Journal of Cultural Economics

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-020-09398-w

BOOK REVIEW

Hans Abbing: the changing social economy of art, are

the arts becoming less exclusive? Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Justin O’Connor1

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

The argument of this book is quite simple. Between 1880 and 1980 was a period
of ‘serious art’ which separated itself from the ‘popular art’ of the ‘lower classes’,
creating a social space apart, exclusive and elitist. Though made possible by the rise
of the market towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘serious art’ disavowed this
market and annexed state funding to ensure its continued survival, shaming those
who would not or could not worship at its shrine. Then, from 1980, as consumer
spending on popular art grew apace, the social respect accorded this serious art
declined, states were no longer as willing to subsidise it, and art was forced both to
engage with a wider audience and find ways of gaining income from the market or
sponsorship. In this way, though we are not quite there yet, serious art has lightened
up, got down with the market, and thus with its users, and has folded itself back into
the everyday life of the people. What’s not to like?
This is presented in a kind of textbook form. It is aimed at students and others
who want to learn, has lots of summary-like headings throughout, with breakout-
sections, ‘asides’ and QR links to a webpage where more ‘data’ can be found. And
yet it is not a textbook, in the sense of an overview of the field, with the various
authors and debates, further reading, key questions and so on. It is, from beginning
to end, a statement of the ideas of the author, presented in a kind of take it or leave
manner. There is little by way of a thesis, other than what I have outlined above.
The thesis is ‘shown’ rather than told, less systematic argument and more illustration
of how the social economy (never defined) of serious art works. The tone is rather
like those mock documentaries, where the anthropologist’s eye is cast not upon an
exotic, pre-modern social group but on our contemporaries. ‘The natives put food in
boxes, drive to a building, look at squares of paint on walls, sit on a bench, eat the
food from their boxes, drive home. This is known as “going to see some art”’. It is
a method of distancing or defamiliarisation that Pierre Bourdieu used to great effect
nearly half a century ago. The social economy of serious art is laid bare, the real
social transactions underneath the froth of ‘art’ unmasked. This is backed up by the

* Justin O’Connor
Justin.oconnor@unisa.edu.au
1
University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

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kind of cultural sociology made familiar by Paul DiMaggio, also half a century ago.
Now of course, nobody is shocked, and everybody is a Bourdieusian. Taking socio-
logical readings off tastes in art, serious and popular, is the staple of most newspa-
pers and websites.
Why serious art and serious artists became separated out from the popular, eve-
ryday mix of entertainment and enjoyment, shaming all those excluded from it
and tapping into state funds provided by taxpayers, made up of those shamed and
excluded, is never explained. There is the ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’ and the ‘rise of
the market’, a bit of modernity theory, but this presented as self-evident fact. How
the emergence of serious art is related to other social, political and economic devel-
opments in that century between 1880 and 1980 is not discussed. Nor why it ended,
other than the rise of commercial popular culture, the market pushing back against
the state, and a bit of postmodernity theory. That the 1880s saw the full emergence
of ‘modernism’ is not explained, this being simply the logical conclusion of tenden-
cies from the eighteenth century onwards, the system remaining with us even now,
though in serious eclipse. Why 1980? Again, no explanation, just a marker of a shift
in opinion, when markets and popular art no longer accord serious art deferential
respect. This is not, then, a history, more an outline of an artworld system that came
and is now going. Why then should we care?
One of the critiques of Bourdieu is that he accords no specific value to the art
object or its experience, both of which are totally absorbed by their sociological
function as markers of distinction and the accumulation of various forms of capital.
Abbing is what we might call a vulgar Bourdieusian, social reductionism with little
finesse or historical nuance, and, unlike Bourdieu, with no real concern with what
might be at stake. For Bourdieu, this involved the historical gain of the autonomy of
art, one that could only be fully redeemed by a radical redistribution of educational,
social and economic capital. For Abbing too, the art work has no value outside the
artworld system in which it is a stake, but there it stops. There are no references to
other fields of power as in Bourdieu, just the elite exclusions of ‘art lovers’. There is
no ‘l’art pour l’art’ (an idea he demolishes in a few lines) and Arthur C Danto has
definitively shown that art is about context. Duchamp’s Urinal was only art when it
was exhibited in a gallery; therefore, that is the same for every other work of art. Art
is in the eye of the beholder only. In which case ‘art’ is essentially democratic – who
is to say what is better than anything else. And the best mechanism for democratic
preference is the market. Art is no longer exclusive because finally it has come to
terms with user preferences as expressed in the market.
Abbing is a cultural economist, which mainly involves grafting the flowering
top of cultural values onto the hardy stem of neoclassical economics. This can
work two ways. One is to use that hardy stem to give cultural value a sturdy eco-
nomic foundation, even if that cultural value is distinct from the economic, as
with David Throsby. The other is to show how cultural value is perfectly com-
patible with neoclassical economics as long as one expands the idea of ‘utility’
to include a range of experiential and positional uses. Abbing takes this latter
approach to provide a market democracy view of the arts. Now that art recog-
nises it is just one set of preferences amongst others, that it need engage with
the market, understand its different segments and micro-dynamics, then all will

