Art As We Know It Is...

Reposting this from another list (thanks to Werner Von Delmont for the info digging!). Comments follow...

source http://www.artmarketmonitor.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/business/08larry...

His business is the ultimate black-box operation, a never-ending and international swirl of cash and canvas that is built for maximum secrecy. What is certain is that his overhead is a multiple of his competitors’. Also certain is that the prices of work by the young artists he has been luring into his galleries — prices that have doubled or tripled in some cases, courtesy of his imprimatur — are falling like bank stocks. Worst of all, the days of the $75 million private deal have ground to a halt.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjon...

[ . . . ] What I want to ask now is – why? What happened? How did art become the mirror of fraud? [ . . . ] After the second world war artists were steeped in history and introspection. Art has never been more serious in its view of life than it was in the era of Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. But even as modern painting reached such heights and depths, western society was going through an epochal transformation. The power of the capitalist economies in the postwar era was unprecedented in world history. An entirely new lifestyle, that of “consumerism”, was born.

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Reading this piece from the Guardian with the NY Times chaser, it feels like old times, with jonathan jones coming out as peter fuller and prescribing leon kossof as the cure for decadence. a totally undialectical brain dead art critic for an age of zombie art; gagosian as the madoff of the art market, the sector's own monster/scapegoat. suddenly appearance is just a lie and what we need is truth and melancholic sobriety - a simple inversion of the previous hierarchy. ironically this makes buying kossof the equivalent of buying gold, a flight to safety and 'solidity', 'real' value after all the 'froth'.

one could point out that art was already suffering from a rampant distrust of/contempt for appearances and that the return to supposed realities is thus the most philistine and bourgeois reaction possible. rather than trying to redeem art from its hypertrophied exchange value and the (complementary) utilitarian insistence on simple truth, pleasure, honesty, etc critics might remember that art is a social fact, it has an objectivity that separates it from the intentions of both its producers and its consumers/owners. the most advanced critics of art begin with art's commodity status rather than trying to bury it under mounds of expressionist mucus; jonathan jones probably never gave it much thought but he seems to want to erase the entire history of critical art and anti-art and cling to the mummy of the old daddy painters.

the outrage expressed by born again anti-postmodernists testifies to a shared perception of art as the distillate of genius subjectivities, but misses the objectivity of appearance, the truth of semblance, and the social substance that is no more reducible to objects than capital is to paper claims (though like capital, art's continued existence as a transcendental signifier depends on the continued circulation of art discourse - declaring it dead has long been the lifesupport machine). now the market/discourse is in crisis, gooey paint becomes the measure of authenticity.

this reminds me of king lear stripping himself of the trappings of sovereignty, going right off his powermad daughters goneril and regan, and getting into the poverty and truth of 'poor tom', the unaccomodated man he meets on the blasted heath. but poor tom is just another displaced trustafarian hiding out incognito, and like authentic art is every bit a simulacrum of intrinsic value. truth as a social process, appearance as the medium of revolutionary critique (for some bourgeois, at least), is obscured by a new capitalist cult of the thing-in-itself. art/ critics that perpetrate the fraud of an art without fraud. a meta-scam to cover over the objectivity of the emperor's new clothes, the performative efficiency of appearance which was always the moment of truth, the only true element in the torrent of bling.

like the new prada collection, faux drab will probably be the necessary form of appearance for art's survival in the same way that social democracy and capitalism in general will now hide out in beggars rags, austerity chic, a return to the real congruent with Obama's new deal. nothing could sustain the spirit of ficititious capital dominated culture better than a stolid retreat to totems of a postivistic truth (an undialectical swing from price to value, exchange to use). but will people follow jones the market maker's lead? are people ready to give up the remains of their brains so completely? some people were gagging for a bout of self-mortification, clearly. nice if you can afford it.

just goes to show that you can attack the form of appearance of capital but fail to hit its essence as a social relation; as long as the latter persists art will not die and jonathan jones will still have a job.

B