Jun 7th 2016

WORDS AND PICTURES

By David Galenson

David W. Galenson is Professor of Economics at the University of

Chicago; Academic Director of the Center for Creativity Economics at
Universidad del CEMA, Buenos Aires; and a Research Associate of the
National Bureau of Economic Research. His publications include Old
Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic
Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Conceptual
Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge University Press and
NBER, 2009).

“I mean, all us lot, we fucking caned the fucking art world. Absolutely totally phenomenal.
We caned the art world as fucking kids.” Thus spoke Damien Hirst in 1999, in one of a series of
interviews that were to be published as a book. “All us lot” referred to the Young British Artists
(YBAs), of whom Hirst was the universally recognized leader, and who had taken the advanced art
world by storm in the 1990s. Hirst spelled this out later in the same interviews: “The center of the
fucking art world’s in England. You know that, don’t you?”

Hirst’s declarations were taken by many casual observers as the arrogant, obnoxious, and
probably drunken rantings of an uneducated and boorish punk. And they were deliberately intended
to make this impression. In fact, however, Hirst’s rhetoric was a sophisticated and calculated
contribution to one of the most vital traditions of advanced modern art, that had been initiated 90
years before, by the equally brash and iconoclastic young leader of an earlier artistic movement.

F.T. Marinetti (1876-1944) was not a painter, but an Italian symbolist poet who liked to
describe himself as “the caffeine of Europe.” He was a thoroughly modern intellectual, who
enthusiastically embraced all the most recent developments in technology, culture, and
communications, and had an intuitive understanding of how to use them for his own benefit. Long
before scholars had begun to analyze opinion polls and study popular attitude formation, Marinetti
understood that whatever the message, its form would be as important as its substance: in a world
of what would later be named sound-bites, how you said something was as important as what you
said. He also understood that in modern society culture would no longer be restricted to the select
few: he was a pioneer of the goal of reaching a mass audience with personal art, rather than that of
the church or state. He approached the marketing of culture as if it were a political campaign,
advertising with posters, newspapers, and leaflets, aimed above all at producing excitement and
controversy. As in politics, he realized that it was important not only to praise his own work and
that of his allies, but also to denounce his predecessors, and abuse his opponents. Above all, he
recognized that the most important thing was to get attention, whether favorable or unfavorable.

Having mastered the existing forms of publicity for art, Marinetti created a new one, that
was to reverberate throughout modern art. In 1909, he published The Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism, in full, on the first page of the French newspaper Le Figaro. Marinetti’s vigorous attack
on Italy’s failure to move beyond its decaying artistic past into the excitement and vitality of the
future gained greatly in impact from its prominent placement in the most respected newspaper in
the cultural capital of Europe. The Manifesto of Futurism became a model for the development of
Futurism as a movement, and an important precedent for many later artistic movements.

The literary scholar Marjorie Perloff observed that Marinetti was mediocre as a poet and
unoriginal as a thinker, “but as what we now call a conceptual artist, Marinetti was incomparable,
the strategy of his manifestos, performances, recitations, and fictions being to transform politics
into a kind of lyric theater.” Drawing on many earlier precedents, including the mixture of political
and poetic rhetoric in the Communist Manifesto (“A specter is haunting Europe…”), Marinetti
transformed the manifesto from a vehicle for political statements into an artistic instrument. He
instructed his Futurist followers that the new literary genre required violence and precision—“the
precise accusation, the well-defined insult.” His own manifestos used a variety of literary devices
to increase their impact, including narrative, satire, theatricality, and abstraction. Titles—critical
for attracting attention—were to be concrete and provocative. And Marinetti’s manifestos were
theoretical: in his highly abstract intellectual world, theory not only preceded practice, but to a
great extent became practice.

The Futurist movement became closely associated with manifestos. Futurism had begun as
a literary movement, but when Marinetti expanded it by incorporating five young Italian painters
in 1910, the first thing these artists did was to publish two leaflets—Manifesto of the Futurist
Painters and Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painters—declaring their distaste for earlier art (“our
deep disgust, our haughty contempt, our joyful rebellion against the vulgarity, the mediocrity, and
the fanatical and snobbish cult of the past which are suffocating art in our country”) and their love
of the modern (“we must now draw our inspiration from the tangible miracles of contemporary
life”). How they would express this on canvas was less clear, and in fact Futurist painting never
developed a specific style to capture pictorially the dynamism of the modern city and its
technology. Indeed, the manifestos of the Futurist painters became more influential than their art.
So for example in 1912, the German Expressionist Franz Marc wrote to his friend Wassily
Kandinsky that “I cannot free myself from the strange contradiction that I find their ideas, at least
for the main part, brilliant, but am in no doubt whatsoever as to the mediocrity of their works.”

