Hoipolloi Cassidy
29th July 2011, 20:40
WOID XX-05. Horrors of the Wack Museum
[Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language (http://theorangepress.com/woid)]
A friend of mine once told about the Art History course she took in college:
Professor shows a slide. Moment of silence. "Beautiful," he murmurs, and on to the next slide: "Exquisite," he says, and then on to the next...
If this sound like every undergraduate Art History course ever taken it's because the teaching of Art History is a well-defined discipline with rigorous pedagogical standards and competencies upheld by the most widely used Art History textbook ever written, The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich; but I have to wonder, as I've wondered elsewhere (http://theorangepress.com/publications/theredmuseum.html), what the connection is between the kind of Art History taught today, and the kinds of people Gombrich considered his friends and intellectual allies: Karl Popper, author of The Open Society, an inspiration to the political speculator George Soros; and Friedrich Hayek, Maggie Thatcher's favorite economist.
What does Art History have to do with economics? It's a given fact among the followers and teachers of Friedrich Hayek, the members of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, that Art doesn't fit the economic model because it's got nothing to do with Scarcity, and scarcity drives the market. This is the lynchpin of the "Calculation Problem," the argument developed by Ludwig van Mises, the Austrian economist, and taken up by later by his epi-goon Hayek at the London School of Economics. Market intervention never works because the calculations can't prove it does; Marxists don't know how to redistribute resources, and that's a fact, in a highly abstract kind of way.
There's a problem with the Calculation Problem, though: if you accept that Culture has a real economic function apart from giving Business majors a chance to take a nap while classroom lights are dimmed, then Mises' argument falls apart, because Culture has little to do with Scarcity. So it is very, very important, children, to emphasize that Art is Just for Staring. It's purely passive. The second problem with the Calculation Problem is, that Mises developed it in the early 'twenties, in Vienna. A lesser man might have been humbled by the thought that he was writing a book demonstrating that Socialism was not economically viable at the time the Socialists of Vienna had managed to rebuild the economy, house hundreds of thousands of workers, and bring an end to tuberculosis. This didn't bother Mises much since, as he later explained, his operating concepts were the equivalent of what Kant called "synthetic a-prioris:" being immediately, intuitively accessible to the intellect (like "space," or "up and down,") they had transcendental validity: they required no proof, and least of all from the likes of you. Like an empty doorway and a maple tree, or a required course, of course, Free-Market Economics should not mean, but be. And the same has been said of Art: "Beautiful. Any questions? Next."
Vienna, 1927: Karl Popper's just another graduate student, an over-educated and under employed formerly-rich whiz-kid trying to get along in the Whiz-Grownup game against some very stiff competition, whose job meantime is teaching the children of the working class. Call it Erziehung, Bildung, Kultur or whatever, the main arena for the development of the promised Socialist Culture in Vienna, the creation of the New Red Man, is Education, now. Popper's dissertation, in Psychology, proves that the little fu... - I mean, the striving children of the Working Class - will never free themselves from their miserable condition because they're too "dogmatic," genetically brainwashed to be oblivious to Culture, much as your average Business Major is said to be oblivious to Art. Popper would later throw that word, "dogmatic," at the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; By the time he'd written his breakthrough book, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) it had become a code for "brainwashed Commie stooge."
Popper and Mises turned out to be prophetic, after all: Socialism didn't work. Not only was Socialism unable to persuade the Proletariat to rise beyond its genetic inability to respond to an incompetent teacher; Socialism itself had an innate tendency to collapse under systematic mortar attacks on a civilian population, as happened in Vienna in 1934. Within weeks, Popper was meeting with various right-wing economists in support of "True Democracy," meaning an economic elite that ruled with the assent of the People, not their participation. "True Democracy" worked like a charm: the Austro-Fascists cut down unemployment compensation, cut wages, and built up huge cash reserves which the Nazis promptly confiscated in order to finance World War II. Somehow nobody stuck around to complain that free-market economics never works because it just accumulates more cash reserves for somebody to steal.
In 1935 Popper traveled to London, the Casablanca of East European intellectuals desperate for a way out of the gathering Heil-storm. Hayek, Popper and Gombrich connected at the London School of Economics, which had been set up to rehabilitate free-market thought - or maybe just to to terminate Keynesian. Hayek had come from Austria to play the Terminator; he was "enthralled" by Popper, whose writings "seemed to him to dissolve the positivist myth of natural science threatening subjectivist economics:" Popper seemed to scientifically prove that certain sciences were scientific; he'd pulled the same Kantian stunt as Mises, with a lot more philosophical jargon; he was on track to becoming the Engels of Free-Market Diamat. Next slide, please.
