The Work of the Critic in the Age of Crisis

Charlie Gere

Abstract

In this essay I look critically at art at a time when it seems beyond criticism, and entirely bound up with the art market, as the purest manifestation of exchange value. This in turn renders all attempts at criticality empty and pointless, and closes up any meaningful critical distance which would enable a genuine engagement with the value of art. This is exactly the loss of distance in general, and critical distance in particular, that Jameson suggests has been lost in postmodernism. This is less a question of postmodernism, and more one of theology and in this paper I suggest that art has become a key component of what Walter Benjamin describes as capitalism as religion. This opens art up to an analysis using the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Marie Jose Mondzain in showing how art continues to be part of apparatus of glory that originates in conceptions of Christian oikonomia, and which is now manifested in the spectacle. Following Agambens analyses of messianism and Franciscan arguments for use over property, I propose an alternative vision of art in terms of use value. This can be found in the project started by artist Tania Bruguera to develop useful art, and in the work of Grizedale Arts, an arts organization in the English Lake District. This is turn offers a different understanding of the role of the critic, as critical of the role art has come to play in late capitalism. Like the monastic orders of the middle ages art, and art criticism, need

perhaps to find a space outside the spectacular operations of power, and to practice critical disengagement and reclusiveness as a means of resistance to that power.

Keywords. Art, exchange value, use value, use, Agamben, Groys, Duchamp, oikonomia, spectacle, Hirst, profanation, play, criticism

The word critical derives from the late Latin criticus, which in turn comes from the Greek kritikos, from krites, a judge, and thus from krinein, to judge, decide. The last is also the origin of the English word crisis, which in late Middle English came to refer to the turning point in the progress of a disease. That we are in the midst of a number of crises, political, economic, environmental, cannot be doubted. What therefore might be the role of criticism in this critical juncture, this time of crisis, in particular criticism of the arts and humanities? Certainly the role of the art critic is increasingly meaningless. Despite the extraordinary degree of inequality and misery in the world, a single art sale at Christies in 2013 made three quarters of a billion dollars of sales, including nearly 150 million dollars for a Francis Bacon triptych. Such extraordinary prices has led Philip Kennikott in The Washington Post to ask As the price of art rises, it its value plummeting? Going back as far as the Renaissance, artists have had an uneasy relationship to patrons and the money they offer. And the fear of mass commercialization has been a perennial theme of art at least since the days of the pop artists a half century ago. But something different is in the air today. The level of disgust is deeper and more visceral. The art world has collapsed into the world of

commerce, and while there may be celebrations at Christies, there is an almost apocalyptic level of gloom everywhere else. (Kennikott, 2014) Is there is no longer any point in trying to make critical judgments about works of art? As far as the art market is concerned there is no incentive to ask is this work of art good?, but only will this work of art maintain or increase its financial value in the future? In such a situation the traditional understanding of the operations of critical distance are rendered irrelevant, in that capitalism forecloses such distance under the sign of pure exchange value as the only meaningful value. Perhaps the perfect example of this is Damien Hirsts For the Love of God, a diamond encrusted skull, which he first exhibited in 2008 in The White Cube gallery in London. Presented as a piece of theatre, in which security guards ushered small groups of viewers up to a small, dark room at the top of the gallery, in which the skull sat in a vitrine, lit dramatically. For all this theatricality the skull itself was disappointing, with the diamonds badly set and thus looking more like crystals masquerading as diamonds, such as those sold by Swarovski in any high street. The real work of art was not the skull itself, but the price for which it was supposedly being sold. Fifty million pounds was widely quoted, though it was also suggested that there had been difficulties getting anyone to buy at it at this price. In the end it was bought by a consortium, one of whose members, rumour has it, was Hirst himself. Of course this could be construed as a kind of performative critique of out-of-control capitalism , a move Hirst himself apparently tried to make. But, as Kennikott remarks:

