The late 1980s was marked by a severe recession and a subsequent art-market crash, one that proved to be a strong corrective to a hyper-inflated art economy. It was during the heady days of the early to mid-1980s that galleries first established waitlists for unmade works of art, and provided sizable stipends and signing bonuses (on top of income earned from sales) to artists whose prices escalated to heights previously unknown. The 1990s were calmer, as the burgeoning and newly international art market regained balance. The increased prevalence of international biennials, which brought new artists to the market, and later, new collectors into the fold, contributed to the steady growth during this period.
But the most notable escalation of the global art market occurred in the years after the September 11 attacks, when the financial markets righted themselves after the initial shock. The first decade of 2000 became the era of the hedge fund, marked by the trading of securities, and a massive housing bubble. Olav Velthuis tackles this history in his “Globalization and Commercialization of the Art Market,” arguing that against the prevailing rhetoric commercialization is in fact a cyclical rather than a constant force in the art world of the last twenty or so years.
The exuberance of the financial markets has mirrored the art market, where auction houses achieved record sales and art fairs—like Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, and Frieze—grew in importance. Fairs have become the financial focal point of the contemporary art world, a place where galleries conduct a majority of their business. Certainly galleries, both big and small, are key factors in the shape of the art market, yet commentators often misconstrue and generalize how in fact they impact the economic face of the art world as well as their importance in creating and maintaining local art scenes. A more nuanced and complicated perspective of galleries comes from interviews with Mihai Pop, Sylvia Kouvali, and Andrea Rosen, who own spaces in Cluj and Berlin, Istanbul, and New York, respectively.
The recession that began in 2007–8 did little to change the dynamics of the art market. It has, though, added further fuel to a wide body of literature critical of the art-market’s structure. One of the greatest challenges today is to come to terms with the operation of this system, while still accounting for aesthetic changes not necessarily related to the market. Indeed, it is often the perspective of artists that is lost in discussions of this kind. Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri redress this issue in “Untitled,” which takes their contribution as a political intervention. Their poetic critique makes clear that to see the market as merely a hegemonic force obviates a great deal of interpretive nuance, since one must still recognize that virtually everyone in the art world unwittingly or otherwise participates in the functioning of the market.
At first sight, the market for contemporary art hardly seems different from the late 1980s, or, for that matter, from half a century ago: Its fundamental market structure and principal actors have remained the same, with two key intermediaries, art galleries and auction houses, vying for market share. Unlike in other cultural industries such as the music business or journalism, the internet has hardly modified the way contemporary works of art are exchanged. New York remains the center of the art market, where the largest and most influential art dealers are headquartered and the main contemporary art auctions are organized. The way new works of art are marketed is by and large identical to the way this happened throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, one could argue that the dealer-critic system,1 which was established in France in the second half of the nineteenth century as the modern art market was born, is still in place: Art dealers continue to represent a limited number of artists on a more or less permanent basis, and try to make a market for their work by inserting it into the taste-making machinery of the art world. This implicit, negated marketing strategy entails raising the interest of critics, curators, collectors, and other art-world members who dispose of the symbolic capital required to create artistic reputations and consecrate new works of art.2 This socially constructed artistic value, in turn, can be translated by art dealers into economic value, i.e. higher prices and sales.3
This stable market structure notwithstanding, the art market has gone through a number of interrelated institutional developments in the last two decades, which have had a significant impact on the exchange of art—both structurally and culturally. In particular, the rise of the art fair, the internet, and the increased competition of auction houses on the contemporary segment of the art market both reflect and further propel the globalization and commercialization of the art world; the latter much to the dismay of those artists, critics, and other members of the art world who claim that commerce, in one way or another, contaminates art. I will first discuss the rise of these three institutions and afterwards their effects on the art world.
Whereas the first art fair—Art Cologne—was established in 1967,4 they have only started flourishing since the end of the 1990s: The number of participants per fair rose (nowadays in the average art fair several hundreds of dealers have a booth), and so did the number of fairs worldwide, their number of visitors, and the media attention which is devoted to them. The rise of the fair should be understood as a response to a changing market environment. First of all, it has provided a new means for art collectors to economize on search time for art. This is crucial for the art market’s clientele whose scarcest resource is not money but time: Traveling regularly to individual gallery shows out of town has become a luxury that the richest can no longer afford, unlike the leisure class of yesteryear who used to be the main customers. The role of the art fair as an economization device is all the more important in an art world where “local” has become a pejorative term. As the art-market correspondent of The Economist put it: “ ‘local artist’ has become a synonym for insignificant artist … ‘International’ is now a selling point in itself.”5 In other words, a global habitus (read: an interest in what is marketed in New York, London, Berlin, Zurich, and a handful of other centers of cultural commerce) is required from all market participants, including collectors. The art fair enables this habitus by temporarily bringing the globally consecrated supply of art under one roof.
Secondly, the fair is the art world’s response to a more general event culture, exemplified by for instance the proliferation of film festivals or art biennials.6 Within this event culture, the consumption (not necessarily acquisition) of contemporary art is packaged as a social and cultural experience, livened up by the artistic performances and round-table discussions of experts which have now become standard elements of the art-fair format.
Thirdly, the art fair has become a successful exchange platform because of its fit with the status-driven nature of the market: The fair embodies a fine-grained tool to both represent and reproduce the status hierarchies embedded within the market. It distinguishes visitors by providing selected groups with VIP-treatment, access to pre-(and pre-)openings, afterparties, or the houses of collectors in the vicinity of the fair. Those types of access are now broadly recognized as signs of status among the cultural elite—the more exclusive the venue, the stronger the signal. Likewise, for the art dealers themselves, being admitted to a select group of art fairs, most notably Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, has become one of the main sources of gallery reputation.
As against the exclusive logic of the fair, the logic of the art auction is a democratic one: whoever has the purchasing power gets access to coveted works of art. The auction houses have pointed at the restrictive business strategies of art dealers who, in the case of extremely popular artists whose production is far smaller than demand, exclude collectors on the basis of—in the eyes of the auctions—obscure criteria. Those collectors, who may not have the social network or the cultural credentials to get access to desired works of art at the gallery, seek recourse at the auction house.
The rise of the auction house on the market for contemporary art is a tale of a broken gentleman’s agreement: Throughout the twentieth century, an implicit division of labor used to split the art market into a primary segment which was the domain of art galleries and a secondary or resale market which was dominated by the auction houses. Since the culture of the market stipulated that works of art would not be re-commodified after being sold in the gallery, at least not any time soon, this meant that auction houses mostly ignored contemporary art and instead focused on old and modern masters. From the 1970s onwards, however, auction houses have increasingly discovered contemporary art as a new source of income.
Their turn to the contemporary can be explained by the drying-up of the stream of old and modern masters offered for sale (their supply is by definition fixed). Of contemporary works of art, by contrast, there is permanent supply. Simultaneously, the demand for contemporary art rose in the last two decades, as part of a wider societal trend towards novelty rather than patina as markers of status, or a more general predilection for rapidly changing trends rather than stable canons of taste. This increased demand is reflected in price levels for the top segment of contemporary art, which between 1990 and the peak of the market in 2008, rose more than sixfold. In other market segments, price increases were more modest. Between 2003 and 2007 the size of the contemporary art market grew spectacularly by 851 percent worldwide, again much higher than the 311 percent growth of the overall art market.7 As a result, for the auction houses contemporary art has now become a core business, which accounts for the largest share of their revenue. And while they are still concentrated on the secondary market, i.e. re-sales, the successful Hirst sale at Sotheby’s in September 2008 warned art dealers that the days of the traditional division of labor between the auction houses and the art galleries may be numbered: Hirst auctioned off 223 works which came straight out of his studio. This was the first time an auction house manifested itself so clearly on the primary art market and an artist decided to bypass his art dealers so publicly8—at least, in the West. In China and India, by contrast, artists selling new works of art directly at auction is common practice.9
The third key institutional development of the art market has been the cautious embracement of the internet. The internet initially failed to get a grip on the art market; the digital adventures of Sotheby’s, among others, failed, and the attempts of eBay and other ecommerce companies to enter the art market have been restricted to decorative and amateur arts. More recently, however, the internet has started to change commercial practices, although still to a far lesser extent than for instance in the music industry. Most art dealers now display samples of their artists’ work on—almost without exception minimally designed—websites. Some are experimenting with areas for private viewing which are restricted to selected clients. Others have ventured into the practice of selling recognizable, blue-chip works of art, made by established artists, from jpegs which are displayed on for instance artnet.com. The buyers are frequently unknown to the art dealer. As a culmination of this ecommerce development, in January 2011, the first online art fair took place, in which many established dealers from the United States and Europe participated. As in the case of auctions, globalization may further spur this development; especially in India, internet sales and online auctions are considered much more legitimate and more common as sales venues than in Europe and the United States.
