“…If this be the sad condition of the Philistine, we need hardly ask why he has another quality, which many people may think the most essential to him, namely, indifference to the beauties of art. For art appeals to the vividness of sensation and to the sweep of fancy; it charms by clearness of form and by infinity of suggestion. But we have seen how the Philistine can never repose in sense, since every sensation is to him merely a sign and symbol, a signal that something is to be done. And he is equally incapable of attaining to imagination, for what he sees and hears suggests to him facts, and facts in turn suggest to him nothing. So that if you set a Philistine before a picture, he will be inevitably bored. He can do nothing to the picture except buy it, and that is soon accomplished. He is too active and industrious a man to stand gaping at it, pretending he enjoys the harmony of its color, the balance of its design, or the richness of its light and shade. And he is too honest to say that the picture represents anything more than a man’s face, or a pretty view, or whatever else the subject may be. If the reproduction is accurate, as far as his perception goes, he will be pleased to notice the fact. But how the image of a face can represent anything besides, or the copy of a landscape be more beautiful than the original, he can never conceive. The comprehension of that depends on the awakening of many dim and profound suggestions, on the creation in the beholder’s mind of some ideal of beauty or of happiness, on the quick passing of some infinitely tragic and lovely vision. And such things are not engendered in the Philistine brain….”

Sarah Lookofsky: I feel compelled to start with some ads that pop up on my Facebook page on a daily basis: a mixture of Roy Lichtenstein lookalikes and model-y people—all with lips slightly agape and searching looks on their faces—summoned to lure me to apply for art school with the promise of generous grants. I haven’t bothered to figure out what is actually on offer (they don’t seem to detect that I am already rather over-educated), but let’s safely assume that the definition of art school is loose and that the “grants” advertised are actually loans. I mention these ads because it seems to me that they give a good picture of the reality of “art school” in the present: The churning out of too many arts professionals annually (not only MFAs but also the multitude of MAs in arts administration, curating, art history, not to mention the PhDs…), frequently saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt post-graduation, that are delivered to an over-saturated field where jobs, when extant, offer little pay and security. Your thoughts on any of the above?

Martha Rosler: The ads on FB are always pitched populist and young, say early to mid 20s (unless they discover you are older and then you get assisted-living ads). You are right, I am sure, that the loans are grants and the schools in question are for-profit scams, disappointment machines for students. But as you suggest, the picture of the art school applicant is a picture of a fashion model, and light in color and European in facial features. Where are the Goths, punks, and bearded boys in flannel? Oh, we are aiming for those who think art is a state of being, an identity, not a get-your-hands (or brains)-dirty sort of profession.

Art schools and programs have been churning out too many graduates since the early 70s; we were complaining about that even then (I wrote about it starting in the 70s). Art school serves a number of social functions aside from teaching art and granting credentials. It serves as a repository for the third son or any recalcitrant wastrel (or any daughter) of the idle (or even the industrious) rich, since for a mere contribution of tuition, room, and board, you can stash that embarrassing child somewhere post high school. I think that Britain decided in the post-industrial 70s to channel disruptive working-class (mostly male) youth into art schools as well, another way to bide time and who knows? Perhaps some might find a métier (as many did, especially, it seems, in music).

Although I’ve been teaching since the mid 1970s, it’s rarely been at free-standing art schools, though I have sometimes done so, in San Francisco, Vancouver, Halifax, and New York. The ambience, expectations, and “outcome” of art schools versus university art programs are sometimes quite divergent, and perhaps growing more so everyday. (There is a crisis in the UK and Canada, at least, where the departmental evaluation standards imposed by administrations on art programs in schools that have affiliated themselves with universities, and in programs already based in universities, are quantified just like all other programs, with respect to numbers enrolled, cost-effectiveness, grant-getting, graduation rate, and so on. Surely we can agree that is hardly appropriate in evaluating the education and training of people in the arts.)

SL: It’s curious that art has been all but abandoned at the lower grade levels, like K—12 in the US, in favor of more qualitative subjects, like reading, math, etc. In higher education, by contrast, they still seem to think it can be measured somehow. This perhaps indicates the divergent definitions of “creativity”—one is unruly and unproductive, while the other can be instrumentalized, turned into marketable skills. But that’s probably a different story for another day.

What about the promise of having a job post-graduation?

MR: The crisis of overproduction used to be based on a false promise that the MFA was a guarantee of a post secondary teaching job, but that was eventually exposed as unrealistic as art schools and departments cut back on faculty and in particular began hiring, and wildly underpaying, adjuncts. At the same time, however, the promise was that to go to art school was to enroll in a success academy, and if you were appropriately productive and nice to your professors and visiting critics, you would get yourself a gallery even before they handed you your degree—by your MFA show at the latest. Thus success became clearly defined not as appropriate development of yourself and your skills as an artist, curator, arts administrator, but—as in the rest of higher education—as an entry to a high-earning profession. The goals of liberal education, namely, the cultivation of a self, a citizen, and a person of refinement and discernment, a person with aesthetic sensibilities, have been replaced by the single goal: maximization of income. The accruing of huge debt burdens was seen as a sure way to guarantee that the unruliness of students manifested in the 1960s, for example, would be curbed so as not to jeopardize that path to high earnings. I know that in the success academies of art, those in New York and California, and perhaps Chicago, some students develop what they hope will be a winning entrée to the gallery world for a career of perhaps ten years, at which point they will have earned enough money either to retire or to go on to do something they think they would like better.

