Aesthetics Seminar (Monday - Week 7, MT23)

I will present some work in progress from a project taking individual works of contemporary art as spurs to philosophical reflection. I call the associated method ‘philosophical criticism:’ after briefly clarifying how I understand this, and where I take it to depart from more common ways of doing the philosophy of art, I focus on several works by the controversial Spanish artist Santiago Sierra:

160cm line tattooed on four people (Salamanca, 2000)

133 People Paid to have their hair dyed blond (Venice, 2001)

Workers who cannot be paid remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes (Berlin, 2002)

Each involves paying minimal wages to people to do things about which we may feel considerable moral disquiet: paying heroin addicted prostitutes the price of their next shot to have their backs permanently marked; paying asylum seekers who cannot legally be paid to sit under cardboard boxes for the duration of an exhibition; paying the street vendors selling fake merchandise on the streets of Venice to have their hair dyed an incongruous peroxide blond. If paying freely consenting participants subsistence wages to do such things is indeed wrong, why is that? One oft-heard charge is that such practices are exploitative, understood in a morally thick sense: that is, wrongly exploitative. But if they are, what makes them wrong? I consider several possibilities here: that they take unfair advantage of a vulnerability in circumstances in which one should precisely rescind from doing so (Goodin); that they extract excessive benefits from those who are not in a position to reasonably refuse (Valdman); that their failure to recognize or respect the value of what is being exploited is degrading (Sample). Do any of these views capture what is going on here? One wrinkle of applying such approaches to works of art is their apparent assumption that exploitation is a two term relation, between a putative exploiter and their prey, when works of art that involve such activities appear to implicate at least a three way relation between the parties to the transaction itself and those for whose edification that transaction is apparently staged. I shall close by considering what, if any, difference should this make to whether we take the practices in question to be wrong and—if we do so take them—what implications, if any, this has for our judgement of their value as art.