John Molyneux and the Question of Art

Abstract

In the last decade or so the Young British Artists movement has sustained a bitter controversy. The movement itself seems to polarize commentators in a vivid opposition. Those who think an unmade bed or a shark pickled in formaldehyde are creations that only someone with more money than sense could regard as genuine art, and those who believe that they are significant works in their own right. The attitude of the Marxist commentariat to this movement has generally tended to be positive. Prominent Marxist and art historian John Molyneux has devoted considerable space to a defence of figures like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, arguing that their work provides a continuation of the most radical and imaginative artistic traditions in the spirit of ‘Giotto and Brueghel, Hals and Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya, Courbet, Picasso and Warhol’. In his article ‘The Legitimacy of Modern Art’, Molyneux offers a systematic defence of the Young British Artists movement, striving to show how the work of these artists is underpinned by a profoundly revolutionary and democratic current. This article offers a decisive rebuttal to Molyneux's position. It attempts to show that much of the ‘art’ of the so called Young British Artists is little more than spectacle; that their work is incubated in an isolated and rarefied realm dominated by slick patrons and investors, and consequently attains an empty and vacant character. An emperor without clothes. Furthermore, the author attempts to locate the germ of Molyneux's theoretical confusion in an unconscious conflation of the Marxist categories of ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value. Finally, through a critique of Molyneux, the writer hopes to elucidate in outline a more viable and genuinely Marxist answer to the question—What is Art?