SL: There is a clear parallel (or continuation) of the 1960s debt burden you mention in the present. Since student debt is the virtually the only debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, graduates of all stripes are now frequently trapped in low-paying service-sector jobs, not the high-earning jobs they were promised upon admission. This is, to be sure, a central fueling anger behind Occupy (which coincides with the trillion dollar student loan “anniversary”), but it is probably also that very debt burden that, as you outline, keeps people away from the streets, since they are worried to leave the job they are “lucky” to have…

This leads me to a related point: As a fellow alumna of UCSD, I also want to touch on the current fate of the UCs, the privatization of public education in the US, and the politics of austerity of which they are part (Of course, though these policies are promoted as inevitable, these changes are in fact avoidable; here, too, the banks only stand to gain). Given that you graduated from UCSD in 1974 and have taught in art schools until recently, you have experienced the creeping privatization of education in the US up close. I am curious to hear how you would characterize the impact of these economic and political shifts on the day-to-day of art school (classes, critiques, work produced, etc.)?

MR: In the 1990s, at the onset of the corporatization, neoliberalization (a term we did not know), and quantification of higher education—including art departments, as I’ve described—deans and art-school presidents began bulking up their staff, to administer what was seen as insufficiently well-run institutions by virtue of being governed by the work force: the professoriate. Those goals of various types of real-world success, measurable in income and status, were imposed on art faculties. Departments had to fill a certain number of seats, or classes would be canceled, and thus the number of course offerings decreased. Students were rethought as “customers”—sometimes very high-paying customers and often with parents footing the bill. This new status meant that the balance of power soon shifted to students, in the form of course evaluations. These had been developed by students in the 1970s to circulate among themselves, to point out the good and the bad among the professors to other students and also to communicate the strength and weaknesses of the course and the teaching style to teachers. The corporatizing university quickly understood the value of this assemblage of data, easily quantified, in imposing discipline on faculty members, especially junior faculty and the burgeoning numbers of adjuncts. Please the customers who are always, as the saying goes, “right.” (This created a serious problem, since the success orientation occasioned a fantastic epidemic of cheating at every grade level and with respect to every pursuit and assignment in which high scores were crucial to success, an epidemic fostered not only by the culture of greed and competitiveness but by the easy availability of capturable materials on the internet.)

At my institution, the dean tried to force those among us professors who were chairs to make fund-raising calls to alumni and potential donors. Since the department had not bothered to retain records of past graduates (what are alumni good for, again?), that required a bit of scrambling to find them and discover their fate.

By and large the faculty and chairs refused to cooperate, and soon enough a new dean was hired specifically for his ability to raise money. The fact that he was a person whose after-hours behaviors I will not describe here and who had no interest in education or in the students, and indeed in art (he came from a different discipline), or in learning about it, or in being respectful of or even simply nice to faculty—as emerged in opinions of his ability and procedures expressed by the faculty in a review hastily cobbled-together by the upper administration about five years into his tenure—did not lead to his dismissal, because he continued to fulfill his fund-raising mission.

During the past decade, the number of senior faculty has been drastically reduced, while their workload has dramatically increased, beefing up the credits given per course so that students need fewer of them for graduation; the students’ ability to take courses elsewhere in the university has been sharply curtailed, so that their numbers bulk up the departments’ own; whole areas of concentration, such as performance and film, have been closed down and other non-success disciplines, such as photography or anything not painting or sculpture, have been squeezed, and fewer MFA students in non-success fields are admitted, except to fill TAships in which they teach classes for undergrads in those fields with little or no supervision; money-making “institutes” have been welcomed and resources given to them from other areas’ budgets, such as a lot of money has been spent buying temporary gallery space in New York for the MFA show, a group show that used to be held on campus; commercial gallerists have been invited as “visiting artists,” as have critics; the studio visit of such people has been routinized everywhere (this was not necessarily a feature of artists’ visits in the past); visits to art fairs are organized or encouraged; and the market has insinuated itself in many other ways into the conversation.

SL: All of this stuff is very end product oriented. I find that people are typically stressed about their final show from the moment they enter graduate school. This also leads to a lower emphasis of what should be central to advanced art education: conversations about process and work in progress, which are always much more engaging and productive than the evaluation of finished work.

MR: Most egregiously, critical studies have been banished and replaced by a class or two in which belle-lettrist reviews are perused. The senior painters and sculptors on faculty, some of whom have been hired quite recently (which reveals, should anyone care to notice, that at a relatively advanced age they don’t make enough from their work to remain outside the academy) to oversee these changes. One of them told me point blank: “You know, I don’t believe that critical studies has any place in graduate art education,” and the other (my students tell me) routinely tells students to stop wasting their time on theory classes and get into the studio and close the door. (He also once called the police on a performance artist—back when we had them—who had announced that his performance would include doing violence to paintings much like his.) Their excuse for their viciousness to students during critiques was that this was a preparation for the real world, a common excuse of bad parents. Our long-time performance prof, also a long-time grad director, snapped back that he thought our role was to nurture students while they were among us; shortly after, he was prevailed upon to retire.

SL: Wow.

MR: The desire of the dean to impose discipline on the faculty was immediately reflected in a signal decrease in faculty governance and a clear telegraphing of favor and disfavor that would affect promotion, for example. The success orientation was reflected in a lack of adventurousness in course offerings and a de-emphasis on, say, art-historical and critical learning among undergraduates as well as graduates. The graduate thesis requirement was canceled, though the BFA thesis was not. Also troubling was the inevitable de-emphasis on minoritarian viewpoints, including in terms of ethnic and racial identity and a marked decrease in faculty members of color, and of women.

SL: It strikes me that much of arts education is about affirmation (yay, hurrah!) and decreasingly about offering models for thinking critically and producing critical work.

MR: Although a belief in authenticity of expression is naïve and insupportable, to communicate or advocate what amount to cynicism, instrumentalism, and sheer opportunism is irresponsible and borders on the unethical. The culture of celebration you refer to is a corporate management strategy not much used in art schools, where sadistic domination is the pedagogical method of choice in critiques, as I’ve suggested. Celebration, however, is pervasive as an administrative tool, including in arts administration; it is also deployed in university administration, where it is thinly laminated over contempt. Unfortunately, it is all too common in arts nonprofits. One bulks up the image of oneself and one’s business as much as possible, to attract attention, status, and donors.