The art fair, the internet, and the auction house share a propensity to deterritorialize the exchange of art: Whereas the traditional exchange of contemporary art involves artists, dealers, and collectors who have built up dense trust relationships, the new institutions may “disembed” the market from local social structures in which it used to be, at least to some extent, embedded.10 They have contributed to a global market architecture, which channels the new wealth of buyers in emerging economies to contemporary art produced in the West as well as the old wealth of buyers in Europe and the United States to new art produced in emerging art worlds. Indeed, Sotheby’s and Christie’s now organize sales dedicated to art from India, Russia, China, or Latin America, and have opened branches in for instance the Middle East and Hong Kong. In 2008, the size of the auction market for contemporary art in China surpassed the one of France. And while in 2002, only one Chinese artist was part of the list of the world’s top 100 artists (computed on the basis of auction revenue), in 2008, this list contained thirty-four Chinese artists as against twenty American artists.11 The art fairs in the West have seen new participants and visitors from emerging markets, and have devoted special theme sections to those markets, while a host of fairs have been established in new art capitals such as Shanghai, New Delhi, Moscow, and Abu Dhabi. Here we find an additional reason why the art market boomed so strongly in the first decade of the new millennium: the influx of new multimillionaires from emerging economies.12 Between 2004 and 2009, the number of buyers from the Middle East at Christie’s rose by 400 percent. Nowadays, the share of high net worth individuals from Latin America and Asia buying art is higher than the share of American high net worth individuals doing so.13
To what extent the art market is truly global nowadays is, however, up for debate. First of all, the markets which have emerged in for instance India and China are far from completely integrated globally. While a small group of Chinese artists, predominantly working in the styles of cynical realism and critical pop, have international reputations and a following of European and American collectors willing to pay five- and six-figure prices for their work, the majority remains unknown outside of the country’s national borders. Instead, they are bought by local collectors through local intermediaries such as Poly International Auction (in spite of Poly’s exclusive focus on the Chinese market, it now has the fifth-largest revenue of auction houses worldwide).
Although they buy into the ideology of internationalism which predominates in the art world, and maintain that nationality does not factor in the artists they represent, the practices of the average Western art dealers have likewise remained by and large local: They have a local clientele and predominantly represent artists who have the same nationality as their own.14
As far as a global market does exist, it operates through a small number of auction houses and powerful galleries such as the Gagosian Gallery, the Pace Gallery, or Hauser & Wirth, who have several offices worldwide to cater to a global demand. But even this top segment of the market can hardly be called global since these market agents and the artists they represent are almost without exception European and American. In fact, in the international marketplaces such as Art Basel, the overwhelming number of art dealers still comes from a small number of countries, most notably the United States and Germany.15
In short, just like what happened in the media and entertainment industries, a multi-polar art world, in which regional centers exist, which are only partially interlinked through a global framework, is in the making.16
The internet, the auction houses, and the art fair have seemingly resulted in a further commercialization of contemporary art. This commercialization of art has been deplored, both by actors within the market as well as by outside observers, for a number of reasons. First of all, the three institutions, foremost the auction and the art fair, are considered to be inappropriate physical contexts to view and appreciate art. They highlight the commodity character and the status value of art to the detriment of its artistic properties. Also, these disembedded contexts inhibit the discursive interaction which according to dealers themselves should accompany the exchange of art. Secondly, the institutions have contributed to the construction of a specific type of agency among market participants: Artists would no longer be interested in producing an uncompromised oeuvre of lasting quality, but more in earning short-run profits, producing art that is fashionable, establishing a quick career, receiving widespread media attention, and gaining a celebrity status. No doubt the most exemplary artist of this celebrity culture is Damien Hirst, who was on the chart of the wealthiest individuals in Britain and Ireland, The Times Rich List, with a net worth of £235 million. Likewise traditional collectors, who buy with their eyes rather than their ears, have a love for art rather than a love for money and status, have allegedly been crowded out by those who see art as an investment. The latter include supercollectors such as Charles Saatchi, who buy cheap in the gallery and sell dear afterwards at auction.
A third detrimental effect of commercialization has been the destabilization of artistic careers. The often aggressive attempts of auction houses to get works on the market that only a season ago were still hanging in the gallery, have provoked strong complaints among artists and dealers: They accuse the auction houses of acting like parasites, with a perverse interest in making quick, short-run profits. Their commercial interference would work against the attempts of dealers to establish a secure, stable, and long-term market for the artist. Moreover, dealers and artists argue that the auction houses are not entitled to the windfall profits the auction sales may generate if the artist’s work is in short supply, and the auction price therefore rises much higher than its current gallery price: In that case, the artist fails to be compensated fairly for artistic labor and the dealer for promotional and market-making activities.17
Fourthly, the new market institutions have contributed to the social definition of a work of art as a financial asset, which can be used for investment purposes, rather than a cultural good. Indeed, in the slipstream of the auction houses, an infrastructure has emerged in the last decade and a half that facilitates rationalized investment in art. This infrastructure encompasses art investment funds and advisory firms, art investment services offered by commercial banks, and a confidence indicator, which measures the level of confidence art investors have in the stability of the market. Companies such as artnet.com and artprice.com have been established, which systematically collect and distribute data on auction prices worldwide. As a result, a new type of actor has been attracted to the art market, who is not looking for artistic value but for a new means to diversify his portfolio or to hedge against risks such as inflation.18
This pessimistic story of the commercialization of the art market in the last decade fits into a wider “hostile worlds” story, which can be retrieved throughout the history of art.19 It implicitly assumes that an intrinsic conflict exists between art and money, that economic interests have increasingly come to contaminate the art world, and that the incommensurable value of art is at stake now that its commodity character is displayed so prominently.
But a number of responses against this story can be formulated. First of all, the commercialization of art is by and large restricted to a top segment of the art market, where prices have risen fastest, and the influence of the art fairs, the internet, and the auction houses has been strongest. Practices in the remainder of the market have not been impacted that much by the rise of these institutions.
Likewise, the extent to which art has indeed become financialized is easily overestimated.20 For instance, of the about fifty art investment funds which were active or scheduled to become active in 2005, only twenty survived at the end of the decade. The reasons for this failed financialization are among others the high risks involved in art investments, the high transactions costs related to buying and selling art, the difficulties for those investment funds in getting access to works that have the potential of rising in value, and the lack of liquidity of the market: Once an art investor would want to sell his holdings, the risk is that he may have to search long for a buyer.
Also, the interest of well-known hedge fund managers-turned-art buyers such as Stephen Cohen, Daniel Loeb, and Kenneth Griffin has too easily been interpreted as a sign of contemporary art’s financialization. This interpretation is hardly convincing given that the amounts of money they spend on art and the potential profits dwarf the holdings of their hedge funds and the profits they make on them. While these hedge fund managers have economic capital in abundance, the more likely interpretation is that they buy art out of status anxiety, that is, because of a deficit in cultural capital and social capital related to specific elite groups.21
Secondly, actors in the art world are no passive victims of commercialization, but have themselves developed strategies to compete or resist. For instance, artists are known to resist the lure of more powerful, commercial galleries, out of loyalty to the art dealer who nurtured their careers early on. Likewise, art dealers have responded to the entry of auction houses on the contemporary art market by actively trying to keep works away from the auctions. For instance, they have stipulated a right of first refusal in selling agreements. Also, they have drawn up blacklists of collectors who they refuse to do business with because these collectors have a reputation of reselling quickly at auction. And when it comes to the predominance of art fairs, dealers in for instance Berlin have actively organized themselves to provide an alternative to the fair. For example, they have come up with annual gallery weekends, when openings and other art events are scheduled and collectors from out of town are invited.
Most importantly, one of the assumptions of the “hostile worlds” discourse is dubious: that the commercialization of art is an ongoing process, that markets get an ever-stronger grip on art, and that a reversed trend is inconceivable. The crash of the art market, which began in the fall of 2008, has proved this assumption wrong. It has meant a watershed and resulted in amendments in the market culture, much like the crash of the art market in 1989 meant a radical break with the overtly commercial market culture of the 1980s. Artists and dealers had economic reasons to deplore the latest market crash, but nevertheless speak about it in terms of purification: a slowing down of the market’s pace, a welcome expulsion of commercially or financially motivated buyers, and a reconfiguration of the market participants’ agency.
