Art & Recognition Part 2: Master is to Servant as Collector is to Artist
Why recognition can only come from work and not from being well-collected.
What follows is not as easy going as a standard essay of mine, and certainly will be less appealing than my standard art reviews. I’ll be returning to those very shortly. The following I realize I have written as much for myself as for anyone else. It’s a cliche now to say one writes — “entirely,” Didion wrote — to know what one is thinking, but in this case, the writing was a means to force a close engagement with some passages in Hegel that are foundational to thinking about recognition and why the work of art is what it is, as both thing and act. I have tried to keep you, the reader, in mind; but I’ve also kept an eye on what it is that I needed to figure out in these passages. You might find it tiresome (I’m sure I will as soon as I’ve pressed “publish”!), but I’m not sure it could be helped. I’m offering this fair warning in the hopes that you won’t hold it against me or, for those of you who are new to my work, won’t be scared off or quick to judge.
An Indecent Proposal?
Hegel’s dialectic of “Lord and Bondsman” or “Master and Servant” from the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is the place in Hegel where recognition comes to matter for the achievement of human freedom, of true human autonomy, but most commentators don’t and wouldn’t turn to it for a theory of art and the artist. For that there are Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, though in those one really doesn’t find an aesthetic theory per se; and that’s a different story than the one I want to tell here.
What I want to say is the drama between Master and Servant in the Phenomenology has something to teach us about the dramas that play out, and sometimes fail to play out, between collectors and artists (but not only between these characters), even and especially to this day.
It’s an interesting relationship, the one between Collector and Artist. It’s not a marriage of course. For that the Artist once had their dealer, their gallerist, though it’s questionable if that metaphor makes sense any longer. It’s not a friendship exactly, even though plenty of artists claim collectors as friends and vice versa, though one suspects a tally of such claims wouldn’t find the columns matching up. But nor is this relationship between Collector and Artist purely commercial or clientelist. Artists are getting something more than just money from collectors. And collectors are getting something more than just goods from the artists. These aren’t drug deals after all.1
The question then really is whether it is a relationship of recognition. And if it is, what kind? Is it mutual? Missed? Thwarted?
If recognition matters as the animating force for art as so much else today, then rewriting this most notorious of the Hegelian dialectical dramas with a different two-person cast in mind might help us make sense of how it matters.2
What is that drama? Let me begin with a vast simplification: two subjects confront one another. They want the same thing, and they see that they want the same thing. We’re talking about how human beings come to be the specific kind of reason-having, free-will-imagining, conflicting-and-collaborating kinds of beings that we are; this is, and these are, Hegel’s “subjects.” So the subjects see each others’ “wants” — Begierde or “desire” is the word Hegel uses. So they see each others’ desire. They see each other as desiring subjects, the kinds of subjects that have desires.
And the desires these subjects have are not just for the satisfaction of certain appetites (food, sex, safety) but for those appetites turned into projects that take time and endure (harvests, families, governance). They are subjects that make plans and rules. They live for norms, not merely in the now. They have intentions and demonstrate agency. Which means they see themselves as different from the present, as differentiating themselves from the world into which they are thrown, as capable of reflecting on it, of thinking about it, deciding things about it and, in the end, negating it, overcoming it, bending it to themselves. The subjects, in other words, are self-conscious.
The subjects’ agency, their self-conscious intentions toward the world, Hegel calls this the subjects’ Desire. Which is why he is able to write that “self-consciousness is Desire” (§174)
But for self-consciousness, for Desire, to be what it is “in truth,” Hegel would say, it requires external validation: not just satisfaction (“I’m happy with my painting”), but recognition (“I think your painting is good”). I may regard myself as the greatest living critic on the planet, but without such regard from others, my self-regard would be mistaken, wrong, delusional, even pathological. Hence, Hegel writes, “self-consciousness [Desire] achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (§175). And “self-consciousness [Desire] exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another” (§178). And self-conscious subjects “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (§184). These are Hegel’s core claims for the centrality of recognition for human freedom.