SL: You are right; it is probably more pervasive in what often passes for education in museums, etc.…

MR: What used to be the purview of the education department, which is to present the work of an artist for the edification of interested observers, is now often treated as an opportunity to turn visitors on to good young artists (or overlooked older ones) who present opportunities to buy art likely to appreciate in value. In the effort to continue to develop audiences, education departments seems to be assuring young people that art is Fun, whereas in the past, the message was that art was Important.

SL: Finally, I wanted to hear your thoughts on teaching. As an artist, who has frequently taught, what do you consider the most important “lessons” to impart to art students?

MR: I am a bad one to lecture art students; I tell them that school, like most institutions, wants to turn their imaginative capacities into “creativity” and stifle their audacity, and that they need above all to preserve that audacity. I remind them that going to art school to make a living is a bit mad and that they should do it because they want to be there; that they should seek little from their professors but a great deal from their fellow students. Art school and art education may provide the context for becoming an artist, but that is not really where learning, or community building, lies.

Sotirios Bahtsetzis
Eikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of Art

Much has been said about the dangerous impact of a superficial, lifestyle-based, money-oriented culture: it has often been invoked as the explanation for why people become passive, docile, and easy to manipulate irrespective of how disadvantageous their economic conditions are. Following the illustrative critique of two eminent proponents of this criticism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the culture of our times is endangered by the uncontrollable expansion of the culture industry into higher artistic production—manipulating the masses into passivity and cultivating false needs.1 “Art” that produces standardized cultural goods reflects a peculiar type of aestheticization of the everyday world: a dream-like immersion into mass-produced commodities. This immersion is equivalent to the adoption of behavioral stereotypes and tastes linked to a continuously advertised petit-bourgeois phantasmagoria, and also reflects the advanced commodification of social life.

Furthermore, this conviction has had an enormous impact on the current understanding of art as derivative of a monopolized market which functions on the same terms as the general financial market, a view that experts in art business share. What is at stake in the contemporary art field, according to so many of its critics, is that the art market, as formed in the nineteenth century, was replaced by art business in the mid-1980s, not only reflecting the fact that contemporary art has become a serious signifier of wealth, but also making visible the devastating influence of neoliberal financial doctrines and uncontrollable fiscal policies formulated by pirate capitalists and corporate lobbyists on an art system that now runs on the basis of speculation and self-promotion.2

But is art’s relation to money so transparent that it can be seen solely as an heroic struggle of art against its subjection to commodification, an attempt to assert its aesthetic autonomy? The implied dialectic of the autonomy of art, a central concept in Adorno’s critique, refers to a complex condition that can only be understood through a more dialectical critique. As Peter Osborne observes, the integration of autonomous art into the culture industry is “a new systemic functionalization of autonomy itself—a new affirmative culture”—that promotes “art’s uselessness” for its own sake.3 Ultimately, the self-legislated “laws of form” in pure art—autonomous meaning production by the work—are an illusion. “Works of art are thus autonomous to the extent to which they produce the illusion of their autonomy. Art is self-conscious illusion.”4

Bernardette Corporation, Is Everybody on the Floor, 2009. Digital inkjet print.

Let us concentrate on this point, as it allows for a further meditation on the connection between the art system, post-capitalist economic power, and official, mainstream politics. Considering how politics work, we witness first that the systemic “functionalization of autonomy” observed by Osborne can also be seen as the grounding force of the post-democratic forms of hyper-capitalism. In other words, it appears that contemporary art’s usefulness offers to contemporary politics a model of moral justification, as art, in itself, becomes synonymous with the absolute autonomization and aestheticization of both commercial pragmatism and political functionality. Art does not expose its uselessness for its own sake, but rather reflects the uselessness of neoliberal administration and, by extension, of a post-capitalist market.

Post-capitalist economics and neoliberal politics mime art’s claim of autonomy as one of the grounding ethical values of Western civilization. In other words, the alibi of autonomy, which was the main assertion and declaration of modernism during its constitution in the historical avant-garde, works today for the benefit of politics and the market of commodities, which act in disguise as (modern) art. For example, Andy Warhol’s conflation of art and business attacks the culture industry by adopting its rules. On the other hand, this same culture industry attacks Warhol’s subjective liberalism by adopting his artfulness. From this standpoint, art must reflectively incorporate neoliberal politics and the post-capitalist market into its procedures, not in order to remain contemporary (neo-modern, postmodern, or “alter-modern”), but in order to continue offering ontological proof for the contemporaneity, by necessity, of both market and politics. By contrast, of course, the market and politics guarantee the contemporaneity and validity of art within a given system. This is a win-win situation. Every artwork produced today that doesn’t comply with this system of mutual recognition is automatically ostracized and disappears from global media and therefore from the public consciousness.

But what exactly does this systemic functionalization of autonomy at work in both art and politics mean, in economic terms? What is the material cause of such an interdependence of art labor, fiscal games, and artful politics as seems to monopolize art discourse today? Isn’t the debate of autonomy versus heteronomy a veiled way of talking about the fetishism of the commodity—one of the major concepts of Marxian analysis—and by extension, aren’t the onto-theological conditions of a functionalization of autonomy best described by the term “capital”?

In Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, capitalist exchange value is constituted at the level of social labor as a measure of abstract labor. It is not the materiality of an object, which assumes the object’s fetishistic nature, but the commodification of labor that determines the value of “objective” commodities.5Although fetishism is immanent to the commodity form, it conceals not simply the exchange value of the commodity, but also the exchange value of abstract labor that stands for the product of labor.6 Based on that Marxian observation, by linking it to the concept of the functionalization of autonomy described above, we can view the fetishistic character of commodities as a form of aesthetization of pragmatic human activity and autonomization, a disjoining of human action from any moral or social realm. In this regard, individuality and morality are evaluated in terms of their materialistic creditability. The condition of alienation in modernity demands this level of sophisticated abstraction between labor and value. Isn’t this the real reason why we keep buying our Nikes even though we are fully cognizant of the unbearable exploitation of humans in their production? Nike as “golden calf” is the emblem of commodity fetishism that sustains, in a sensuous way, our alienated understanding of our inter-subjective relation to others: a totally crude form of paganism that also illustrates the theological nature of Marx’s early socio-economical thinking.