The opposition between the art market’s superstar culture of the 1980s on the one hand and the much more prudent, inward-looking culture of the 1990s on the other, is homologous with the opposition between the first boom decade of the new millennium and the sobering era which started in 2008. In short, rather than a linear, ongoing process, commercialization seems to be cyclical, with the market producing its own countervailing tendencies.
Notes
1 H. C. White and C. A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965).
2 P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
3 Cf. R. Moulin, “The Construction of Art Values,” International Sociology 9 (1994), pp. 5–12.
4 C. Mehring, “Emerging Market: On the Birth of the Contemporary Art Fair,” Artforum (2008), pp. 322–328, 390.
5 “Global Frameworks; Contemporary Art,” The Economist (June 26, 2010).
6 Cf. B. Moeran and J. Strandgaard Pedersen, “Fairs and Festivals: Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries,” Creative Encounters Working Paper (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 2009).
7 C. McAndrew, Globalisation and the Art Market: Emerging Economies and the Art Trade in 2008 (Helvoirt: Tefaf, 2009); Artprice, “The Contemporary Art Market 2007/2008,” The Artprice Annual Report (Lyon: Artprice, 2008).
8 See O. Velthuis, “Damien’s Dangerous Idea: Valuing Contemporary Art at Auction,” in J. Beckert and P. Aspers, eds., The Worth of Goods: Sociological Approaches to Valuation and Pricing in the Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9 See e.g. B. Pollack, “The Chinese Art Explosion,” ARTNews 107 (2008), pp. 118–127.
10 Cf. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944 [1957]).
11 Artprice, op. cit.
12 See e.g. McAndrew, op. cit.
13 Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, World Wealth Report (2009).
14 O. Velthuis, “Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art: Why Local Ties Remain Dominant in Amsterdam and Berlin,” European Societies (forthcoming).
15 See A. Quemin, “Globalization and Mixing in the Visual Arts: An Empirical Survey of ‘High Culture’ and Globalization,” International Sociology 21 (2006), pp. 522–550.
16 Cf. J. Sinclair, E. Jacka, and S. Cunningham, New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
17 O. Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
18 See O. Velthuis and E. Coslor, “Financialization of Art Markets,” in K. Knorr Cetina and A. Preda, eds., Handbook of the Sociology of Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); N. Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
19 Cf. E. Coslor, “Hostile Worlds and Questionable Speculation: Recognizing the Plurality of Views about Art and the Market,” Research in Economic Anthropology 30 (2010), pp. 209–224; V. A. Zelizer, “Enter Culture,” in M. F. Guillen, R. Collins, P. England, and M. Meyer, eds., The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), p. 101.
20 See e.g. S. Malik, “A Boom Without End? Liquidity, Critique and the Art Market,” MuTE: Culture and Politics After the Net 2 (2007), pp. 92–99; M. Gilligan, Hedge Funds (Frankfurt am Main: Texte Zur Kunst, 2007).
21 O. Velthuis, “Accounting for Taste,” Artforum (2008), pp. 305–309; T. Wolfe, “The Pirate Pose,” Portfolio Magazine (2007).
The Editors (TE): How did you decide to start Plan B?
Mihai Pop (MP): It’s quite a long story but to make it short, I was running another gallery: the University of Arts in Cluj. I was a student in the master class in 2000, and I ran that space for two years and a half. That was a very good practice for me and I met many of the artists I’m working with now. They were students, and I organized their exhibitions. It was very interesting for all of us to exercise without any commercial reasons or power structures and things like that. Afterwards, I had a break of two years, and decided to open my gallery. I called the gallery Plan B because it was based on the previous experience, which was not necessarily the most positive one. My program was built on what’s going on in the world now, and also financially, I knew that in order to be able to run a long-term project, I needed to have some money from the beginning, some support. From this perspective we immediately jumped into the art market. The public money in Romania in 2005 was problematic. Now it’s better, but it’s better because of the integration in the European Union in 2007. But when I opened the gallery it was impossible to base such a project on public sources so we all decided—me and artists like Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man, and Ciprian Muresan—that it’s time to step into the market.
TE: Was there a market in Cluj?
MP: No. Luckily, we had a friend, a young guy who wanted to build an art collection. It was Adrian Ghenie, mainly, and myself, working for this guy as kind of advisors. Something between friendship and advisor. Looking back I would say we were not so clear who’s the gallerist, who’s the artist. Now it’s clearer. Being active internationally you have to make everything more professional. But at the beginning we did what we thought correct. So we were just advising this guy to buy good art and to buy from Romanian artists. We told him, it’s better to concentrate on Romanian art of the last forty years because the public institutions in Romania didn’t have the budget to collect, and it was also something urgent, because many good artists are now old and dying and their works will go directly to the trashcan. That’s really a problem, so we said look, we know these guys, please collect these good works and you will have an important collection that will be a foundation for international curators to research.
TE: How did you orient yourself internationally from Cluj?
MP: Some of us already went abroad, like Victor Man. Mircea Cantor went very early to France. He emigrated from Romania to France and they said wow, this is an interesting artist! So he built his career there. But what’s interesting with him is the fact that he’s a carrier of good energy. He always brought good things from Romania to France and he brought from France information to Romania. And actually this happened with Plan B in general later because we played this role too, we did this work of emancipating a bit of the local context. We didn’t do this on purpose. We are not patriots, it’s not about that. But I see the results, it’s important to go outside and to bring real information inside because these small art scenes, they develop through frustrations and a false image of the real art scene.
TE: You mean they develop because they have an idea of what’s happening in New York or Berlin and they want to imagine it …
MP: Yeah. So it’s important to be on the real art scene and on the real art market and to bring the correct information back, especially for the young guys. People like Mircea Cantor and Victor Man, they were kind of pioneers for me, for my gallery. We went first to the Vienna art fair. Because Vienna had this tradition and maybe postcolonial complex of looking to the ex-Austrian empire, so they support the East European context and Balkans and so on. So they had this focus on these countries, so we got a little bit of support from the Vienna art fair, so it was easy and was cheap for us to go there and to pay for a booth. We packed the van and drove everything up.
And in 2005 there were many american collectors going to vienna. they were fascinated by this idea of the east of europe as a reservoir for good artists. and in 2006 we got an invitation to apply to the armory show and we said why not? and we applied and we got accepted.
TE: So art fairs are part of your business model, and were critical from the beginning?
MP: Art fairs were very good, but they could be very bad. We realized later that it was good to have seven to ten years of being anonymous because it offered us the chance to develop our work away from the art market. When we went out into the world we had works, we had artists that were not spoiled by the market.
TE: And has that changed?
MP: You know I think we belong to that generation that was never interested in leaving the country. We realized that our good source is Cluj. We realized that if we want to build a real career we have to go where this effort is appreciated. We have to contribute to our local art scene, but we don’t have time to wait until it will be good enough to offer us all the resources. So in 2008 we decided to have a second permanent space in Berlin. This decision came with a double meaning. First, to escape the constant national art scene feeling, and on the other hand to be treated as one of the galleries in the world, not just the exotic gallery from Romania.
TE: Can you describe your involvement with the Venice Biennial in 2007?
MP: That’s another hybrid from the East because it’s hard to imagine a commercial gallery being a commissioner of a national pavilion in Venice. I’m sure that in the Western countries something like this is quite impossible, but in our case it was about the development of the Romanian art scene. The ministry of culture decided that we are more able as a private gallery to organize the pavilion. I was the commissioner, so I took care of the technical, organizational stuff. The concept belongs to Mihnea Mircan, he’s a Romanian curator and a good friend of mine.
TE: Did you have to raise money for the pavilion?
MP: The government provided a budget, which was not sufficient, and I put some money through Plan B. It was not a big amount. We decided to keep it low-key. But still, the budget we had was ridiculously small. I think it was the same as what Germany had just for the opening party.
TE: Could you speak about the hybrid situation that the East provides?
MP: I see this hybrid more and more as something good, as something coming from our area, something about us, something that makes a difference. It was always like this. During Communism it was very hard to have clear positions because the artists who did subversive art—political subversive art—were also part of the Communist union of artists. They had to be part of the official structure; nobody was out of these structures. So, of course, that changed the perspective of what subversive art is. These in-between situations created these hybrids.
I also honestly don’t see any reason for following blindly a pattern that is not our pattern. so i’m on the western market because that’s super developed and evolved and so on, but i don’t want to follow all the rules of that market. it’s their party; it’s not my party. we have this idea of look, that’s not our society, that’s not our party, but we have to use it. they created structures and we will use these structures. but we don’t necessarily have to fit that context.
* * *
The Editors: When did you open Rodeo Gallery?
Sylvia Kouvali (SK) : In 2007.
TE: Why Istanbul?
