Table of Contents

Philistines & Yahweh: How the Unauthorised Version Still Upsets (A review of The Philistine
Controversy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

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Philistines & Yahweh: How the Unauthorised Version
Still Upsets (A review of The Philistine Controversy)
ByBen Watson

Ben Watson reviews The Philistine Controversy, edited by Dave Beech and John Roberts, and smells
an ’academic marxist’ rat

[IMAGE]
It comes in screaming yellow, with an unfinished ’painting-by-numbers’ on the cover. The picture
looks like one of Warhol’s late canvases, but it’s actually a graphic supplied by the book’s designers.
If fine art steals from mass culture, why shouldn’t it return the compliment? Inside, Beech and Roberts
wrestle with the vexed relationship of Modern Art to mass culture, seeking to ’unblock’ the current
stand-off between Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, the former characterised as the defence of high
art (a position adopted in the recent ’return to value’ by Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson), and the
latter as the celebration of mass culture. The concept of the ‘philistine’ is the Beech/Roberts battle cry
and battering ram, a provocative reminder of the damage and hurt and exclusion wrought by all culture
(including the ’popular’: there is always someone denied access to Kylie Minogue or wrestling or
mobile phones). The ’philistine’, they declare, is the spectre which haunts the postmodern
smorgasbord. If Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, whatever their differences, sing Dobie Grey’s
’(I’m In With) The In-Crowd’, Beech and Roberts are with Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs bellowing
’(I’m In With) The Out-Crowd’, detuned punk chorus and all. Or is it all a feint? Are Beech and
Roberts really super-aesthetes, Hoxton yuppies dressed as bovver boys? Who’s in and who’s out? The
argument is nuanced and complex.

In keeping with dialectical logic - this is a zone where the accusation that an opponent’s argument is
’undialectical’ is deemed sufficient to rubbish it - the book presents its argument as an open debate
rather than a finished thesis. Part one consists of an opening salvo by Beech and Roberts in New Left
Review from July 1996, ’Spectres of the Aesthetic’, along with replies in later issues by J.M. Bernstein
and Andrew Bowie, and then Beech/Roberts responding to themselves. Part two furthers the
discussion with contributions from Noël Burch, Esther Leslie, Gail Day and Malcolm Quinn, and
there’s a final, third essay by the editors.

Unfortunately, we are not given John Roberts’ initial airing of the ’philistine’ thesis, ’Mad For It!
BANK and the New British Art’ (Everything 18, February 1996). This denies the reader a useful
entrée to the controversy: knowing that the ’philistine’ concept was first formulated in response to
young British art (or ’yBa’). Roberts described works by Dave Beech, Maria Cook, Martin Creed and
Matthew Higgs as ’the revenge of a stereotyped proletarian cognition (pure appetite; a body without
subjectivity) on the deracinated body of bourgeois culture and the piety of an identity politics that has
no place for the voluptuous and transgressive’. Tracey Emin was about ‘talking dirty and showing
your bottom for the sheer delight of it’, ’a proletarian-philistine reflex’ against ’80s feminist propriety’
and the ’professional institutionalisation of critical theory’. Given the involuted hegelianism of Beech
and Roberts here (’bad sublation is the violation of the delusion of non-violation; good sublation is the
violation of the violation’, p. 278), ’Mad For it!’ did have the virtue of placing the philistine
controversy in a mass-media context. Another drawback of non-specific theories of ’art’ is that,
because they assume the inviolability of an entity which many current political and cultural activities
actually contest, they tend to sociological positivism.

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Although he isn’t criticised (indeed he’s thanked at the beginning), one target here is surely Julian
Stallabrass, whose attack on yBa in High Art Lite became by default the ’marxist critique’. Beech and
Roberts want to occupy Stallabrass’s intellectual high ground with a general theory to explain why pig
plastic piglets with penis ears and pokemon arseholes are more necessary to the onward march of art
than political correctness and artistic gravitas. Even with the above proviso about the dangers of
positivism, one cannot resist a certain ’hurrah!’ at the prospect.