But how do we know that another self-consciousness, another Desire, is what it is in truth, and not, say, an elaborate ruse, like an AI? For Hegel, it comes when Desire is tested by another Desire, when it comes into conflict. And, crucially, for Hegel, this conflict, this “struggle,” must be one of “life and death.” It will entail at least one subject committing to their Desire even at the expense of their own life. Thus whatever it is that the subject wants, it can’t be for mere satisfaction; it must be something that is for the subject more important than the subject is to itself, more important, that is, than “Life.”
In so committing, the subject “raises the certainty of their being for themselves to truth,” Hegel writes. And both subjects will see it, will learn that truth, will grasp it. It is only here that “freedom is won” that the subject can be seen as “pure being-for-self” (§187); that is, not subject to any other person, thing or condition that they haven’t chosen for themselves.3
Now, the artists reading this may see themselves so reflected here. We hear all the time from artists that they couldn’t possibly be any other thing than what they are, not because they don’t know how to do anything else (though that’s a reason often given), but because they wouldn’t — even couldn’t, possibly — do anything else. If they couldn’t make their work, they wouldn’t be who they were; if they didn’t make their work, something of them would die.
So far, so romantic. But the artists would be wrong, at least in their identification with what seems like the winning side in this act of the drama. Because Hegel’s struggle to the death, though it teaches subjects what freedom is, it does not result in it. Death is not freedom; and the dead don’t recognize. In the struggle to the death, then, all must be risked, but all must not be lost.
What Hegel’s struggle produces is an inequality. Two subjects meet and, acknowledging each others’ Desire as their own, they struggle to realize it, for themselves. One subject risks everything. The other risks almost everything. But that almost is everything; it’s the difference that creates distinction: one subject becomes a Master, the other a Servant.
The Collector’s enjoyment, or the unessential
What’s of interest is what plays out between the subjects once they begin to play the roles of Master and Servant, or rather, what no longer plays out between them: once the struggle to the death results in the subjects’ occupying these new roles, there is no direct relation any longer; they do not confront one another as subjects in-themselves, as Hegel might say. The Master, having succeeded in the struggle, now lacks any true challenge. The world is open to the Master, available for the taking.4
What I want to picture here is Hegel’s Master as one of Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe” who continues to hold sway in the popular imagination as much as, now, in public life. Howard Lutnick, former CEO and Chairman of trading house Cantor Fitzgerald, and now U.S. Secretary of Commerce, will do to illustrate, particularly the picture of Lutnick recently captured on X doing an unboxing video of his gift bottle of The Besties All-In Tequila (retails at $1200 a bottle) while sitting in front of one of Rashid Johnson’s signature Anxious Red drawings (auctions at $2M). Lutnick is obviously rich (though with a net worth of $3.3B according to Forbes, he doesn’t even crack the top 1000 list of global billionaires). And according to videos such as the one shared on X, and a recent profile in The New Yorker, Lutnick is interested to inform you that he’s rich, and that he is enjoying himself.
And that enjoyment is the province of the Master. In the conflict that produced the Master and the Servant, there was some “thing” that the Servant was not willing to risk. Whatever it was to which that subject felt attached, which they were unwilling to “negate,” to use Hegel’s favored term, that thing, whatever it is, which the subject “cannot go the length of being altogether done with it,” is the thing that that subject, the Servant, “works on” (§190; emphasis in the original).5 And what the Servant can only work on, the Master “has the pure enjoyment of it” (genießt es rein).
Very quickly one can see how the depredations of the aristocratic estate, the colonial plantation, and later in Marx’s hands, the factory floor, would suggest themselves as the scene and setting for this drama of labor and its fruits. But why not Lutnick’s living room? A more domestic scene to be sure, and one not lacking in the basic contours of what we’re discussing. Collectors enjoy their art after all; in fact this is what collectors are counseled to do: enjoy first, before any consideration of the work’s other values (political, financial, positional). And today, as much as they buy the art, collectors buy the “Artist.” That Anxious Red painting is as much a “Rashid Johnson” as it is any particular work of art — a work that makes its own independent aesthetic or formal claims apart from its signaling who made it. In this setting, one can say with some confidence that who made the work is more important than anything about the work itself.