Image from Ad Buster’s 2011 “Buy nothing day” campaign.

Does art occupy a particular status quo within this theoretical edifice? Drawing on Marx’s seminal concepts of labor, alienation, and objectified species-being (Gattungswesen) of being human as described in the Manuscripts of 1844, we can argue that an artwork represents a specific type of product of human labor.7 It is not outside the human condition and social-being (das gesellschaftliche Wesen), which means that it partakes in humankind’s universal sense of alienation, which is an inevitable intermediate stage in the so-called socio-historical process. However, the product of human labor as a sovereign and self-contained force (unabhängige Macht) independent from its producer, potentially entails the means to overcome the alienated stage of current social-being.

Radicalizing this Marxian analysis, we can then offer a more refined description of autonomous art. Artworks are, in any case, a product like any other and thus a part of the capitalist exchange system. However, they are defined by a special type of resistance; not a resistance to being subjected to their capitalist commodification, but by another type of immunity. They tend to refuse commodity’s own raw fetishization, which, when unconcealed—that can happen at any time—simply exposes its uselessness, drawing attention directly to the masked social constitution of capitalist exchange. It might be easy to see behind any simple commodity as fetish and expose the exchange value structure that sustains it. It becomes, however, very difficult to look behind an artwork as it constantly negates its capitalist exchange value while preserving the concealment of abstract labor assigned to it.

Drawing on the above consequences, we can argue that art is somehow different from all other types of commodities. Above all, the debate between the autonomy and heteronomy of art, or the fiscalization of art and the aestheticization of the everyday world, does not take place between the value of “pure” or autonomous art and its exchange value as a commodity, but is rather a combat between two forms of fetishistic character. In this regard, the artwork (either as pure, commercial, or even anti-artwork) is a second-order fetish commodity: an intensified fetish. The functionalization of autonomy can be seen as this second fetish character of art, constituting a notion of fetish the reverse of that described by Marx. This is a category immanent only to the artwork. It conceals not only the exchange value of the product, but, most significantly, the generic fetish character of commodities or capital in general, and, therefore, the commodification of labor, which constitutes the value of “objective” commodities.

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Boxes, 1965.

The work of art comes to be an acheiropoieton—not handmade—and thus theologized. This term is used in Byzantine theology to describe icons, which are alleged to have come into existence miraculously (not created by a human painter). According to Alain Besançon’s reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics, the notion of modern art is closed to such a concept of the icon.8 One might assume that, even after the Hegelian proclamation of “the end of art,” the concept of art as an acheiropoieton prevails, transcending art’s demise despite its continuous secularization and humanization. If art’s function was once to make the divine visible (as in ancient Greece), its function in the modern era is to make the visible divine. In other words, over and above the common phantasmagoria of the commodity (Adorno’s position), we have also the “asceticism” of the work of art. In this regard, an acheiropoieton appears to be outside human nature and the social order, possibly following another disposition or system—in other words, it creates an illusion of autonomy from the (human) labor from which it arises and to which it belongs. An artwork has the tendency to reside outside the normal mechanisms of the market, to exist as something that cannot be sold, as something that resists exchange, thus creating the illusion of a non-alienated social-being, although it is in fact located at the very heart of neoliberal speculation.

Let me give you a banal example from the everyday world of art business as evidence for such a paradoxical thesis. We can honestly say that the reason for the hostility with which galleries face the mercantile practices of auction houses can be traced back to this double nature of the artwork. By simply offering an artwork for open sale, an auction house degrades the artwork to a mere commodity with an exchange value. In this case, the artwork appears to be an interchangeable equity, like real estate or stock market shares, stripped of mystification and negating its character as intensified fetish, as an acheiropoieton. Usually we experience only the negative results of this double bind between the economy of commodity and the economy of the intensified fetish. The practice of an auction house poses a potential threat to the controlled pricing and validation policy of a gallery; it transforms an artist’s career into a speculative bubble, with the attendant precipitous drop in price due to uncontrolled manipulations. Suddenly, the artwork loses its value; it becomes a nothing, a useless plaything—or, looking at it from another perspective—a non-alienated product of human labor! On the other hand, galleries, through their preferences for particular buyers (collectors and museums), often try to protect the symbolic and “universal” value of the artwork as something that can’t be sold. Having enough cash doesn’t make someone automatically eligible to buy art. And this false exclusivity is not simply a matter of the “conspiracy of art,” or the privilege of insider trading attached to art by its practitioners, as Jean Baudrillard remarks, but an inherent quality of the artwork. In other words, the conspiracy of art lies precisely within this paradox: the artwork’s unreachable nature in fact guarantees the commodity’s disposability.9

It can be argued that the artwork’s double nature has enormous consequences for a capitalist market system. Actually, its character as an intensified fetish safeguards any commodity’s struggle to be presented as an acheiropoieton, which can thus be disguised and sold as a “pure” artwork. The new systemic functionalization of autonomy itself—a new “affirmative culture”—is a coy description of this fact. Such a belief is gloriously performed in the contemporary culture industry, which produces commodities that must be sold, however frivolous, unnecessary, or even impossible (like Japanese gadgets) they are. They only manage to circulate if they can be masked with the aura of freedom that stands in for the allegedly autonomous artwork. The culture of logos, luxury goods, and cult objects benefits from this almost theological dimension of the work of art. This fact should be seen also as the true reason why contemporary art is so valuable to the financial market and political business today, and not necessarily the other way around.