Another omission caused by bypassing the Everything article is the spat with Stewart Home which
appeared in subsequent issues (texts reprinted in Stewart Home’s Disputations On Art, Anarchy and
Assholism, Sabotage Editions: London, 1997). Transfiguring the controversy into something worthy
of the attentions of New Left Review meant suppressing one of the keenest - and certainly funniest -
contributions. Home’s seasoned pose as headbanging proletarian anti-artist could only treat Roberts’
belated discovery of the ’philistine’ - just when the art market and commercial media were poised to
embrace it - with gleeful derision. His invective recalled the scatological fury of Karl Marx when in
pamphlet mode:

In "Mad For It!", Roberts writes: "The truth is, playing dumb, shouting ’ARSE’ and taking your
knickers down has become an attractive move in the face of the professional institutionalisation of
critical theory in art ... it would be a mistake to identify the new art and its fuck-you attitudinising with
anything so simple-minded as the ’de-politicisation’ of art ...". Having said this, Roberts should not be
surprised that some of those his "theorising" configures as "philistines" may be Frankenstein’s
monsters. Rather than simply screaming "ARSE" and taking its own knickers down, the "philistine" is
also capable of shouting "ARSEHOLE" while debagging those who perhaps imagine they stand in
"judgment" over "art". It should go without saying that this particular "philistine" [ie Home] has no
intention of making votive offerings to "Yahweh" [ie bourgeois culture]. Instead, Roberts might like to
follow the lead of the biblical philistines and make himself a seat of skins, since he’s patently failed to
cover his arse.’

Well versed in materialist polemic, Home is alert to how cultural and political sanctimony quickly
regresses to religious tropes. Once, asked by left anthropologist Chris Knight if a narrative of skinhead
revolution and blow-jobs declaimed at a book launch meant he held ’nothing sacred’, Home shot back
that ’the sacred’ is a religious category, and that as a materialist he didn’t recognise it. He likewise
objects to Roberts’ phrase ’the wider world of everyday pleasures in which art moves and breathes’.
Echoing Marx’s mockery of the bourgeois worldview in Capital Vol 3 (chapter 48), where ’Mr Capital
and Mrs Land do their ghost-walkings as social characters’ while real people merely look on, Home
comments dryly ’this is simply idealism, Roberts is anthropomorphising art, plainly it neither moves
nor breathes’ (Disputations, p. 24). The phrase ’moves and breathes’ does indeed evoke the Anglican
prayer book. The materialist explanation for this ’coincidence’ would be that when the vicar leads his
flock singing praises to ’immortal, invisible, God only wise/in light inaccessible hid from our eyes’, he
is actually showing tender care for his stipend; Home’s charge is that Roberts’ piety about art
constitutes a similar mystification of the source of his income as critic and curator.

Home backed up his ad hominem abuse with a political critique of yBa, comparing it to Brit Pop as an
export commodity, with all the dumb subservience to national economic and ideological interests that
entails (this text is available in Home’s Confusion Incorporated, Codex, 1999, pp. 75-85). YBa’s
reckless nihilism was revealed, not as a critique of tired Critical Theory, but as collusion with vested
interests. Home’s proletarian internationalism - which made him anathema in Britain during the
’politically-correct’ 80s, his novels more popular with Italian punks and autonomists than
jazz-listening yuppies - suddenly scores a direct hit: if yBa can be bracketed under a banal rubric like
’Britishness’, then its promise of upsetting bourgeois values falls flat on its face. It was not for nothing
that the Sex Pistols vilified the Queen and the H-bomb.

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Perhaps Beech and Roberts were right to leave the Everything material alone. Home’s punk diatribe,
however entertaining, might have capsized their debate. So they let the yBa afterbirth slip away, and
present their ’philistine’ thesis as an independent and immaculate critique of the ’new aestheticism’ of
establishment ’marxists’ Eagleton and Jameson. Beech and Roberts take their stand on the firmly
materialist - if quiveringly dialectical - rock of Adorno, a writer whose mandarin sensibilities find no
sympathy chez Home. In his lucid introduction, Stewart Martin points out that ’ultimately Beech and
Roberts understand the philistine as the symptom of species-being alienation’ (p. 4), which is another
way of saying that they speak ‘as marxists’ (their own self-description, p. 130). However, marxism is
an aspiration to a historical-materialist, non-idealist viewpoint, and not necessarily its achievement.