And what is the Artist if not just that self-consciousness that can only work on what the Collector can only enjoy?
The story is of course more complicated than this, but not by much. What I want to push here is that the work of art qualifies as a subset of what the Servant works on, and that it also qualifies as the outcome or endgame of that work. Whatever it is in the world that the Servant works on, it is by definition for Hegel “independent” of him; it cannot be entirely negated by the Servant, else there would be nothing to work on. The thing would be wholly consumed, or incorporated — negated. This is what Hegel means when he says that the Servant cannot be “altogether done with it.” There is something about this “thing” that remains independent of the Servant, cannot be mastered by him, cannot be overcome.
And I think this offers something essential about what motivates the best artists (Hegel might say the “truest”): there is some thing that ties the Artist to world, something that she can’t be “done with”; and out of this comes her work. The difference is between negation (think “consumption”) and work (think “transformation”): Hegel’s word for work in these passages is bearbeit, which has the sense of edit, handle, or process, terms of artisanal as well as psychological efforts, what Hegel will shortly call “formative activity” (das formierende Tun). And so the thing that holds the Artist, that the Artist cannot quite be done with in the world, the thing on which the Artist can only work, the Collector takes for enjoyment.
It is immediately following this identification of the Master’s enjoyment with what the Servant can only work on that Hegel begins the dialectical reversal we have come to count on. It goes something like this, but with our new actors in their roles to spice things up:
The Collector seeks recognition in and from another self-consciousness, but cannot find this recognition from the Artist who, because of her attachment to the world, does not possess the Collector’s pure being–for–self, the freedom (which comes with all that money) that would equal the Collector’s own. From what the Artist works on, from the Artist’s work, the Collector gets enjoyment, but from the Artist, the Collector cannot gain recognition: What confronts the Collector, Hegel writes, is a “dependent consciousness,” and thus the Collector cannot be “certain of [his] being-for-self” (§192). When the Artist tells the Collector they have a great eye, for example, or that their taste is exquisite, or their home is beautiful, or the dinner party was lovely, thank you, and yes, you were so right about that show — well, the Collector cannot be sure if he is hearing honesty or obsequiousness. The Collector has no equal here. And so what the Collector thought had been won, the truth of his own self-consciousness, the truth of his freedom, has in fact been lost: it was a pyrrhic victory. The Collector may find enjoyment in what the Artist works on, but surrounded by dependent consciousness, the Collector has no access to truth, his own or anyone else’s.6 “[The Collector’s] truth is,” Hegel writes, “the unessential consciousness and its unessential action” (§192).
The Artist’s work, or “desire held in check”
Well, let’s weep not for the Collector. He’s enjoying himself at least.
At this point Hegel comes at the drama from the other direction, filling out the backstory of the Artist/Servant, who will be revealed as the “truth of the independent consciousness” (§193; to do justice to Hegel’s text, I’ll be moving back to his characters for a bit here).
Hegel now narrates what it is in the struggle to the death with the Master that aids the Servant in its achievement of independence, of being-for-self. It’s worth noting that Hegel does not speak here of the Servant and self-consciousness, but of “servitude” (Knechtshaft) and consciousness alone, and that is because Hegel is pinpointing a moment prior to any state of recognition in which the Servant’s self-consciousness has been achieved.
So, as Hegel will write, the individual consciousness, the subject, “has experienced the fear of death” and “in that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But,” Hegel continues, “this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness” (§194).
