Symbolic Revolutions

Bourdieu’s work is insightful here in two senses. Firstly, in terms of our relationship to art as it is constructed through museums, understood as places where social inequalities are reproduced. In his book L’amour de l’art (1979), he explores the links between museum institutions, as guardians of works of “legitimate culture,” and the structures of economic and social domination.

Today museums would seem to be open to all, and policies to democratize such institutions are also making them relatively inexpensive to visit. But Bourdieu and his team carried out a survey, interviewing visitors. They found that — notwithstanding the relatively open access — the vast majority of visitors were from the wealthier parts of society. What’s more, they found that the time they spent in front of a work, and the way that they approached it, differed considerably according to social class. This shows the intimidation these institutions provoke, revealing inequalities of “cultural capital.”

But artistic creation can also go against these social barriers — artists sometimes break with the dominant codes of artistic discourse of their time. This is why the second aspect of Bourdieu’s work invites us to consider art as the site of unsuspected possibilities. In his final course at the Collège de France, devoted to a detailed analysis of Manet’s oeuvre, Bourdieu explores the notion of a “symbolic revolution.” While the painter is now considered a “legitimate” artist par excellence, it seems difficile to imagine the scandal his paintings caused when they were first exhibited. The typical example is Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), now so un-subversive, and canonized by art history, that it is even depicted on cake tins.

Yet everything about this painting broke established nineteenth-century artistic codes, as evidenced by the shock among art critics, i.e., the “cultural field” in which the painter operated. The painting’s large format, usually reserved for “valuable” subjects such as epic or battle scenes, was used by Manet for a scene from everyday life — a picnic involving characters visibly from the working classes. Manet also inserts a nude model, probably a prostitute, who looks at the viewer, disturbing their passive contemplation. As for the still life on the left-hand side of the painting, this time executed according to current codes, it is interpreted by Bourdieu as a wink by the painter to the critics, seeking to signify that he is just as capable of mastering the codes of his time as of transgressing them.

Bourdieu thus seeks to understand the painter’s creative gesture — suggesting that it contributes to transforming the norms of the artistic field. However, 160 years later, it’s not certain that the “revolutionary” character of Manet’s work is still really perceptible, except through the eyes of this enigmatic woman. This also raises questions about the posterity of subversive works. Perhaps it’s also a matter of personal revolt, capable of transmitting the courage necessary for future creative acts.

Revolutionizing the Everyday

What, then, of the experience that brings the artist to the canvas? This is a primary, more or less conscious struggle, as expressed by artists like Van Gogh. It manifests itself first and foremost in the painter’s relationship with the space of the sheet of paper or canvas. Van Gogh writes in a letter to his brother Theo:

You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of “you can’t.”

Here, Van Gogh expresses the need to draw on a certain marginal experience, to truly challenge what we falsely imagine to be self-evident or natural. The possibilities of an inventive “madness” emerge, something of which will perhaps be communicated to the viewer. The way he paints landscapes, still lifes, and everyday objects constructs a radically new relationship with the world, and his work can be termed revolutionary in the same sense as Manet’s. That the painter encountered extreme difficulty selling his canvases is further proof of the artistic upheaval he provoked.

Van Gogh sought above all to paint reality. In a letter reacting to a painting by Paul Gauguin, for example, he declared: “I love the real, the possible.” This obstinacy is not so unequivocal, however, in the letters he wrote to his brother Theo, particularly during his stay at the Saint-Remy asylum between 1889 and 1890. Here, his “creative madness” is wrestling with his illness, while his clear-sightedness seems to be lacking. The painter downplayed his own work, far from suspecting its future contribution to the history of art.

Van Gogh’s correspondence with his brother revisits these questions, from the time of the production and reception of the artwork to the place of madness in art, or the role that artworks play in translating the past. In a way, we find traces of the profoundly unique breaking through into the history of art. Such breakthroughs are also political weapons, revealing by their very existence the enigmas and illusions of the commodification of art.

Resisting Commodification

“What’s worth more? Art or life?” asked Phoebe Plummer, one of the members of the Just Stop Oil collective, just after spraying Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with soup. While this approach can be understood as part of an activist intervention, it nonetheless reproduces a questionable opposition between “art” and “life” — and associates it with the commercial vocabulary of “valuing.”

Yet this opposition was strongly challenged in the twentieth century, in the wake of the Surrealist and Situationist movements, which also had their influence on the revolts of 1968. “Art is dead! Let’s liberate everyday life!,” the rebels wrote on city walls at the time. Hierarchies between different creative productions were thus demolished: the visual arts, political posters, cinema, associative drawing, games like the “exquisite corpse,” works made by children or even in asylums, all contributed to artistic expression, far from the canvas imposed by the cultural order.

Art historian Bruno Nassim Aboudrar points out that the target of the Just Stop Oil actions was not the works themselves, but the institutions that house them. True enough. But it is nonetheless useful to question this “activism in museums” and the methods it employs. Politicizing cultural sites — which run the risk of becoming memorial sites, preserving the past with no concern for a possible future — is itself an interesting strategy, provided that the reality that is sought there is not reducible to a can of soup or mashed potatoes. Rather, it’s a matter of recognizing what’s at stake in a creative gesture like Van Gogh’s, perhaps enabling others to have the audacity to do the same.

Placing art and life in opposition on a scale of value (what is “worth the most”), these activists run the risk of being trapped by the logic of commodification they are fighting against. Indeed, Plummer acknowledged in interviews afterward that this separation was nuanced, even thinking of her gesture as a kind of homage to Van Gogh, noting that the artist himself had “said ‘What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?’ I’d like to think Van Gogh would be one of those people who knows we need to step up into civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action.”

This question may also be raised by sabotaged artworks, illustrated, for example, by the case of Banksy. In 2018, the artist partially destroyed his own painting Girl With a Balloon — with a paper shredder hidden in its frame — just as it was being sold to a European collector for €1.2 million. Two years later, in December 2021, the painting sold again, this time for €21.8 million. It had been renamed Love Is in the Bin. How then are we to understand this partial destruction — said to be an act of opposition to commodification, but ultimately recuperated by market mechanisms?

It would be wrong to just settle for noting the contradiction. The meaning of artistic creation also lies elsewhere, outside the commercial and symbolic dimensions with which artistic productions are continually confronted. What makes art, in fact, is the struggle to bring unexpected possibilities to life. These unclassifiable elements, which have to do with the relationship between art and life, are particularly noticeable when creators go against the codes of art — at the risk of being misunderstood, ignored, or rejected. Perhaps real art always begins on the margins.