year in 1979, and from 1981 there is a new editor and a new proprietor, but the downward trend predates these events.
By the late 1970s, talk of decadence had already dropped to levels not
seen since the 1860s. And it has never recovered since. It is still possible
to find correspondents complaining about the ferocious decadence of
the government in promoting lgbt education in schools, but talk of
decadence has in general moved off the editorial and letters pages to the
lifestyle section. You are more likely to find a celebrity chef describing
the best way to make a decadent bittersweet chocolate and cardamom
tart than an editorial about the decadence of contemporary culture or
political institutions.1 By this measure at least, Fred is right. Decadence
has declined, major, major decline. But why?
There is no easy answer, but looking at a much larger but less focused
body of the data, the Google n-gram (Figure 3) for decadence and decadent across two centuries, it is apparent that the changing vocabulary of
The Timess letters and editorials reflects a wider phenomenon. In the
books in Googles database, the use of decadent continues to rise while
1

Andrew Schofield, letter, 11 March 2009; Gordon Ramsay, 4 April 2009.

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Figure 2: Decadence or decadent in The Times, by year

20

1939

1913
1929

15

10

1966

0
1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Figure 3: Decadence and decadent in Google Ngrams: English

0.00035
0.00030
0.00025
0.00020

decadence

0.00015
decadent

0.00010
0.00005
0
1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

that of decadence, with its historically specific links to the Decadent

movement of the 1890s, decreases after the First World War; but usage
of both falls from the Second World War onwards, except for the 1960s
uptick in decadence (also discernible in the data from The Times). The
1970s represent a final turning point, with both decadence and decadent
declining sharply to a level from which they have never since recovered.
From these graphs, it appears that one possible answer to the question
of why decadence declines might be the rise of neoliberalism, for talk of
decadence trails off in the 1970s just as the economics of neoliberalism
take holda change consolidated by the 1976 imf bailout in the uk and
the 1979 Volcker Shock in the us. And there are reasons for thinking

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this could be significant. Since the mid-nineteenth century there have

been two overarching narratives of decay in Western society: the decline
of capitalism and the decadence of the arts. And though only Marxist
critics of capitalist decadence insisted on making a direct link between
the two, the narratives appeared to run in parallel, with the economic
depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s together marking two upswings
in the discourse. Each of these downturns was associated not just with
analysis and commentary on economic decline, but also a large volume
of cultural criticism on artistic decadence. On this interpretation, there
would seem to be an inverse relationship between decadence and capital
growth, and so the resurgence of capitalism might be expected to have
suppressed the chatter once more.
But that cannot be the whole story. It is true that, for three decades,
discussion of both forms of collapse almost ceased as the fall of
Communism and the triumph of neoliberalism generated utopian fantasies of a global network culture fuelled by the new economy. Since the
financial crisis of 2008, that confidence has seemed misplaced. And yet
the rhetoric of cultural pessimism has not re-established itself. In 2008
there was no upturn in the talk of decadence in the editorials and letters pages of The Times such as there had been in 1913, 1929, and 1939.
Somehow, the triumph of neoliberalism appears not merely to have suppressed talk of decadence but to have permanently uncoupled it from the
fortunes of the capitalist economy.

From Nietzsche to Jameson

How might this have happened? It is helpful to look more closely at
one particular strand in the discourse of decadenceused by Marxist
critics and cultural conservatives alikethat sees decadence in terms of
cultural disintegration. The classic statement of this view can be found
in Nietzsches The Wagner Case (1888):
What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in
the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the
sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains
life at the expense of the wholethe whole is no longer a whole. But this is
the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, the
disgregation of the will, freedom of the individual . . . 2

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, New York 1967, p. 170.