SK: I had never worked in a commercial space before. I never knew what running a gallery really meant besides going to galleries since I was a child in Athens with my father. Then I was here in Istanbul. I did my studies here and got an internship in an art center. There was a moment when I thought I would go back to London or New York, and work as a receptionist or archivist at a gallery. The other option was to stay in Istanbul. There was a particular moment for me in Manifesta 6—the one that didn’t happen in Cyprus. I was for the time in Nicosia, but living in Istanbul, yet coming from Athens, being part of a generation that is starting a discussion about this part of the world.
I couldn’t be in athens because i found the galleries and the art system too focused on economic concerns. at that time, in the early 2000s, it was still possible for athenian galleries to be self-sustaining. it was around that time that i came to istanbul, where i found a space for a new way of dealing with art in a commercial way. i decided to open the gallery while i was at manifesta, seeing the potential in istanbul, while knowing things about greece, and also cyprus. there were similar sensitivities amongst the artists from the region, even amongst those of different ages. the name rodeo is kind of a joke, but it also comes from latin: to circulate, to surround and contain.
TE: How would you describe the art scene and the art market in Istanbul? How has it changed from when you started the gallery?
SK: It has taken a very interesting direction, growing during this time—as with everything in Turkey. Anything that happens in the arts is a private initiative, whether at the behest of a bank or a very wealthy family. The Istanbul Modern, for example, comes out of a private family collection. There is the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, founded by Vasif Kortun in 2001; that is a key moment, where things start to happen. Vasif is a catalyst, able to convince a bank to give him the funds to curate a collection as he wished. This was a radical move for Turkey, and other banks have followed. As part of this activity many galleries have opened as well.
TE: What’s the relationship between the private sector, those that support the arts, and the politicians of Turkey?
SK: There is a huge gap between these groups, and in my opinion it’s good. It’s great that these people choose to take culture into their own hands. I’m not saying that this is ideal. Of course, we’d all prefer to have a Ministry of Culture that functions and stands next to a European Ministry of Culture. There is a huge gap between those in the private sectors supporting art and people in the government. I don’t think they can sit at the same table. The one always feels that they are losing power over the other.
TE: With the gaps between the private sector and the public sectors do you feel there is a stable foundation for the Istanbul art market?
SK: Ninety-five percent of the art market is in development. Turkey is a country made of youth. I think if those people are really absorbing what’s happening right now, it’s great. And with the economic growth, to have the means to go abroad, to study, and then come back … then the foundation is good. I have no idea what can happen financially here because we are part of another bubble. Turkey wants to become a role model of the region but still struggles to take care of its basic problems.
TE: How would you define the region? Where do you see Istanbul?
SK: Everywhere. I always like to put Istanbul next to New York because they are both self-obsessed and self-consuming places. But I think Istanbul is becoming more open in terms of accepting what it was and what it forgot in the last 100 years. Istanbul is a cosmopolitan place and always has been. Of course Istanbul is part of Turkey, but then it’s not. It’s like how New York is part of America, but it’s not.
TE: How do art fairs play into your programming?
SK: They are major. It wouldn’t be possible without them because my program would not be able to survive here. Turkish collectors tend to buy “Turkish” art or what fits under this category. Without art fairs there wouldn’t be Rodeo. It would have to migrate somewhere else.
Art fairs make art scenes happen not just in istanbul but also in berlin, in london. you see all the east london galleries at fairs and you wonder why. collectors aren’t coming to the east end. they prefer to fly to berlin or vienna for the weekend than taking a cab to the east end. collectors often don’t get out of their comfort zone.
Everything that a fair offers is a lifestyle decision. It is a package that covers a certain treatment, certain educational aspects like visiting collectors’ houses; it becomes sexier and maybe more interesting. I went to FIAC last year without exhibiting in it. It was great. It’s very interesting, especially not working there. You do business, you see exhibits, it’s like a fun-fair for grownups.
TE: How different is your understanding of art fairs to that of biennials, especially the Istanbul Biennial?
SK: The first days of the Istanbul Biennial are really like an art fair. I had people coming into the gallery for the first time saying I want that and that. Perfect. It’d mean I wouldn’t have to do so many art fairs.
basel will still be basel, but now we have fairs in hong kong, mexico city, colombia. all those places that people now prefer to go see an art fair rather than paris or london. it makes things blur, especially in places like istanbul or sÃo paulo or sharjah. at the end of the day, the crowds mix together, collectors buy works on view in biennials, and curators learn about artists from dealers. we don’t really know how to separate art fairs from biennials anymore.
I was talking with a friend yesterday about how many more curators can the world take? I could have become an independent curator and have far less worries. We will see more and more galleries growing from all those curators without jobs. There are not enough institutions, and there is not enough public money to sustain them. Institutions are dying, and as a result we are going to have so much more interesting galleries around. Galleries made out of young curators. And then art fairs will have to go through an identity crisis. There are so many good galleries around, so many good artists around. Fairs are going to have to become bigger but this isn’t really possible. It’s all becoming this huge machine and we don’t even know how the world will be able to archive this in a hundred years. When you’re so myopic and really into your own thing, dealing with accounting in Istanbul, say, you don’t even think about the whole system, but when you get out of it you’re like “whoa,” maybe I should really go and grow tomatoes.
* * *
The Editors: When did you start your gallery?
Andrea Rosen (AR) : The gallery opened in 1990, though I decided to open it the year before. I’d worked at a number of galleries and actually had left the art world to get a Masters in a completely different field. At different points I was disillusioned with how much artists wanted to seek out careers as opposed to making work that was meaningful. But I came back. I felt like there was clearly a theoretically-informed generation, which was sort of my generation, who had grown up with all of the self-questioning of the ’80s but was also then free to take another step, which was to make work that was meaningful within an aesthetic context. And so I felt like it was my obligation to contextualize by opening a gallery.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who I knew through his projects with group material, definitely became the backbone of my gallery and probably represented my entire identity to some degree: a core of content and responsibility within an aesthetic framework. we opened in january of 1990 with a show of felix’s, just before the first major recession. so it was interesting to see how that moment also for better, for the most part, really affected the gallery as well.
You know, it’s shockingly over two decades later, and his model is still absolutely the focus of the gallery. As a gallery, I’m probably known for being very concerned about the gallery’s responsibility to keep archival records, which revolves around an idea about longevity or maybe the desire to create history around artwork. But on a personal level the part that’s most important and interesting to me is actually the immediate, the everyday aspect of the gallery, which is that galleries, unlike museums, are free to the public. People have the right to come in and have a point of view—and the right to walk in and walk out. While there’s a press release about any given show, information on hand, and so on, it’s ultimately up to an individual to decide the meaning for herself without being dictated to. On a social-political level it is about encouraging not only this right to a point of view, but the responsibility to a point of view, which is also, I would say, a position that I shared with Felix.
TE: How has the growth of your gallery transformed your ideals?
AR: It has been very curious to see how developing and keeping a long-term and sustainable community of people working together has become such a compelling part of the job. Obviously art remains at the root. But I have been moved by collectors, too. As much as we can talk about the market in recent years, collectors still come to buy art because they want to be inspired, because, even though they themselves are usually exceptional, at the top of their respective fields, they want their lives to be fuller and more meaningful. They believe that it is art that will immortalize them and our times.
And there’s something very legitimate about the market. to say that history comes exclusively through museum exposure and critical attention is absolutely not true. for me to be able to say, for the first time only very recently, and without self-effacing guilt, that i am a dealer—and not cloak myself behind my curatorial practice—has been liberating. to be clear, as a good gallerist, part of my job is to protect artists from some parts of the market. as they evolve there’s less protection in that way, but to understand what it means to put an artist in the market appropriately is crucial. is there a history without a market? and, again, to undervalue the significance of the collector as patron, as caretaker, as the person who will eventually donate work to museums, or to not address the unfortunate—to no fault of their own—limitations of institutions (in their acts of censorship, necessity for consensus, and more) is naive. we have to recognize what they are up against.
TE: To your mind, how has the globalization of the market changed the nature of collecting?
AR: There are amazing new and knowledgeable collectors all over the world now. There’s the Middle East, India, China, Korea …This is all very exciting, and parts of that very real, but in the last few years an alternate market has developed, which is not totally based in transparent truths. I think we’re just beginning to see the divergence of the truth and the not-truth and that artists who are not necessarily historically significant are being played with in the market. And unfortunately there is a reliance on emerging markets in order to play this out. We are beginning to see artists being chosen for this alternate market path without being proven. It seems they’re chosen because they are blank slates. One of the problems with that illusion is that I’m not even sure that the artists are being told; it’s almost as if those dealers don’t care what they pay the artist because what they want is to keep up a certain illusion. Many people fall into the why-pay-less category: whatever artwork is the highest priced must be the best. It’s a game that plays on the least knowledgeable. How long can this sustain itself?
