What makes art different from any other commodity? Is it its monetary worth? The skill level of the artist? Does it have a particular 'quality' that separates it from mere "things"? If art can be commoditised, what is the difference between the Mona Lisa and a paperweight? I will be discussing these questions and many more in relation to Ben Lerner's American novel 10:04 (2014).
It had transitioned from being a repository of immense financial value to being declared of zero value without undergoing what was to me any perceptible material transformation—it was the same, only totally different. (133)
[Judd’s] interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space—I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco or a Home Depot or IKEA; I’d never cared more for Judd’s “specific objects” than any of the other objects I encountered in the world, objects that were merely real. (178)
(Lerner, Ben. 10:04. Picador USA, New York, 2015.)
Ben Lerner, in his American novel, 10:04 (2014) highlights the fineness of the line between commodity and art in the modern, capital driven society of New York City. In the first excerpt, the protagonist is stunned at how material items can shift in value between very valuable and practically valueless without changing in appearance or quality, a behavioural and attitudinal trend evident in people evaluating both art and commodity. In the second excerpt, the protagonist speaks of Judd and his particular taste in what kind of items he wishes to acquire and surround himself with. While they are of meaning to Judd, the protagonist finds no value in them than any other mass produced, easily purchasable items on the market. In a number of ways, both statements can be about opinions and approaches towards art and of commoditised ‘things’. While some artwork and types of ‘things’ appeal to some people, they could be worthless to another based on their personal likes and interests. However, what Lerner emphasises is how similar if not the same art is to commodity as it can be commoditised and that art collectors and appreciators are not very different from people who collect a certain kind of mass produced merchandise. Ultimately, both art and commodity items are ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ to be made and acquired for the purpose of a person’s hobby or for building and reaffirming their sense of belonging to a certain fanbase or audience. In one sense, everything can be seen as merely ‘stuff’, but on the other hand, if one were to approach any lifeless, man made, acquirable item with an open mind in regards to their origin, production and place in the complex matrix of society, almost anything and everything can be appreciated as a work of art, a work made for a distinct purpose, whether that be of function or fashion, self expression or simply for commercial profit.
What distinguishes certain activities and practices as ‘art’ has always been a contentious area of discussion, due to the subjective nature of opinion. Even if someone were to consider one painting more artistic than the other because it sold for more in an auction, this would still be subjective, as it is in this person’s opinion that economic value equates to artistic value. Others may consider the aesthetic attributes of the work, being its beauty as perceived by the five senses. In this way, a play with lyrical language could be considered artistically written. Likewise, a piece of pottery could be artistic because of its perfect portrayal of a classic style and also just as much if the artist were to abstract this known style into something entirely different. According to Raymond, “…the true crisis in cultural theory, in our own time, is between this view of the work of art as object and the alternative view of art as a practice. Of course it is at once argued that the work of art IS an object: that various worlds have survived from the past, particular sculptures, particular paintings, particular buildings, and these are objects. This is of course true, but the same way of thinking is applied to works which have no such singular existence. There is no HAMLET… in the sense that there is a particular great painting…yet the habit of treating all such works as objects has persisted because this is a basic theoretical and practical presupposition.” (Raymond, W. (1980), p. 47) While the definition for what makes art ‘art’ so broad, it ironically can narrow the possibility of some things and practices being considered as art, especially when those become taken for granted and rendered common.
In Oscar Wilde’s essay, 'The Decay of Lying: An Observation', he highlights the similarities between liars and artists, as well as the practice of lying as being an artistic practice. In the dialogue essay, the character, Vivian reads aloud her article, declaring that “People have a careless way of talking about a "born liar," just as they talk about a "born poet." But in both cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts… they have their technique, just as the more material arts of painting and sculpture have, their subtle secrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their deliberate artistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.” (Jalic Inc. (2017)) In this sense, even someone of presumed immoral character, due to their dishonesty, is skilled in their own way of being what they are. A person who is a good liar has worked on their techniques over a long time, exactly as an ‘artist’ would in their field of expression. A person cannot simply decide on the spot that they will be a liar and make it happen with the same believability that a practiced individual would show. This is exactly like how any person could pick up a paintbrush and produce a painting. While they could get lucky and create a beautiful piece (just as the unpracticed liar may get away with a tall tale), It will not have the quality that comes from a professional painter, who had worked and experimented for years to get their style right.
