Ciarán Finlayson
This text was performed as part of the event MANIFESTO!, held on March 19, 2025, at KGB Bar in Manhattan.
Ciarán Finlayson at the MANIFESTO! event.
This is not, like Marx and Engels in 1848, a manifesto to win you all to the cause of scientific socialism. It’s more a proposal, presented for you all, my comrades, at a convening of our multi-tendency body, on which you can decide to vote up or down.
Proposal for a Materialist Criticism
Whereas, criticism is not, of course, dead, but it is irrevocably and undeniably in a state of crisis.
Whereas, structural crisis is the social form of the present, the early phase of high capitalism.
Whereas, since January, this crisis has taken the specific political form of an all-out assault on basic liberal-democratic rights, the gutting of the administrative and welfare states, the disappearing of student protesters, the militarized roundup of undesirables, the deportation without trial or charge of lawful permanent residents, the firing and expulsion of labor organizers, etc.
Whereas, the crisis has taken the cultural form of: the federal government scuttling exhibitions of Black and Indigenous artists; nativist politicization of grant-making bodies; naked partisanship of CEOs and CFOs in the boardrooms of the culture industry on behalf of far-right governments, free markets, and foreign wars; a plan to contract the sphere of higher education—which produces most working critics—in order to purge humanities and social sciences of left intellectuals.
Whereas, the S&P is tumbling, sales at a top auction house fell by 23 percent in the last year, a declining art market has created a new $80-billion industry of art-backed securities, no category of art has seen its value rise in the past two years.
Whereas, the hit to the art market has been compounded by the collector class’s desire for revenge against artists, publishers, and writers who dissented from the effort to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza.
Whereas, the progressive phase running from Occupy to the George Floyd rebellion transformed the self-understanding of contemporary art and its institutions. The backlash against this has left many artists disillusioned with art-world politics and art as a site of political activity.
Whereas, cultural ground has been ceded to the right, which has near hegemonic control of the independent digital media spaces, where public opinion is now being shaped.
Whereas, we have witnessed a renaissance of reactionary criticism fostered by a glut of investments for the podcasts, clubhouses, film festivals, and magazines of right-wing bohemia, paradigmatically in lower Manhattan, the present venue not excluded.
And whereas, today’s artists, critics, and theorists, when they engage the left at all, tend toward rhetorical maximalism, ultraleft posturing, campist declamation, or the micropolitics of the undercommons—all of which are uniquely unsuited to confront the present danger.
Therefore, be it resolved that the highest aim of criticism is to complete the work of art by providing it with general social and historical significance.
Be it resolved that all criticism adequate to the moment must be materialist in method, if it is to grasp the cyclical crises that shape not only the world that works of art inhabit but the formal structure of works of art themselves.
Be it resolved that we affirm the defense of basic democratic rights, which are a precondition for art and criticism as viable enterprises, and recognize that they can be achieved only by the completing of the bourgeois-democratic tasks and social-democratic goals, outlined by Reconstruction, and the movements for labor and civil rights.
Be it also resolved that we recognize the progressive aspects of the general disillusionment with the politics of art. Engaged practitioners and critics are desisting from engaging the art world as their primary site of political activity, and instead joining political organizations and social movements with strategic leverage, an orientation toward labor, and the capacity to challenge state power.
Be it resolved that now is the time for artists and critics to embrace mass politics, to construct usable pasts as models for a present-day cultural front.
Ciarán Finlayson is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy. He is the author of Perpetual Slavery.