TE: So how do you counter this?
AR: For me the goal is longevity in any career. What most artists want for the most part is to be historically significant and to be historically significant entails a lifetime battle—no matter how great you are. If you’re the best artist for a couple years or an entire decade or more, it isn’t enough; unless you continue to be historically relevant you will be eliminated, and that’s a really difficult reality. Understanding this, some go another route and say, well, I’m not going to get there so I might as well at least make some money. Yet I would also say for the artist who is evolving and making history and sustaining himself for a long time and becoming historically relevant and remaining historically relevant, they tend to be quite level headed, less vulnerable to influence, and ultimately the most successful.
The idea that i can make a career though, even for an artist for whom this historical relevance seems certain, is another illusion. i suppose the status of a gallery makes a difference, but each artist has to prove it for themselves. and it’s possible that a gallery like mine could sustain an artist longer than they deserve to be sustained … that i would say, non-indefinitely. however, i really believe so deeply that people want to be inspired, that great work will shine and there’s a whole, it’s not me, it’s not the gallery, there is a real consensus because art ultimately makes up all of our history, so it tends to be primarily sincere and responsible.
It was interesting because one of my artists recently said to me, “Oh, all these artists live in this fiction that there’s a system where your gallery can call up a museum and get you a show, and the illusion that you have to have this kind of show and then you need that show in order to reach your goal ….” I mean, it just doesn’t happen, and I always tell other artists that it just doesn’t work like that.
It is important that artists are responsible for evolving as a person in order to evolve as an artist. You have to be exceptional and you have to keep that room to evolve yourself. This might sound sentimental. I think that in order to be great, it’s really difficult not to find a space to be an exceptional human being.
How do you approach a book like this?
We often enter a process using a question or two, something like “how does x work and how can we change the way x works?”
And we read, look for ideas, positions, friends … then try to produce encounters and interrogate further with those we involve in the process. The questions we choose are critical, because they already imply a horizon.
In this case, the field of art and the market has been circumscribed for you. Should one answer a question that is not one’s own?
As artists who have devoted a good part of their practice to exploring relations, struggles, lives that have attempted to thwart and avert destruction or death from the disproportionate force allotted to money today, it is a task, not without its irony and even gravity. To say yes requires a struggle over terms and a struggle over how to approach the question.
Would you call this a political intervention?
Yes, we would.
How can one intervene politically in such a book? At which level do the politics take place?
Clearly every essay in this book carries with it, tacitly or implicitly, political considerations or positions. Even the mode of address, the way one approaches a question, the way that language is used, and its relation to the reader has a politics to it.
What does it mean to foreground the political considerations explicitly and make this a potential terrain of its very legibility, especially in a section devoted to the market?
We would like to make the claim that there is no more suitable place to intervene politically in a book aspiring to encapsulate the discourse about art since 1989 than by addressing the dispositif of “the market.”
Furthermore, we assert that no book that attempts to speak about contemporary artistic practices after 1989 could be considered legitimate without addressing the larger dynamics, the hegemonic norms, and the unquestioned assumptions that have driven the institutional developments and structures supporting artistic production in that same period.
Lastly, as artists, we would like to use this space of the book to give voice to the kinds of concerns and considerations that inform our practice and the practice of many friends. We believe this is more difficult to access in historical accounts of art, which disproportionally focus on the reception of specific works and are written from the perspective of spectatorship, albeit an “informed” one.
You refer to the dispositif of “the market.” How are you using this term?
Dispositif is a technical term we borrow from Michel Foucault. The French word can be translated as an “apparatus” or a “device,” but instead of simply thinking of a gadget, it refers to a whole set of norms, bodies of knowledge, institutions, practices, laws, police or military measures, and beliefs that together function like a device, aiming “to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings”1 intervening in relations of/to knowledge and of/to power.
In his essay ‘What is a dispositif?’ Giorgio Agamben has argued that it arrives as “a set of practices and mechanisms that aim to face an urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate.”2 Can you speculate what “the market” is responding to?
The 1960s and 1970s produced the last global challenge to capitalism through struggles against colonialism, worker exploitation, racism, sexism, and imperialism. Neoliberalism was born out of the ashes of those struggles, and the dispositif of “the market” we inherit today is largely a response to that crisis. That response, according to David Harvey, resulted in a diabolical pact: Neoliberalism may recognize or even subsume your identity claims into the marketplace, grant your demands for greater individual freedom and sexual emancipation but you must drop your call for collective social justice, for economic equality, for environmental sustainability. What better way to understand Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) then as a critique of the ways in which the emancipatory struggles of the 1960s were already by the mid-1970s being instrumentalized into a new kind of totalizing, objectifying logic?
This tacit pact was accompanied by the steady transformation of the role of a state from one of protecting the welfare of its citizens to that of caring for the interests of corporations. If historically every government protects the interest of capital, under this new regime this hidden secret was not only made public but also said to be the only way.
1989 was used as a marker and further vindication of the claims that “the market” is a sturdier and a more accurate arbiter of the expressions, needs and well-being of the world’s inhabitants than any political claim or paradigm. In this way, the dispositif of the market was and is intended to homogenize and delegitimize other experiences, approaches, systems of value, forms of exchange, political considerations, and ways of thinking about how we can live or organize ourselves.
Your comments recall Fukuyama’s oft-quoted proclamation of the “End of History” where he speculated:
… in a world where struggle over all larger issues had been settled, a purely formal snobbery would become the chief form of expression of megalothymia, of man’s desire to be recognized as better than his fellows. In the United States, our utilitarian traditions make it difficult for even the fine arts to become purely formal. Artists like to convince themselves that they are being socially responsible in addition to being committed to aesthetic values. But the end of history will mean the end, among other things, of all art that could be considered socially useful, …3
Each one of these assertions has been proven false over the last twenty years of wars, genocides, economic crises, extra-judicial detentions, assassinations, ecological devastation, continued processes of dispossession, psychic upheavals, revolutionary upheavals …
One wonders whether Fukuyama has reconsidered these claims in light of what transpired over the last twenty years?
It appears that in 2009 he did reconsider and determined “History is Still Over,” going on to explain how capitalism has survived this crisis, even managing “genuinely positive results,” citing, for example, the ability to replace the G8 with a more inclusive G20, leading to a to “a larger and less arrogant” IMF.4
But the fact Fukuyama has not disavowed his proclamations does not surprise us. The zealots of capitalism are like any orthodox believers of a religion.
Walter Benjamin once theorized capitalism as a cultic religion. But whereas, in Clement of Alexandria, oikonomia (translated into Latin as dispositio) “merged with the notion of Providence and indicated the redemptive governance of the world and human history”5—in capitalism, according to Benjamin, there is no redemption. It is “probably the first instance of a cult that creates schuld (the German word for both debt and guilt) not atonement.”6 Benjamin wrote about worry; today we call it anxiety, precarity, depression. For Benjamin, the cult of capitalism finds its culmination only when all share in the guilt/debt.
Of course today, Benjamin’s hallucinatory analysis appears far closer to reality than Fukayama’s. How else can one understand a phenomenon such as micro-finance, which in the name of empowerment and ending poverty enables new forms of capital or collateral (one’s reputation in a community) to borrow against as well as share the schuld?
But if you take, for example, the majority of critical thinkers that are invited by cultural institutions to reflect on global developments the claim that after 1989 all remaining issues can be resolved through “the market” would be subjected to a radical critique, if not ridiculed.
Yes, but at the same time, a majority of those same cultural institutions which invite such critiques (museums, universities, public, private, for- or not-for-profit institutions) have either willingly, through norms dictated by states (as protectorates/captives of the dispositif of the market) or by their largely corporate-minded boards, had to assume this ridiculous “rationality” of this cult as the reality under which they can continue to survive, not theoretically, but operationally.
What is so outrageous is that even euphemisms like “sustainability” are used to bring in the corporate logic and governance. Meanwhile, this same corporate governance is destroying our planet and is anything but sustainable.
Maybe this is what is meant by the term “capitalist realism?”
What we believe “capitalist realism” gets at is the constructivist dimension of thirty plus years of neoliberalism. It is not enough to simply govern people; you must produce subjects. And this is why we like the term dispositif because it implicates the conglomeration of disparate entities, ranging from ideas, to laws, to how things are done, produced, and finally to the production of subjects who have hardly experienced another channel, let alone another rationality.
Can capitalist realism be combated?