In the struggle to the death between two subjects — not yet Master, not yet Servant, not yet a recognitive scene — it is not only the overcoming of the fear of death that opens on to true being-for-self (as we thought was the case with the Master), it is also the earth-shaking, ego-shattering fear experienced in the struggle itself. The commitment to one’s intentions and projects, one’s Desire, need not be greater than one’s commitment or attachment to Life, because that fear, that trembling, is itself a moment of absolute negativity, what Hegel will here call a “dissolution” (Auflösung), which Hegel equates with the essence of self-consciousness, pure difference from every person, thing, or condition of the world.
At first this newfound being-for-self is only “explicit” for the Servant in the person of the Master. But through the Servant’s work it becomes “actual”: “Through his service [the Servant] rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail” (§194). For Hegel, this is a parallel, if not wholly equivalent, moment of “dissolution.” The Servant performs this dissolution on natural existence, he “gets rid of it,” Hegel writes, “by working on it” (§194). And thus it is “through work,” Hegel continues, that “the Servant becomes conscious of what he truly is” (§195). What the Master got rid of, his attachment to natural existence by a willingness to risk absolutely everything, even his own existence, the Servant gets rid of through his work, through his newfound capacity to transform all of the givens of the world through his own agency, his own Desire.
“Work” has a two-fold dimension for Hegel at this point, which corresponds well with how we can think about the “work” of art. That is, in these passages of Hegel’s Phenomenology, work is written about as both an activity (a “formative activity”), as a kind of labor, and it is written about as an outcome, and object, something “outside” the Servant. And it turns out both dimensions are necessary.
Work is the actualization of the “dissolution” that Hegel will equate with the “absolute power” of freedom from determinate being (that is, being subject to the world, to one’s whims and appetites as much as to the world’s inherent insecurities). Through work, the Servant experiences his own capacity to transform “natural existence in every single detail” (§194). Hegel here returns to the idea of Desire, because if Desire, according to Hegel, “reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self,” (recall, Desire is also another word for self-consciousness), then work offers a similar demonstration of “pure negating,” but with an important twist: Desire’s “satisfaction” is only “fleeting” or “vanishing” (§195).
Think of the Collector’s enjoyment. It is momentary. Think of the Master’s triumph. It too is momentary, if not illusory. As Hegel will say, Desire’s satisfaction “lacks the side of objectivity and permanence” (§195). But “work, on the other hand” — and this is the key point — is “fleetingness staved off,” and more to the point, “work…is Desire held in check” (§195)7 Work not only transforms, processes, and so “negates” natural existence, but that negation endures and persists in objects which can be seen and beheld and experienced as such.
On the face of it this may seem a trivial point, but this double dimension of “work,” as activity and object, is essential to understanding how the Servant comes to be the “truth of independent consciousness.” Because as Hegel writes, “the negative relation to the object,” the transformative work, what the Servant does, “becomes [the object’s] form and something permanent” (§195). That “negative relation,” that “formative activity,” Hegel reminds us, “is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness, which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence” (§195). Pure being-for-self, freedom in agency, “independent consciousness,” is now there, in the work, where it is “held in check.” And so, in the “independent being” of the work — as in the work of art — the Servant, the Artist — “comes to see…its own independence” (§195).
It would be enough to stop there. Hegel has here articulated an evolution of the freedom of self-consciousness that is also a theory of art, or rather a theory of individual freedom that is applicable to what makes art the instantiation of freedom that it can be (but certainly not always is).
The “formative activity” that the Artist performs on the materials of the world engenders works that embody the self-conscious, independent, and free act of that activity, and thus the pure being-for-self of the Artist. Through the work, the Artist enacts her freedom; in the work, the Artist can see it — or rather, the Artist recognizes it.
Though Hegel doesn’t use the term “recognition” anywhere in these final sections of the Lordship and Bondage chapter of the Phenomenology, he is rewriting the entire drama of recognition between Master and Servant as taking place now between the Servant and his work. Hegel writes, “in fashioning the thing, the Servant’s own negativity, his being-for-self, becomes an object for him only through his setting at nought the existing shape confronting him,” that is, in work, in his “formative activity,” the Servant negates natural existence and cancels it out. He processes the materials of the world and makes what he wants of them. “But,” Hegel continues, “this objective negative moment is none other than the alien being before which it has trembled. Now, however, he destroys this alien negative moment, posits himself as a negative in the permanent order of things, and thereby becomes for himself, someone existing on his own account” (§196).