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The analogy between the disintegration of the text and the atomization of
society was not original to Nietzsche, but taken directly from the French
novelist and critic Paul Bourget, who had picked up the cellular theory of
society from mid-nineteenth century scientists and applied it to literature
in his 1881 essay on Baudelaire.3 Both Bourget and Nietzsche characterized this atomization as a breakdown of hierarchy. But organicist theories
of sociology were not the preserve of political conservatives. They lent
themselves equally to socialist interpretation.4 In Marxism too, decadence
was understood as an excess of individualism. Plekhanov, for example,
argued that in the era of bourgeois decadence people had lost all capacity
of communication with other people and the idea that there is no reality
save our ego had become the theoretical foundation of the new aesthetics. In his view, this art was characteristic of the decay of a whole system
of social relationships, and . . . therefore quite aptly called decadent.5
Acknowledging Nietzsche as the cleverest and most versatile exponent of
this decadent self-knowledge, Georg Lukcs developed his own account
of decadence in similar terms.6 Whereas great literature shows individuals interacting with each other, and with society, in decadent literature
every character has a particularized, isolated and unique existence from
which there can be no bridge of communication to other men.7 The
human type portrayed is the individual, egoistic bourgeois isolated artificially by capitalism, whose consciousness is an individual isolated
consciousness la Robinson Crusoe.8 In these circumstances, dialogue
is not the expression of encounters between people, but rather shows
how men talk past each other without actually communicating.9
The epigraph to Lukcss essay The Intellectual Physiognomy in
Characterization (1936) is a quotation from Heraclitus: Awake, men
have a common world, but each sleeper reverts to his own private world.
Reprinted in Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, Paris 1883. For further background, see Matei Clinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, nc 1987,
pp. 149221.
4
As Durkheim quotes Edmond Perrier as saying, a community of polyps in which
one cannot eat without the others is Communism in the fullest sense of the word:
Division of Labour, London 1984, p. 140.
5
Georgi Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, London 1957, pp. 201, 204.
6
Lukcs, The Destruction of Reason, London 1980, p. 316.
7
Lukcs, Writer and Critic, London 1970, pp. 150, 169.
8
Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, London 1971, p. 135.
9
Lukcs, Writer and Critic, p. 174.
3

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The basis of all great literature is this common world of men, so writers
must rouse themselves:
To portray what men have in common emotionally and intellectually in
general experience and in their personal lives and finally to awaken them
from the sleep of decadence in which each man revolves in his private
world, in his own narrow impoverished subjectivity.10

Lukcss emphasis on the privatization of experience influenced later

generations of Marxist critics as well, and Fredric Jameson united it
with the Wittgensteinian term private language in his characterization
of modernism. In Fables of Aggression, his study of Wyndham Lewis,
he argues that in the Anglo-American context modernists set out to
reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal
styles and private languages, only to reconfirm the very privatization
and fragmentation of social life against which they meant to protest.11
This proliferation of private languages and private philosophies reflects
the disintegration of traditional values that Jameson elsewhere links
more specifically to the atomizing effects of capitalism.12 However,
Jameson distances himself from Lukcss notorious concept of decadence, on the basis that it implies works of art . . . are conceivable which
have no content. Modernism did not so much avoid social content as
conceal it out of sight in the very form itself. The greatest aesthetic
productions of capitalism therefore turn out to be the cries of pain of
isolated individuals against the operation of trans-individual laws, the
invention of so many private languages and subcodes in the midst
of reified speech. Rather than being contentless, the fragmented forms
of modernism reveal a social malaise. When we dissolve the reification
of the great modernist works we return them to their original reality as
the private languages of isolated individuals in a reified society.13
This emphasis re-emerged on both sides of the political spectrum in the
debate about postmodernism, which many saw as awash in a sea of private
languages.14 Daniel Bell identified the new era as the coming of a postindustrial society, in which high art itself is in disarray, if not decadent.
Lukcs, Writer and Critic, pp. 161, 1878.
Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression, Berkeley 1979, p. 2.
12
Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 1, London and New York 1988, p. 125.
13
Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2, p. 138; vol. 1, pp. 1489; vol. 1, p. 179.
14
Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, London 1985, p. xii.
10
11

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And although he did not explicitly identify it as the cause of decadence,

he argued that specialization created so much tension between culture
and society that it had become difficult even to speak of the culture when
there were so many sub-cultures or private worlds which in turn created
private languages and private signs and symbols.15
Jameson too took his essentially Lukcsian analysis of modernism with
him into his analysis of postmodernism. But though Jameson makes
much the same diagnosis as Bell, he does not identify the outcome as
decadence. In postmodernity,
the immense fragmentation and privatization of modern literatureits
explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerismsforeshadows
deeper and more general tendencies in social life as a whole . . . each group
coming to speak a curious private language of its own . . . each individual
coming to be a linguistic island, separated from everyone else. But then in
that case the very possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one
could ridicule private languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, and
we would have nothing but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity.16