When considering the modern world, especially that of the built up, largely populated city of New York, the city which ‘never sleeps’, Wilde’s argument makes just as much of a point when ‘lying’ is substituted for ‘commodity’. While they may be mass produced, not very pretty, easily accessible and not at all unique, there is great value and need for even the simplest items in the immense web of modern life. Michael, who produced an article entitled: ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking…: Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment Relations’ argues and directs conversation to the most mundane technological conveniences, stating that “…the present article is concerned not with ‘epochal’ technologies, but mundane ones, specifically, walking boots. But why consider a mundane technology such as walking boots?…these obvious, ‘invisible’ technologies receive little academic attention yet they are pivotal in shaping everyday life, and do so often through the body.” (Michael, M. P. 107-108) Thus, even if they are not often thought of, ‘boring’ or ‘regular’ items like walking boots can have a big impact in people’s lives. While the degree of specialness is seriously lacking, considering that practically all people own a pair, without them, a long walk could be a painful and despairing experience. Lerner draws attention to the importance of these regular ‘conveniences’ in a poetic but also deeply relatable fashion.
A potent example of this is where the author character goes to meet with the librarian at the coffee shop. “Someone said his name because his coffee was ready. He approached the counter and collected the giant cappuccino, noting the flower pattern in the foam...he had taken it with two hands, one on the cup and one on the saucer, so as not to spill coffee or upset foam; he couldn’t return her wave…He walked slowly, eyes fixed on the dissolving flower, to the seat beside the window, having ruined everything.” (p. 61) This awkward, practically pre-social encounter kicks off the second chapter. While it is very much concerned with how first impressions are so quickly formed and how people tend to over analyse even the smallest of actions at times of nervousness, the fact that the protagonist approaches all subject matter in the novel with this level of intensity, the object being the ‘giant’ cappuccino is the star of the show. In regards to spatial politics, the gigantic nature of the item fills the hands as well as the space of the moment. Even if it is non-living, an object of literal consumption and incredibly usual, it is what handicaps the protagonist and gets the most descriptive attention this passage. While the reader can practically see and taste the coffee, the appearance of the librarian, the person who is main reason for the visit, remains a mystery. Neither of the human subjects get any descriptive attention. While this passage could definitely and most likely be poking fun at the way people obsess over meaningless things, it also highlights the importance of these so-called ‘meaningless things’ in our day-to-day lives. For all we know, the protagonist may have spent the whole day alone up until this point, so the barista calling his name could have been an incredibly welcome form of human contact, as routine and basic as it is. Obsessing over the rather generic flower pattern in the cappuccino can also be considered funny as it is made to be destroyed quickly. However, it also represents order and is a perfect version of what it is, even if that is just a cheap coffee. This ‘thing’ may be the only thing going well and in a person’s day. It could even offer a moment of warm comfort on a cold winter’s day; a wake up call in the morning after a very long night at the office. While this passage has so many potential meanings, there is much that can be said about the central object, not as a metaphor for a greater issue but just as itself and the experience it offers.
The process of commodification is certainly a complicated process which varies based on the time, place and sort of item. According to Kopytoff, “...the production of commodities is also a cultural and cognitive process: commodities must be not only produced materially as things, but also culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing. Out of the total range of things available in a society, only some of them are considered appropriate for marking as commodities. Moreover, the same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not at another. And finally, the same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another.” (Kopytoff, I. (1986), p. 64) When looking at the novel for example, the written word in the earliest of times was greatly respected, as it not only required the person who wrote it down to be literate and able to read and write. The audience of readers who had access to the materials were also automatically limited to those who could read. Reading and writing was not only a marker of class in regards to education. Additionally, these people who could read would also need money to purchase these books which before the times of the printing press were expensive and took a long time to produce. Much later on, the novel received the reputation for being just that, ‘novel’, a novelty as such, read by those who had nothing better to do. The average American 1950s housewife for example was known to read novels, filling her head with useless, romantic dreams and ideas, after she finished the day’s chores. The more educated men, in the meantime would read proper non-fiction reference books and literature regarded as ‘classic’.