Francis Bacon used to say that as an artist he was interested in producing facts that contradict and resist the consensus reality. It isn’t enough to simply not believe in the “capitalist reality” or to run away from it. The flight should be active, producing counter-facts, other temporalities, other spaces, other accesses to reality. But the idea of a lone artist, able to do that in their studio may be insufficient considering the challenges. So the relation to others, the invention of new ways of working and struggling with others is critical to dissipate capitalist realism.
The financial crash of 2008 is a critical moment, because “the market” showed itself unable to even act as the “best arbiter” for the economic well-being of the majority of the world’s inhabitants. It laid bare an economic logic of privatizing gains (or resources) into the hands of very few and socializing or externalizing losses (or pollution) for the many. Is there a chance of a kind of dissolution, as we witnessed in 1989?
The nature of a book is that it remains long after the words have been printed onto its pages. So what is important here is not the answer yes or no. It is the fact that this question has been asked, and that, in this particular moment, even a few crazy people sat around and thought seriously about this. So we respond to preserve a trace of this moment, rather than prophesy a future.
But we have seen a formidable resistance to neoliberalism over the last twenty years. The alter-globalization movements did a lot to bring attention to the economic crimes of entities like the IMF or World Bank, and for more than a decade in Latin America we have seen a resurgence of efforts to introduce more just economic policies. And what we see unfolding in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East is clearly a part of the inability of “the market” to answer the needs of many people. Even in the face of nuclear fallout a “market”-driven society can only find its resolution in continuing as before. But the cracks of such an unsustainable course are becoming more evident. And the polyphony of whistleblowers and hackers that have entered the machine, seen the violence it produces, and decided to share this knowledge with others is growing. The entrenched forces that would like to restore “stability” after such events are many. But a sequence of such moments has the potential to arouse or even force people to reconsider their trust in such a course.
If we return to art briefly. One could argue that the entrenched world of art and its institutions has grown too comfortable with its corporate sponsors and collectors and has yet to adopt these insights mentioned previously. We don’t yet see those changes or cracks reflected in art institutionally. On the contrary, the only changes from 2008, thus far, have pitted institutions receiving public funds against one another, having them compete for reduced funds on account of austerity measures that are characterized as unavoidable public sacrifices for sustaining the speculation of “the market.”
Artists have to find ways to create their own realities, their own spaces, temporalities, organizations of long or short duration; and to make sure their work is not completely subsumed by any institution which takes too facile a relation to the corporatization of art. Of course, these funding cuts will place more publicly funded institutions at the whim of corporations or corporate-minded “philanthropists,” who even if they mean well, often cannot help but bring and apply their business practices into those institutions. Nevertheless, within these same institutions there are always allies who are aware of these dynamics; so you work together. But there is a kind of equation one must invent for oneself, and hopefully with others, how to retain this space of producing another experience, time, and space for the work one does.
What are the differences between 1989 and 2008, if we see them in this parallel construction you have been proposing of a collapse of illusions?
Clearly there are many differences. But one could say there is no new political paradigm that has attempted to claim victory over the failures of the regime of “the market.” Neither a politicized Islam nor the emergent racist, nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in the West or East include a radical critique of capitalism. Instead the first signals we see in much of the world, in the midst of this crisis, are to continue with the same assumptions, allowing the banks, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, and major corporate interests to determine and impose what should stand for good policies with respect to social welfare, health, education, science, development, environment, culture, food, economics, and whatever else one can imagine.
It is remarkable that in 1921 Benjamin was able to write the following lines: “Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.”7 What we feel more than ever today is this destruction. We feel it in the deaths of innocents in daily bombings and the body bags of soldiers fighting for oil. We see it the insane rationality that continues to build nuclear plants, prisons, and military weapons as efforts to “jumpstart” the economy. We feel it with each suicide and each person we see sleeping without a home. We see it in the fundraisers for elderly or those suffering from disease because they cannot afford health care. We see it in the billions of impoverished lives, even of the wealthy, who are subjected to this guilt/debt-tripping machine.
This is what has caused various thinkers in the last years to proclaim that it is easier today to envisage the destruction of the world rather than an end to capitalism.
There are a few points you make that are interesting to pursue. Let’s start with another religion, Islam. Let’s think for one moment that you are reflecting on the subject of “Art and Islam after 1979,” instead of “Art and Markets after 1989.”
If this book were being written from the trajectory of 1979 and the Iranian Revolution, the set of references as well as developments addressed with respect to culture change quite a lot. Yet, we can also link these developments to 1989, by seeing the renewal of a politicized Islam as a part of a struggle by Western capitalist interests to eliminate socialism and communism at all costs. So 1979 is a contested and ambiguous moment in history. There is no question that it was a truly popular revolution, involving communists, feminists, Islamists, independents, victims of political persecution, the disenfranchised, and all those struggling for social justice.
But what were the forces that unleashed the revolution?
We would argue that the impulse of the revolution was not simply based upon interest alone, but came from a gradual build-up of a plane of oscillation. And through that a social desire took hold based upon struggles against injustice, torture, autocratic rule, inequality, political persecution of oppositional views, the need to restore accountability of a state to its people, and an affirmation of a more dignified life. But no specific demand or response, for that matter, can contain or sum up the forces of that or any revolution.
And today, in no small part due to the historic efforts by Western capitalist interests to dismantle and discredit the socialist or communist vision throughout the world, political Islam has filled that vacuum.
People are hungry for other ethics, other ideas of value, of knowledge, of development, and of justice. Politicized Islam has been able to axiomatize upon a desire to oppose Western indifference to regional autocratic governments and an unequal “market”-driven paradigm that benefits the few while plundering the resources of a country.
Can any religion offer an alternative to the market fundamentalists?
Firstly, it must be mentioned that according to David Graeber much of the language and theory of “the market,” even examples by Adam Smith, are taken from Medieval Islam. So any simple opposition has to be ruled out. But even if we exclude all the limitations any theocracy may pose for those who are not believers or who do not want to live under its system of values, norms, justice we should recall Benjamin’s observation that “the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic, it cannot be set as a goal,” since it literally would be the end of history.8 So, even with Fukuyama and the market fundamentalists, we are entering a kind of messianism.
Seeing this problem, Benjamin insisted that the “quest of free humanity for happiness” must be erected upon a profane order. The only caveat is once we see capitalism as another religion we can no longer uncritically invoke a notion of the secular. We will need to rethink the division between the religious and the secular.
So does that leave us seeking or constructing an alternate political ideology?
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari once asserted “there is no ideology, there are only organizations of power.”9 They don’t want to downplay the critique of capitalism; on the contrary, this is what gives force to their writing. But simply revealing capitalism’s contradictions is not enough. Moreover, they argue that ideological battles can mask repressive forms of organization which can take hold under any new conception of the world.
Their analysis of how desire is not simply channeled and woven into the economic infrastructure and political life but is a constituent element of their organization is very rich and introduces another analysis for approaching the problems we have alluded to. It also introduces a place for aesthetic experiments or processes which critique capitalism not simply on the order of ideological representation, but approach the realm of feelings, perceptions, sensations, tastes, social relations, relations to technology, to work, to the conduct of everyday life, to exchange, to consumption, to our environment, to what we eat, to production, to education, to race, to gender, and all of the levels at which desire is invested and connected to the dominant economic infrastructure.
They introduce questions that help us see how individuals whose interests might diverge with a particular organization of power may nevertheless partake and even fight for it. Their conception of desire is not based on lack, nor a simple idea of something repressed which needs expression. Desire is immanent; it is social and takes place between bodies. It can become an itinerant line, sometimes forming assemblages that can include persons, ideas, objects, tools, organic and non-organic matter, which together can threaten existing dispositions of power. Or it can be channeled and reinvested through various social formations toward heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, exclusionary, imperialist or colonial projects. The medieval crusades, for example, can be a story of how an itinerant line, a desiring machine of social unrest is recouped by the Catholic Church toward imperial ends and sovereign control.
The organizations of power they refer to, the networks formed by the heterogeneous set of codes, institutions, ways of thinking, living could be likened to Foucault’s notion of dispositif. When a particular social formation exhausts itself, as was the case in 1917, 1979, 1989, and we claim we may be on the cusp of such a moment today, it seems to follow what Deleuze describes as, “all sorts of things decode themselves, all sorts of uncontrolled flows start pouring out.”10 The concepts that Deleuze and Guattari introduce—becoming minor, deterritorialization, lines of flight, bodies without organs, the rhizome, desiring machines, war-machines, schizoanalysis—all of these concepts are part of an attempt to theorize revolutionary processes and possible collectivities that could avoid repressive organizations of power and the dispositifs that attempt to contain and reorient the emancipatory potential of such processes or collectivities. The fact that aesthetic, performative, and literary figures traverse their individual and collaborative writings and the building up of these aforementioned concepts gives us an indication that art is not ancillary to and may even be a central part of emancipatory struggles.