For Jameson, the disappearance of the shared norm must be taken seriously; if there is no norm, there is nothing against which decadence can
be measured, and so the claim that the culture has become decadent
because it has lost its bearings is necessarily meaningless.
So where does that leave the concept of decadence? Jameson concedes
that decadence is in some ways the very premonition of the postmodern
itself, and that postmodernity could pass for ripely decadent in the
eyes of any sensible Martian observer. But he maintains that because
postmodernity lacks the sense of the normativity of the past which the
moderns still possessed, the concept of decadence has lost its raison
dtre. It rather compels by its absence, like a smell nobody mentions,
until such time as it fades away and is no longer available for characterizing our reactions to the postmodern.17
The argument is never systematically articulated, but it is worth examining further. If each individual were to become a linguistic island,
Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York 1976, pp. 136, 95.
Jameson, The Cultural Turn, London 1998, p. 5.
17
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991,
pp. 382, 377, 383.
15

16

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separated from everyone else, what would be the consequences for the
culture? Would it, as Jameson claims, become meaningless to think in
such terms at all, or might there be other ways of co-ordinating these
private codes and idiolects?

Private languages of conceptual art

The references to private language in both Bell and Jameson highlight
the way in which the concern with specialization, social isolation and
solipsism so evident in Lukcss discussions of decadence in the 1930s
was now fed by another source, Wittgensteins remarks on private language from the Philosophical Investigations (1953). This had shifted the
emphasis from the highly personal to the logically private, and within
the avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 70s, there was at least one
movement, conceptual art, that self-consciously played with the latter
as an expression of the modernist impulse toward the former. This
makes conceptualism a particularly interesting test case for theories of
decadence based on privatization. By no means all conceptual art was
immaterial, or devoid of publicly accessible content, but within conceptual art practice, as nowhere else, it seemed possible that artists might
indeed become linguistic islands.
In a long article entitled Art Teaching published in the fourth issue of
Art-Language (1971), Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin (two of the
founding members of the Art & Language group) described how this
worked in the context of the average British art school at the time:
An art student X does some work
And this is an object
A teacher Y says this is good
Now X may not be aware of this aspect of the object that Y judges
to be good, and Y himself may not be too clear as to why he judges
the object good.
[So] Y adds something like . . . thats the magic in art.18

The exchange might serve as an example of how, in Lukcss words, people talk past each other without actually communicating. But in the
art school, according to Atkinson and Baldwin, it is assumed either that
everyone can more or less know what everyone else means by these
18

Atkinson and Baldwin, Art Teaching, Art-Language, vol. 1, no. 4, 1971, p. 34.

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terms, or else, given that it is far from certain that they do, that one
need not know what others mean by these terms and that this is the
essence of art. However, to hold the latter view would be to commit oneself to the idea that the public character of the art-educational domain
can be realized through dialogues that are no more than an exchange of
private languages. And this, Atkinson and Baldwin contend, is ridiculous, for (after Wittgenstein) it is clear that the idea of a private language
is itself absurd.19
Rosalind Krauss made a very similar point a couple of years later in
an Artforum article that tried to differentiate post-minimalism from
conceptualism and establish the former as the heir to the minimalist
(and modernist) legacy. Though dematerialization was common to both,
Krauss argued that it was over the notion of privacy or private languages
that the division between these artists [the conceptualists] and minimal/
post-minimal art arises. The former betray a deeply planted traditionalism with respect to meaning which involves the construction of the
work of art around the notion of intention in such a way that it points
directly inward: to the privacy of a mental space. That is what is implied
by Rauschenbergs telegram saying This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say
it is, just as much as by Douglas Hueblers claim that its perfectly fair
to say that time is what each of us says it is at any given moment.20
In fact, the privacy involved in conceptual art extended beyond meaning
and intention to the very existence of the work itself. Robert Barrys work
Closed Gallery (1969) was composed solely of invitations (to gallery shows
in Amsterdam, Turin and la) which stated that During the exhibition
the gallery will be closed. Even less tangible was Barrys contribution to
the exhibition Prospect 69 which, as he explained in an interview, consisted of the ideas that people will have from reading this interview,
with the result that Each person can really know that part which is in
his own mind. And more inaccessible still was Barrys Telepathic Piece
(1969): During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a
work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image.21
Atkinson and Baldwin, Art Teaching, pp. 356.
Krauss, Sense and Sensibility, Artforum, vol. 12, November 1973, pp. 456.
21
Krauss, Sense and Sensibility, p. 45; Robert Barry quoted in Alexander Alberro,
Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, ma 2001, p. 207 fn 22.
19

