Manifesto of Exquisite Surrender

René Bennett

“What is art? Prostitution.”
—Charles Baudelaire

Five instances of artistic sterilization:

1. In 399 BC, Socrates was sentenced to death for “not believing in the deities of the city, introducing new deities, and corrupting the youth.” At first glance, this accusal may not appear to have been concerned with art at all, but if we are to imagine art as a process—not as a static object—then the archon’s characterization of Socrates is implicitly as that of a rogue poet, for the artist creates their own pantheon under which all else is corruptible, and this is the eternal threat to the status quo that the artist contains immanently.

2. After the Renaissance period, patronage of arts was largely replaced by mass consumption of arts, and the refiguration of art into something foremost marketable fomented in the 19th century, crystallizing in P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome in 1870, a whimsical canvas of freaks and exoticisms, in which the advertisement and the advertised merged within bodies both human—often bodies regarded as extraneous to elite normativity—and animal. The body itself was turned into fodder for the pacification of the masses, serving as both producer of the artwork as well as the produced work itself. This is not to say that the circus serves as one example of art turned into commodity fetishism, but rather that all of art, now manufactured for the purpose of sales, is a circus. Juvenal: “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.”

3. Kurt Cobain and AIDS are the only real things to happen to Americans since their exile from the Commonwealth. After both descended into the musty caverns of our collective imagination, much of the artwork produced out of the ensuing mass grievance was absorbed neatly into what Dirk Gindt calls “neoliberal sentimentality,” a phenomenon by which the very real experience of the subject of crisis is reduced to its aesthetic marketability, often at the expense of a complex and nuanced engagement with such moments in history (1). Anything real that is experienced en masse easily is transmuted retroactively into financially profitable narratives of melodrama and tragedy porn.

4. A digital copy—an “NFT”—of an original Basquiat drawing was auctioned to private buyers in April 2021 with the option of destroying the original physical copy of the drawing upon purchase. Notwithstanding that Basquiat’s estate intervened to prevent this from actually happening, NFTs—essentially, digital copies of artworks that come with usage rights—have become a sensationally profitable commodity in the contemporary art world, with the artist Beeple selling one of his NFTs for $69 million (2). We are at the culmination of what Walter Benjamin described as an acceleration of art’s mechanical reproducibility, an age in which art has become divorced from “its presence in time and space,” removed from its embeddedness in a uniquely transient confrontation with the viewer (3). The work of art mechanically reproduced as an NFT feigns permanence because the artwork is subsumed into pixelation, a static reduction of reality to a non-situated, fungible form (a paradox, given that NFT stands for “non-fungible token”). In this way, our affective engagement with works of art is being flattened down and replaced with our identification with the flat screen.

5. I have witnessed my grandmother’s paintings accumulate in her basement like metastasizing cancer left untreated. When my grandmother was little, having just immigrated to the United States, she would make paintings when not working at the belt factory and sell them for a few extra cents, usually spent at the candy store. She tells me that she promptly gave up the fantasy of becoming a full-time painter when she was not willing to disavow her unique artistic persona to sell out to a market that would put food on her table, and she tells me this as we watch a newscaster describe the growing trend of NFTs. Now, she continues to paint, but her completed works are left to collect in her basement, cut off and lonely, and I don’t know if this is better or worse than if she had simply given in to selling out; she has been ensnared by the conditions of privatized art which we now give up our souls to.

In my dreams, I am repeatedly met by an angel with dark, heavy wings and a dress made of ever-flowing water. The angel is called the Angel of Surrender and tells me this:

“Suppression and Surrender are the archangels of history. In every moment humans find themselves anxiously at a crossroads: do you restrain your impulsive longings for a lukewarm but secure life, or do you surrender yourself to your turbulent passions? As such, you are faced with a contradictory dilemma, which we see billowing in profusion out of history—fleeting luster or enduring dullness, unhindered passion or restrained comfort? And now you are living in an age in which every eruption of beauty is subjected to the Angel of Suppression. 

