Liam Drain
In many ways there's already no difference between the market and art. Damien Hirst's diamond skull was more or less the Duchamp Fountain of the market. Duchamp demonstrated that the difference between an art-thing and and a non-art-thing is invisible. Similarly, the conceptual import of Hirst's skull is determined by its status in global markets. The good thing is, now there's an object in the world that demonstrates how the art market is inextricably bound to other global markets and how these markets are exploitative and violent - from the working conditions in diamond mines to the fact that there are plenty of people in the world who would be very willing to kill a security guard to steal Hirst's sculpture. Not that that will ever happen, but things of great market value create potentially bad situations. In the case of Hirst's sculpture but at least it's a physical thing. Trading in an economy of constructed social situations is, of course, already happening but nevertheless, the prospect of full-on incorporated capitalism as a form of social practice is troubling. Especially after the recent global financial meltdown, how many more chances are we supposed to give capitalism?
The contemporary corporate environment appears to be, and in some ways might be, more egalitarian than it was in the past -you get to wear jeans on Friday and call your boss by their first name. But bosses are bosses. In the new corporate environment we're obligated not only to do as we're told, but to treat the bosses like friends (notice there are no longer 'employees', we're all team members, associates, Sandwich Artists, etc.), joke around, participate in team building exercises and so on but the relations of power haven't really changed. They're just hidden better. The people at Weiden & Kennedy seem to being having a great time and many of them must find it to be a very satisfying and rewarding place to work, and good for them -we should all be so lucky, but there's way more at stake than personal enjoyment or fulfillment. Business is concerned with maximizing efficiency to produce market values and the market produces social condition that are far from fair. So, it's true that capitalism seems to be infinitely adaptable, able to co-opt everything (e.g. the cellphone commercials that are indistinguishable from Improv Everywhere's performances) and remain structurally the same, but that doesn't mean we should surrender to the model of capitalism.
Art is one of the few things left in the world accommodating to values other than market value, profit, and efficiency. It's impossible to remove the villainy from business because the villainy is not a symptom of some defect in implementation that can be worked out by adopting egalitarian or sustainable business practices. The villainy is structural. Business wants to reproduce itself infinitely, no matter what. From nuclear weapons to the imminent ecological catastrophe, all the ways we've made to destroy ourselves are products of capitalism. So, when the bombs go off or the ice caps melt, will the few people left to roam the wasteland pushing shopping carts around like in Cormac McCarthy's The Road consider the event of flashing lights in the sky, then fires, then nothing to be the catastrophe, or will they think of the conditions leading up to the flashing lights in the sky, fires, then nothing to be the real catastrophe? And if they got a chance to rebuild the world, what mistakes would they want to avoid repeating? Just the bombs? Just the dependence on fossil fuels? Wouldn't they want to avoid the social structures that allowed the bombs to be built or the ice caps to melt? And since all of that stuff that can, and probably will kill us already exists, since those structures are already in place, why not just act like we're already pushing shopping carts around an ashen wasteland (except now we're lucky because we still have some resources left that might be used to resist and rebuild)?
For the most part, art is already lost to the market; artists like Jeff Koons and Hirst adopted a corporate model in their production years ago and we've had plenty of social practice projects using the humiliating boss-who-forces-you-to-pretend-he's-not-the-boss (or author-who-forces-you-to-pretend-he's-not-the-author) model but there might be some room for art to resist capitalism, if not to win (because we probably can't win), at least on principal.
Works of art have always been really good at being new, unpredictable things in the world. They're good at being undetermined and radically inefficient (kind of like babies). A hopeful feature of social practice is the potential for inefficient, un-business-like situations.
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