20

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What the conceptualists appeared to be doing, albeit with a knowing sense

of irony, was acting out the solipsism and indifference to communication that Marxist critics had long attributed to the decadent productions
of capitalist culture more generally. But, thanks to Wittgenstein, there
was now a philosophical as well as a political argument against such
practices, for his model had, according to Krauss, severed meaning
from the legitimizing claims of a private self, undermining the very
idea that there must be a private mental space . . . in which meanings
and intentions have to exist before they could issue into the space of the
world. Unlike the conceptualists, minimalist and post-minimalist artists
had absorbed the implications of Wittgensteins argument, and committed themselves to exploring the externality of language and therefore of
meaning. The real achievement of Frank Stellas paintings was, Krauss
claimed, to have made meaning itself a function of surfaceof the
external, the public, or a space that is in no way a signifier of the a priori,
or of the privacy of intention.22

Secondary information
As it turned out, exploring the externality of language was not the only
option. Private languages that lacked externality themselves could be
represented by other means. As Carl Andre once said: The beef stew
cooking on the stove doesnt need any advertising. It has advertising. It
has aroma. You can smell the beef stew on the stove. But the beef stew in
the can has to be advertised. And this, as the gallerist Seth Siegelaub realized, was what was needed for the private languages of conceptualism:
When someone painted a painting what had been done and what you saw
were the same thing . . . it was all there in front of you . . . With a painting on the wall, the art and the presentation of it is the same. But with
conceptual art, the presentation of the art and the art are not the same
thing. What this meant in practice was a separation between the art, or
the primary information, and its presentation, the secondary information. In this way, even private languages could have a public face.23
There were different ways of doing this. Barrys Inert Gas Series, in which
the artist went out into the California desert and released inert gases into
the atmosphere, was represented by a mailshot with a poster giving the
title of the work, and an address and telephone number. The address
22
23

Krauss, Sense and Sensibility, pp. 479.

Alberro, Conceptual Art, pp. 6, 556.

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was a po box in la, and the telephone number an answering-service

voice message describing the work. The exhibition was therefore split
between the release of the gases (invisible and virtually inaccessible) and
its presentation as an ephemeral audio recording and a publicity poster.
The exhibition was accessible to the public solely in the form of advertising, as pure sign.24
A more fundamental way of translating the private into the public was
through making a sale. This approach had already been used by Yves
Klein for his Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959), in which
the artist sold one of these immaterial zones for gold with a receipt that
proved that a formal sale had taken place. Each buyer had two options:
if they kept the receipt, Klein kept all of the gold, and the buyer did not
acquire the authentic immaterial value of the work; if the receipt was
ritually burnt, the buyer would be left without proof of purchase, Klein
would throw the gold into the Seine, and a more definitive immaterialization would be achieved.25 Between 1959 and 1962 eight such zones
were sold, five without the ritual and three of them with.
Advertising, documentation and sale were not mutually exclusive strategies. But of the three, it is the last that is the most surprising, as it
involved acquiring legal rights to things that had no tangible existence,
and which, in some cases, could never be shown to have existed at all.
In many cases, the only visible aspect of the work was a certificate of
authenticity and ownership on a piece of paper.26 Nevertheless, the
market for conceptual art developed quickly. As Lucy Lippard noted,
although in 1969 it seemed that no one . . . would actually pay money, or
much of it for a Xerox sheet referring to an event passed or never directly
perceived. Three years later, the major conceptualists [were] selling work
for substantial sums here in Europe.27
Although they were, in some cases, quite literally paying money for nothing, buying conceptual art brought a lot of satisfaction to the enterprising
early collectors. Barrys Closed Gallery was acquired by Herb and Dorothy
Vogel, who boasted that We have without a doubt the greatest piece of
Alberro, Conceptual Art, p. 118.
See Thierry de Duve, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein,
Duchamp, Chicago 2012, pp. 3757.
26
Alberro, Conceptual Art, p. 120.
27
Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Berkeley 1997, p. xxi.
24
25