Can we go even further and argue that contemporary art’s innate tendency to replace the general fetishism of commodity with the “particular economy of the artwork” is the model for any and every semblance of societal pragmatism today? In light of such a comment, and if we ignore the fact that the art system is actually subjected to the dominant social relations of capitalist exchange as argued above, every wealthy collector appears to be a radical trickster, idealizing himself as a romantic hero and spiritual Parsifal, as some collectors indeed claim to be. Indeed, they might represent a kind of hero if we consider the fact that one can easily earn more investing in the stock market and currencies, instead of buying art. Investing in art is simply not as lucrative. If we take this statement seriously, the choice between the two forms of investment is actually a combat between two forms of commodity fetishism: labor versus the intensified fetish. Both types of investment are potentially unstable and they demand the readiness of the investor to take risks. But only the second can safeguard capital’s ontological foundation.

Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond’s 2006 Serpentine Pavilion conceived as a hot air ballon.

We can expand this discussion and argue that a work of art in times of economic crisis, as in the current crisis, actually represents the ideological means for capital’s own survival. Economic crisis is linked to the fluctuation of “fictitious capital” to which credit and speculation capital belong.10According to Norbert Trenkle’s analysis of the late-2000s financial crisis, “the growth of fictitious capital not only provides an alternative choice for investors, but also constitutes, when viewed on the macroeconomic level, a deferral of the outbreak of crisis,” which is inherent to the capitalist system. (Such a crisis is a crisis of over-accumulation, or, to phrase it in the vocabulary of contemporary macroeconomics, a crisis of “over-investment.” In this case, a proportion of capital becomes excessive—measured according to its own abstract rationality as an end in itself—and is, therefore, threatened by devalorization.) The outbreak of a series of capitalist crises from the 1970s to today has demonstrated the extreme unreliability of credit and speculation capital; they threaten always to translate a particular crisis of devalorization into a genuine global-market crisis. Credit and speculation capital grow too fast because of electronic transactions—digitally automated—and, as a result, create virtually instantaneous financial bubbles, always ready to burst.

Art as intensified fetish always masks its own existence as fictitious capital, eliminating in this way any moral consideration regarding its speculative nature. We can then assume that art’s fictitious capital represents the best possibility for a continuous deferral of the outbreak of an unavoidable capitalist crisis, and, for that reason, view art on the macroeconomic level as the best option for safeguarding the system, deflecting a crisis of over-investment. Compared to the credit and speculation capital of digitally multiplied finance, art represents in this regard a slow type of fictitious capital. It requires its own investment time. This would make art the perfect defense mechanism, an optimal deferral of the possible outbreak of systemic crisis inherent to a capitalist system. Art would combat the stagnation of the valorization of capital in the real economy. If so, collectors are indeed the heroes of macroeconomic planning.

Claire Fontaine’s neon sign at restaurant Grill Royal, Berlin.

This is indeed true. However, in search of a better understanding of the current status quo, it is important to choose an alternative perspective. In the current state of hyper-capitalism, human labor guarantees both the over-productivity and the accumulation, not of goods, but of information-commodities. As Franco “Bifo” Berardi notes, for post-operaist thought (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi),

social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.11

If commodity fetishism conceals the exchange value of abstract labor (according to Marx), then labor today stands for the attentive and affective time we produce and consume. Labor today is both a semiotic generator and a creator of organic time (of attention, memory, and imagination) to be produced and consumed. Let me give you a simple example. Television advertisers purchase advertising time slots. The question is, from whom do they buy this time? Aren’t the millions of spectators who offer their attention, cognitive engagement, and time while watching commercials the actual creditors of media and creative industries? This is modernity’s credo. However, one must add that information theory does not consider the importance of the message, or its meaning—those are matters of the quality of data, rather than of its quantity and readability. In this regard, the message quality distributed through the television is of no importance. Semiocapital pays no attention to the importance of distributed messages. Such a disjuncture between informational quantity and the quality of communication finds its equivalence in the economic system. Ever since the abandonment of the gold parity rule, the value of monetary currency is determined according to its “informational” value, its exchangeability in stock markets.

Sylvie Fleury, C’est la vie, 1990. Collezione Leggeri, Bergamo.

In addition to that, today’s extreme acceleration of production and distribution of semiocapital has reached capacity, so that “deep, intense elaboration becomes impossible, when the stimulus is too fast.”12 What if the present-day crisis of capitalism, which has obviously reached the critical moment of “an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods,” is a crisis of goods that cannot be consumed? What if the current crisis is not a financial crisis, but a crisis of governance and distribution of semio-time? What alternative to this condition can art offer?

Art represents a very particular type of semiocapital. In contrast to the accelerated and digitally self-multiplied capital of the global financial system, the semio-time produced and consumed within the system of art is slow and personal. You need some ninety minutes to watch a film, but only seconds to consume a TV commercial. With modifications, the same applies to the reading of a painting or a book of poetry. Furthermore, art deals primarily with the importance of distributed messages, not with its informational quantity. In this regard, quality equals the intellectual labor and cognitive activity invested by the production of art workers and the reception of connoisseurs of art. It is the deceleration of intellectual labor and cognitive activity offered by art that makes the difference. Deceleration means to focus on the creation of deeper, slower, and intensified time, to concentrate on the production and reception of meaning—ideally the maximum quantity of infinite and, for that reason, inconsumable meaning! (This might be another way to describe what Adorno has called art’s “muteness”; for Adorno art is critical insofar as it is mute, insofar as what it communicates is its muteness.)