Dozens of Futurist manifestos, on subjects ranging from painting and sculpture to

architecture and clothing, spread across Europe in leaflets, newspapers, and magazines. Many other
ambitious young artists soon appropriated the new genre for their own purposes. (These young
artists were conscientious students of Marinetti, and they demonstrated their mastery of his lessons
by following his example. Prime among his commandments was to denounce one’s predecessors.
Since Marinetti was the spiritual father of the next generation of manifesto authors, he and his
Futurist movement took a considerable verbal beating from artists all over Europe.) In London in
1914, the painter Wyndham Lewis issued a manifesto extolling the advantages of Vorticism—
“England is just now the most favorable country for the appearance of a great art”—over earlier
styles (“The artist of the modern movement is a savage—in no sense an ‘advanced’, perfected,
democratic, Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination”). In Moscow in 1916, the
painter Kazimir Malevich published the Suprematist Manifesto, announcing “The first step of pure
creation in art,” and again rejecting its ancestors: “Yesterday we, our heads proudly raised,
defended Futurism—Now with pride we spit on it.” In Zurich in 1918, the poet Tristan Tzara’s
Dada Manifesto declared that “We have enough Cubist and Futurist academies: laboratories for
formal ideas,” and “so Dada was born of the need for independence.” Each of these movements
produced a cluster of manifestos, as did Surrealism in Paris after the end of World War I, beginning
with the poet André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924.

Surveying the history of this flood of manifestos, the philosopher and critic Arthur Danto
remarked that “manifestos were among the chief artistic products of first half of the twentieth
century,” and in recognition of this, christened this period the Age of Manifestos. Danto observed
that all these manifestos shared the characteristics of defining a particular movement, or style, and
proclaiming that this was the only kind of art that mattered. Manifestos were thus intended to
establish a particular movement’s claim to be the one true and valid approach, that would become
the point of departure for all future art. Ironically, however, Danto noted that in all cases these
programs failed: “The manifestoed movements of the twentieth century had lifetimes of a few years
or even just a few months, as in the case of fauvism.”

Danto’s description of the role of these manifestos is correct, but it fails to account for the
key historical question: why did art manifestos appear when they did, and why did their use spread
so widely in this period? Danto’s inability to explain the relevant causation can be traced to a failure
to consider the economic history of art, specifically the market conditions underlying this episode.

Manifestos were one consequence of the radical changes in advanced art that were caused
by a transformation of the structure of the market for advanced art that began in the late nineteenth
century. For centuries, from the time of the Renaissance, there were stylistic variations in advanced
art, but these were relatively subtle, for artists were tightly constrained by the need to satisfy
powerful patrons—the church, the state, or the agents of the state, as in the case of the French Salon
in the nineteenth century. The rise of a competitive market for art, that began with the Impressionist
exhibitions of the 1870s and ‘80s, and culminated with Picasso’s shrewd manipulation of Paris’
leading private dealers in the first decade of the twentieth century, for the first time allowed
advanced artists an unprecedented degree of freedom. The result was a proliferation of radical new
styles, most prominently created by young, conceptual innovators. Early in this new regime, F.T.
Marinetti perceived that sophisticated advertising could be a valuable adjunct to the production of
radically innovative art, and a new artistic genre was born.

Manifestos were chiefly associated with conceptual artistic movements, for several reasons.
One of these was apparent to one of the pioneering conceptual innovators early in the modern era.
In 1883, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “One of these days I shall write you a letter;
I shall write it carefully and try to make it short, but say everything I think necessary. You might
keep that letter then, so that in case you should meet somebody who might be induced to buy some
of my studies, you could tell that man my own thoughts and intentions exactly. My thought in this
being especially: one of my drawings taken separately will never give complete satisfaction in the
long run, but a number of studies, however different in detail they may be, will nevertheless
complement each other.” Van Gogh was a prototypical example of a kind of artist who would
become common later in the modern era, a conceptual innovator who created a personal symbolic
language that held meanings for him that would not be apparent to anyone looking at one or two
works. Hence Vincent’s suggestion that he could write a statement explaining his works to potential
collectors. This would be one central role of the manifestos of the next generation of conceptual
artists.