“And while the containment of the masses by art that is alienating and sterile seems to have its grip on history, you can already see the Angel of Suppression stumbling to pass over the chasmic rifts splintering across the surface. In every attempt at calculated containment these rifts quake from the underbelly: John Lennon’s ardor for Yoko in the last years of The Beatles; Rosa Luxembourg’s revolutionary foresights under the Kaiser-sympathizing presidency of Friedrich Ebert; and expressionism in the time of Nazi realism. These ruins of quashed desire tell you what you already know—that contained endurance is an illusion of endurance and vitriolic passions do not fade away.

“So you must follow the Angel of Surrender and fall openly into every moment of ecstatic passion that will inevitably end in collision. Surrender yourself to the exquisite pounding of your heart like a hormonal adolescent slipping love letters into the locker of their crush. Great Pyramids will spring from your wounds and your mouth will turn monologues into warm kisses. Desire is a snare that catches beautiful things.”

The path of turbulent passion is always a path of risk because there being an insecurity to this passion presupposes there being a secure order which must be defied. When we risk we risk being labeled degenerate because we refuse to contain ourselves, and yet there is nothing more generative than risk, the Tao of rabble-rousers and new lovers alike, tearing up the perceived order. When we risk we risk past and future, because we gamble the future and we excavate the fragile stonework of the past. Nothing is sacred, so long as we risk without dragging others through the blades of our propellers. Is this a principle? Let it be a principle if you want it to. Nothing is sacred, so long as compassion isn’t neglected.

This Tao is inseparable from lived experience, and it is through such inter-cohesion that it becomes both destructive and transformative. For long enough, art has been partitioned from lived experience by the attempt to categorize art and life as two distinguishable realms, wherein one imitates the other. If we try to posit art as imitated by or imitator of life, we fall back upon essentializing, and further: essentializing by the standards of the bourgeoisie whose blood money has led the rest of the world on to believing what has value or not. In place of this binary, we should ask, what does art do? And then we find that it fulfills nearly the same role as that of a lover, who does not imitate but rather gives a certain depth to the subject’s life. Life and art are codependent, forming an intertwined pair, feeling each other up in a dark room. Think: the creation of man in God’s likeness. There is but one realm in which art and life both exist as part of the same plane, neither transcending the other, always acting upon one another, and so to risk either is to risk both.

Under this Tao, no art will be cordoned off by the cushion of a ticketed museum, or a private theater, or the penthouse of Steve Cohen. We will obliterate the boundaries separating art and public life so that all art will be embedded within the lives of the masses—not sold to them but sewn into their world. This art should invoke a re-evaluation of the world in which it is situated, for the sake of inspiring deliberation and not for the sake of mere provocation for provocation’s sake. In both its content and its distribution, the work is generously embedded in the life of its locality, not imposing itself nor deceiving people into its consumption, but skillfully involving itself in the daily life of throngs of people who wander around, looking for something beautiful.

In a dream, the Angel of Surrender says:

“In order to transform what is produced, you must transform the world from which it is produced. Any attempt to create transformative art without reshaping the environment from which it springs is futile.”

“Imagine a tidal wave arising from the ocean. Even before erupting into this form, the tidal wave is always-already contained within the ocean. It is not that the tidal wave transcends and acts upon the ocean, but rather that the ocean materializes and effects itself into the tidal wave. The work of art is already contained within the worldly plane that produces it, so it is not that your surrender should be to the consecrated artwork, but instead you must surrender yourself to the ocean, where a tidal wave then might emerge.”

Interlude. A note about price gouging: don’t fucking do it! 