- PW
[first part of a two-part article]
[Reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language (http://theorangepress.com/woid)]
A friend of mine once told about the Art History course she took in college:
Professor shows a slide. Moment of silence. "Beautiful," he murmurs, and on to the next slide: "Exquisite," he says, and then on to the next...
If this sound like every undergraduate Art History course ever taken it's because the teaching of Art History is a well-defined discipline with rigorous pedagogical standards and competencies upheld by the most widely used Art History textbook ever written, The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich; but I have to wonder, as I've wondered elsewhere (http://theorangepress.com/publications/theredmuseum.html), what the connection is between the kind of Art History taught today, and the kinds of people Gombrich considered his friends and intellectual allies: Karl Popper, author of The Open Society, an inspiration to the political speculator George Soros; and Friedrich Hayek, Maggie Thatcher's favorite economist.
What does Art History have to do with economics? It's a given fact among the followers and teachers of Friedrich Hayek, the members of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, that Art doesn't fit the economic model because it's got nothing to do with Scarcity, and scarcity drives the market. This is the lynchpin of the "Calculation Problem," the argument developed by Ludwig van Mises, the Austrian economist, and taken up by later by his epi-goon Hayek at the London School of Economics. Market intervention never works because the calculations can't prove it does; Marxists don't know how to redistribute resources, and that's a fact, in a highly abstract kind of way.
There's a problem with the Calculation Problem, though: if you accept that Culture has a real economic function apart from giving Business majors a chance to take a nap while classroom lights are dimmed, then Mises' argument falls apart, because Culture has little to do with Scarcity. So it is very, very important, children, to emphasize that Art is Just for Staring. It's purely passive. The second problem with the Calculation Problem is, that Mises developed it in the early 'twenties, in Vienna. A lesser man might have been humbled by the thought that he was writing a book demonstrating that Socialism was not economically viable at the time the Socialists of Vienna had managed to rebuild the economy, house hundreds of thousands of workers, and bring an end to tuberculosis. This didn't bother Mises much since, as he later explained, his operating concepts were the equivalent of what Kant called "synthetic a-prioris:" being immediately, intuitively accessible to the intellect (like "space," or "up and down,") they had transcendental validity: they required no proof, and least of all from the likes of you. Like an empty doorway and a maple tree, or a required course, of course, Free-Market Economics should not mean, but be. And the same has been said of Art: "Beautiful. Any questions? Next."
Vienna, 1927: Karl Popper's just another graduate student, an over-educated and under employed formerly-rich whiz-kid trying to get along in the Whiz-Grownup game against some very stiff competition, whose job meantime is teaching the children of the working class. Call it Erziehung, Bildung, Kultur or whatever, the main arena for the development of the promised Socialist Culture in Vienna, the creation of the New Red Man, is Education, now. Popper's dissertation, in Psychology, proves that the little fu... - I mean, the striving children of the Working Class - will never free themselves from their miserable condition because they're too "dogmatic," genetically brainwashed to be oblivious to Culture, much as your average Business Major is said to be oblivious to Art. Popper would later throw that word, "dogmatic," at the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; By the time he'd written his breakthrough book, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) it had become a code for "brainwashed Commie stooge."
Popper and Mises turned out to be prophetic, after all: Socialism didn't work. Not only was Socialism unable to persuade the Proletariat to rise beyond its genetic inability to respond to an incompetent teacher; Socialism itself had an innate tendency to collapse under systematic mortar attacks on a civilian population, as happened in Vienna in 1934. Within weeks, Popper was meeting with various right-wing economists in support of "True Democracy," meaning an economic elite that ruled with the assent of the People, not their participation. "True Democracy" worked like a charm: the Austro-Fascists cut down unemployment compensation, cut wages, and built up huge cash reserves which the Nazis promptly confiscated in order to finance World War II. Somehow nobody stuck around to complain that free-market economics never works because it just accumulates more cash reserves for somebody to steal.
In 1935 Popper traveled to London, the Casablanca of East European intellectuals desperate for a way out of the gathering Heil-storm. Hayek, Popper and Gombrich connected at the London School of Economics, which had been set up to rehabilitate free-market thought - or maybe just to to terminate Keynesian. Hayek had come from Austria to play the Terminator; he was "enthralled" by Popper, whose writings "seemed to him to dissolve the positivist myth of natural science threatening subjectivist economics:" Popper seemed to scientifically prove that certain sciences were scientific; he'd pulled the same Kantian stunt as Mises, with a lot more philosophical jargon; he was on track to becoming the Engels of Free-Market Diamat. Next slide, please.
- PW
[first part of a two-part article]