One virtue of the philistine controversy is that it exposes the gulf between right and left interpretations
of Adorno. In 1991, J.M. Bernstein edited a volume of Adorno’s essays for Routledge under the title
The Culture Industry. Its political usefulness was mitigated by omission of the dates when the texts
were written, making Adorno’s concrete positions on workers revolution, Nazism, Stalinism and the
Cold War hard to decipher. Harried by the charge of ’new aestheticism’, Bernstein demonstrates the
reactionary implications of late Adorno by arguing bluntly that the working class is no longer an agent
of change, and that Modern Art remains the sole site of resistance to capitalism. Unlike Adorno,
Bernstein assumes that Modern Art must be a province of middle-class education and privilege,
whereas Adorno’s point was that bourgeois institutionalization and the logic of the commodity only
wreck it. Whereas reading Adorno makes this reader feel like smashing up a McDonalds while playing
Peter Brötzmann on a ghetto-blaster, Bernstein’s Adorno is pessimistic and ’reluctantly’ reactionary.

Bernstein’s relationship to marxism is hardly that of the partisan. By saying ’the constellation of Marx,
Nietzsche, and Weber within Critical Theory provides for its advantage over competing sociological
and philosophical paradigms’ (p. 110), he shows a fundamental allegiance to neo-liberalism: the
reduction of theory to ’competing paradigms’ naturalises commodity-production and the market as the
ground and judge. Indeed, it assumes a priori what Marx’s theory wished to contest. Marx used
political economic categories to show that, unlike cash and culture, value does not trickle down from
above, but is produced by labour, and that under capitalism what we call ’wealth’ results from
sundering the producer from the product (’alienation’). Bernstein’s exclusive understanding of value
as a cultural phenomenon means that it rapidly becomes an high ideal which ’ought’ to shape the
masses, but unfortunately doesn’t. He ends up with an idealist moralism as old as Plato and St Paul:
’art now is a motley, but I doubt this fact has any deeper implications for radical thought other than the
dispiriting one that art is becoming increasingly less formative for culture as a whole and culture less
formative for society as a whole’ (p. 104). By replacing the term ’capitalism’ with ’modernity’ (p. 110,
n. 6), Bernstein replaces scientific analysis of a concrete social relation with ungrounded speculation
about cultural symptoms. As with most modernist/postmodernist musings, the writing quickly
crumbles into zeitgeist falafel.

Given critics like Bernstein, who reduce adornoism to the melancholy reflections of a disappointed
vicar, it’s easy to understand why Beech and Roberts should reach for a term as rebarbative as ’the
philistine’. They want to remind us of the exclusions and hurt inflicted by culture. However, that
doesn’t mean they abandon ’art’. Beech and Roberts remain artist and critic, merely claiming to
understand art’s dialectic better than the affirmative doyens of the ’new aestheticism’. Art can only
develop and grow by recognising its opposite, which is the philistine: this is what yBa was doing by
referencing drugs, trash TV and abject states such as boredom, commodity lust and domestic disorder.
Even those without sympathy for the art game as it’s played today, must admit that yBa did manage to
present something novel, even if it was only a further step in what Guy Debord called the
’decomposition’ of contemporary art.

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Although the philistine controversy has severed its immediate connection to yBa, it’s evident that
Bernstein - and the other antagonist here, Andrew Bowie - are both unmoved by its strategies, and that
this conservatism is the principal cause of Beech and Roberts’ pique. As Gail Day says in her
contribution: ’ossifying around a canon of Modern Art, inattentive to the moves, dilemmas and reach
of post-war practices, Bowie and Bernstein offer closures rather than openings to a critical
understanding of art’ (p. 243). Day also - uniquely among the contributors - notes ’there seems to be
something of a watershed around punk’ (pp. 234-5, n. 11). This is as to-the-point as Stewart Home’s
charge of nationalism: more fundamentally than disagreements over yBa, what distinguishes Beech
and Roberts from Bernstein and Bowie is that the latter have no sympathy for punk. They are too
patrician to admit being touched by pop culture (although Bowie does mention making a living as a
jazz saxophonist in Berlin, he takes his stand on the joys of Mahler on the headphones and Californian
Chardonnay in the glass). In other words, Beech and Roberts are waging a generational war. Unversed
in the street and cyber ironies of post-punk, Bernstein and Bowie are incapable of interpreting the art
being shown today at Tate Modern and MOMA: the ’marxism’ of Beech and Roberts is less
commitment to the emancipation of the working-class than a bid for the intellectual status of Jameson,
Eagleton and Bernstein as interpreters of Modern Art for a puzzled bourgeoisie. ’Bend over,
professors, and tell Clement Greenberg the news’: déjà vu, or what? It’s like watching the gruesome
phenomenon of Pop Art all over again! If you feel trapped in an eternal return, the best thing to do is
check your dialectic.