Or, with our new characters in place: through her work, the Artist has made pure being-for-self, her free agency and action, her Desire, into something permanent and objective: a work that endures and stands apart from her as an object. Whereas once that being-for-self was present for the Artist only in the person of the Collector, in truth it was actually in the Artist, in her fear, as the “alien being before which it has trembled.” But now, “in fashioning the thing, [the Artist] becomes aware that being-for-self” — freedom, autonomy — “belongs to [her], that [she herself] exists essentially and actually in [her] own right” (§196). The Artist recognizes herself in her work. She recognizes herself in and through her Desire “held in check.” She recognizes herself in her self-consciousness made manifest. “Through this rediscovery of [herself] by [herself],” Hegel writes, “the [Artist] realizes that it is precisely in [her] work… that [she] acquires a mind of [her] own” (§196). It is through the work, the work of art, that the Artist comes to be what she is: free.8
No recognition but in work
Perhaps the most salient implication of this dialectical drama is that there can be no recognition except in and through work. Two points follow:
Contemporary art’s culture of the past decade (at least) has coalesced around a priority for publicity and posting. Getting a spread in a trending lifestyle magazine or site, building a following out of images and reels that picture the artist at work and at play, being seen within the society pages or on the society circuit, getting just the right influencer to cross-post or follow — all of these are fully legitimized and even sought-after strategies of career advancement for an artist. Within an attention economy, relevance is measured by the real estate portfolio one amasses in the minds of others. And the assumed way to do that for many artists and their advocates is to crank up the machinery of the PR and so-called creative agencies to fashion an entire dreamworld of derivative imagery that will carry forward the artist’s persona to potential fans.
But relevance is not recognition (I probably didn’t need Hegel to make that point, but there you have it). It is a metric for the markets (of both money and attention), and its pursuit is a means of increasing interest from collectors who can pursue only their own “enjoyment” through the equally fleeting activity of consumption — an activity that is in no way formative (it nether makes nor educates). Hence the drive for ever more “social” engagements, both online and in-real-life, that cater to collectors’ enjoyments: the activations, the dinners, the destinations, the galas, the soirees, the salons, the step-and-repeats.
Such are the scenes of the collectors’ self-regard. Hegel does not go any further into the mind of the Master. Whatever enjoyments the Master has, they are always and necessarily “mediated” by the work of the Servant. It’s never made explicit how Masters might regard one another, but on the logic of Hegel’s Phenomenology, one can only presume it is by witnessing the mediating conditions of each others’ enjoyments: a funhouse of consumption. It’s not clear, but it does not seem likely, that the Master ever achieves a mind of his own, consumed as he is by his own fleeting appetites and the insecurity of his own illusory being-for-self. (Need one even switch characters here?)
The second point is that, just at the Master cannot gain recognition from the Servant, by the end of Hegel’s drama it is obvious that now the reverse holds true: the Servant cannot gain recognition from the Master.
By the end of our drama, the truth of self-consciousness rests with the Artist. She is in possession of a mind of her own, achieved in and through the externalization of that mind in her work. Does the collector see that mind, or mindedness? Perhaps. (And in a period when the work of collecting is increasingly outsourced to others, one might say in that scenario it’s unlikely, but I digress.) But does the collector recognize it? There, the answer, on the logic of the Phenomenology, would have to be No. The Collector does not labor as the artist does, he does not work on the world in the way that the artist does, at least not in this respect.9
In a moment of intense and ubiquitous mediation, it’s worth recalling that the Collector’s truth, as mentioned above, is “unessential action.” The Artist’s CV no doubt mentions how well and how broadly the Artist’s work is collected, but we should take this for the unessential recognition that it is.