What if the present-day crisis of semiocapitalism is at the same time a crisis of the current political order? In order to elucidate this last thesis, I would like to link the notion of the work of art with the notion of oikonomia as analyzed by Giorgio Agamben. The theological doctrine of oikonomia—originally meaning “stewardship,” or wise and responsible management or administration of domestic life—was first developed by early Christians to interpret the divine intervention of a personal God into the world. This concept was introduced in order to reconcile monotheism as an emerging state religion with the doctrine of the divine nature of the Son (within the Trinity), and thus explain and justify the intervention of God’s house, the Church, into the earthly world. The extremely sophisticated Byzantine discourse of oikonomia is directly linked to an elaborate conceptualization of the icon (mainly that of Jesus and, by extension, of all imagery) as being part of both the heavenly and the earthly realms.13 Understanding oikonomia (or dispositio, in Latin) as a Foucauldian project, Agamben interprets it as a general theological genealogy of modern economy and governmentality. Modern political and economic doctrines, such as the invisible hand of liberalism over a self-regulated market and society, go back to these early Christian theological concepts, which refer to God’s activity in the world. Such a genealogy of economy—meaning of a government of men and things—is pertinent to a critical re-orientation of thinking concerning key socioeconomic concepts such as the capitalist ethics of work (according to Max Weber) or the fetishism of commodities, alienation, and human labor (as per Marx). Not only various political concepts, but also the triumph of financial thinking over every other aspect of life in our times, testifies to this close connection between modernity and the secularized version of the theological concept of economy and governance. The novelty of Agamben’s claim—echoing both Walter Benjamin’s ideas of capitalism as religion and Carl Schmitt’s famous thesis about the modern theory of state as a secularized theological concept—is that modern power is inherent not only in political and financial administration, but also in Glory (doxa), meaning the ceremonial, liturgical acclamatory apparatus that has always accompanied it. As Agamben puts it:

The society of the spectacle—if we can call contemporary democracies by this name—is, from this point of view, a society in which power in its “glorious” aspect becomes indiscernible from oikonomia and government. To have completely integrated Glory with oikonomia in the acclamative form of consensus is, more specifically, the specific task carried out by contemporary democracies and their government by consent, whose original paradigm is not written in Thucydides’ Greek, but in the dry Latin of medieval and baroque treaties on the divine government of the world.14

This is exactly the issue of what is perceived as the visual manifestation of power sustained by the semio-time offered by consumers-creditors of semiocapitalism, which allows mediation regarding art’s current state and future role. In view of capitalism’s tendency to commercialize everything as part of global financial speculation, could art—understood as affective and sensuous time—offer an alternative? If economy alongside bio-politics is the secularized pendant to oikonomia, and the technological spectacle produced by modern industries of the imaginary is the equivalent to Glory, then the following question arises: If the work of art as a dispositif of acheiropoieton can be turned back against the doctrines, what caused human labor to appear as a commodity at the very beginning, and what caused current society to look like a network simply of fiscalized info-producers?

It is pertinent to us that art permanently assumes its position as acheiropoieton—a slow and mute icon—offering the impression that it is situated outside the world of labor (semio-time) as part of a particular economy. In this regard, the economy of the artwork might be the hidden equivalent of both the governmental machinery and the economic control power within our alienated society. Because of this, art strives to infiltrate current society with the ascetic notion of the acheiropoieton and to hijack the secret center of power: capitalism’s political and financial mechanisms and the spectacular “glory” that sustains them. Eikonomia,15 an economy of the work of art, can serve as a Trojan horse against the appealing and seductive deluge of accelerated information produced by “creative” investment managers, film producers, software developers, and corporate advertisers, who sustain commodity fetishism and direct consensual political decision-making. Such an alternative economy does not exist outside the given system of hyper-capitalism. It simply works outside the given informational parameters of the system. It produces an inconsumable and intensified semiocapital, slowing down affective and cognitive time—or, in the words of Lazzarato, it creates novel “time-crystallization-machines.”16 This is its hidden surplus value in view of a future society in which labor is not a commodity, but the production and consumption of content-time.

It is indeed difficult to imagine a world in which the economy of the artwork will have a stronger influence on the global distribution of images, stock market courses, and the bio-politics of labor, and will be able to establish a paradigmatic shift in society. But even if such a world remains utopian at the moment, art’s double nature, which intervenes both in cycles of financial speculation and in the actual productive economy of affective time, still offers options for working within the structures of managerial, economic, and political control. Beyond any romantic ideas of a revolution that would end the evils of capitalism, the marketability of art should not be seen as its handicap, but as its safeguarding screen—a trompe-l’œil until a universal economy of the artwork can be established. This might not cancel out the condition of alienation inherent to the human condition and create a society free of conflicts—the romantic dream of all social revolutions—but it might be able to suspend its force to destroy our inherent social-being. The price to be paid is often very high: present-day impoverishment and precarization of intellectual labor, which makes artists (as well as inventors, philosophers, therapists, and educators) appear simply as ornamental accessories of the economy. Indeed, present-day “immaterial” and creative workers belong to the most exploited part of the labor society. Not so, though, if we evaluate this labor not according to economic, but eikonomic criteria. Nevertheless, in a futuristic post-human scenario, in which semiocapital is not only produced but is also consumed by those who are able to deal with its endless acceleration—meaning by “intelligent” machines—and in which humanity exists only as a beautiful, viral bubble within a gigantic technological, informational, and fiscal Gestell (the beginning of which might be the so-called Internet of Things), the intensified, non-fiscalized, and creative time offered by art would be our only recourses. Focusing more on labor as praxis, as a bringing-forth that takes into account human labor’s product as an acheiropoieton and its specific oikonomia, might offer us some solutions: worshiping less the golden calf of semiocapital and creating invisible dispositifs of intensified time! This project will require its own economists, theorists, and workers. Even if, for now, leading a life that is as creatively intense as it is economically effective shouldn’t be regarded as taboo, one should also urge: Be careful whom you offer credit to!