There lingers in some corners of the art world the conviction more like a desperate article of faith that art can still redeem itself, through mockery, satire and irony. Thus, artists such as Koons and Hirst are somehow satirizing or critiquing the market that makes them wealthy. But more and more there is despair, a sense that they arent joking their way out of anything, just sneering all the way to the bank. There is no outside to the market from which artists can observe and comment independently. (Ibid) There is also, therefore, no outside, and thus no point of distance away from the market in which critics can do the same. The Skull was exhibited shortly before the scandal of subprime mortgages and toxic debt bundles nearly brought the entire world economy crashing to the ground. Hirst cleverly auctioned off a large amount of his work for a record 111 million literally days before the actual crash, or, more accurately, before the markets started to respond in panic-mode to the consequences of their own greed. The skull seems to suggest that contemporary art has its critical distance from the market and thus has lost any engagement with genuine attempts at social and political transformation, and has allied itself with capitalism, its use value entirely forgotten, leaving only its exchange value. As Julian Stallabrass puts it Art and money represent an almost pure form of exchange: in the opposition between use value and exchange value their weight is on the side of exchange. In the pricing of art, exchange value is tied above all to aesthetic judgement. The association is so familiar that it has developed the power of truism; if people say an artists work is undervalued, they generally mean that it is a good investment

prospect. People rarely say that some body of work is fine, but the market does not recognise this and, what is more, never will. (1997, 65 - 66) This is what the skull seems to indicate, that the whole of capitalism was predicated on investing now against putative future value, and that such investment was the basis of almost all financial transactions. Here perhaps is the real reason why mainstream art has difficulties addressing the current crises. It is absolutely part of the problem, rather than of any potential thinking through of solutions. The avant-garde notion that the value of a particular work of art or of a particular artist will only be properly appreciated in the future, a future that the artists work has helped bring about, has been conflated with the increasing importance of futures or derivatives trading in finance, in which a commodity is traded in terms of its potential value in the future. Thus finance becomes nothing more than a form of informed betting, or what is sometimes called casino capitalism, and art has become part of this structure, with artworks bought and traded in terms of their potential future value. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of the art market in its current highly monetised form happens at the same time as the beginnings of futures trading as a mainstay of investment with the development of the Black-Scholes equation in 1973, that enabled people to calculate the price of financial derivatives, financial instruments that have values based on the expected future price movements of the assets to which they are linked, which in turn are based on the value of the underlying assets. Clearly the idea of futures trading in art has a number of implications. One is that there is considerable impetus to make sure that a work of arts financial value increases by various means, whatever intrinsic value as an artwork it might possess. Another is that there is a strong incentive on the part of artists to obey the logic of the avant garde in

terms of current shock value leading to future appreciation, and to make works that look like they will be properly understood and valued in the future, either because they are now too difficult or too transgressive and provocative for our current sensibilities and understanding. This is not to suggest that artists are insincere or lack good intentions, but rather that art education and the art market has come to value the sovereignty of the artist as the source of future value. A Rothko or Pollock labouring heroically in the studio to produce something new and unprecedented in art becomes the model for the artist as the source of future value. Decoupled from any notion of skill or craft this is then reduced to the value of the artists choices and decisions. Art is massively invested in by the wealthy not just because it is a good investment, but also because it offers an image of freedom, a distance, if you will, from the mercenary constraints of the market, though this is no longer a critical distance, and as a way of using up the inevitable excess, the accursed share, that accumulates in capitalism. Thus the uselessness or purposelessness of art that is the legacy of Kantian aesthetics becomes a means by which the sovereignty of capitalism is confirmed. In its refusal of use value Art has become pure exchange value. Thus arts purposelessness or uselessness becomes a paradigm for the commodity whose value for capitalism is that of its exchange value, and not its use value. It is the commodity in its purist form. It can be argued that this is a theological matter. For Bernard Stiegler modern and contemporary art offers a displacement of the mystery constituted by the object of desire that was once God, moving toward a new mystagogical field, a mystagogy of immanence, and thus a space of belief of a new type (2008, p. 35). The immanence to which such works offer an initiation is perhaps that of capitalism itself, especially in its

current neoliberal, virtual mode, which has apparently entirely subsumed all aspects of contemporary existence, and for which profit appears to be a good that trumps all other considerations. In a recent interview Giorgio Agamben makes the following claim:

that capitalism is really a religion literally, the most fierce, implacable and irrational religion that has ever existed because it recognizes neither truces nor redemption. A permanent worship is celebrated in its name, a worship whose liturgy is labor and its object, money. God did not die; he was transformed into money. The Bankwith its faceless drones and its expertshas taken the place of the church with its priests, and by its command over credit (even loans to the state, which has so blithely abdicated its sovereignty), manipulates and manages the faiththe scarce and uncertain faiththat still remains to it in our time.(Sava, 2012)

In this he follows Walter Benjamins idea of capitalism as religion (1999). For Benjamin capitalism is more than merely a formation conditioned by religion, as Weber believed, but has a religious structure. [C]apitalism serves to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers (288). Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy], in which everyday is a feast day, and commands the utter fealty of the worshipper (Ibid). Above all it creates guilt and not atonement; A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal (Ibid). Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the

reform of existence but its complete destruction (289). For Benjamin it is this expansion of despair, that makes despair the religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation.