The fascist princess commodifies her tears. The instant we turn art into a transaction which is always set on the terms of the business class we place ourselves again behind the metal bars of the established order. Our passions are deformed into lost impressions of a passion so that some yuppie in Brooklyn Heights can hang it above their chinoiserie collection and say they care about art. Dear Otto Dix, don’t let us hold back our drives to sell out to an elitist sensibility. Gucci has already managed to successfully market pre-dirtied sneakers because their buyers think it is “unique and exotic.” The success of certain artists will always come at the expense of someone who is better but does not have the support and resources to become successful. 

It should be clear then that art is not art unless we divorce it from the interests of capital, which have made art detached and lonely. And though the exquisite artist willingly surrenders themselves to turbulence and disarray, no one should be deprived of the basic needs for life—survival is at the heart of any campaign for freedom. The artist should be compensated by the public and serve the public, so that the work is treated as an artwork and not a commodity.

And what is art that is not commodity? It is degenerate, debauched, caustic, foul-mouthed, obscene, contagious, narcotic, agonizing, but also wholehearted, tender, and communal. It is the surrendering of oneself to the temple of flux. 

Commodified art readily follows the formula of neatly packaged emotional grenades, as if affect can be contained by stable forms: a melodrama for those who want to weep, a comedy for those who want to laugh, a porno for those who want to get off. The artist of surrender surrenders any presumption of a borderline around each affect, instead favoring the more stimulating, more complex convolutions and interjections of affective shifts. Just as a person does not encapsulate a fixed and transcendent position over time, the work of art cannot be deformed into the capsule of a fixed genre, for art has been sterilized by its predictability. In juxtapositions we may engage with the work on polyvalent levels, interrogating its varying dispositions and the new totality produced by their juxtapositions. Hence, we surrender to the path of turbulent passion.

Dream and reality are not so strictly delineated, and the Angel of Surrender does not exist outside of real time, but is constantly emerging from within it. The work of art is a dream of reality and the reality of a dream. Defamiliarization (in the Brechtian sense) will make an audience aware that the dream of the work is not totally separate from the reality encompassing it, but this is not to say that sincerity and affective identification should be abandoned, since these serve as valuable tools for deindividuation, allowing for the individual to recognize that conscious experience exists in multiplicity and that our view of the other is not altogether so different from viewing ourselves. One who bears witness to this art should become detached from the linearity of their individual life and blossom into a branching plethora of conscious experience.

Time (that is, metrical time (fascist time)) has been hijacked by the capital engine and reimposed as the standard for punching the clock. This is how a factory works, my grandmother tells me. Your whole life becomes reduced to these calculations: start shift, end shift, lunch break, alarm clock. She recalls this like an astral projection from her past, shedding tears for the lucid dream that one can never quite awaken from.

Art does not follow the life-disavowing calculations of mechanical time, and so the exquisite artist must surrender themselves to the rapturous rhythms of messianic time (Benjamin). I feel it when I enter her basement, a tapestry of could-have-beens, a juncture of numerous states of intensity across different eras, thrust back into electrified living each time they are borne by a witness. And from each of these moments of intensity my grandmother is materialized in the image of a holy dreamer, she contains multitudes, a paint-splattered messiah, and she speaks:

We will turn time into a sex doll that is disposed of at our will. We will unravel the thread of history and recalibrate it into the body of a winding snake. We will de-stratify the linear narrative, the hierarchical model, the factory terrorism of the structured ordering of life, in favor of the unobstructed flow of messianic time, time gauged by deaths and lovers.

We will wax messianic, world-weary and world-hungry desiring. Our creations will serve as the testimonial of our blood.

There we may hold ourselves in warmth and see histories yet to be made in each other’s eyes.

The Angel of Surrender beckons us to leave our weapons and our wealth and risk all syntax for our humanity. 
Tear down the floodgates—that’s where we’ll find each other.

1. Gindt, Dirk. “National Performances of Crying: Neoliberal Sentimentality and the Cultural Commodification of HIV and AIDS in Sweden.” Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 235–253.

2. Kastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 Million.” The Verge, The Verge, 11 Mar. 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million.

3. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin, 1935, www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.