In addition to explanation, Marinetti recognized that written texts could powerfully

complement the intellectual appeal of conceptual paintings or sculptures, because of their shared
basis in ideas. The controversy created by the Futurist manifestos created an aura of exhilaration
around the paintings they accompanied, or often preceded, and thus added an extra dimension of
intellectual enjoyment to the experience of viewing the canvases. Malevich’s novel painting of a
black square on a white ground must have gained considerably in power when accompanied by his
oracular text that proclaimed that “The square is a living, regal infant,” and declared that “Our
world of art has become new, non-objective, pure.” With the new sophistication of artistic
manifestos, a succession of articulate conceptual innovators demonstrated Perloff’s observation
that “To talk about art becomes equivalent to making it.” And, we might add, to read about art
became equivalent to seeing it. Thus in the highly competitive market for advanced art of the early
twentieth century, a powerful and appealing new form of advertising emerged, to educate and
intrigue collectors, in the form of the manifesto. Its rapid diffusion and widespread adoption
provide strong evidence of its value to the many artists who made it a trademark of the era.

Although there are notable exceptions, manifestos have rarely been produced by
experimental artists. In part this is a function of the visual goals of experimentalists: they are likely
to say that if they could explain verbally what they wanted to achieve, they wouldn’t have to paint.
Experimental artists also typically lack the confidence and certainty that Marinetti and his
conceptual heirs all displayed in abundance. Thus for example Robert Motherwell observed that it
was difficult to find a true Abstract Expressionist manifesto, because “the very nature of a
manifesto is to affirm forcefully and unambiguously, and not to express the existential doubt and
the anxiety that we all felt.”

Formal artists’ manifestos dwindled in importance in the second half of the twentieth
century (in 1989, the painter R. B. Kitaj introduced his First Diasporist Manifesto by noting that “I
just read in an art column that the time for manifestos has passed. So I thought I’d write one.”)
There appear to be a number of reasons for this. Ironically, one may be the rise of a mass audience
for art. With an increasing public appetite, newspapers and magazines have devoted more attention
to contemporary artists and their movements, and this may have reduced the need for artists
effectively to write their own advertisements. Such general interest magazines as Time and Life
wrote about the Abstract Expressionists in the late 1940s and the ‘50s, and Pop Art further
expanded public curiosity about advanced art in the early ‘60s. Artists’ interviews became more
prominent in the ‘60s, and Andy Warhol provided a prime example of how artists could
dramatically increase their fame by speaking to journalists rather than writing themselves. (During
the 1970s, Warhol extended his fame beyond the boundaries of the art world by publishing a
monthly magazine he named Interview, which featured interviews of celebrities by celebrities,
including Warhol himself.)

Some important contemporary artists have continued to take advantage of the manifesto. In
1961 Claes Oldenburg, one of the original Pop artists, wrote I Am for an Art to affirm his belief in
popular art (“I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top”),
at the same time that he endorsed a model of the artist quite different from that of Warhol (“I am
for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways”). In 1970 Gilbert
and George, who had earlier declared themselves to be living sculptures, in What Our Art Means
produced a manifesto that not only promoted their own art (“We want Our Art to speak across the
barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life”), but also denounced their predecessors
(“The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood”). In 2000, Takashi
Murakami wrote The Super Flat Manifesto to define his new form of art, asserting that “’Super
flatness’ is the stage to the future.’”

For the most part, however, contemporary artists do not write manifestos, preferring to have
others record and publish their words. Yet this should not be taken to mean that the traditions of
the manifesto have disappeared, for tones of F.T. Marinetti and his many descendants can still be
heard to echo in the words of prominent contemporary artists. Damien Hirst, for example, has
consistently used interviews to promote his art and that of his YBA followers over the competition:
“With the exception of my own generation of artists, who are friends, there’s not a living artist that
I know that I respect.” He doesn’t hesitate to identify the competition: “these Americans have had
it all their own way for far too long.” He openly embraces attention: “I think all publicity helps
everything.” He takes credit when he believes it is due: “Art’s popular. That’s my generation. It
wasn’t before.” And he freely expresses his vast ambition: “I want to live for ever. And the best
way to live for ever is to be better than everyone else.” It’s difficult to believe that F.T. Marinetti
would not be proud.