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conceptual art that was ever done in the world.28 Giving the work a monetary value also proved to be an effective way of ensuring that collectors
did not throw away their acquisitions and kept conceptual work in circulation. A secondary market developed, and Barrys Closed Gallery was
subsequently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
For some of the artists, particularly those associated with Art & Language,
this development appeared ambivalent. Ian Burn complained that market values were distorting all other values, so that even the concept of
what is and is not acceptable as work is defined first and fundamentally
by the market. As a result, the artist became alienated from his work:
Once entering the market it becomes foreign to mebut without the
market I dont recognize it, because it is defined via the market which
I have internalized.29
The paradox that the artist depended on the market not just to sell
the work, but also to define it, preoccupied another member of Art &
Language, Mel Ramsden:
This is the mode of existence in which we become prices on the mediamarket, in which we become commodities, a mode of existence in which
what counts is the demand for what the market defines as your talents . . .
The products may change . . . but the form of life remains the same: the
ruling market provides the standard of intelligibility. One question to raise
about this standard of intelligibility is whether market relations are really
separate from what we do? That is to say, just how far has market-standing
been internalized.30

But how exactly do you price an invisible artwork? Indeed, how do you
know it is an artwork at all? A work whose content cannot be communicated, like Ramsdens Secret Painting (The content of this painting is
invisible; the character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the artist) of 19678, and purchased by
the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2003, exemplifies the problem
posed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations:
Anthony Haden-Guest, A New Art World Legend, New York Magazine, 28
April 1975.
29
Ian Burn, The Art Market (1975), in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds,
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 327.
30
Mel Ramsden, On Practice (1975), in Alberro and Stimson, eds, Institutional
Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Cambridge, ma 2009, p. 171.
28

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If you say he sees a private picture before him, which he is describing, you
have still made an assumption about what he has before him . . . If you
admit that you havent any notion what kind of thing he has before him
then what leads you into saying, in spite of that, that he has something
before him? Isnt it as if I were to say of someone: He has something, but I
dont know whether it is money, or debts, or an empty till.31

It is another way of describing the problem posed by Siegelaub. But if

art and presentation arent the same kind of thing, what is the difference
between them? And what is the connection?
In an interview in 1971, Art & Language interpreted the private/public dichotomy in terms of Marxs theory of value, claiming that Marxs
categories of use value and exchange value can transform the production of art by pitting private use (private language) (use value) against
public use (exchange value).32 They had good grounds for aligning the
Wittgensteinian terminology of private and public languages with the
Marxist concepts of use value and exchange value, for in both cases the
argument hinges on the potential creativity of an isolated Robinson
Crusoe figure. In Capital, Robinson is described as generating value
which can be worked out simply by collating the objects of utility he has
produced with the labour time necessary for their production. According
to Marx, those relations contain all the essential determinants of value
and provide the model for an association of free men, working with the
means of production held in common.33 In this context, making private
could be seen as a return to use value and the socialized production of utilitya way of defeating the market. And yet, as Ramsden acknowledged a
few years later, the opposite turned out to be true. It was the market that
was giving value to private languages by making them intelligible.