Novels today range in value according to many factors. For example, in the modern age of cellphones, iPads and social media addiction, it is a welcome site to see any young person pick up a novel and read. However, a lot more respect would often be shown to student A, who decided to read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles in their spare time than student B, who chose to re-read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, even if they were the books that got them to like books again. It is also important to remember that both books are novels and were treated as such when they came out. The fact that Twilight has been so popular all over the world, made into movies and mass marketed over the last 13 years has, as some may say, cheapened its artistic potential, while Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a Penguin Classic and comes up regularly in high school and university studies. At the same time, while the texts vary so much in terms of reputation and validity as important books, it is essential to note that both are still mass produced and can be found online or in bookshops for roughly the same price. Anderson accentuates the positive and community fostering abilities of having common books available and easily accessible. “If the development of print-as-commodity is the key to the generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity, [why]…did the nation become so popular? …In the process [of vernacularisation] they gradually became aware of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.” (Anderson, B. (2006), p. 37-44) While these effects can certainly be seen, within groups in society today, this does not mend the rift between art and commodity and what makes an item fall into one category or the other.
So where exactly does the difference lie between art and commodity? Are both Twilight and Tess of the D’Urbervilles equally eligible to be considered as art and where exactly does 10:04 stand in terms of this divide? Robertson argues that “The compulsion of early man to make art suggests that it was important to his survival, as important perhaps as food and warmth. Art of the Ice Age is not a commodity. Early Christian art is not a commodity, art made for the temple, the shrine, the mosque and the cathedral is not a commodity, although it can all be commoditised. Art that is a commodity is such because it exists within a world that packages needs and desires into goods. Art is made today but has not sold on the global art market is not art because the system within which it exists does not recognise it as such.” (Robertson, I. (2016), p. 27) In one sense, all novels and mundane items that fill this commercially driven world are commodity because everything and everyone has a price tag. Almost anything can be sold for the right price, just as a person, given the right amount of money would be prepared to do almost anything. Just as The Verve says in their famous 1997 song, Bittersweet Symphony, people are just “Trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die.”(Richards, K. & Jagger, M. & Ashcroft, R. (1997)) If this view was exclusively taken on board, life in the modern world of progress, convenience and efficiency would seem entirely grim. However, just as everything and everyone can be thought of as commodity, everything can also be thought of as art, with their own stories, purposes and place in the world.
Even the most simple items, like the giant cappuccino can be powerful and beautiful despite if not especially because of its simplicity. When Lerner contemplates the item that had altered value but not really changed from what it was, he states that it “...was the same, only totally different”. This quotation makes a similar point to what Andy Warhol does in his famous rhetorical question: “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” While many things happen and are felt, done and said all around the world at different times and simultaneously, there is no doubt that even the most original and drastic ideas have been implemented or at least thought of before. If approached negatively, this idea can support the idea that human beings, in a big picture way lack uniqueness and thus purpose, as almost everyone wants to leave their impression on the world in order to justify that their life was well lived and so they could continue to influence the future by living on through their legacies. However, for Warhol and Lerner, lack of uniqueness is not at all diminishing but rather distinguishing, depending on how the ‘regular’ subject matter is represented. According to Indiana, “Warhol infuriated de Kooning, among others, by claiming only to paint ordinary things that he happened to like, and by painting them in the starkest, most personally uninflected manner, by making art in the easiest way he possibly could: he wasn’t struggling with inner demons, or wresting from paint any sort of transcendental truth, and his work seemed to lampoon the whole idea of artmaking as something intrinsically difficult that carried any risk of failure. For Warhol, the art object didn’t even have to be made by the artist—he just had to attach his signature to it after it came off the assembly line.” (Indiana, G. (2010), p. 66)
Just because his art was not psychologically fuelled or focused on subject matter of epic influence, Warhol’s identity as an artist was questioned. His work, especially in his popular pop art Campbell’s soup can prints literally turned trash into treasure. Taking something as mundane as a soup can and depicting it in such vibrant colours juxtaposed the normality of the subject. The pop art style of making many versions of the same image imitated the modern process of mass-production. “Our media-saturated world today is a function of a growing society inundated with need-to-know, need-to-know, rinse, repeat, rubbish. “Oh, he called it 50 years ago,” laughs Donovan. “He would have delighted in it today. Reveled in it. He would have been in the thick of it—obsessed with the Internet, social media, celebrity.” We love to hate today’s shameless boldfacers, to judge them, to question their motives, or, at times, to sympathize with their plight.” (Bennet, K. (2011)) The spirit and motivations behind Warhol’s work can definitely be detected in Lerner’s novel, 10:04.