Giorgio Agamben expands on Benjamins essay on religion in In Praise of Profanation (2007). For Agamben the Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods (73). This is in keeping with Agambens understanding of religion as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core. (74) Therefore to consecrate is to remove things from the sphere of human law, and to profane is to return them to the free use of men (73). This is however a form of distance that precisely forecloses any criticality, inasmuch as it negates critical distance by separating everything. As such forms of resistance to capitalism, such as indifference are coopted in the more general process of separation. Thus, following Benjamin, for Agamben

capitalism, in pushing to the extreme a tendency already present in Christianity, generalizes in every domain the structure of separation that defines religion. Where sacrifice once marked the passage from the profane to the sacred and from the sacred to the profane, there is now a Single, multiform, ceaseless process of separation that assails every thing, every place, every human activity in order to divide it from itself. This process is entirely indifferent to the caesura between sacred and profane, between divine and human. In its extreme form, the capitalist

religion realizes the pure form of separation, to the point that there is nothing left to separate. An absolute profanation without remainder now coincides with an equally vacuous and total consecration. In the commodity, separation inheres in the very form of the object, which splits into use-value and exchange value and is transformed into an ungraspable fetish. The same is true for everything that is done, produced, or experienced even the human body, even sexuality, even language. They are now divided from themselves and placed in a separate sphere that no longer defines any substantial division and where all use becomes and remains impossible. This sphere is consumption. (81)

This is how Agamben understands the Debordian notion of spectacle, as a sort of generalized condition of difference, in that the

extreme phase of capitalism in which we are now living, in which everything is exhibited in its separation from itself, then spectacle and consumption are the two sides of a single impossibility of using. What cannot be used is, as such, given over to consumption or to spectacular exhibition. This means that it has become impossible to profane (or at least that it requires special procedures). If to profane means to return to common use that which has been removed to the sphere of the sacred, the capitalist religion in its extreme phase aims at creating something absolutely unprofanable. (82)

Much of the problem here can be understood in terms of what Agamben calls the museification of the world, in which

One by one, the spiritual potentialities that defined the people's lives - art, religion, philosophy, the idea of nature, even politics - have docilely withdrawn into the Museum. Museum here is not a given physical space or place but the separate dimension to which what was once - but is no longer - felt as true and decisive has moved. In this sense, the Museum can coincide with an entire city (such as Evora and Venice, which were declared World Heritage sites), a region (when it is declared a park or nature preserve), and even a group of individuals (insofar as they represent a form of life that has disappeared). But more generally, everything today can become a Museum, because this term simply designates the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing. (83 - 4)

In her book Image, Icon, Economy (2005) Marie-Josie Mondzain proposes that our entire contemporary relation to the image can be traced back to the disputes over the icon in eighth and ninth century Byzantium. These in turn were responses to the notion of Christian oikonomia, the idea that Christ was part of Gods overall plan for the salvation of humanity. In order to make possible a theory of the icon that would not be tainted by idolatry, and subject to the mosaic proscription on images, the Byzantine iconophiles developed the idea of the invisible image and the visible icon (69ff). This in turn served the strategic needs of the Church in its wielding of temporal power. In The Kingdom and the Glory (2011) Giorgio Agamben has pursued a similar investigation of

the modern idea of the economy as being rooted in early Christian notions of oikonomia. For both Mondzain and Agamben the Trinity as a structure defined by relationality is central to this development. At the heart of Agambens analysis is the idea that Western sovereignty, based as it is on this economic trinitarianism, is symbolized by the empty throne(245). In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agambens goal is to reveal that sovereign power is fundamentally emptyand the empty throne is a powerful image for that reality (or lack of reality) (245 - 6). It is this in turn that makes glory in the form of liturgical ceremony a necessary component of politics. For Agamben this economic understanding of politics emerging out of Trinitarian Christian theology remains paradigmatic of our contemporary situation, notwithstanding its supposed secularization. Following the work of Guy Debord and his analysis of the society of the spectacle Agamben sees modern democracy as formed on the basis of spectacular power, and the public sphere, and public opinion are the modern form of acclamation and glorification of power (280). There is a connection here between the current society of the spectacle and earlier visual regimes of power. Here one might cite the cooption of painters by the royal courts away from the guilds, in the early modern era, as part of the glorification of the monarchy. This is described by Martin Warnke in his groundbreaking book The Court Artist (1995), in which he showed that this cooption led to the notion of the artist as autonomous and sovereign. To this one might add the religious use of art in the Catholic counterreformation, and the emergence of the spectacular form of art known as the Baroque. For Debord Baroque was the art of a world that had lost its center with the collapse of the last mythical order: the Medieval synthesis of a unified Christianity with the ghost of an