The market for private language

Art & Language were not the only ones to note the similarities between
Wittgensteins private language argument and economic theories of
value. In Vienna after the First World War, Robinson Crusoe, the individual isolated consciousness, stood for three seemingly distinct problems:
in Marxist literary criticism, the problem of decadence; in philosophy,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 294.
Catherine Millet, Interview with Art-Language (1971), in Alberro and Stimson,
eds, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, p. 264.
33
Karl Marx, Capital, London 1976, pp. 1701.
31

32

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the problem of private language; and in economics, the problem of

market co-ordination. As Saul Kripke first pointed out, there is an obvious analogy between the private language argument and Ludwig von
Misess socialist calculation argument.34 In Economic Calculation in the
Socialist Commonwealth (1920) Mises had argued (against the Marxist
Otto Neurath) that even Robinson Crusoe cannot operate solely with
subjective use value because valuation can only take place in terms of
units, and it is impossible that there should ever be a unit of subjective use value for goods.35 Subjective use value is neither calculable nor
comparable as a purely individual phenomenon; it becomes so only in
exchange value, which arises out of the interplay of the subjective valuations of all who take part in exchange.36
It is perhaps in this context that the paradox of conceptualism should
be interpreted, because it helps to explain how, contrary to the expectations of those involved, private languages turned into exchange values.
Artists may have thought that in using private languages they were creating subjective use values, but insofar as those languages were private
they proved to be unrecognizable, even to their creators:
Once entering the market it becomes foreign to mebut without the market I
dont recognize it.
Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, London 1982, p. 122, fn 89.
Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Auburn,
al 1990, p. 9. In Durch die Kriegswirtschaft zur Naturalwirtschaft (1919), Otto
Neurath had argued that socialist economic planning could operate on the basis
of calculation in kind. However, he later accepted a version of Misess argument
not in his economic theory but in his philosophical essays, Physicalism (1931)
and On Protocol Sentences (1932), where, in a precursor to Wittgensteins private language argument, he argues that a Robinson Crusoe cannot self-verify his
own protocol sentences but must use clocks and rulers, in other words intersensual and intersubjective language: Neurath, Philosophical Papers, Dordrecht
1983, pp. 545. Ironically, Marx and Engels influenced Neurath here, for he twice
noted the statement in The German Ideology that language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men and for that reason alone it really exists for me
personally as well. See Thomas Uebel, Overcoming Logical Positivism, Amsterdam
1992, pp. 2623.
36
Mises, Economic Calculation, p. 10. The early Marx might actually have agreed
with Mises on this point. For in 1859 he had argued that Production by a solitary
individual outside society . . . is just as preposterous as the development of speech
without individuals who live together and talk to one another: A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, London 1971, p. 189.
34
35

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Following the economic analogy, it can be argued that taking something

to market potentially provides a lot of information about a work of art
that would otherwise not exist. In the case of an invisible painting, for
example, the market may not reveal what it looks like, but it will tell you
how much it is worth compared to other paintings, both visible and invisible. That price will embody market assumptions about the nature of the
work, providing the standard of intelligibility to which Ramsden refers.
Indeed, if the work is otherwise inaccessible, its exchange value may be
the only information available about it. We may in fact sometimes need
the market to tell us whether a work exists or whether it is art. Without
the market we would not know how many Zones of Immaterial Pictorial
Sensibility there are.
The situation is easily caricatured. Andrea Fraser, in her 1991 performance piece May I HelpYou?, plays the role of a gallery staffer walking
round an exhibition of Allan McCulloms Surrogate Paintings, saying to
a prospective client:
You know, some people come in here and they want to invest and then they
havent got the time. Imagine! They havent got the time to be personally
interested.
On the one hand investment and on the other, total incompetence.
If you stuck a piece of shit on the wall it would be all the same to them
as long as someone told them the shit was worth money. Thats the
nouveau-riche approach.37

But what Fraser calls the nouveau-riche approach is not necessarily irrational. If someone says somethings worth money, then thats the price,
which tells you what someone is willing to pay for it, and so registers
information about size, medium, authorship, subject, style, date, quality of execution and preservation, provenance, and so on. Price alone
does not reproduce specific information of this kind, but it is sensitive
to whatever is known, or assumed, about all of these things, and anything else that might conceivably be of relevance. Thus price is liable to
include more information about the work than any one person is likely
to have at their disposal, including a great deal of information that would
be unavailable on visual inspection.
Andrea Fraser, May I help you? [performance script]: available at artarchives.net/
artarchives/frasertexts.html.