On close examination, the dialectic of Beech and Roberts is not so much marxist - an exposure of the
material interests driving the spectacle - as deconstructionist. By emphasizing the dependence of an
abstraction on its logical opposite (’aesthetics versus philistinism’), the authors hope to unseat truisms
and map power relations. However, as with Michel Foucault, a unitary and idealist account of power,
ungrounded in concrete social division (capital and labour, ie class), generates endless paradoxes
expressed in ever-more complex formulations (the immaterialism of such a dialectic is evidenced by
Art & Language’s weakness for the logical-positivist aphorisms of Ludwig Wittgenstein). Capital and
labour are mentioned, but their specific role in art and its discontents is never spelt out. By interpreting
Adorno as a theorist of gallery art’s ’autonomy’ (when in fact Aesthetic Theory is about music - as
process and experience rather than product and property), Althusser’s ’structuralist’ marxism is
retrieved from the dustbin of history. The authors claim that conceiving alienation as ’ontological’
avoids ’relativism, subjectivism, voluntarism and, not least, political preaching’ (p. 153). Alienation
becomes a generalised malady which pervades society, rather than the mark of capital’s appropriation
of surplus value from labour. Although this leads us into a somewhat arcane dispute within marxism, it
has important repercussions for the argument about art.

Beech and Roberts want to be revolutionary marxists, but they suffer from the compromises forced on
academic marxism during the political sloughs of the monetarist 80s. Following the Communist
Manifesto they say ’history is the history of class struggle’, but then they add, ’And, it must be said,
other struggles too.’ (p. 152) This effectively destroys historical materialism, and paves the way to
liberal pluralism and the inability to criticise anyone’s self-definition of ’struggle’. According to Beech
and Roberts, since alienation is ’ontological’, it is ’variously experienced and understood according to
knowledge, class position, gender, race and so forth’ (p. 153). These are precisely the mealy-mouthed
formulas (the root source of Deleuze and Guattari’s anarcho-liberal ’either ... or ... or’ dialectic) which
surround tokenist liberalism: art as a church with many chapels, each devoted to a different oppressed
group, yet all centred towards the altar of bourgeois artistic value (propped on a wad of hard cash). It
is surely just this postmodern ingratiation - garishly false and patronising, a kind of art-poilitical PR
exercise - which begs for the iconoclasm of the righteous philistine. Instead of locating the key
contradiction in capital (how the free market’s law of value produced the presentday imbalance
between town and country, between first world and third, on its bloody way creating the slave trade,
the nuclear family, fascism, holocaust, the motor car, fast food, wars for oil), left critique becomes a

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list of oppressed groups who can be easily subsumed under the ’sectional interests’ of bourgeois
representational politics. Worse still, Beech and Roberts’ ’ontological alienation’ (p. 153) - the phrase
is a dubious mix of Heidegger, Sartre and Marx - sabotages the revolutionary implications of the
marxist dialectic, which insists on a necessary connection between social science and political action
(’theory and practice’).