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be well. Governments would do well to move away from using taxpayer funds to
foist art onto the lower classes who do not want it and start to encourage more
user-friendly popular art and to facilitate market-oriented action by artists and
institutions.
There are a few sticking points remaining. Those wedded to the artworld sys-
tem–‘art lovers’–are classed as ‘social conservatives’, and how can they not be as
they are trying to prop up an elitist system against popular desires. They do not
like the market, and nor do ‘leftists’, who wrongly attack it for undermining art
and homogenising popular culture. We do not really get to hear much about these
leftists (though there is the obligatory appearance from Adorno) but then, being
leftists they can be safely ignored. What we have are the sensible centre, those
who have embraced the democratic market in popular art and  have learned not
to be too serious, or exclusive, and can now, as cultural entrepreneurs, begin to
differentiate their offer and run websites. Those dissenting politicians or artists
(like Abbing) who questioned state subsidy for art loving elites, and who, we are
told, suffered back in the early 1980s, are now vindicated. Indeed, as we know,
the European Far Right now routinely call for the abolition of culture budgets on
anti-elitist grounds.
Abbing claims that the book is about serious and popular art, but really it is
about pulling back the former from its century-long elitist escape from the latter.
Popular art remains unexamined, simply a useful corrective to serious art. Seri-
ous, we should know, is not a good thing; popular art is about entertainment, a
good thing. There is no discussion of the actual culture industry—whether good
or bad, the large multinational corporations or continent spanning networks of
‘platform capitalism’ do not get a mention. Markets are just neutral mechanisms
based on the allocation of goods, in this case preference goods whose value is
purely in the eye of the purchaser. There is a recognition that the market might
make some goods more expensive, especially for the lower classes and people
who are ‘non-white’. These should be given free stuff, though who decides what
stuff is not clear. As long as it is not serious it should be fine.
Art is now part of a consumption economy, and that is OK because there was
nothing really at stake in art other than its elitism. Abbing is the very picture of
a bien-pensant market democrat, extolling the received wisdom that has come to
us from 1980. The pretentions of the art world have been seen off, and we are left
with the universal truth that art is brief but the market eternal. That the neoliberal
counter-revolution of 1980 might have something to do with this market-democ-
ratised art world, or that there may be deleterious consequences of the reduction
of art to the status of commodity—let us leave that to the social conservatives and
leftists. As we enter a darker post-pandemic world, one in which forty years of
neoliberalism have left workers worse off, unpicked our social fabric, hollowed
out the democratic state and have set off an ecological chain reaction on a scale
we struggle to comprehend, it might be useful to start thinking about what art and
culture do for us as a collective. Perhaps it might involve a common horizon of
experience that is not captured by the market aggregated expressed preferences
of that frenetically commodified lifeworld we call culture. None of the questions
we need to ask are in this book, which remains entrapped by cultural economics’

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neoclassical roots. Only a political economy of culture can get us out of this, and
a reaffirmation of the value of art beyond the commodity-form.

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