The intimate commodity of the commercial artist.

A reflection on style, art and self in a capitalist system.

This is a Reflection letter of The (Im)posture — the newsletter from Julien Posture. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.

This text was first published in French, in the magazine Siggi : Le Magazine de Sociologie and has been translated and edited, well… for style. Be sure to check it out, it is a wonderful magazine that publishes sociological insights in an accessible form, previous issues have covered topics like “L’attente”, “Les gens”, and “Le style”.

Mastering a style is my profession. I cultivate a particular assemblage of colours, shapes and ideas which, by dint of repeating them, convey an impression of recognizable singularity, a visible entity which is a priori very personal to me. This visual assemblage is also of great value, because in an attention economy, a beautiful image attracts the eye like milkweed attracts butterflies. As a result, the paradox of having an intimate relationship with a commodity is engraved in one of my titles, I am a “commercial artist”, an oxymoron linked by the invisible hyphen of style. In other, less connoted words, I am an illustrator.

Being an illustrator means having an intimate relationship with the concept. We learn early on to anxiously ask the question, "How do I find my style?". An important quest because romanticism has taught us that style is an expression of an artist's interiority and therefore finding your style is a bit like finding yourself. But from romanticism this quest has above all the bitterness and restlessness, because failure to find your style is therefore failure to find yourself. In this context, style is almost always a goal to reach, a treasure to find, in short, a desirable object.

Years before I had to ask myself these questions, while studying at the “Beaux-Arts” in France, I was socialized to be an artist without being commercial. When I mentioned the style of an artist I admired to a teacher, he corrected me: “Artists don’t have styles, they have an approach [démarche in French]”. I realized that “style” is a term that we used among students, but rarely with the teaching staff for whom pretending that this word did not exist was undoubtedly a pedagogical strategy. At the time, I only understood that ideas take precedence over form, that style is only a superficial coating. But this is only part of the puzzle and I was left with the feeling that there was in this terminological correction an ideological rectification.

It wasn't until years later, when this time I was studying anthropology at the University of Montreal, that anthropologist Lily Chumley offered me the missing piece in her book on Chinese art schools : “Style is one way to know you are in capitalism”. In its most recent formula, capitalism indeed offers individuals the opportunity to shape their identity through the consumption of stylized goods which, together, constitute tangible proof of their tastes, their choices, their uniqueness. As a commercial artist, I produce the very raw material of this economy : style. I then realized that if my professor in art school was so quick to push style away from the artist, it is because the history of the discipline has carefully pushed economics away from art. In the capitalist system, my style, barely "found", is already no longer mine - it may never have been - others have taken care of defining it, delimiting it and to capitalize on it.

The art director of a magazine once contacted me to illustrate an article and attached to her email some images from my Instagram account to exemplify the elements of my work that she liked. The images in question embodied everything that I no longer wished to do, a version of my work - or perhaps of myself - that no longer resembled me. Trapped in style, I reluctantly accepted. Commercial art is a strange beast, never totally art, never totally commodity, but always a bit of both. Here, originality only has value compared to others, to my contemporaries. Over time and compared with my previous self, originality is to be avoided at all costs and must be replaced by flawless consistency, without surprises. It is this tension between originality in space and similarity in time that makes it possible to capitalize on style by making it predictable.

Working as an illustrator is a bit like playing this game in which someone counts until 3 their back turned to a group running toward them, then turn around and eliminate people who are not standing still. In France it’s called 1,2,3, Soleil, and in Korea 무궁화 꽃 이 피었 습니다. In illustration, we move on, we experiment, we take risks until someone turns around and looks at our work to hire us, then we have to stop, pretend to have a style, be still.

If the idea of style seemed like a kind of liberation while I was looking for it, the practice of style is anything but emancipatory. At the intersection of the self and others, art and the market, romanticism and neoliberalism, my style is a hybrid object whose contours I can no longer easily discern. I often wonder what my job would look like if our ideas of what art, work, economy, authenticity were different. What would the cultural industry look like if it offered to discover “approaches” rather than to consume “styles”? Did Giotto or Piero Della Francesca think about their style? Did they ask themselves which combination of colours, shapes and ideas would get them the most contracts? Does style have a place in art beyond its economic utility? Is my intimate relationship with a style just a facade to sell more?

In the end, is my profession to serve, rather than to master a style?

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