Beech and Roberts’ distaste for crude class positions doubtless comes from bitter experience of what
T.J. Clark once called the ’bone-hard philistinism’ of the left. Although in this context of
’knickers-down’ radicalism he’s happy enough to appear as a cultural conservative, Andrew Bowie’s
position - Mahler is wonderful, it’s just a shame that education cuts deprive working-class kids of the
joys of his music - is not a million miles from that of some SWP members. However, as has been
pointed out many times at the SWP’s Marxism Week, this position may be popular among progressive
members of the middle-class, but it does not bear marxist scrutiny. It perceives culture as an
unproblematic resource which ’ought’ to be more widely available. Like Proudhon’s call for fair
wages, universal education as a solution to alienation is ’distributionist’: hypnotised by commodity
fetishism, distributionists do not grasp that the commodity in question (’culture’) embeds a social
relation. Such panaceas ignore the fact that it is the social relations of production which need to be
changed, that it is not a matter of ’equal wages’ or ’equal access to culture’, but of the socialisation of
private property (a criticism made by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy). Culture conceived as a
noble object of contemplation is no more than T.S. Eliot’s vicar-like ’teach us to sit still’; it is only by
involving the whole gamut of proletarian desires - political, sexual and cosmic - that the motivic
sensuousness of Mahler can be released from pedestalised kitsch into a modern musical language (as
instanced by the astonishing suites achieved by Marvin Gaye, Iggy Pop and Eminem, and also by the
workshops run by the late John Stevens and now Asian Dub Foundation). A class whose lives will be
spent transforming the world in a practical way - albeit alienated from moral and global design - will
never be convinced by admonishments to contemplation, as the frazzled nerves of generations of
music and scripture teachers attest.

Considering Beech and Roberts’ evident intimacy with issues facing artistic productivity, it is
disappointing that they do not use Marx’s proletarian communism to answer Bowie. Instead, they
reject Bowie’s argument because, in the face of postmodernist criticism, it ’could seem to be nothing
more than a "return" to modernist positions’ (p. 276). This concern as to appearance may be
appropriate in self-confessed aesthetes (despite their emphasis on philistinism, Beech and Roberts do
not ’set out to supplant the aesthete or the intellectual as models of self-knowledge and reason’, p.
127), but its investment in fashion sits oddly with their claim to marxism, which has always looked
sceptically at both ’generational’ warfare and bids by soi-disant avantgardes for positions within the
higher echelons of bourgeois power.

In dismissing Bowie for sounding old-fashioned, Beech and Roberts are hardly writing in the spirit of
Marx and Engels, whose ’most important characteristic,’ according to Trotsky, was ’a complete and
ingrained independence of official public opinion at all times and under all conditions’ (My Life,
1929, p. 216). Or as Lenin, put it: ’The genius of Marx and Engels consisted in ... mercilessly brushing
aside as litter and rubbish ... the innumerable attempts to "discover" a "new" line in philosophy, to
invent a "new" trend and ... scholastic play with new philosophical "isms" ....’ (Materialism &
Empirio-Criticism, 1908, p. 407). This independence of isms is won by a materialist assessment of
social ideas based upon the political economy of Capital.

Adorno, whose Aesthetic Theory hinges on the marxist distinction between use value and exchange
value, actually delivers this; Beech and Roberts are too involved with a defence of the art world as an
’autonomous level’ to apply Capital’s determinate categories. Their attention to the ’philistine’ may
place them in a better position than Bowie to articulate the nihilist disdain which was tapped by yBa,

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but their thesis remains cramped by its self-declared limits. Although they want to transcend the
stand-off between Critical Theory and Cultural Studies - the academic pseudo-choice between high or
low culture - the philistine controversy actually amounts to a defence of culture as defined by property
relations, ie art, or high culture. What they admire about yBa is that it gave art a new lease of life by
absorbing trash motifs (’the accommodation of alterity’, p. 279), whereas what punks liked about it
was that it ground the noses of the bourgeoisie in the same old crap they inflict on us daily via the
mass media.

Stewart Home put the punk position succinctly (it’s also, surprisingly enough, what Adorno was
saying): ’I do not wish to commend art as somehow superior to popular culture, or vice versa - since
each category is produced by, and mediates the other - instead, I recommend the analysis and criticism
of both these commodity forms’ (Disputations, p. 23). Beech and Roberts are at pains to point out that
’proletarian’ and ’philistine’ do not always coincide, but the two terms keep merging in their
discussion, just as their idea of ’worthwhile aesthetic experience’ keeps merging with ’art’ as curated
by the art world.

