ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

Video of Danica Phelps’ presentation at The Drawing Center:

About ten days ago I gave a talk at an SVA ATOA panel on which I was to speak on the waning influence of art critics as compared to the rise of curators and collectors.  Shortly I’ll post a revised draft of that talk on my ‘Essays and Talks’ page, but here I want to return, if however briefly, to something I broached toward the end that talk, which, for me, is the importance of the concept of “emergence.”

I was reminded of this today by an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes that challenges the conventional wisdom of “market equilibrium” when it comes to thinking about just how we find ourselves faced with the current financial shit show.  The author of the piece essentially espouses the practice of agent-based market modeling, which “builds” or “grows” models of market behavior, rather than working from first principles–e.g. equilibrium–and then deducing from there how things “should” work.  In discussing a Yale economist’s model of credit levels and market stability, the author offers this key passage:

…the model also shows something that is not at all obvious.  The instability doesn’t grow in the market gradually, but arrives suddenly.  Beyond a certain threshold the virtual market abruptly loses its stability in a “phase transition” akin to the way ice abruptly melts into liquid water.  Beyond this point, collective financial meltdown becomes effectively certain.  This is the kind of possibility that equilibrium thinking cannot even entertain.

What is being described here, of course, is emergence–that is, the emergent behavior (which can tend towards order or disorder depending upon which direction one is moving) of a collection of independent “agents.”  These can be people with individual economic interests or, as the ice-to-water example demonstrates, even atoms or molecules.  What matters here is that emergence is opposed to a kind of reductionist thinking which believes that if you understand the behavior of a single agent (homo economicus for econmics; a point particle for physics) then you can understand everything.  (The billions of dollars spent on the LHC at Cern is a large and expensive demonstration of the power of this kind of reductionist thought).

Now, why might the concept of emergence be important for art, or for art history, criticism and theory no less?  It seems like a silly question to be sure.  After all, we’re talking here about economics and physics, fields which always seem to bear a bit more urgency for everyday life than do the arts as we confront them today.  But here are some initial thoughts: in terms of history, the concept of emergence recasts our understanding of the shift from modernism to its subsequent iterations (postmodernism or what have you) as a shift away from aesthetic reductionism.  Understanding those subsequent iterations, then, would benefit from an understanding of emergence in all of its varied interdisciplinary manifestions.  (That P. W. Anderson’s “More is Different,” perhaps the seminal text on the dialectic of emergence and reduction, appeared at the very moment–1972–as debates were raging over the fate of modernism in the arts, gives the concept a very attractive historical specificity as well.)

In terms of criticism, emergence would require that we begin to look at entire populations of agents and objects rather than continuing to focus on those agents and objects alone.  This may seem anathema to what art critics do, which, on the standard thinking, is to write about, assess and judge works of art.  But it should come with little suprise that I find this notion of criticism obsolete.  It is “art writing,” not criticism, and yes, it has its place and function, but we should not fool ourselves that it is “critical” in any rigorous or robust sense of the term.  Though it takes literature as its object, Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005) offers a promising example of how an emergence-based criticism would look in practice.

But if we are faced with confronting individual agents and objects, which is to say art works and artists, emergence offers us not only a framework but an incredibly versatile conceptual tool with which to approach the job of building and defending arguments about the work at hand.  I have tried to do this through a comparison of certain of Tara Donovan’s sculptures to installations by Sarah Sze.  Some, but by no means all, of Donovan’s work not only illustrates certain principles of emergence but also restages the negation of artistic subjectivity–think John Cage–which played such a large role in the demise of modernist aesthetics.  Sze, on the other hand, offers only the “appearance” of emergence–in the form of complex, artificial, biomorphic “worlds”–without any of the underlying dynamics, and so puts into place an updated but no less mythological, and outmoded, image of the artist as Creator.

Finally, from a more purely theoretical perspective, emergence offers us a way out of the genesis/structure aporia that runs through philosophical phenomenology (Husserl) and structuralism (Saussure) to deconstruction and beyond.  The figure of the “symmetry breaking phase transition,” which is central to emergence, is a figure of the pure “event” which arises not in spite of, but as a fundamental feature of, a given dynamic system, be it physical, economic, social or historical.  Of course, the work of Gilles Deleuze has probably done most to stir this pot, which is why thinkers such as Brian Massumi and Manuel Delanda have gone very far in articulating general theories of emergence.  Nevertheless, one cannot begin to understand the full ramifications of this powerful idea without the incomparable efforts of Stuart Kauffman.

A senior executive in fine art and title insurance at one of the major insurance companies told me this morning that she has been contending this August with a flood of clients asking for revaluations of works and even of entire collections.

This is usually a step people take before consigning work to auction, but it can also signal potential estate plan restructuring. Either way, if there is a glut of good work trying to find its way onto the block, we can be sure that auction house egos will rise even further than they have. Let’s hope that American consigners can continue to find European, Indian and Asian buyers.

Christopher Ho, an artist friend of mine, and I were discussing recently how to map out the state of contemporary art (this is something that takes us back to grad-school days and the semiotic-square, which now seems so outre that we must indulge in it behind closed doors), and we got onto the topic of methodological models which have been useful, even definitive, to historians and critics in the past. These should be widely familiar by now: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, anthropology, to name a few of the more influential disciplines. Art history, we thought, could do with an infusion of new blood, so to speak. (This idea may be highly unpopular, that art history needs models from other disciplines to fuel new insights; but one must admit that many of the most significant historians and texts within the field have derived that significance from cross-disciplinary borrowings. And why not look around a bit?)

Given, it seems, everyone’s obsession with the market, Christopher suggested that we should be looking much more closely at the one discipline whose raison d’etre is developing conceptual models: economics. This, we agreed, would require a lot of work: though certainly highly intelligent, art historians aren’t given to the kind of thinking that goes with economic expertise. We both thought that there would necessarily be some text which could establish the framework through which art historical insights might be derived. What that text is, we don’t know. I suggested Jeffry Frieden’s Global Capitalism (Norton, 2006) as a place to begin, especially given Frieden’s positioning of the gold standard as fundamental to the growth of global capital in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course Walter Benn Michaels’ The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) has tread some of this ground already. But Frieden’s book is more historical than theoretical, and it doesn’t offer the kind of structure that is easily imported from one intellectual terrain to another (a prime example here being Frederic Jameson’s borrowing of Ernest Mandel’s phases of capitalism from the latter’s Late Capitalism [1972]).

Perhaps whole texts are not what we’re after, though. James Surowiecki’s column in a recent New Yorker discusses the economics of strikes and mentions work by Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein on “self-serving bias.” This bias alters, quite literally, how and what people see, and it works as a kind of cognitive override of direct perception. Now it seemed to me that we’re familiar with this kind of concept from Arnheim’s (gestalt) psychology of perception, which had its day in the 1960s and, as we know, was important in the early discourse of minimalism. (I also think it’s a subset of Wittgenstein’s discussion of “seeing as” from the Philosophical Investigations, which formed the basis of Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art.) But perhaps the Babcock and Loewenstein study may round out, update or, more importantly, trouble these ideas of perception, especially as they move the locus of inquiry from the individual subject to a site of intersubjective conflict (the economists’ study entailed the judgments by two different groups of fans of whether a football game was called fairly). Needless to say, this may be a productive line of inquiry.