Recognition for the Artist, true recognition, must come from another Artist. Again, this may be a trivial point to make, but I believe artists understand it intuitively, and the rest of us know it’s true, even though we imagine that our appreciations and interventions and advocacies and consumptions somehow matter in the same measure. And we have built an art world that disregards our intuitions. So not the Collector, the Curator, the Critic, but the Artist, who has achieved a mind of her own in and through work, is in a position to recognize such a mind in another’s art.
Though this is a wholly debatable statement. Many years ago I had a private conversation with the head of one of the bluest-of-blue-chip mega galleries who explained to me that only a handful of his clients had the “illness” of compulsive collecting, and that the gallery’s job was to serve those clients primarily, and to find more of them.
That drama appears in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). I am working from the A.V. Miller translation first published by Oxford in 1977. Paragraph numbers refer to this edition. I have exchanged Miller’s translation of Knecht as “Slave” for Terry Pinkard’s translation of it as “Servant” because of its more copious sense, today especially, of a position entailing “labor” and less the sense of subjection, abject and otherwise. Pinkard’s translation was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press, and I have used his edition as a cross reference for Miller’s. Though Pinkard’s translation “updates” and modernizes much of the language, I find that I’m still partial to Miller.
It seems obvious that here we have the makings of an Hegelian correction to the now wholly outmoded Turing Test. We will know that the machines have achieved “self-consciousness” when they are willing to risk their “lives” for their goals. The moment a machine shuts itself down, erases itself, ceases to “be,” for some given “reason,” we may be much closer to needing to recognize it as “self-conscious” rather than as merely intelligent or sentient.
Susan Buck-Morss is helpful here by drawing our attention to Hegel’s System of Ethical Life from 1803, in which the Master is described as “in possession of a surplus of physical necessities.” In the System Hegel deals more explicitly with economic categories, and so “possession” matters more in this earlier context, as do questions of labor, and money, and exchange. See Susan Buck-Morss’s “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry (Summer 2000) as well her extension of that essay into Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2006).
“Ebenso bezieht sich der Herr mittelbar durch den Knecht auf das Ding; der Knecht bezieht sich, als Selbstbewußtsein überhaupt, auf das Ding auch negativ und hebt es auf; aber es ist zugleich selbstständig für ihn, und er kann darum durch sein Negieren nicht bis zur Vernichtung mit ihm fertig werden, oder er bearbeitet es nur.
In a different register, one need only conjure the specter of toxic leadership in any field to understand this insight of Hegel’s: surrounded by the “dependent consciousnesses” of “yes-men,” the leader loses touch with reality, both that of their own own efficacy (“I’m doing a great job! Everyone tells me so!”), and the reality they are charged with managing (“If you bring the boss bad news, you’ll be fired.”). Our time is tragically rife with real world examples, so take your pick.
Miller does not italicize the terms, even though they are emphasized in the original: “Die Arbeit hingegen ist gehemmte Begierde, aufgehaltenes Verschwinden, oder sie bildet.” Pinkard translates this passage as: “In contrast, work is desire held in check, it is vanishing staved off, or: work cultivates and educates.” Miller translates that last clause as, “in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.” I’m partial to Miller’s direction of course, as it maintains the more aesthetic and fundamental sense of “form” and “forming,” even “picture” (bild) over and against the more immediately social and normative sense of bildung. My preference would be for the active verb sense of “work forms.”
The big question left hanging here is of course what is the role of “fear” in this drama. Is it a literal fear of death that is necessary for the Artist to become “free” in the sense Hegel seems to mean it? Or is there a broader way of thinking about this in terms of “risk,” as we saw earlier with the Master? My inclination is to think of it along the lines of the latter, that it in our modernity, the Artist must risk something total, and complete, in order to achieve something true, something free. But more on this in a subsequent essay.
It is of course the case the Collector can be many things, and if the Collector is also a producer in his or her own right, a creator of things in which their own mindedness is manifest, well then, in this drama, they are both Collector and Artist and recognition is back on the table.