Empire, which had harmonized heavenly and earthly government (189). He continues that What eventually followed Baroque, once it had run its course, was an ever more individualistic art of negation which, from Romanticism to Cubism, continually renewed its assaults until it had fragmented and destroyed the entire artistic sphere. The disappearance of historical art, which was linked to the internal communication of an elite and which had its semi-independent social basis in the partially playful conditions still experienced by the last aristocracies, also reflects the fact that capitalism produced the first form of class power that acknowledges its own total lack of ontological quality a power whose basis in the mere management of the economy reflects the loss of all human mastery (Ibid). This in part at least offers an explanation for the extreme hostility shown by twentieth century totalitarian governments towards the art of negation to which Debord alludes, whether this takes the form of the abandonment of avant garde art in Stalinist Soviet Russia in favour of socialist realism, or the condemnation of degenerate art by the Nazi regime. In both cases perhaps the role of art in the glory that conceals the ontological truth of the empty throne is promoted, and modern arts deconstruction of that role is condemned. This obviously resonates with Walter Benjamins famous claim that Fascism aestheticises politics and socialism must politicize aesthetics. But it might also be suggested that contemporary art, or at least that form of contemporary art that constitutes the art market, is a form of glory for capitalism, especially when considered in benjaminian terms as religion.

The irony here is that it is art that mimics the art of negation that is most prized by the oligarchs and other supporters of the hugely inflated art market. Hirst and Koons in particular can be understood, or perhaps misunderstood, as heirs and faithful followers of the greatest exponent of negation, Marcel Duchamp, yet it can also be argued that their practices fatally miss the point of Duchamps work, particularly in relation to the readymade. The case of Damien Hirst indeed shows how easily Duchamps radical move can be co-opted by the art market and the museum. Agamben makes this point in the interview quoted earlier. After discussing the radical and critical intentions behind the urinal he goes on to say that As you know, what happened instead is that a class, one that is still active, of clever speculators transformed ready-made into a work of art. And so-called contemporary art does nothing but repeat Duchamps gesture by filling the museums, which are nothing but organs of the market devoted to accelerating the circulation of merchandise which, like money, have attained a state of liquidity and which they want to continue to value as if they were works of art, with nonworks and non-performances. This is the contradiction of contemporary art: it abolishes the work of art and then puts a price tag on the result. (Sava, 2012) What perhaps needs to be recovered is the radical, eschatological dimensions of Duchamps move with the ready-made, and its implications for art, which is perhaps a kind of critical distance from art itself, and its underlying theological structure. In his recent book Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012) Boris Groys suggests that for Kierkegaard Christ is a kind of proto-readymade, in that he is thoroughly ordinary and

entirely contingent (xii). In his online essay Marcel Duchamps Absolute Art, Groys declares that Kierkegaard called Christianity the absolute religion because it was not based on any objectively provable difference between Christ and any other human being. In the same sense, one can see Duchamp as opening a way for the absolute art that valorizes the profane and devalorizes the traditionally valuable at the same time without abolishing either of them. (Groys, 2012 ) Elsewhere he writes that we can say that Duchamps Fountain is a kind of Christ among things, and the art practice of the readymade a kind of Christianity in art. (2008, 29 - 30) Nor was Duchamp unaware of this implication of his work, given that he described, ironically perhaps, as transubstantiation. According to critic Jerry Saltz in an article in Village Voice Duchamp may be the first modern artist to take God's prohibition against hewn objects to heart. Fountain is not hewn or made in any traditional sense. In effect, it is an unbegotten work, a kind of virgin birth, a cosmic coitus of imagination and intellect. Like a megalithic stone, Fountain is merely placed on view, pointed at as the locus of something intrinsic to art and as art itself. Duchamp's work relies on a leap of faith: that new thought structures can be formed based on things already in the world. Fountain is the aesthetic equivalent of the Word made Flesh: It is an incarnation of the invisible essence of art, an object in which the distance between image and prototype is narrowed to a scintillating sliver. Just as Christians perceive Christ as the invisible made visible, Jesus said He that hath

