Making art nobody sees but you

This article is about Jonathan Beller, film theorist, culture critic and mediologist, and Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt University.

Beller is a writer and generally avoids having too much of his work online. His work skirts around art as research, but as an academic, not an artist. He is focused on visual culture, cinema and anything with a screen.

He has a Marxist background and sees the ideas of Marx as useful in understanding how social and cultural structures influence thinking and may help us think critically. He is an academic, and his work must be approached in this context. He does a few online things, see here, but I get a sense that he is most comfortable as a writer. Stick with the video as he does give his thesis, but does not present in a comfortable way. He lectures, but not that well.

What I found most interesting is his emphasis on visual culture, particularly what we attend to visually.

As an example, to open my mobile phone, I am now expected to look at it, gaze at it and have it gaze at me. He proposes that this is an act of having me become part of the world computer to make money through this as post-capitalist economic media. He proposes, for example, that this could be seen as labour as it makes money for the provider of the media, and provides me with a benefit, ie the phone and all that it does.

One bit of Marx that he talks about, in his very academic way, that has to do with art making that nobody sees but you, is to do with use value and exchange value, in this case, of the art you make.

Marx argued that workers in making stuff, prior to ‘capitalism’, ie being paid to work, the value of the stuff they made for themselves was in how they could make use of it, themselves. Marx called this ‘Use Value’. The worker grows corn and uses it to make bread, then eats it. The use value is retained by the person who grew the corn.

In making stuff for money for someone else, benefits came from ‘Exchange Value’. The stuff was exchanged for money. And the more times the stuff could be exchanged, the more money the person doing the exchanging makes. So the worker grows corn for a landowner, it is exchanged for money by the mill owner, it makes flour, which is exchanged for money by the bakery to make pastry, which is exchanged for money by Greggs, who sells the worker a sausage roll. All the people who do the exchanging make the most money, not the worker.

All I am suggesting is that in making art nobody sees but you, the use value is retained by you.

Exchanging art for money can be a great thing. Think of Picasso paying his bar bill with his signature on a paper napkin, or Jeff Koons selling a sculpture for $91,075,000 at Christie’s in 2019. If you want this, go for it.

But making art that nobody sees but yourself changes your relationship with what you make as art. It makes seeing its use value to you more available.

I cannot tell you what its use value is, only you can do that, or more importantly, the artwork tells you. This is useful in telling you something about your experience of making the art and thus something about your experience.

Clearly, if it’s exchange value would pay for a 3-week stay for you and your family in the Maldives this summer, then its exchange value to you is useful to you.

But making art nobody sees but you is a useful way of shifting your relationship with it away from exchange value to use value. And, if you do not see yourself as an ‘Artist’ because the art you make would clearly not sell, you retain the use value the art has in talking to you about experience. Seeing its use value makes you make it in a different way.