everybody else.) Those working for “cultural
change” through political theorizing and occa-
sional actions are opposed to anybody getting a
piece of the pie, though politics appears to be
getting fashionable again in the art world and
may itself provide a vehicle for internal success;
today one can refuse a piece of the pie and
simultaneously be getting a chance at it. Still,
the pie is very small and there are a lot of
hungry people circling it. Things were bad
enough when only men were allowed to take a
bite. Since “aggressive women’ have gotten in
there too, competition, always at the heart of
the art-world class system, has peaked.

Attendance at any large art school in the U.S.
takes students from all classes and trains them
for artists’ schizophrenia. While being cool and
chicly grubby (in the “uniform” of mass produc-
tion), and knowing what’s the latest in taste and
what’s the kind of art to make and the right
names to drop is clearly “upward mobility” —
from school into teaching jobs and/or the art
world —the lifestyle accompanying these habits
is heavily weighted “downward.” The working-
class girl who has had to work for nice clothes
must drop into frayed jeans to make it into the
art middle class, which in turn considers itself
both upper and lower class. Choosing poverty is
a confusing experience for a child whose
parents (or more likely mother) have tried des-
perately against great odds to keep a clean and
pleasant home.l

The artist who feels superior to the rich be-
cause s/he is disguised as someone who is poor
provides a puzzle for the truly deprived. A par-
allel notion, rarely admitted but pervasive, is
that a person can’t understand “art” if their
house is full of pink glass swans or their lawn is
inhabited by gnomes and flamingos, or if they
even care about house and clothes at all. This is
particularly ridiculous now, when art itself uses
so much of this paraphernalia (and not always
satirically); or, from another angle, when even
artists who have no visible means of profes-
sional support live in palatial lofts and sport
beat-up $100 boots while looking down on the
“tourists” who come to SoHo to see art on
Saturdays; SoHo is, in fact, the new suburbia.
One reason for such callousness is a hangover
from the 1950s, when artists really were poor
and proud of being poor because their art, the
argument went, must be good if the bad guys—
the rich and the masses —didn't like it.

In the 1960s the choice of poverty, often
excused as anti-consumerism, even infiltrated
the esthetics of art.2 First there was Pop Art,
modeled on kitsch, on advertising and consu-
merism, and equally successful on its own level.
(Women, incidentally, participated little in Pop
Art, partly because of its blatant sexism, some-
times presented as a parody of the image of
woman in the media—and partly because the
subject matter was often “women’s work,” en-

nobled and acceptable only when the artists
were men.) Then came Process Art—a rebellion
against the “precious object” traditionally de-
sired and bought by the rich. Here another kind
of co-optation took place, when temporary
piles of dirt, oil, rags and filthy rubber began to
grace carpeted living rooms. The ltalian branch
was even called Arte Povera. Then came the rise
of a third-stream medium called “conceptual
art” which offered “anti-objects” in the form of
ideas —books or simple xeroxed texts and photo-
graphs with no inherent physical or monetary
value (until they got on the market, that is).
Conceptual art seemed politically viable be-
cause of its notion that the use of ordinary,
inexpensive, unbulky media would lead to a
kind of socialization (or at least democratiza-
tion) of art as opposed to gigantic canvases and
huge chrome sculptures costing five figures and
filling the world with more consumer fetishes.

Yet the trip from oil on canvas to ideas on
xerox was, in retrospect, yet another instance of
“downward mobility” or middle-class guilt. It
was no accident that conceptual art appeared at
the height of the social movements of the late
1960s nor that the artists were sympathetic to
those movements (with the qualified exception
of the women’s movement). All of the esthetic
tendencies listed above were genuinely insti-
gated as rebellions by the artists themselves, yet
the fact remains that only rich people can afford
to 1) spend money on art that won't last; 2) live
with “ugly art” or art that is not decorative,
because the rest of their surroundings are beau-
tiful and comfortable; 3) like “non-object art”
which is only handy if you already have too
many possessions—when it becomes areaction-
ary commentary: art for the overprivileged in a
consumer society.

As a child, | was accused by my parents of
being an “anti-snob snob” and I'm only begin-
ning to see the limitations of such a rebellion.
Years later | was an early supporter of and pros-
elytizer for conceptual art as escape from the
commodity orientation of the art world, a way
of communicating with a broader audience via
inexpensive media. Though | was bitterly dis-
appointed (with the social, not the esthetic
achievements) when | found that this work
could be so easily absorbed into the system, it is
only now that I've realized why the absorption
took place. Conceptual art’s democratic efforts
and physical vehicles were cancelled out by its
neutral, elitist content and its patronizing ap-
proach. From around 1967 to 1971, most of us
involved in conceptual art saw that content as
pretty revolutionary and thought of ourselves as
rebels against the cool, hostile artifacts of the
prevailing formalist and minimal art. But we
were so totally enveloped in the middle-class
approach to everything we did and saw, we
couldn’t perceive how that pseudo-academic
narrative piece or that art-world-oriented action

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