Half empty

ArtForum, Feb, 1999 by Thomas Frank

Were one to restrict his or her reading of Perverse Optimist to Kalman's writing and remarks in interviews, though, one might easily take him for the dead-on (if less than subtle) critic of capitalism he purports to be. He begins the book with a double-barreled blast at the culture industry, declaring that "consumer culture is an oxymoron" and "most media, architecture, design and art exist for the sole purpose of creating wealth." "Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America," Kalman tartly observes in an essay titled "Fuck Committees." "Our culture is corporate culture." We hardly need him to tell us this, but given his embeddedness in the center of it all, we begin to expect great revelations.

But we are disappointed almost immediately. Kalman actually argues that the only capable challenge to the total-corporate world is from . . . corporations. Or, to be precise, good-hearted entrepreneurs and CEOs, those Benettons who are willing to sink enormous money into the work of people like Kalman. His manifesto concludes by mourning the disappearance of the really, really big philanthropists and advising readers to seek out "lunatic entrepreneurs," persuade them to bankroll our projects, "treat them well and use their money to change the world." There's Rolf Fehlbaum of the Swiss office-furniture concern Vitra, whose adventurous projects and openness to innovation are the subject of a 590-page montage-homage that Kalman put together in 1997. That book was whimsically entitled Chairman Rolf Fehlbaum and designed to resemble those little red books from the '60s, but that is where Kalman's romance with Marxism ends. "I think you can be political only when you're privileged," Kalman opines at one point in Perverse Optimist. "The agent of social change," he declares in Wired, "is the corporation." Historical agency is a thing reserved for capitalists and their hired pens, whom Kalman suggests that we "trick . . . into doing socially responsible things." This may seem like a fairly realistic vision of culture and corporate responsibility to those whose world is underwritten by foundations and errant millionaires, but as a description of the way history works, it stinks.

Beneath this curious "radicalism" is an oddly dated view of the world of business. In "Fuck Committees," Kalman vents that the "struggle" now is "between individuals with jagged passion in their work and today's faceless corporate committees," and complains that "TV scripts are vetted by producers, advertisers, lawyers, research specialists, layers and layers of paid executives who determine whether the scripts are dumb enough to amuse what they call the 'lowest common denominator.'" But in fact, while it's true that business imperatives determine mass-cultural content, those imperatives are vastly different from what they were in the '60s, when Kalman's passion-versus-hierarchy rap first became popular. Today it's a different story. Embracing nonconformity, practicing transgression, smashing the existing order - these are the cliches of organization these days, repeated every year thousands of times over in hundreds of business magazines and management books, translated into countless pictures and charts and formulas, each one struggling to convince you of the same thing that Kalman apparently believes to be his special revelation and his alone.