37

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It is not just that, as so often in art, aesthetic value and price are entangled in an ongoing dialectic, whose unravelling can only partially be
accomplished.38 In cases where the work is either, of its very nature,
unavailable for inspection, or of a kind that yields little to the eye (or
the other senses), price may actually be the best lens through which to
view it. As Hayek and his followers argue, the most significant fact about
the price system is how little the individual participants need to know
in order to be able to take the right action.39 And not only is very little
knowledge required, but that knowledge may be of an unformalizable
kind, contextual knowledge that cannot be put in language. In this way,
price is a form of communication that might even be said to surpass the
limits of language, by aggregating and communicating tacit and contextual knowledge in the absence of linguistic information.40
Perhaps conceptualism turned to the market because the market was
the form of communication best suited to generating a language for it.
Although private languages cannot be communicated, because their
meanings can never be established, the market potentially provides a
medium for exchange of the meaninglesslike people buying and selling boxes with beetles in them. No one is in a position to know what a
beetle actually is, but the price of the box will communicate the markets assumptions about whats in it, which is not only all thats needed
for an exchange to take place, but as close as anyone will get to discovering what they have in their own box as well.

Interpreting conceptualism
In a famous critique, Benjamin Buchloh argued that by effacing all residues of representation and style, of individuality and skill, conceptual
art had paradoxically transferred judgement from the sphere of aesthetics to that of administration:
In the absence of any specifically visual qualities and due to the manifest
lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction, all the
traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment . . . have been programmatically
38
Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for
Contemporary Art, Princeton 2007, p. 178.
39
Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review, vol. 35,
no. 4, 1945, September 1945, p. 526.
40
Steven Horwitz, Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication
Process, Review of Social Economy, vol. 50, no. 2, 1992, pp. 206, 212.

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voided. The result of this is that the definition of the aesthetic becomes on
the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of
power rather than taste).41

In other words, the very radicality of the critique enacted in conceptualism created a lack that could only be filled by something external to it, a
vacuum that was filled by institutions which served to align art with the
instrumental rationality of administration.
Oddly, Buchloh makes no mention of the art market, but other writers
described the same developments in market terms. Krauss, reflecting
many years later on Marcel Broodthaerss Department of Eagles exhib
ition of 1972, noted the way in which the artists manic labelling of
every object in the exhibition with a figure number reduced everything,
irrespective of medium or function, to a system of pure equivalency
by the homogenizing principle of commodification, the operation of
pure exchange value from which nothing can escape.42 And writing
from a more conservative cultural position, Donald Kuspit identified
the key difference between modern and postmodern art as the transformation of the artist into an aesthetic manager. Whereas the former
gave expression to unconscious feeling, the aesthetic manager . . . packages exchange value under the guise of making art. In which case, the
final confirmation that one is an artist is that your aesthetic product is
marketablesells . . .43
But rather than being a reduction or an intrusion of market values
into the realm of the aesthetic (as Krauss and Kuspit claim), the reliance on exchange value can be seen as the solution to the problem of
private language that Krauss herself identified in the early 1970s. The
artist, in the position of a Robinson Crusoe who cannot value his own
produce, sells work on the market as a way of making it public, of
41
Benjamin Buchloh, Conceptual Art 196269: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions, October, vol. 55, 1990, pp. 143, 1178.
42
Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition,
London 1999, p. 15.
43
Donald Kuspit, Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries, New York 2000, pp. 1501. In his
essay Art is DeadLong Live Aesthetic Management, Kuspit uses Warhol as the
example of an aesthetic manager, but sees the struggle between the creative artist
and the aesthetic manager continuing in the division between the German NeoExpressionists and the American Conceptualists (p. 138).