In the protagonist’s life, only a series of mundane events occurred, at best however, the way in which they are written emphasise the importance of the banal. “Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs” (p. 17). The way in which the conversation around him becomes so similar that it shares a theme highlights its regularity however, predictability is not always a bad thing. Predictability is comfortable and homely or ‘heimlich’ as Freud refers to it in his essay, The ‘Uncanny’ (Freud, S. (1997)). According to Freud, man’s greatest fear is the unknown or ‘unheimlich’ (unhomely). If something is known, it can be beaten as they say in the well known idiom, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. The mention of the universally known chain supermarket, ‘Whole Foods’ and ‘Union Square’ in New York allows the reader to feel familiar and grounded, even though this may not be anything like the home they live in. The protagonist’s familiarity with the train route N emphasises the routine nature of his life while the encounter with the Jewish and Indian people highlights that even the most regular commutes can result in culturally diverse encounters. The poetic writing style of Lerner works in the same way as Warhol’s whimsical and fun art style as both are directed towards subjects of the everyday. However, it is important to note that it is not the artistic gloss that makes these regular commoditised items and experiences beautiful, it merely works to accentuate and bring out the overlooked glory already present within them. Both Lerner and Warhol do not create this beauty from scratch but rather use their skills to point out the art worthiness in the most unlikely places.
As mentioned before, it is not only items that can be commoditised, but certain experiences and kinds of people as well. Ben Lerner being a white, middle-aged American male living in New York City makes him one among millions of the same background who have shared their stories or featured as the central character of stories throughout the history of American literature (additionally in television and film). Before reading the novel, the reader has high expectations for Lerner, that he would present something new in a sea of ‘dime-a-dozen’ New York City life novels. One of the earliest styles of novel structure was the bildungsroman. It was style which especially suited American concepts of nationalism in regards to the power of the individual and construction of the ideal self. According to Buell novels followed, “...the traditional plot of identity formation unfolds in symbiotic tension with the imperatives of social adjustment and collides with the modernist emphasis on imperfect, failed, or arrested development… neither the myth nor the story line that embodied it withered away. On the contrary, both have persisted into the twenty-first century in mutated forms, in a striking mixture of recognition, critique, revision, and defiance of the diminished probability of actually living out the traditional dream script” (Buell, L. (2014), p. 108). While the protagonist in the novel is not exactly the ideal bildungsroman hero, who overcomes great adversity and achieves the perfect version of himself, he certainly embarks on a reflective journey towards understanding and defining what is around him. In the spirit of the bildungsroman, we follow this one individual through his life journey however unlike a hero narrative, the ordinariness of the protagonist allows the novel to be a work of realism. According to Matz, “When the moderns took it up, the novel had long been a form of realism. Its main goal had been to create the illusion of real life in action. As Ian Watt writes in his study of “the rise of the novel,” it aimed at a “full and authentic report of human experience,” an “air of total authenticity,” with “verisimilitude” as its proof of success.1 But this “formal realism” (this making form mimic reality) had really always really been a set of conventions. That is, the novel may have seemed just to present reality directly, but it always did so based on some shared set of norms, some customary way of seeing, particular to the times.” (Matz, J. (2004), p. 32) Even though Lerner’s poetic style of writing marks him as educated and skilled, the way in which he takes in the world around him is as approachable as it is analytical and profound.
In conclusion, while some people may disagree, there is great significance for people like Lerner to tell their stories, even if it may be commodified. Everyone has their own style and view of the world thus reading novels like these allows us to put a face on someone in a crowd of seemingly identical individuals. While Lerner may be using the novel as a form of expression, a medium that is a commodity, this commodification is an inevitable consequence of living in the modern, capital driven world. In a sense, everything and everyone exists as a commodity, with a cultural and commercial value. This however does not limit their ability to transcend their forms and become significant, meaningful and artistic. A painting and a novel at the end of the day are both objects, even a person living as one of the millions of people in New York City can be seen with similar value however, while they all have the equal ability to be worthless, they also possess an equal ability to become great as well.
References
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Michael, M. (2000), ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking…: Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment Relations’, Body & Society, Vol 6, Issue 3-4, https://doi-org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1177/1357034X00006003006, accessed 14/10.17
Pfaelzer, J. (2012), ‘Dreaming of a White Future: Mary E. Bradley Lane, Edward Bellamy, and the Origins of the Utopian Novel in the United States’, A Companion to the American Novel, Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Raymond, W. (1980), ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, NLB, London
Richards, K. & Jagger, M. & Ashcroft, R. (1997). Bittersweet Symphony [Recorded by The Verve]. On FM [MP3 file]. New York City, New York, Abkco Music, Inc
Robertson, I. (2016), Understanding Art Markets: Inside the World of Art and Business, Routledge, New York, London
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