Rain Embuscado, “The Art World Responds to Brexit,” Artnet News, June 24, 2016 →.
Apparently this specific market crashed in the meantime. Art markets in general are still rather stable.
The idea of art as currency is also explored in fascinating detail by David Joselit in After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), but at a different historic moment, the moment of the expansion of neoliberal globalization. Now, at the end of this historic moment, art as currency seems to have become even more powerful.
The term “derivative fascisms” means a jumble of widespread extreme right-wing movements that relate to twentieth-century fascisms in terms of future options, but not by any means as equivalents, as in: creating and marketing future options for fascism. There is no point in asking whether they are really fascisms or not because fascism is the underlying entity, which may or may not have anything to do with its derivatives.
I use the term “middle class” in a more expanded sense—in the sense of a global middle class (which may well include both working and out-of-work classes in formerly industrialized countries) undercut by outsourcing and expanded competition. However, economic reasons are not the only explanation for the new popularity of derivative fascisms. How is it that in Germany, ninety refugee camps were attacked last year by arson alone (total attacks numbered 901 that year), while at the same time the country is doing very well economically? Indeed, the unemployment rate in Germany has fallen to its lowest level in twenty-four years. Why is Austria 53 percent likely to elect a neofascist president, when it’s own unemployment rate hasn’t surpassed 6 percent at any point since the mid-Nineties? How does one explain the constant and growing presence of extreme-right-wing organizations in these two countries that have profited massively from recent crises—Austria, from the so-called Eastern expansion, a pillage streak that moved the pensions of local retirees to the art collections of the Austrian financial industry; and Germany, which made a windfall from the European debt crisis and funneled centuries of Southern European peoples’ futures into subsidies for domestic car industries cheating on carbon emissions? It’s true that inequality has risen in both countries. But in Portugal, economic inequality is way higher, and unemployment is twice as high (not to mention state debt and related austerity policies), yet this country does not have a significant right-wing party or movement, partly due to its recent history. Look at Spain or Italy, both hit by the debt crisis; no new fascist party on the ascent. Even in Greece, hardest hit by crippling austerity, votes for the fascist Golden Dawn are going down, not up. The more than 50.000 refugees stranded there by the closing down of the so-called Balkan route have been mostly generously welcomed; certainly not with 90 arson attacks. In contrast derivative fascisms are strongest either in comparatively rich European countries (France, some Scandinavian countries, Austria) or countries that are refusing to take in refugees like Hungary or trying to minimize numbers like Poland. The economy is most certainly an important reason for the acceleration of fascism. But it is also most certainly not the only reason for the boom in fascist derivatives. In light of hard facts, the correlation between economic hardship and fascist popularity is very much complicated. The latter also requires a part of the population that will, if it feels threatened or just slighted, blackmail the whole of society vote fascist, destabilize, or kill.
To make this very clear: art is not a cryptocurrency. I am trying to point out some structural similarities between art systems and cryptocurrencies, not to suggest art as currency works in the same way. Nevertheless, the possibility of art becoming a cryptocurrency is raised in a very informative text by J. Chris Anderson, “Why Art Could Become Currency in a Cryptocurrency World,” The New Stack, May 31, 2015 →.
In contrast to cryptocurrencies, in art there is not the slightest pretense to decentralized transparency, nor the pretense to an automated incorruptible set of functions. Art as currency gains its relative stability precisely because of nontransparency, and because of its overwhelming reliance on human relations.
See →.
This leaves art projects that deal with alternative currencies (or financial options or contracts) on a double scene. They can become representational and sometimes somewhat misleading because they show something other than they actually already do themselves.
I very much agree with Ben Davis’s excellent text “After Brexit, Art Must Break Out of Its Bubble,” Artnet News, June 28, 2016 →.
By “post-public” I mean semi-public corporate ventures like biennials and many institutions and museums.
W.A.G.E., Precarious Workers Brigade, etc., are doing a stellar job on this issue, as are new artist unions and other organizations working on related issues, including Liberate Tate, Gulf Labor, etc.