Decades after the death of Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in its Age of Technological Reproducibility was often mis-read and misunderstood, but in its own time, this essay had a profound impact upon the thinking of Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno. Almost a decade after the death of his friend, Adorno, working with Max Horkheimer, examined ”The Culture Industry” in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Adorno and Horkheimer were alerted by Benjamin the unholy alliance between politics and art, but Benjamin’s larger project in his “Work of Art” essay was more subtle. Benjamin was interested in the new mode of perception ushered in by modern mechanical reproduction. In other words, his essay recalls the anxieties of the Ninth Century Iconoclasts that the image might replace the authenticity of the Divine with a simulacra and anticipates the predictions of Jean Baudrillard that the simulacra will be substituted for the real. The central question of the “Work of Art” essay is how do we see and how to we think now that we are exposed to reproductions?

Of singular importance to this question is the association between Benjamin and the Weimar film writer, Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966). Kracauer, like Benjamin, had a Neo-Kantian background, and was one of the intellectual pioneers in formulating a theory for film, a new art form. This essay, therefore, needs to be understood from a dual perspective. First, Benjamin examined the idea of the substitution of the object for its reproduction and second, he was concerned with the new mode of cognition wrought by this new “Age.” As Kantians, both film writers, Kracauer and Benjamin, would have been concerned about the impact of a mechanical apparatus mediating reality—a mass social experience that Kant could not have anticipated when he posited his “Copernican Revolution.”

A hundred years ago, at the dawn of mass media, Benjamin was concerned with the idea of “origin” or authenticity. If the origin can be located or known, then authenticity can be assured. “Aura” refers to that “quality” which defined “art”—its inaccessibility, its remoteness, its distance from the observer/worshiper. Art—or that special object set aside from normal social life—was always a cult object, viewed but never approached, venerated but never touched. However reproductive technology was in the process of dispelling “aura” by making a cult object visible and available through an endless reproduction. As Benjamin wrote, “By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique experience.”

“The masses,” Benjamin thought the masses wanted to get closer to the object in their “concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness.” The precise thing that gave art its “aura” must be assimilated into a mass experience. Benjamin understood that “art” needed to be understood from another point of view, one that did not depend upon the inaccessibility of the object. He also understood that the entire apparatus of mass media reproduction, especially film, had a profound impact upon how people would perceive the world: through the mediating actions of images. These images would be ubiquitous and would bear messages of all kinds. Unlike the work of art, these images would be partial, fragmented, un-whole, and conveyed via montage, which sliced through time and space, deploying incomplete impressions.

For wholeness and authenticity and completeness and, ultimately, “aura,” “technological reproduction” must suffice and substitute. These notions of origin and authenticity and the vanishing point of aura also refer to the bourgeois ego, also on the point of vanishing into the commodity spell of capitalism. The moment of the writing of this essay—1936 in Paris—is a time of crisis for the work of art and for the intellectual freedom of the consumer, perpetually under the spell of an increasingly technological society. Thanks to technological reproducibility, art could be dislodged from its site and from its place in history and could be magically transported into the present where it could be possessed, used or misused. Under such a system, aura would wither and decline.

“Aura” was an odd topic for this most Jewish of Jewish writers to take up, for traditional Judaism forbad “graven images.” Art and its aura was a manifestly Christian tradition, but Benjamin understood art as having its origins in the rituals of the (prehistoric) cult—an object of veneration upon which human feelings of awe was projected. He defined “aura” as that which is generated by and from the work of art when it functioned as a cult object within ritual due to the distance between the relic and the worshiper. The psychological and physical space between the spectator and the relic created an aura that could be completely dispelled when the distance vanished. Mechanical Reproduction had the capability to bring that worshiped object down to earth, as it were, and place in within visual reach of the viewer.

“Auratic perception” could be defined as an atmosphere enveloping the object. The subject’s position is one of contemplation or repose, a mental absorption in the object, an “intent attentiveness”. But with the possibilities of reproductive technology, art was displaced from its position of distance and uniqueness and could be (re)possessed through mechanical reproduction. In addition that “attentiveness” was, in modern times, disrupted by the effects of mass reproduction of images, requiring little more than a passing glance.

Whereas both Marx and Baudelaire discussed the loss of the halo worn by those who had once made “art,” Max Weber used the term Entzauberung or “demystification,” or the loss of enchantment, in the world to explain the loss of “aura.” Benjamin examined the possible role of the art object in a secularized and modernized culture. Some twenty years later, André Malraux would take up the idea of reproducing works of art in his book, Museum Without Walls. By then, art history books and reproduction of works of art was commonplace, but, in the Thirties, when this use of reproductive technology was in its infancy, and Benjamin was concerned about the fate of art.

The question for Benjamin is where did the status of auratic art begin to decay? The atavistic, sacred, and mythic character of the cult object was transformed in the Renaissance. “Art” was displaced from ritual and replaced into a cult of beauty and thus became profaned. The result was contradictory—on one hand, art was emancipated from its dependence upon ritual, but on the other hand, the work of art became a fetish with mystifying character due to its former role as a cult object. Benjamin asserted that, “mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new.”

For Benjamin the reproduction of works of art, which are unique, part of ritual and sacred practices, destroys the authority of art. Loss of authenticity or aura destroys the very “rootedness” of art. This “aura” Benjamin discusses is the result of distance which is decayed by the desire of the masses to bring things closer both in human and in spatial terms. This loss of distance between the viewer and the work of art and the replacement of aura with familiarity lead to the universal equality of things, or what Benjamin called the “cult of similarity.” On this point, his friend in the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, will not only agree but will also appropriate some of his colleague’s insights. For Adorno, equality will lead to “identity thinking” and he will recommend the philosophical position of “negative dialectics” to counteract the deadly and totalitarian effects of demanding totalization of thinking.