seen me hath seen the Father, so Fountain essentially says, He that hath seen me hath also seen the idea of me. (Saltz, 2006) In another recent essay entitled Weak Universalism (2010), Groys, following Agambens work, suggests that the avant-garde artist is a secularized apostle, a messenger of time who brings to the world the message that time is contracting, that there is a scarcity of time, even a lack of time. Following Agamben, and also Walter Benjamins notion of weak messianism Groys proposes that: Contracting time impoverishes, empties all our cultural signs and activities turning them into zero signs or, rather, as Agamben calls them, weak signs. Such weak signs are the signs of the coming end of time being weakened by this coming, already manifesting the lack of time that would be needed to produce and to contemplate strong, rich signs. However, at the end of time, these messianic weak signs triumph over the strong signs of our worldstrong signs of authority, tradition, and power, but also strong signs of revolt, desire, heroism, or shock. (Ibid) Groys derives his notion of messianic signs from Agambens idea of messianic time, which in turn Agamben takes from St Paul. In a talk given in front of the hierarchy of the French Roman Catholic church in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2009 he explained his understanding and how it differs from the normal conception of messianic delay. The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in time is experienced. For this reason it is inconceivable to speak of a chronological delay

in this context as though one were speaking of a train being delayed. Because there is no place in messianic time for a fixed and final habitation, there is no time for delay. It is with this in mind that Paul reminds the Thessalonians, About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night' (1 Thess 5.l-2; 262). In this passage 'comes [erchetai] is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes'-that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that, 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.' (2009, p. 5) Thus for Agamben the time of the messiah is not the end of chronological time, but ...is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time. This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time. On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have. To experience this time implies an integral transformation of ourselves and of our ways of living. (12 - 13) Agamben quotes Paul from Corinthians to the effect that time has contracted, and that while it lasts, those with wives should be as those who are without, those who weep as if they wept not, those who rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and those who buy as though they possessed not, and they that use this world, as not abusing it. The as not, hos me in Greek, means that the ultimate meaning of the messianic vocation is the

revocation of every vocation, so as to free them for a new usage. Messianic time is the penultimate time, before the ultimate time, in which things are rendered inoperative, the more accurate translation of the Greek verb katargein, usually rendered as destroy (19). For Paul messianic time is not future time but ho nyn kairos, now time, or what Benjamin calls jetztzeit. The parousia or presence of the messiah is a presence that distends time, an already that is also a not yet, a delay that does not put off until later but, instead, a disconnection within the present moment that allows us to grasp time. (26) Agamben accuses the Church of losing contact with its eschatological heritage, and forgetting the economy of salvation described in Pauls letters. Instead it remains in thrall to the force of Law or State, which is dedicated to the economy or, in other words, the indefinite, infinite governance of the world (35). The Church has forgotten what should oppose this, the Pauline economy of salvation. As a sense for an economy of salvation in historical time is weakened, or eliminated, the economy extends its blind and derisive dominion to every aspect of social life (Ibid). In his book on Paul, The Time that Remains (2005), Agamben suggests that the radical Franciscans in the late middle ages were exemplary in their attempt to recover the messianic heritage (27). He explores this further in his book The Highest Poverty (2013) in which he engages the theological uses and implications of poverty within monastic orders in the middle ages. The Highest Poverty is, ostensibly, a study of the relation between the law and monastic rule in the medieval period, though, as Adam Kotsko (2013) points out, it is also a subtle critique of neo-liberalism. At the heart of the book, and central to its critique of neo-liberalism, is an analysis of the Franciscan attempt to refuse any form of property in pursuit of the highest poverty (123ff). This brought the