What’s the way out of this trap, in which any admission of values beyond those of the mass market
seem to lead inevitably to the Beckett-like art of Turner-Prize winner Martin Creed, who switches the
lights in the gallery off and on at unpredictable intervals? This ’light inaccessible hid from our eyes’
has something theological about it, and is in fact a celebration of the power of art to make something
out of nothing - which is why the Turner Prize jury found Creed’s piece pure and sublime in a way that
any artwork with content couldn’t be. We get to art by denying it, like a mystic finding God by saying
’no’ at the cross-roads. The convoluted paradoxes of Beech and Roberts’ vaunting of the ’philistine’
beckon: how to express horror and disgust at this idiotic game whilst standing inside it. But maybe we
don’t want to stand inside it ... maybe we’re not standing inside it!

The ’philistine’ thesis could be an invitation to look at art from the point of view of the entire person,
the material, social, active human being Marx starts with. However, that possibility is quickly closed
down as Beech and Roberts concentrate on what the ’concept’ of the ’philistine’ can bring to bear on
art criticism, and refuse to grapple with the wider society they’ve invoked.

A further problem is that Beech and Roberts themselves subscribe to the pessimistic, adornoite
marxism of the ’new aesthetes’ they criticise, one so grotesquely inappropriate to a post-Seattle world
of anti-capitalist mobilisations and mass strikes. They’ve also imbibed the art world’s blatant cynicism
about the potential of visual materials to transfigure perception. What they say about Jim Shaw’s Dime
Store Paintings, a display of rankly amateur rejects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, is indicative:
these worthless works are ’like autographs of people nobody has heard of’ (p. 290). If art only
signifies because of its relationship to celebrity, it is not art any more, but gossip. This is probably why
a humourist like Matthew Collings is currently Modern Art’s best chronicler.

Since Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the art market has reeled under a relentless barrage of jokes,
provocations and paradoxes, making the actual artworks quite meaningless outside the ’art’ rubric. The
attempts of feminist and black pressure groups to inject worthy meanings into this farrago produced
artworks which would be still more ludicrous if they weren’t also so sadly tokenist and self-deluding.
The sole use value of all this nonsense is absurdity, which can render its own dotty pleasures
(Oldenburg, Koons, Minotto), though the astronomical prices paid for these jokes spray a mystique
around this absurdity and freeze our laughter. Perhaps Beech and Roberts would like their concept of
the ’philistine’ to highlight such flashes of liberating absurdity, but their term is too real and painful to
name anything so frivolous.

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Beech and Roberts latch onto Adorno, but his contribution to ’art theory’ remains militantly unusable
for their purposes: he was actually writing about music, a form which has a different relationship to
time, audience and bourgeois property values. To take an example from another contributor, Gail Day
quotes Adorno from Aesthetic Theory (p. 254) - ’works that go out on a limb, seeming to rush
headlong into perdition, have a better chance of surviving than the ones that bracket temporality for
the sake of security’ (p. 253) - but it is hard to see how this criticism of trivial music (where you know
precisely how long it will last) in favour of extremism (Brötzmann! Descension! Pig Destroyer!
Apeshit!!) could be applied to art objects. After the assertion quoted by Day, Adorno proceeds to a
discussion of contingency and chance in Stockhausen’s latest scores, broaching issues only addressed
today in Free Improvisation, a movement staffed by refugees from the art world. It is significant that
saxophonists Peter Brötzmann and Alan Wilkinson both started as painters. In common with many
radical artists in the 70s, insistence on process rather than product led them to abandon art for
in-person performance; however, they took this so far that they began to define themselves as
musicians and abandoned the art-market. They broke their link with Clement Greenberg’s ’golden
umbilical cord’, and so cannot be picked up on the Beech/Roberts radar, though they are dealing with
precisely the issues of duration and unpredictability raised by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory - and more
effectively than the longueurs of 70s performance art ever did.

Mention of Free Improvisation opens up solutions which the ’philistine controversy’, despite its attack
on the ’new aestheticism’, is too bewitched by official values to acknowledge. Compared to the artistic
density and social critique of the oeuvres of Sun Ra, Derek Bailey and T.H.F. Drenching, the
’achievement’ of a Martin Creed is surely footling. From this perspective, the ideology of ’art’ is a
snare, and one that duchampian ’subversions’ perpetuate rather than diminish. When the US academic
Marjorie Perlof exploded in the London Review of Books letters page as a rabid supporter of Bush’s
’war against terror’, it showed that appreciation of the complexities unleashed by Marcel Duchamp’s
readymades does not guarantee a critical attitude towards bourgeois money and power. At all.

