ESSAY | Part 2: Does the demand for accountability really account for art?

Increasingly, the artist's biography comes to overshadow their art. This article seeks to challenge the focus on the artist, not by separating the artist from their work but by exploring richer theoretical frameworks by which to interpret art.

Emmy Lou Packard, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at home in Coyoacan, Mexico, 1941. Emmy Lou Packard Papers, 1900-1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

The art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) asserted that “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.” He continued, “The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.” Rosenberg was describing action painting, better known as abstract expressionism, but while Rosenberg was precise about the art movement being distinct, it is now common to view all art as an expression of the artist. Rosenberg, in his celebration of the individual, could not have predicted the extent that the artist’s own biography would come to jeopardise and overshadow their work. Paradoxically, the very attempt to elevate the artist as self-expressive genius opened the way to denigrating the work as a reflection on the artist’s deeds. If the artist is a “toxic” person does that also render the art ethically problematic? Jackson Pollock, after all, was certainly, in the current tepid lexicon, problematic.

In contrast, Orson Welles elevated Chartres Cathedral as a work “without a signature.” In his 1973 documentary meditation on authorship, originality, and authenticity, F For Fake, Welles esteemed Chartres as “the premiere work of Man, perhaps in the whole Western world.” Undoubtedly many would recoil from the Eurocentrism of this assessment but there is something to Welles’s point that art moves beyond the creator. For Welles, not only may the author be irrelevant to beauty and grandeur, but Chartres is significant precisely because it aspires to something beyond mere authorship, instead being “a celebration to God’s dignity and to the dignity of man.”

Yet there is the demand that artworks be read through the artist or interpreted exclusively through moral criteria. And it is true that too often powerful people have gotten away with too much. But while heterosexual dead white males are often the subject of rebuke, it is worth pointing out that problematic artists are not exclusively heterosexual, dead, white, or male. One may think of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s betrayal of Leon Trotsky and their conversion to Stalinism, or recall that Simone de Beauvoir has been accused of grooming teenage lovers for herself and Jean-Paul Sartre. Then there’s Andy Warhol’s response to Freddie Herko’s death, “I wonder when Edie [Sedgwick] will commit suicide. I hope she lets us know so we could film it.” More extreme is the collage artist Kenneth Halliwell who murdered his lover, the writer Joe Orton. Many think the recently deceased Carl Andre murdered Ana Mendieta, with protests accompanying his shows.

Increasingly, exhibitions attempt to raise awareness of historical wrongs by reframing artworks with the creators’ identities and biographies—one of the more infamous was Hannah Gadsby’s critically panned It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby for the Brooklyn Museum in 2023. For what it is worth, I am not against attempts to increase representation and include great artists who have been overlooked, but amid a climate of accountability, biography has been stressed often to the point of overcorrection. Article after article has explored the issue of whether the artwork should be for its creator. Such articles tend to list shameful and / or wicked actions by artists. Sometimes there’s a call for captions to patronisingly enclose the viewer’s experience. Indeed, there is also this question about the audience’s morality: is it right to enjoy art made by monsters? There are troubling assumptions here. Too often art is understood as an undiluted expression of an atomised artist whose work has little social or historical import beyond the artist’s own morality and society’s complicity. There also seems to be an application of the market logic that consumer choices express approval, which marries with a much older, reactionary conviction that art should be judged not by aesthetic criteria but by moral criteria. Art is presented as a social danger that will either infect individuals or else express the viewers’ own immorality.

Despite the tendency to equate art with the artist, various frameworks in academia have long challenged the centrality of the author. Michel Foucault claimed the author-function may be dwindling, while Roland Barthes had already called for the death of the author and championed the birth of the reader—both were evidently premature. Poststructuralism tends to prioritise the textual quality of the work and often recentres the author as a function of the text. Reception theory analyses works by de-emphasising the author and elevating the audience responses. Formalism evaluates art through a formal aesthetic analysis of compositional elements. Phenomenology grounds analysis of works in their experiential character.

To be sure, there are frameworks that critique works by the author. Certain strands of feminism targeted rather braggadocious, misogynist males—think Kate Millet’s assessment of Norman Mailer who even (non-fatally) stabbed his wife. One could also think of certain postcolonial critics, such as the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe who in 1975 denounced Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, as racist. However, postcolonial theory can be more nuanced, often emphasising hybridity and ambiguity. For instance, analyses of orientalism often note a deeply flawed rebellion against European mores in the fetishisation of the exoticised other. Similarly, Queer theory situates how the villain in art, literature, and particularly cinema, is presented as queer and other. Yet at the same time, the villain is often desirable and offers a kind of visibility to queerness that was too-often repressed and suppressed, suggestive of a cloaked fascination. Understandably queer theory, with its emphasis on sexuality, often borrows from psychoanalysis, situating within art a return of repressed queer subjectivity. For certain strands of psychoanalysis, a work both evokes the psychology of its creator but also reveals the structuring of the psyche, offering insight into the audience as well as the creator. What is repressed finds a satiation in sublimation and catharsis. 

Curiously, right wing commentators often blame “cancel culture” and “woke moralism” on so-called “Cultural Marxists.” The conspiracy theory alleges that the Frankfurt School—founded in 1923 by Marxists involved with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt—sought to undermine Western institutions and high art through political correctness. This is a laughable interpretation. Art is part of what Marxists call the dialectic of history, where social momentum and innovation emerge through contradiction, so the idea that the Frankfurt School advocated a woke purism is absurd. Indeed, Herbert Marcuse, the closest thing to a Frankfurt School celebrity, defended the aesthetic dimension of art as something that resisted the instrumental logic of the capitalist system and social obedience.

Marxist frameworks tend to emphasise how tensions within society, shifts in the mode of production, and class antagonism, shape artworks and artists’ reaction to social transformation. Of course, Marxist analysis is diverse: some Marxists championed social realism, while others championed modernism. But despite or because of these debates, Marxist analysis provides one of the richest and most credible frameworks for interpreting art, with figures including: Georgi Plekhanov, Walter Benjamin, Frankfurt School (especially, Theodor W. Adorno and Marcuse), György Lukács, Clement Greenberg (formerly), Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Carol Duncan to name but a few. A key political figure like Trotsky, deemed art to be “the most complex part of culture,” and insisted on artistic freedom arguing that “Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement.”  As Trotsky explained, art is “a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious.” Of course, Trotsky himself would be a cancellable figure given his own brutality in crushing the Kronstadt rebellion. But his ideas are relevant in locating a tension between the artist and society that is often lacking today.

In this way, perhaps art shares more in common with politics than it does morality. While morality conceives of actions in relation to duty, modern politics and modern art are concerned with freedom. Perhaps, the best approach is to view art as contradictory just like its creators: the artist, their society, and an ever-changing audience. We should insist on seeing what kernel of emancipation operates within an artwork’s tensions rather than imprison it in the same cell as the artist.  

Image courtesy of Emmy Lou Packard Papers, 1900-1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

This essay was first published in Artist Profile Issue 73.  It is the second in a two part series by Dr Aleksandr Wansbrough with Part 1 first appearing in Artist Profile Issue 72.

Dr Aleksandr Wansbrough is a writer, lecturer and artist, interested in film, art and philosophy.