Once the apparatus of mechanical reproduction is established, then art is produced for reproduction, fundamentally changing the character of art, which was once unique and original. Without uniqueness and originality and authenticity, art has no aura. Art is displaced from the cult and its cult value is replaced by its exhibitionary value. Once art is on film (reproduced) or is film (photography or movies) its aura “shrivels” and ”withers” to the extent that the distance is diminished. But Benjamin was concerned with the difference between the “first technology” or the desire to master nature and the “second technology,” or film, of which he said, ” The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.”

Benjamin, however, had hope for mechanical reproduction. Like his colleague, Bertold Brecht, he hoped that cinema, as a mass media, could, and would be an instrument to awaken the masses. Film inherently tended to dissipate “aura” but Benjamin balanced losses against gains and the possibility of positive results. There is the possibility of a catharsis, of a clean slate, which starts by admitting the modern poverty of experience in a disenchanted world. New technology, used properly, could change the world. The Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, had hoped that montage or editing would emancipate the thinking of his audience.

Benjamin understood that montage could work in another fashion: that editing and constructing a film role could build up an actor’s “aura,” an effect clearly seen in Triumph of Will—the “star power” of Hitler, who was framed in such a fashion to make him look like a god. Plainly, Benjamin understood the danger of the “close up” to produce another kind of aura—a more dangerous cult could arise. But he also had faith in the possibility that mass audiences could organize their own responses to film and thus, perhaps, emancipate themselves by using avenues of resistance and expression that “art” does not provide. He stated,

“Not only does the cult of the movie star which it fosters preserve the magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its commodity character, but its counterpart the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses.”
For Benjamin, the loss of aura was deeply tied to a more profound crisis, and the loss of the aura of art was but a symptom of this crisis. Borrowing from Marx and combining these insights with those of Freud, Benjamin dated the crisis from the end of the Great War to the end of the Weimer Republic, culminating in the seizure of power by the Nazis. This crisis was the shattering of tradition, a tradition that had guaranteed coherence, communicability and the transmissibility of experience—the accumulation of unconscious data called “memory.”

“Erfahfung”, that assimilation of sensations, information, and events into an integrated experience had given way to “Erlebnis” or (modern) experience reduced to a series of atomized and unarticulated moments merely lived through. Baudelaire understood modern experience, and Benjamin who wrote extensively on Baudelaire, while he was in exile in Paris, oscillated between celebrating this new culture and mourning the loss of traditional culture. He was horrified by the new political barbarism he saw and was pained by the new poverty of experience, mediated by mass culture.

Indeed, in the early years of the Frankfurt School, the scholars did empirical studies which revealed that the masses were inherently passive and uninterested in rising up politically to help themselves through political revolution. Benjamin watched while the forces of fascism took hold of the passivity of the masses and mobilized them to the cause of keeping property relations unchanged. In other words, fascism gave the proletarian mobs the illusion of participating in shaping their own destiny while they remained powerless.

The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction is often reprinted in a truncated form and was, in effect, intellectually and anachronistically “rewritten” for the purposes of re-contextualizing the work of Benjamin in the contemporary context of the art world. Art historians who rediscovered Benjamin in the 1980s depoliticized his thinking. However, this essay was very much concerned with politics, particular the rise of fascism, which manipulates the masses through art forms. Benjamin begins this essay by stating that under the “present conditions of production” (mechanical), “outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” can be used by Fascism, or they can be used for “the formulation of revolutionary demands of the politics of art.”

Benjamin understood that Fascism, like the Roman Empire before it, would attempt to provide bread and circuses to distract the masses. He also saw the danger that aesthetics and politics could be linked to war:

Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, which Fascism, with its Fuehrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus, which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war…Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.
The “self-alienation” of society, Benjamin continues, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics, which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

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Thus ends one of the most significant essays for the Postmodern Condition. However, the historical context of this essay was lost, as, when the work was finally translated, it was released in America during the high verses low culture debate. Certainly, Benjamin understood that once art was displaced from its auratic function, art could float from high to low, but his interest was more in what would later be termed “appropriation” or in what Clement Greenberg clearly saw was “kitsch” or the appearance or semblance of “art,” watered down for mass consumption. After the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s, the work of Benjamin was recontextualized and distorted to fit into Pop’s use of ready-made imagery.

In part one of this section on the “Work of Art” essay, the question was asked if this meditation on that which has been lost by Walter Benjamin has any value today, one hundred years later. In the twenty-first century, we enjoy the fruits of mechanical reproduction and “technological reproducibility.” We are inundated with images, bombarded by media, from twenty-four hour cable to radio stations that never go off the air to the faux intimacy of the Internet. All “information” gets the same weight and accountability to the “facts” is often absent. Media has become a commodity which needs to be bought and sold, meaning that intellectuals and ideas, as Marx foretold, are part of capitalist transactions.

Most people know “art” only from mechanical reproductions, augmented by occasional visits to a museum or gallery. Television flattens the intellectual landscape by giving equal value to reality shows and Masterpiece Theater. The movie industry produces entertainment for the lowest common denominator (the teenage boy) and news “papers” are becoming extinct and morphing into apps. One wonders what Benjamin would have thought. It is possible he would have delighted in the openness of the World Wide Web and would have been thrilled at the emergence of the “Arab Spring” via cell phone and blogging, but he would have grieved at television being appropriated by corporate interests, which use the concept of “news” to manipulate and dominate the masses.

When his essays were translated into English in the 1980s and made available for a wider readership, the cultural context of his essay made it clear that the writer was struggling between what he could clearly see as a misuse of “culture” and the great liberating possibilities of bringing images and people together. Here is this benign field of entertainment the dominant ideology can be challenged and perhaps changed. Years later, greatly indebted to Benjamin’s ideas, Theodor Adorno would write of a dominate “culture industry” that served to support the prevailing belief system. Benjamin would not live to see how this culture industry came to dominate and shape “reality” or how the internet allowed the people to lay their hands on “the media.” If he were alive today, Benjamin would probably be on the internet, blogging away.