The use of blockchain technology in art circulation, criticism, and documentation opens up a huge can of worms relating to the quantification of different art phenomena, the manipulation of consensus, submission to the tyranny of averages, etc. Arguably, art’s appeal (and value) derives at least in part from the fact that it does not always reproduce the so-called “wisdom of crowds” or other popularity-driven functions. There is enough great art about this (see, for example, Komar and Melamid, “The Most Wanted Paintings on the Web” →) to understand how it would be both funny and devastating for all art to be like this or made on demand according to futures and prediction markets. That said, it would be extremely useful to record the provenance and to a certain extent the authenticity of artworks, and to establish public registries of works and their whereabouts in order to prevent money laundering through art. And in the longer run, this kind of record-keeping could perhaps also support more ambitious projects. Of course, this also creates the potential for the total tracking and secondary data analysis of art works, thus assimilating them on another level into social marketing and metasurveillance.
And the currency function will be diminished by decreasing circulation, thus possibly eliminating art’s function as currency altogether, reverting artworks to commodities or products.
Adapting a set of propositions advanced by Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013) →.
Pointed out by Anton Vidokle in “Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art,” e-flux journal 43 (March 2013) →.
I am fully aware that it is a major luxury for most artists to be able to say no to anything; but even in this case one could still rethink one’s participation in circulation.
One of many excellent examples is Neue Nachbarschaft in Berlin, where Berliners—both longtime residents and newcomers—come together for art courses and lessons in German or music.
See the Platform Cooperativism website →. The idea is to use technology to connect workers and service-providers to users through platforms that are worker-owned or organized cooperatives. Blockchains are used in many of the already existing examples. A lot of art projects incorporate different versions of blockchain elements. See, for example, Sami Emory, “BitchCoin Is a New Cryptocurrency for Art,” The Creator's Project, February 10, 2015 →; and Steven Sacks et al. in conversation, “Monegraph and the Status of the Art Object,” dis magazine →. An excellent critical reflection on art projects dealing with blockchains can be found in Sven Lütticken, “The Coming Exception,” New Left Review 99 (May–June 2016).
This question requires a long paragraph reexploring the idea of “delinking” under conditions of simultaneously networked and fragmenting global systems—an idea which has been explored by Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi, among others. A more fully developed version of this text will rely heavily on Karatani Kojin’s idea of “autonomous modes of exchange.” In his book The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (2014), Karatani foregrounds circulation as a mode of production and highlights cooperativism and associationism as sites of creative organization. Art systems combine most modes of circulation mentioned by Karatani: pre-agricultural clan-based modes; modes based on plunder, expropriation, and statehood; and capitalist modes. Art also contains seeds of a potential future mode of circulation based on sharing, the dissolution of enclosures, locally actualized diverse constituencies, and the creation of parallel economies using LETS and other pre-blockchain alternative currencies. On the one hand, this means utter corruption; on the other, a parallel form of exchange. On a related note, see Aria Dean’s excellent recent text “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” which maps vectors of a Black circulationism projected by shared motion, history, movement, and multiplicity →.
I suppose big art institutions could see themselves as cities.
How do we defend municipalities under attack, like the twenty-four deposed municipalities administrated by the pro-Kuridish Democratic Regions Party (DBP) in southeast Turkey, including Nusaybin, Cizre, Sur, and Suruç, some of which have declared self-rule and operate on a model of assembly-based autonomy?
A proposition advanced by Brian Massumi in “Conjunction, Disjunction, Gift,” transversal, January 2011 →.
Confluence instead of coalition, a way to let movements move. Overflow: productive loss of control over dynamic developments. See the new issue of the journal transversal on these and other notions →.
By trying to gauge artists’ lifespans or investing according to the number of the kids female artists have.
I learned this from Elie Ayache’s fascinating treatise The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010).
Thank you to Sven Lütticken, Anton Vidokle, and Stephen Squibb for very helpful comments.