Art Against Art – Issue #4

The art market is being kept alive with constant stimulus in the form of Venice-Basel-Kassel-Athens-Frieze-TEFAF. As the series of electric shocks continue, the art market is still in a period of reconfiguration trying to find longevity in the new. Whereas the art fair format inherently lacks culture – merely being a market place/forum for where exchange takes place – the biennial format has become too broad to create lasting cultural meaning; therefore the art market must look elsewhere for metrics of value. But if it only finds mirrors of its own logic (the free market itself), it will do nothing more than to accelerate the process upon which it has been organizing itself.

Definitions of culture have traditionally meant that the market can reflect on them too to prevent it from being flippant and volatile. The free market functions anchorless and incomprehensible without definitions – landmines of bubbles created without any meta signifier or even private collections and museums springing up that hang on the whim of the collector/personality/entrepreneur rather than frames of reference that create wider cultural value.

Contributors: Iain Robertson, Andrew Rankin, Antek Walczak, Samuel Veissière, Marina Pinsky, Taslima Ahmed, Klaus Theweleit, Jeff Berwick, Guan Xiao.

€9.00

Buy

EDITORIAL

When considering the art field as being a raft in speculative time, the tendency is to seek comfort in numbers, regressive ideas such as another return to painting[1] or hedging bets on all sides whilst pursuing an unreasonable personal growth fetish.

These are classic reactions to a perceived risk that arises as a result of readjusting to new data. Uncertainty, if left unmediated, will pose a risk not just to market stability but to conceptual stability as it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate between artists and ads; artworks and hype-objects; or content and sponsored content – keeping us in a state of high drama too complex to decode. For example artists who consciously use marketing strategies as art are contextually mixed up with masses of artists who simply run a marketing strategy. Or, equally, galleries with a reputation for long-term quality regularly use their weight to inflate very short-lived speculative art. It is in these differences that art barters itself off very quickly to sometimes uninteresting effects holding us in a certain inappropriate narrative if we are not careful.

Up until a hundred years ago, it was normal to assume that all art aimed at “beauty” or varying degrees of “representation” and that anything but, would not be considered art. Later, after The Fountain, this evolved into the politics of mass production leading to whatever fallacy that we have today – perhaps a speculative bias targeted at an erroneously projected future consensus. It may be worth considering ditching all retroactive rhetoric about “safe places” in favor of heightening one’s own form of perception (perhaps even through enhancement), to adapt to the new environment and to filter through informational debris.

Inside the art world…

9€
Buy it