Today, people speak of nothing existing outside “the market,” inferring either we are doomed or that all innovation will take place through capitalism. How do you position yourselves in relation to this?
Maybe they only believe this because capitalism’s particularity is in its capacity to impose and overcome its own limits. It “vamps” off of, lives off of decodings. Deleuze would describe the basis of capitalism as an axiomatic of decoded fluxes. In other words, capitalism is able to axiomatize, that is break into rules and profit off of the very flows that decode its previous ability to channel and embed desire into a new economic assemblage. We alluded to such a process when we were describing the birth of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s. Or consider the parallel body of analysis under the heading of post-Fordism—which argues that many of the demands from this period of struggle informed a radical transformation of capitalism—and how it would create value, and exploit labor in this new epoch.
You can see today, for instance, how established industries and states (often on their behalf) fight to criminalize and delegitimize people’s desire to share information and data freely through various peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Until of course, a corporation is able to axiomatize upon this openness to share, reorient that unremunerated energy into a profit model, and find a way to turn social cooperation into a new model for conducting business.
But we must distinguish these freely cooperative forces, innovations, or lines of flight from capitalism. Of course, even when some things are “recouped” other things have to be left aside, separated, some residual elements that cannot be monetized or absorbed. For instance, in all the talk of recuperating the Situationist discourse on architecture and urbanism—especially among the architects who have today consigned their work and their fate to the so-called “laws of the market,” as if they were natural and unchangeable—there are elements that escape or remain outside because they simply cannot be absorbed. For instance, in Constant’s architectural proposals private property does not exist.
In making this example we are not espousing a morality play in which private property is original sin. We are simply saying that this sacred and holy cow of capitalism that is today pressed into the world of ideas, code, images, and words is potentially deterritorializable. If artists and anyone else is interested in resisting this delirious logic, which looks back at the past twenty years and reaffirms that “history is still over”; then our work cannot remain satisfied with inventing new forms for the marketplace, or to introduce fluxes or oscillations which will readily become a part of a new regime or organization of power. To escape the “overcode,” to borrow a phrase from Brian Holmes, we will need to orient our activities toward innovations which can harm, destroy, profane, render inoperative this insidious logic of guilt, worry, debt, property, poverty, competition, conflict, exploitation, profit, and destruction that is capitalism.
If artistic practice has any vocation today, it will have to resist becoming a cheap labor or research and development wing for what capital would like to call “the creative industries.” Artists will have to resist modeling and exploring new ways to absorb and reorient collective desires toward modes of profit making. Instead, in these next decades, artists and other cultural practitioners may invent practices which wean themselves off of over-legitimized circuits of support and open to the world, explore different modes of thinking and doing, undoing, constructing planes of consistency, plugging into revolutionary processes, inventing mytho-poetic processes and artistic devices which if absorbed by capitalism, will help bring about its demise.
ambition n. 1a An appliance made of wood, metal, or rope, usually portable, consisting of a series of bars (“rungs”) or steps fixed between two supports, by means of which one may ascend to or descend from a height. b To or towards a higher position or plane; from a lower to a loftier level or object; in an ascending course or direction. 2 An elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length. 3 Like woven fabric, ambition consists of horizontal and vertical elements. However, ambition’s horizontal elements move towards social formations, its vertical elements form hierarchical isolations. 4 Philosophy being necessarily bipolar.
art n. 1 A point or topic to be investigated or discussed; a problem, or a matter forming the basis of a problem. 2a For what reason? From what cause or motive? For what purpose? Wherefore? b In what way or manner? By what means? c Of what account, consequence, value, or force? d At what time? On what occasion? In what case or circumstances? 3 The opening or passage into a space. 4 The Sea! The Sea! The open Sea!… Without a mark, without a bound. 5 A glossary is provided for those who don’t know their camshafts from their crankcases.
art fair n. 1 An extensive area, esp. an aggregate of many areas, under the ultimate authority of one person. 2 A place where a quantity of things; spec. one lent on credit by a usurer for resale, usu. to the usurer himself. 3 Authority; esp. delegated authority to act in a specific capacity or manner. spec. Authority to act as agent for another in trade; payment to an agent disproportional to the amount involved in a transaction, a random percentage on the amount involved. 4 (colloq.) pretentiously artistic. 5 Something resembling this; a whip, a scourge. 6 An idea that insinuates itself. 7 Mere talk, chatter, babble. 8a Suddenly snap or bite (at something). b Suddenly catch at a thing, in order to secure hold or possession of it. v. t. 9 Discharge the contents of, empty. 10 The third mood of the second syllogistic figure, in which a particular negative conclusion is drawn from a universal negative major premise and a particular affirmative minor premise. 11 A puff, a whiff; a short blast, a small explosion. 12 When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what is most attractive. 13 The storm had given fair warning of its approach. 14 Heads I win, tails you lose.
artist n. capitalist ideology 1 A person who studies or practices the art of transmuting metals: now usu. connoting the pursuit of transmutation of baser metals into gold, and the search for the elixir of life, etc. 2a A wrinkle, a crinkle, a small crease or fold; (also) an undulation. b A ripple on the surface of water. Literary Theory. 3 The impossibility or indefinite deferral of any ultimate or metaphysical signification, on account of the constantly changing and proliferating relationships between the linguistic signs in any sentence or utterance; an instance of this. 4 I keep thinking I just have to get through today, you know?
biennial n. 1 A building fitted with stalls, loose-boxes, rack and trappings and other appliances. 2a The application of a trade-mark or brand to a city. b To frame the city to investors’ appetite. c They had been speculating in city lots. 3 Television programs that are made up like boxes of assorted chocolates leave one with a confused taste in the mouth. 4 Nothing passed more than what is usual after long absences. 5 I am well aware of it, you need not tell me.
blue-chip artist n. 1 An animal, a member of the mammalian order Cheiroptera, and especially of the family Vespertilionidæ; consisting of mouse-like quadrupeds (whence the names Rere-mouse, Flitter-mouse), having the fingers extended to support a thin membrane which stretches from the side of the neck by the toes of both pairs of feet to the tail, and forms a kind of wing, with which they fly with a peculiar quivering motion; hence they were formerly classed as birds. They are all nocturnal, retiring by day to dark recesses, to which habits there are many references in literature. 2a The sound made by a cash register when it rings up a sale. Freq. allusively, implying the acquisition of (large amounts of) money. b Indicating the acquisition of (large amounts of) money; expressing happiness at such an acquisition; (also more generally) expressing celebration of or happiness at an achievement. 3 He discovered a good investment for his skill, sagacity, and endurance. Now dial. 4 A country bumpkin; a clown, lout, boor; a heavy dull creature; a blundering fool. 5 Now, don’t you call me any names, or you will find that two can play at that game. 6 The less said the sooner mended.
board of directors n. 1a A team or organization which prepares motor cars for racing; a group of racing cars owned by the same enterprise. b More widely, an establishment which trains or produces persons, etc., esp. of a characteristic quality or type. Also, a group of persons (spec. in publishing) under the same management or trained at the same place. 2 A form of poker in which each player is dealt two cards face down, and combines these with any of five community cards to make the best available five-card hand. 3a Clergymen who are inclined to (in addition to preaching in their own church) preach in somebody else’s parish. b Clergymen who preach all the time. 4 The philanthropy culture is probably most highly developed in the USA, where charity fundraising ideas, for museums and art galleries in particular, are innovative and constantly changing. 5 This action is goal-oriented. 6 They hold their own self-interest to be the devoted guide of their whole conduct. 7 The prerogative of being cannot withstand the deconstruction of the word.
collector n. 1 A skillful or an unskillful hunter. 2 Quick to seize or grasp at something, someone, etc. (lit. & fig.) 3 A person mentioned by name; spec. the person named in connection with a prescribed method or process for finding unknown numbers or positions. 4 Gray-haired or gray with age and having a favorite subject or occupation that is not one’s main business. 5 Olive and black with a white spot on the nose. adj. 6 Well-fed, of larger size than is usual; large in comparison with others of the same species. 7 A simple card-game player often playing with special cards. 8 A fair-weather friend. 9 A person of unknown origin. 10 Someone who has an excessive longing for something. pl. 11 Shifting and fluid cliques of society. 12 My house is lonely I and my bees have the estate all to ourselves. 13 He hungered to explain who he was. 14 The clock slowly inclined forward and fell. 15 We pay double the price we formerly did. 16 He had shown so little emotion about anything. 17 Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. 18 The customer is king. 19 Bernadine wanted to tell him that he could take his little Barbie doll and leave now.
