Pop 89: What Exactly Do We Mean?
By Madonna Hamel
As a self-proclaimed “forensic etymologist,” I am always interested to see how words enter, morph and exit from our vocabulary. I just finished reading “Keywords” by John Patrick Leary, wherein he reveals the absurd ways business culture has “word-jacked” (my word) the languages of the art world ( ex: “curate”), the helping professions (“wellness”) and even religion {“virtue”) and used them to sell stuff.
I’m neither Marxist nor Socialist, but I’m not a big fan of Capitalism or woke-ism, either. It seems to me all the -ists and -isms of the world are doing their best to make themselves “the one true religion” and in so doing leading us away from each other. Martin Luther King warned us: “We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”
I am interested in how religious language has been either jettisoned or co-opted. When it is used it asks so little of us because it is not speaking to us as souls but as consumers, buyers of products. It’s not reaching for nobleness or goodness but for an untapped market. Religious language turned secular dries up. Its vision shrinks and is minuscule and ignoble in comparison with its original far-seeing intent.
I’d have to say the same for artistic language as well. I no longer know what it means to be a successful artist. It never meant to become a household name, though the attraction of AI jumps directly to that promise. Nor certainly is it to become wealthy. If your motive is wealth, go get a business degree.
Even that word “wealth” has changed its meaning. Derived from the Old English word: “weal,” meaning “welfare” and “well-being,” who uses the word that way anymore? Wealth has long taken on a purely monetary meaning. And why shouldn’t it? We live in a time that recognizes product over process and equates security with monetary wealth. And yet, while money brings a certain material stability, it does not assure contentment, peace of mind or healthy relations among friends and family. And it certainly is no guarantee of “well-being”.
Once, fresh out of art school, a fellow classmate and I were at a gallery opening of another former classmate. “It’s funny,” my friend said, “we know the guy. And his art is nowhere as tender and uplifting as the guy himself.” “I know”, I replied. “I’ve developed a theory that, for those who work hard and try to be true to their art, their art becomes their prophet. I mean, their art is way ahead of them; it can see around corners, as it were.”
I didn’t think the guy was insincere. That is, I don’t think he was making what I call “anticipatory” art - art that anticipates what the market would buy because of a fad (from the Latin for “fatuous,” a “fancy adopted and pursued for a time with irrational zeal.”) I don’t think he was painting for profit - though he intended to make a living at his work. He worked hard and was true to his vision, and lucky for him, he did well. The moral of this story: always be true to the vision first. Then, you can be a prophet. If you make a wad a cash at it- that’s a profit - a perk. But there will be no regular paycheck - such is the feast-or-famine nature of art.
But really, who cares about prophets? Let alone, “the moral of the story”? The very word “moral” is a bummer word. “Morality,” along with unhip words like “vice,” “sin,” and “hell,” make us feel bad about ourselves. Apparently, the only way to keep religious or sacred language alive is to “pivot” and “innovate” them into secular tools for the “meritocracy.” The problem is once you do that, you’ve divested them of numinousity and mystery, and they lose all their power.
Ironically, while a great deal of contemporary art is generated by anti-capitalists, we seem to live in a world that puts the money-hungry donkey before the bountiful cart of art. What passes as art is often anything that offends old-fashioned notions of art as embodying beauty or truth.
Words like: “disruptive” and “transgressive” - just decades ago used to describe abusive behaviour - are now goals for art and artists. The more disruptive, transgressive and irreverent you are, the more “nimble” you are at “articulating” the “polemical” “phenomenology” of “epistemic imperialism” in an “anti-didactic” way. This does not require hours of labour and intensive handiwork as much as a deftness with an incomprehensible language that must accompany and describe every work of art; the art cannot be understood or comprehended without it. The irony is that the jargon of todays’ art market transgresses and subverts itself all the way into the very institutions they claim to reject.
Capitalism, when it legitimizes a compulsion to generate capital out of anything and everything, is troublesome. But the force that drives the compulsion is “greed.” Greed is the problem. Greed is another word for insatiability, endless craving, unquenchable lust. These are all earmarks of addiction. But because we no longer describe greed as a “vice,” we can exploit addiction as a market.
Take the word “binge”. In the 70s, when I was in high school, I had an eating disorder. I binged on food to deaden a deep depression mingled with existential dread. At that same time, snack food companies caught on to food addiction as a money-making proposition, and they salted and corn-syruped their way to the bank. Never mind it was unhealthy- they had lawyers. Never mind that what they did was immoral- we don’t use that language anymore. Never mind they were selling their souls, we’re consumers, not souls! I think about that every time I crave a little “binge-watching.” And that’s why I keep asking not just what we mean, but what has meaning?