Franciscans in conflict with Pope John XXII, a dispute which involved sophisticated philosophical arguments on both sides. The Franciscan argument hinged on the distinction between property and use. Franciscans can use consumable goods, such as food, without owning them, and thus compromising their absolute poverty. This in turn involves a turn away from being to becoming, inasmuch as consumable goods are successive kinds of things, which one cannot have in a simultaneous and permanent way (132). If contemporary art in the galleries and auction rooms has become the glory of capitalism-as-religion, then what is perhaps needed is an equivalent of the Franciscan critique of the Papacy. Perhaps this can be found in the concept of Arte Util, or useful art. This idea was originally developed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, during a series of residencies. As the website for the Museum of Arte Util puts it Whether through self-organised groups, individual initiatives or the rise of user generated content people are developing new methods and social formations to deal with issues that were once the domain of the state. Arte til case studies show how these initiatives are not isolated incidents, but part of a global movement shaping our contemporary world (Arte Util) This is followed by an eight-point programme which proclaims the movement's intentions to; Propose new uses for art within society; Challenge the field within which it operates (civic, legislative, pedagogical, scientific, economic, etc); Be timing specific, responding to current urgencies; Be implemented and function in real situations; Replace authors with initiators and spectators with users; Have practical, beneficial outcomes for

its users; Pursue sustainability whilst adapting to changing conditions; Re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation (Ibid). As Bruguera puts it Useful Art is a way of working with aesthetic experiences that focus on the implementation of art in society where arts function is no longer to be a space for signaling problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and implementation of possible solutions. We should go back to the times when art was not something to look at in awe, but something to generate from. If it is political art, it deals with the consequences, if it deals with the consequences, I think it has to be useful art. (Ibid) Perhaps the most resonant example of Brugueras ideas is also arguably the simplest. She has proclaimed the need to put Duchamps Urinal back in the restroom (Ibid). In doing so she out-duchamps Duchamp. Brugueras move removes art from the sphere of the commodity and of spectacle and glory, in an act of profanation, and returns it to use. The urinal is just a urinal. Contra Joseph Beuys claim that in the future jedermann ist ein kunstler, in what Agamben calls the coming community nobody is an artist, not at least in the glorified sense that that term has assumed in late capitalism. Here I interpret Bruguera use of the term useful not to be understood in instrumental terms, but rather as a child uses what is available to her in play. For a child an object has only use value, and not exchange value. In this sense it is the opposite of art, as defined by Julian Stallabrass, quoted earlier, as representing an almost pure form of exchange. As Agamben puts it The toy is what belonged - once, no

longer - to the realm of the sacred or of the practical-economic (1993, 71). In Praise of Profanation he claims that

It is well known that the spheres of play and the sacred are closely connected. Most of the games with which we are familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious sphere In analyzing the relationship between games and rites, Emile Benveniste shows that play not only derives from the sphere of the sacred but also in some ways represents its overturning. (2007, 75)

For Agamben play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it (76). It deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized (77).

Perhaps the finest expression of the coming together of use and play is a work of art by artist Jeremy Deller, working in collaboration with the arts organization Grizedale Arts in the English Lake District. (Grizedale Arts are also part of the useful art network initiated by Tania Bruguera). In 2004, as part of an initiative entitled Romantic Detachment, critiquing the romantic ideas we entertain about other cultures. Deller commissioned a painter of customized motorbikes to decorate a pair of tea urns and teapots, one of which was given to Water Yeat, a small village in the Lake District, for use in their village hall, and the other was sold to Tate at the Frieze Art Fair. The Tate version is accompanied by a strict instruction that it is not meant to be used. Thus, in one neat move, Deller

profaned the sacred art object, and returned it to use. This is one of a large number of playful projects that Grizedale Arts has been involved with since the end of the last century.

Here then might be a new understanding of the role of critic; not to engage in judgments on aesthetics or the effectiveness of a work of art, but to be critical of the whole apparatus of the art market and indeed the art world, much as the great Franciscan thinkers of the late middle ages were critical of the wealth of the papacy, and its failure to pursue the Churchs eschatological mission. Thus, like the monastic orders of the middle ages art, and art criticism, need perhaps to find a space outside the spectacular operations of power, and to practice critical disengagement and reclusiveness as a means of resistance to that power. Like those orders the basis of this withdrawal might be found in a refusal of possession and an embrace of use.

References Agamben, G. (1993). Infancy and History. Cambridge: Verso Agamben, G. (2005). The Time that Remains. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press Agamben, G. (2007). Profanations. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books Agamben, G. (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press Agamben, G. (2012). The Church and the Kingdom. London: Seagull Books Agamben, G. (2013). The Highest Poverty. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press Arte Util. http://arteutil.net/main/. Retrieved 13th February, 2014

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Bio Charlie Gere is Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, and author of Digital Culture (2002/2008), Art, Time and Technology (2006), Community without Community in Digital Culture (2010), co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art, 1960 1980 (2009) and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2010), as well as many papers on art, philosophy and technology.