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exploring the externality of language. To make meaning a function of

price turns it away from the privacy of intention just as effectively as
making it a function of surface (as Krauss claimed that Stella and the
post-minimalists had done).
Whereas Buchloh presents the institutionalization of the aesthetic as the
unintended consequence of the dematerialization of the art object, this
analysis suggests that reliance on exchange value as a form of secondary
information may be the inevitable outcome of the privatization of primary information. The double bind of conceptualism was that making
publicly accessible work appeared to invite the attention of the market,
but making work private made it accessible only to the market. Rather
than leaving solipsists isolated, unable to find a common language or to
communicate with each other, the market provided a means of aggregating what little could be gleaned from these would-be private linguists
and communicating it back to them in the form of price. In avant-garde
practice, privatization led to marketization.
If so, this suggests an alternative explanation for the decline of decadence. Lukcs maintained that the highly personal preoccupations of the
modernists were solipsistic and presaged the breakdown of all communication. The conceptualists demonstrated how this might happen, and
yet the critique of decadence lost traction at the very point its expectations were realized. Jameson argues that in postmodernism the concept
of decadence became irrelevant because there was no longer a norm
against which it could be judged.44 But in conceptualism, which is often
seen as the hinge between artistic modernism and the postmodern,45
the absence of traditional norms had the effect of deferring authority
to something outside of the practice itself, not so much institutional
authority (as Buchloh argued) as the authority of the market, which used
a measure, price, that was not a fixed norm but rather a variable one.
In practice, art that might be considered decadent (i.e. whose meaning
or existence is difficult to verify) was, and has remained, comparatively
However, Jameson does acknowledge that in postmodernism the cultural and
the economic . . . collapse into one another and say the same thing . . . it seems
to obligate you in advance to talk about cultural phenomena at least in business
terms: Postmodernism, p. xxi.
45
Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Reflections on Art &
Language, Chicago 2003, p. 35.
44

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cheap. As Robert Smithson noted at the time, when galleries and

museums are forced to make cuts, they need a cheaper product . . . and
compared to isolated objects, isolated ideas in the metaphysical context
of a gallery offer . . . an aesthetic bargain.46 So rather as the declining
stocks called fallen angels were repackaged as junk bonds in the 1970s,
what might once have been considered decadent art became cheap
art, which was attractive to those with limited budgets and an appetite
for risklike the Vogels, who bought conceptual art on low municipal
salaries. As the painter John Currin remarked in an interview after the
2008 financial crash: What the hell else is a work of conceptual art but
a securitized idea?47
This helps to explain why decadence starts to decline at just the point
when private languages acquire exchange value. Price may not be a very
satisfactory proxy for meaning, but it provides a simpler and more objective measure for whatever decline in meaning the concept of decadence
had sought to register. Cultural decadence has long been compared and
contrasted with economic decline, but if the decadence is a form of privatization for which the market can assign a price, then there is no sense
in distinguishing cultural decadence (the privatization of meaning) from
economic decline, because the former can be expressed as a variable of
the latter. In conceptualism, art posed a philosophical problem for the
market to solve, and the market solved it by discounting the price.

The undecadent
Where does this leave the question of decadence? On this view, the market
is an effective way of sharing the reality of the absence of a shared reality,
for it substitutes price for (the absence of) common consciousness. It may
be a poor substitute, but where decadence has been successfully priced,
there is little need to designate devaluation outside of market terms.
Rather than being uncoupled from the fortunes of the capitalist economy,
decadence has been folded into it. Decadence has declined as the market
has expanded because decadence is a non-market form of devaluation
that has little meaning within a market economy. In retrospect we might
speculate that the concept of decadence was itself produced by a lagging
marketin the time it took for modernism to find its price.
46
47

Robert Smithson, Collected Writings, Berkeley 1996, p. 378.

John Currin, interview with Glenn OBrien, Interview, June/July 2009, p. 119.

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What is significant about a market for private languages is not that price
makes a private language public, but rather that it provides a substitute
for language when it comes to communicating our shared assumptions
about the content of private languages. If decadence is the absence of
any way of co-ordinating multiple private languages, then a market for
private languages renders the concept superfluous because price provides a means of co-ordinating those languages without intruding on
their privacy. It is, in Lukcss terms, a way of monitoring our sleep that
never threatens to wake us.
And if that is the case, there must be an entire category of cultural production whose difficulty, ambiguity, and unknowability has effectively
been absorbed by the marketwork that might have seemed decadent
but is not any more: the undecadent, everything that might have undermined the culture, but hasnt. Undecadence is cultural disintegration
transformed into product diversification, an analgesic for all those
cries of pain of isolated individuals. Its how the market keeps our
culture forever young.