Book Notes: This Is Not Art

May 29th, 2025

“Book Notes” is a place for me to dump unstructured and unpolished thoughts about things I’ve been reading.

I picked this up from the library on a whim. I’d never heard of it. It was just on the shelf next to something else that I had: Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art. Looking it up later, I’ve seen very little critical writing about the book at all, which poses certain ironies given the central argument of the book.

The vantage point that I’m approaching the book from is an interesting one, where I’m far more well versed in the book’s economic interests (e.g. capitalism, socialism, neoliberalism) than its art interests. By Jelinek’s eventually argument that puts me in a position of irrelevance with respect to art (which I don’t necessarily disagree with) though I’d argue I do make art (she’d disagree). What this vantage point affords is the knowledge to understand that Jelinek’s borrowing of economic language is rather confused.

A central, and recurring, confusion revolves around the term “neoliberalism”, and what exactly that entails. Much of the author’s descriptions are fair: a set of policies around prioritization of (unregulated) markets, and a set of societal values that import the logic of free markets into the interpersonal realm, namely via self-responsibilization. All that is fair. Where things get weird are when additional, contradictory, qualities are added to the definition. For example, neoliberalism allegedly prizes hierarchies of accredidation and authority, but also apparently rejects ideas and objects as “elitist” if they aren’t readily available to the masses. Neoliberalism emphasizes self-responsibilization, but arguing that the path to solving climate changes is individuals becoming responsible for their individual behaviors is not neoliberal.

I bring this up not to offer any critique of the author’s conception of neoliberalism. Just to demonstrate that it appears confused, and shape-shifts to fit whatever the argument demands. Neoliberalism is assumed to be bad (I agree!), and then a number of bad things are associated with it, including things that seem to preclude formulations of neoliberalism in earlier chapters.

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There’s a fetishistic attachment to “collapsing binaries” that pervades the book, and results in some remarkable claims and misleading associations. The working-class/upper-class divide has apparently been dismantled! Big if true! By categorizing it as a binary, and from the understanding that there’s a prerogative to collapse binaries, this description of the world no longer holds. Additionally, Marxism is irrelevant because a model of the world divided between the powerful versus the powerless is outdated. Jelinek describes that model as simplistic, which it is, though the fault there lies with Jelinek, not Marx. The property relation of tenant-landlord, or employer-employee, still exists. We could expand upon the ways in which the latter division has become increasingly muddied by, for example, a culture that binds the little wealth of the working class into the stock market. But these materialist analyses don’t appear anywhere. Instead, by caricaturing a conflict as a binary, we can dutifully collapse it.

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What’s most confounding is that the complaints above have nothing to do with what I consider to be the main point of the book: producing endogenous definitions for both art and for the means of assessing the quality of art. Some four chapters of the book lay a rickety foundation for a fifth chapter that could probably stand on its own relatively successfully (though there are certainly parts of Chapter Two that provide useful context).

If I dismiss all of the weird economic and political descriptions, which I don’t think serves the core argument, I’m left with something that, while I disagree with it, still seems to be a coherent and defensible view: art is defined by the art world as a knowledge-producing discipline, akin to anthropology or archaeology or (my addition) physics. And quality within that space is determined by research (read: art making) to alter aspects of the discipline, and produce a discourse within the art world.

Off the bat, I don’t like this, because it excludes many things that I think of as art from the domain of art. However, just because Jelinek and I disagree about the answer to “what is art?” doesn’t mean that I don’t agree that this thing that she’s describing is an extant thing, and is a thing worth considering and examining. I actually like this model! It doesn’t apply to me, and is wholly irrelevant to my life (since I am not part of the discipline that she’s describing), but that’s ok.

I contributed “physics” to the set of other disciplines because that’s my (past, academic) background and it provides one very useful category of figure: the crank. Jelinek argues that practicioners of art are in dialogue with the history of “research” in their discipline, and are building upon it. And that to make art requires an artist to be conversant and aware of the ongoing and historical developments and controversies or their discipline. By contrast, the crank is the guy you met who thinks Einstein wasn’t quite right. Who is engaged in something that is dressed up in many ways as “physics”, but is so dismissive or unaware of the state of the art that their attempts at contributing to the conversation are second-hand embarassing. To the artworld, I am a crank. And I don’t think the artworld is wrong.

The activity that I assign the label of “art” to (which is an activity that Jelinek recognizes as existing, but is distinct from the activity that she assigns the same label to) is an outgrowth of human culture. Art making is a process by which we as regular people make sense, and make meaning, of our own lives, as well as the process by which we attempt to share those discoveries with others. I’m also moved by Jason England’s description of culture as being “about collective communion, uplift, and rescue; culture is not about the solitary production of an approximation of itself for consumption”.

Jelinek considers it “hypocritical” to state that all people can be artists. There is only hypocrisy if one is committed to the worldview and values of the artworld. I bear no such chains, since I’m a crank. And so I freely declare: art belongs to the people.