By returning to Dada in their final essay, Beech and Roberts acknowledge that it has indeed left some
unfinished business. However, their wonder at the paradoxes of anti-art fails to discern the critical
difference between European Dada - anti-war, pro-soviet (’Long Live the Machine Art of Tatlin!’),
anti-professional, domestic and environmental (the Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters), avid for social
revolution and an end to the special status of art - and its reception in New York as a deracinated
commodity.

It is to Beech and Roberts’ credit that they include an essay which offers the marxist categories needed
to save us from the oroboric writhings of post-duchampian art theory. In her historical-materialist
account of the cultural politics of Weimar, Esther Leslie comments on the National Socialist
alternative to ’degenerate’ art: ’having located the spoils of nineteenth-century realism, the Nazis
wanted to rid the world of the revolutionaries and bohemians and critics who had produced it’ (p. 223).
This sense of culture as a product of labour - of the activity and striving and work of actual people, not
simply a readymade style option in a cultural super-store - is properly marxist, and undermines the
class prejudices and commodity fetishism which buttress both Critical Theory and Cultural Studies.
The alienation of culture from its producers is not simply millionaires like Gertrude Stein and Peggy
Guggenheim buying up avantgarde paintings, it is also government cant about ’heritage’. Capital’s
appropriation of labour - and hence our alienation - extends to the cultural sphere.

Although Critical Theory and Cultural Studies pose as alternatives, both only address certified culture,
whether that means ’art’ or ’popular culture’. Status is conferred at both levels by votes of confidence
(investment) from the capitalist class. To organise criticism around that vote is disastrous: official
culture is like a dot.com bubble share, it bursts into nothingness at the merest touch. Again and again,
it’s been proved that genuine developments are made by those who don’t play the game of celebrity

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and recognition, but organise and discuss without heed to the dictates of institutional power and
speculations about profit. As Marx pointed out, ’The learned men by profession, guild or privilege, the
doctors and others, the colourless university writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, with
their stiff pigtails and their distinguished pedantry and their petty hair-splitting disstertations,
interposed themselves between the people and the mind, between life and science, between freedom
and humankind. It was unauthorised writers who created our literature.’ (’Debates On Freedom of the
Press’, April 1842, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 178) The stakes are highest, not when we seek to
second-guess the gambles of capitalist investment, but when we face with sober senses our real
conditions of life and our real relations with our kind. For this, all kinds of cultural and political and
informational sources are relevant. Some may come from ’art’ as defined by Beech and Roberts, some
may come from debates they stir up. Most will not.

The unauthorised critic needs unauthorised culture, and this means networking and debating beneath
the horizon of the ’culture’ brokered by Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. The ’counter-intuitive
philistine’ evoked by Beech and Roberts is, at its best, a name for the human mind and body abused
and travestied by the specialisations and lies of global capitalism. At its worst, it reduces the injustice
and oppression of capitalism to a frisson required to keep the art racket functioning. Unlike the
’philistine’, which is a name for the oppressive shadows cast by presentday monuments, the prospect
of an unauthorised culture - a counter-culture, a pursuit of artistic use value rather than exchange
value, punk defiance of the spectacle, a DIY-esemplasm - is a premonition of future movements,
catastrophes and possibilities. It is predicated upon the possibility of new epochs and new ways of
doing things. It has none of the guilt, shame and self-hatred which Beech and Roberts reveal as the
secret dynamo of today’s art scene.

For revolutionaries, the socialism of Marx and Engels did not simply ’put another spin’ (p. 274) on the
meaning of ’philistine’ when they condemned the liberal middle-class and their ’sentimental
enthusiasm for unrealisable ideals’ (Ludwig Feuerbach, 1885, p. 40). They named an enemy worth
fighting. When the forces of anti-capitalism rally, the ’philistine’ will no longer be some mysterious
catalyst for the generation of Modern Art, but our term for the institutionalised intellectual who cannot
comprehend the social struggles engulfing the globe.

Ben Watson
http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk

The Philistine Controversy // Dave Beech and John Roberts // London, Verso, 2002 // ISBN:
1-85984-374-3