Post by Admin on Feb 6, 2015 17:35:41 GMT
political conflict between neoliberalism and the fundamentalism is advanced by art as free flow of images vs. origin
_Ownership: right of possession (does not depend on either cultural commonality or special knowledge, but rather on pure empathy.) - a collective form of of community management of cultural heritage.
The question of art´s circulation, or its currency - whether migrant, native, or documented - is thus intricately tied to different understandings of its “site specificity.”
In Benmjamin´s essay (TWOAITAOIMR) the dialectic between the “native” and the “neoliberal” is already encoded.
There is still no better analysis than Benjamin´s of the economic-aesthetic “regime change” that occurs when mechanical reproduction causes the unit of aesthetic analysis to shift from individual works to virtually unlimited population of images. p.13
According to Benjamin, aura results from the site specificity. It is because the work of art belongs to a “time and space” that is can possess the authority of a witness. Reproduction jeopardises “the historical testimony” and the “authority of the object”. (It eliminates distance of time and space by making the image nomadic. Aura is closely associated with image fundamentalism.)
But as Benjamin was well aware, one of the primary aesthetic and political struggles of modernity has been the dislocation of images from any particular site, and their insertion in networks where they are characterised by motion, either potential or actual, and are capable of chaining format - of experiencing cascading chains of relocation and remediation. p.14
The commodification of identity is one of the primary crimes mechanical reproduction is accused of - the loss of authority, history, and authenticity
One could say, following the Comaroffs and contra to Benjamin, that it is saturation through mass circulation - the status of being “everywhere at once” rather than belonging to a single place - that now produces value for and through images (“and not only in “ethno-commodites”).
A buzz arises not from the agency of a single object or event but from the emergent behaviours of populations of actors (both organic and inorganic) when their discrete movements are sufficiently in phase to produce coordinated action - when bees, for example, organize themselves into a swarm. Such events are not planned or directed by a single focused intelligence - they are “distributed” over several small acts that, taken individually, may have no intention, or consciousness of a bigger picture. p16 Buzz indicates a moment of becoming - a threshold at which coherence emerges. (emergent or distributive forms) (bruno latour) p18
The emergent image is a dynamic from that arises out of circulation. As such, it is located on a spectrum between the absolute stasis of native site specificity on the one hand, and the absolute freedom of neoliberal markets on the other. Its specific location on this spectrum - its particular quotient of nontransferable native content to commercial mobility - represents its velocity as cultural product. p.20
This is what the contemporary global artwork must be: an emissary, whose power arises out of cultural translation rather than avant-garde innovation, a form of international currency that can cross borders effortlessly….Instead of continuing to accumulate more artworks in the basement of museum proliferating across the developed world, we could take image diplomacy seriously and attempt to imagine how art can function as a currency without falling into monetization…It might involve regarding images as a global resource and working toward global image justice, including the redistribution of image wealth between the global North and the global South. (inequalities between the developed and the developing worlds). p21 (cultural diplomacy as utilisation of art)
I am advocating that we think more democratically about image circulation - that we begin to consider what a reattribution of image wealth might look like, and that we use the currency of art for purposes other than financial profit. p.23 By tethering things to meanings, such analysis participates in the very process of reification that the progressive wing of art history has devoted itself to critiquing. Assigning a meaning is merely another way of setting an artwork´s price in the currency of knowledge, transforming it into a certain kind of commodity for collectors to buy and or museums to “sell” to their audiences. p.46
Like a commons, a building or a work of art may host several actions, both actual and virtual.p50
What now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible pattern through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting. What counts, in other words, is how widely and easily images connect: not only to messages, but to other social currencies like capital, real estate, politics, and so on. In economies of image overproduction connectivity is key. p.56
Brugera´s title, Generic Capitalism, as a particular apt category of all such works: she stages interpersonal transactions premised on trust and aimed at producing value though collective knowledge. This speculation on the social - on the very possibility of pro ducting different fomats form public space. The currency exchanged in such situations may be cultural (perhaps political), but we shouldn´t forget, as critics often do, that such human “commerce” is one of the pillars of financial capital: witness the art of the deal. the currency of social interaction is indeed as generic as it get. p.68
Artworks and brands are positioned on the same continuous spectrum of gradation between two ideal poles: the absolutely hermetic image, which has a connectivity quotient of o, and the absolutely accessible image, with an infinite capacity to reach audience… It is in buildings - and particularly high-profile projects designed to functions as “three-dimentional logos” (Wallace “museum branding” - that the entire spectrum between hermetic object and branding is realised in a structure. p.73
“art”, defined as a private creative pursuit leading to significant and profitable discoveries of how images amy carry new content, has given way to the formatting and reformatting of existing content - to an Epistemology of Search. The major consequence of this shift is that art now exists as fold, or disruption, or event within a pollution of images - which i have defined as a “format.” p89
Much of the work categorised as institutional critique since the late 1960s parodies the power of art without either adequately defining it or coming close to actually extinguishing it. Asserting that a work of art is a function of a framing condition of the museum (or other art world institutions) is certainly not false, but it tends to accept the museum´s ideological self-presentation on its own terms as a given rather than exploiting its complex formal more creatively. p.92
I believe image power - the capacity to format complex and multivalent links through visual means - is derived form networks rather than discrete objects. That means that works of art must develop ways to build networks into their form by, for example, reframing, capturing, reiterating and documenting existing content - all aesthetic procedures that explicitly presume a network as their “ground”. p.94