creative industries n. 1 A graphic symbol that conforms to middle-class taste. 2 Pseudo-establishment mingled with; added as an ingredient. 3 A character impressed upon something; an attribute communicated by, and constituting evidence of, some agency; “stamp,” “impression.” 4 Accountants and graphic designers busily gentrifying the shell-shocked terraces are just as hungry for pleasure. 5 Keep in mind, however, that no existing property is this typical. 6 I think it was in the early eighties. 7 Place a ruler from A to B and join A to the straight line.
curator n. 1a A person who promotes styles. b A person noted for or aspiring to good taste. 2 A person who goes everywhere. 3 To perceive to be the same as something or someone previously known or encountered; to identify (something that has been known before). 4 This is what I like. 5 Why looke you strange on me? You know me well.
emerging artist n. 1 A swimming bird of which species are found all over the world. 2 Transferred uses. a A term of endearment. b A fellow, “customer,” 3 May I try to explain? 4 There was nothing unusual in his departure except its suddenness.
gallerist n. 1 A person skilled in applying the laws of refraction for the correction of visual defects. 2a The owner and manager of a shop. b A person whose occupation is the sale of goods or commodities for profit. Now rare. 3 A person who shares with another in anything; a partner, a colleague, and ally. 4 A cholesterol-lowering agent. 5 They always kept a gap, a distance between them. 6 I’ll stick where I am, for here I am safe.
investment n. 1 A joke-book wisdom. 2 False expectation of something desired; false desire combined with expectation. 3a Now usually in bad sense: having or showing skill in achieving one’s ends by deceit or evasion. b A crafty or fraudulent device of a mean or base kind; an artifice to deceive or cheat. 4 The flows of affliction. 5 A chain that ascends in a continuity of links. The weak at the mercy of the strong and the ignorant of the crafty. 6 Where there is so much of Competition, and Uncertainty, you must expect Self-interest will govern.
laziness n. Why in the name of all patience should you work so hard as this?
market n. 1 A place of refuge for specific scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics, economics, or society and forming the basis of action or policy. 2 Substituting for or taking the place of the principles or standards of a person or society, and unifying the personal or societal judgment of what is valuable and important in life. 3 As if certain, established as fact, not to be called in question: there is no mistaking! 4 A safe answer. 5 Fancy business schools have more to offer than the University of Life. 6 A heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The network that is established between these elements. 7 To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command. 8 As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge. 4 Resembling a fable, absurd.
market fundamentalism n. 1 The belief or theory that the world has no real existence; the rejection of all notions of reality. 2 A three-dimensional matrix of control corresponding to a two-dimensional one. 3 The formation, or coming to a head, of an abscess; the formation or accumulation of pus; treatment to induce suppuration. 4 We know the object as one previously perceived … we recognize it. 5 This story will, I fear, run and run. 6 Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. 7 Ouch! Stop it! 8 Big, strong, violent. 9 Look: I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.
mid-career artist n. 1 A domesticated carnivorous mammal, which typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell, non-retractile claws, and a barking, howling, or whining voice, widely kept as a pet or for hunting, herding livestock, guarding, or other utilitarian purposes. 2 What’s that fellow doing here? 3 I shall not be the person to discourage him.
museum n. 1 An edifice devoted to the worship of division. 2 An uninhabitable house. 3 A place that attracts tourists and provides for their entertainment and recreation. 4 God said Let there be light: and there was light.
neoliberalism n. 1 A doctrine in which government is subject to economic rationality. 2 Of life or a way of living reduced to calculation. 3 Decisions marked or characterized by material benefit derived from a property, position, etc.; income, revenue. 4 Human existence = a business man’s insistence. v. 5 To put forward as an assertion or statement to be dealing with matters in accordance with practical rather than theoretical considerations or general principles; to allege, assert, contend to be aiming at what is achievable rather than ideal; to claim, declare oneself (with intent to deceive) as matter-of-fact, practical. 6 As if identical with “The state of human affairs, the state of things.” 7 A proprietary name for a constructional toy consisting principally of small interlocking plastic blocks; such blocks collectively to form a church, school, university, college, museum, bank, hospital, asylum, reformatory, mission, NGOs or the like. 8 An entity that repeats the words or ideas of others mindlessly, mechanically, or without understanding. 9 The economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. 10 The college is calculated for the reception of sixty students. 11 It is possible to make the watch gain by making the balance heavy at its lowest point. 12 It was a great big thing, the size of a small haystack. 13 The door is opened to a host of frauds.
post-Fordism n. 1 An oppressive hot wind from the west or northwest, which blows at intervals for about fifty days and fills the air with dust. 2a Fear-inspiring; gloomy, strange, weird. b The city was nervous, starting at every sharp sound. c A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward. 3 The Great Transformation. 4a Emotions collectively: to make capital out of emotions. 5 To apply, exert oneself. 6 A labor regime in which worker mobility and variable hours are accompanied by continuous electronic surveillance and the managerial analysis of performance. 7 Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme. 7 The Metamorphosis of the One-Dimensional Man. 8 Everyone working everywhere all the time. 9 A flood-plain; land susceptible to flooding. 10 Your uncle … being deprived from managing your business. 11 But the passage I have quoted suggests a second observation. 12 This story will, I fear, run and run. 13 We have been having bad weather these last few years.
privatization n. Much about the same, I should say. And further repetitions express continued laughter.
property n. 1a The object of veneration. b Something that cannot not be questioned or criticized. 2 Kept or regarded as inviolate from ordinary use, and appropriated or set apart for religious use or observance; consecrated, dedicated. 3 An unquestionable fact or truth. 4 Another kind of God, one not self-sufficient or absolute, but … requiring the existence of other beings. 5 The first car built by the Daimler Company at Coventry. 6 Where God is pleased to reveal Himself most, is called His house. 7 I return to my château this evening. 8 The boat of my desire is guided. 9 To a feather-brained school-girl nothing is sacred.
speculate v. 1 To be always occupied in calculating the potential economic value, of one’s own education, marriage, childrearing, altruism, friendliness, cleanliness, etc.. 2 To valuate human potential on charts and screens of post-social traders. 3 To encourage the individual to constantly assess his or her own value in monetary terms. 4 To journey toward disaster. 3 A rich-man’s dance, in which two or more (mostly) men improvise to the accompanying gold-rush sound . Also attrib., and transf., the place where such dancing occurs. 3 His multi-million dollar collection all began in Uncle Robert’s garage in Kansas City. 4 If you say to a lot of people, “PopArt is meant to be one word with a capital A in the middle,” they look at you like you’re really up your own ass. 5 Ask the experts! How they shake the head o’er these characters,… Call them forgery from A to Z! 6 Convivial slogans which use exclamations instead of question marks—“Have You Been Rippled Yet!”
sponsor n. 1 A concealed identity under a different name or title. 2 A person who sometimes damages something. v. 3 Supplying milk or oil in a strategic manner. 4 The name of a character in a novel represented as the perfect valet, used allusively. 5 He was none of your ordinary cocks, for he had a pedigree as long as your arm. 6 Very well, we’ll expect you at nine this evening. Who did you say this was? 7 If this is the way they eat all the time in America I won’t be a bit hungry and I’ll be fine and fat, as they say in Limerick.
work n. 1 A letting loose, abandonment or surrender to natural impulses; hence entire freedom from artificial constraint or from conventional trammels, unconstrainedness of manner, careless freedom, dash. 2 That has been washed clean. Also: worn away by washing. 3 The action of waiting or delaying. 4a The action of remaining, staying, or dwelling in a place; a stay, a period of residence. Freq. in place of work. Now somewhat rare. b Continuance, duration, permanence, enduring; an instance of this. 5 Removed or detached by rubbing or scraping. 6 Lots of time taken up telling your aches and pains. 7 After thinking the matter well over, we have determined not to compete.
work of art n. 1 Communication of a communicability. 2 Self-opening and concealing. 3 A paradigm of human activity and life without a specific end in mind. 4 A pair of peasant shoes. 5 What matters who’s speaking, someone said what matters who’s speaking.
Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 12.
2 Ibid, p. 8.
3 Francis Fukuyama, “Free and Unequal,” in The End of History and the Last Man (New York, The Free Press, 1992) p. 320.
4 Francis Fukuyama, Newsweek (December 6, 2009).
5 Giorgio Agamben, op. cit., p. 11.
6 Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–26 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 288.
7 Ibid., p. 289.
8 Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 305.
9 Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, “Capitalism a Very Special Delirium,” in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Chaosophy (New York, Semiotexte, 2009), p. 38.
10 Ibid., p. 44.
* The text was written July 28, 2011.