Image of Immersive Van Gogh, courtesy of Redd Francisco and Unsplash
text by Perry Shimon
Walk into most art fairs today and you can reasonably expect to find yourself on the outskirts of an urban area, in a sterile convention center, walking through a maze of white booths selling wall hangings and sculptures.
Meanwhile, visual culture in the internet age is increasingly variegated, saturating, operational, and complex. In many contemporary art institutions, we encounter a range of aesthetic practices that, more or less, reproduce the dominant social and economic relations of today. These deserve closer examination.
The production of contemporary art in the age of neoliberalism largely articulates and legitimates the economic logics that encompass it. Today’s art world routinely rehearses and enacts the post-industrial trends of outsourced and deskilled labor, the rise of marketing and service sectors, and precaritization—particularly through on-demand labor contracts, often between the artist and institution as well as between the artist-as-entrepreneur and the labor hired to manufacture the art. It also serves the substantive agenda of neoliberalism and furthers the spread of its values, namely: possessive individualism, marketization, and the reconfiguration of preexisting conditions to make them more amenable to capitalization. Contemporary art engages in a rhetorical obscurantism similar to that of finance capitalism, deploying a specialized language largely inscrutable to lay audiences and serving to mystify questionable speculative financial assets.
On the occasions when contemporary artworks perform resistance to neoliberal logic, this resistance is frequently recognized at the very moment it is recuperated into the circuits of commodity exchange. For instance, Hito Steyerl’s 2015 Factory of the Sun, commissioned for the Venice Biennale and collected by Museum of Modern Art, takes up themes of surveillance capitalism, data extraction, and the gamification of exploitative labor in the form of a spectacularized critique.
Installation view of Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun, February 21–September 12, 2016 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Justin Lubliner and Carter Seddon.
Contemporary art is thus largely determined by the aesthetic conventions, rituals, and social relations developed within neoliberal capitalism. This is not to say that contemporary art is reducible to neoliberalism, or incapable of resisting it, but rather that it has become one of the privileged sites where neoliberalism aestheticizes itself, encounters critique, and frequently absorbs that critique into value production. The art market administers one of the largest unregulated global asset classes—trading at tens of billions of dollars a year—and forms part of a half-trillion-dollar (and growing) global market. I would argue that, perhaps more than anything else, contemporary art is the threshold where social and material relations become private property.
One ubiquitous example of art’s ability to render the material world in rarefied terms of artificial scarcity can be observed in the treatment of the photographic image—an easily reproducible artifact created by a complex range of historical processes, technologies, and actors that, under art’s jurisdiction, is transformed into a limited series of prints put into the market for speculation. This process, along with naturalizing the marketization of the reproducible image, also reinforces the liberal subject as sovereign owner of private property.
Contemporary art functions largely in a prospective register: an avant-garde goes out in search of new frontiers, enclosures, and commodities. In this respect, the art world shares similarities with science, which prospects proprietary opportunities and employs similar scopic regimes, including similar lens-based, lighting, and spatial conventions.
The art market has coevolved with very particular social dynamics and necessarily omits all but the most exclusive initiates who adhere to esoteric procedures and codes that aid in producing the scarcity necessary to command blue-chip prices. This scarcity propels the value of the work produced by a small group of players who control the market, as well as the canon dictating the terms that determine the reception of the work of aspiring artists.
The dynamics visible in contemporary art are not exceptional; rather, they often appear as intensified versions of broader tendencies in platform capitalism. The unique features of internet capitalism, too, find expression in artistic production today. The capture and exploitation of social energies by internet capitalism is mirrored in, for example, contemporary art’s turn toward social practice. In some ways, both online platform capitalism and artists profiting from social energies resemble earlier periods of feudalism, where the labor of landless serfs was largely expropriated by landed lords. This historical analogy becomes more resonant as the ability to survive in the contemporary becomes increasingly dependent on one’s presence online: each so-called user is allocated an individualized space and identity from which to competitively accumulate and transact attentional capital, in an illiberal metaversal space owned by an elite class who are the primary beneficiaries of all subordinate social energies.
The resulting spectacularized and competitive milieu is also reminiscent of the Colosseum, a distracting and placating arena of cruelty, competition, and violence where an anonymized and often vicious crowd administers ad hoc adjudications with their thumbs and fickle affects. These individualized, quantified, and competitive users are further subjected to relentless surveillance, advertising, and increasingly sophisticated forms of behavioral manipulation.
Pollice Verso, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872.
The set of ideologies, practices, and material effects associated with free-market capitalism—and their expression in art and its financialized transactions—can be described collectively as “neoliberal cosmopoetics.” By this I mean the aesthetic forms, perceptual habits, and ritualized social practices through which neoliberal capitalism becomes sensible, desirable, and naturalized. Neoliberal cosmopoetics will serve as a central focus of the series to follow. Beyond the fiercely guarded confines of contemporary art, and within the general field of aesthetic interaction, exist incalculable aesthetic articulations of neoliberal cosmopoetics, sometimes jostling for a position within the art market or making themselves available to the appropriative and acquisitive mode popular among professional contemporary artists.
A telling recent example of neoliberal cosmopoetics, transversally articulating itself through variegated media space, extends from Angela Nikolau, who was born in post-Soviet Moscow and studied gymnastics and art before becoming a social media sensation for rooftopping—or climbing skyscrapers and taking vertiginous selfies. She began collaborating with her partner Ivan Beerkus to make a series of images of the couple scaling the largest skyscrapers in urban centers and performing romantic tropes on life-threatening pinnacles. It’s hard to imagine a better articulation of neoliberal cosmopoetics: the performance of a competitive, zero-sum, life-or-death ascent up the tallest, phallocentric markers of capitalist architecture, filmed with selfie sticks and drones and broadcast over social media to an alienated audience, and eventually leveraged into a Netflix deal. The resulting film served to announce and promote the artists’ NFTs.
NFTs, blockchain, and Web3 more generally are all part of an infrastructural project for a new frontier of capitalism aiming to commoditize every conceivable object, process, or social relation. Contemporary art, as the most promiscuous and versatile of commodity forms, has been mobilized as an avant-garde on this new front. An infrastructure that can transact and account for the capaciousness and variability of contemporary art is well suited for nearly every other form of commoditization. The realization of this infrastructural and psychological project will mark a totalizing saturation of neoliberal realism. Everything from the commoditization of hospitality and even experiences on Airbnb to the pornogrified self on OnlyFans articulates the extent and pervasiveness with which these commoditizing logics manifest themselves.
The emerging, deterritorialized, illiberal, and almost entirely unaccountable virtual plane of interaction is supported by an extremely large and rapidly growing supply of violently extracted and exhausted material, energetic, and labor resources. The Silicon Valley model has been one of breathless Promethean marketing to raise venture capital, accumulate monopoly market positions, and then cash out with a public offering—often leaving behind staggering social and ecological ruination, distributed unevenly according to class and geographical situation. In short, the Silicon Valley model often functions like an enormous Ponzi-like scheme, dependent on perpetual growth, speculative capital, and energy consumption rivaling that of nation-states. In order to dominate these new virtual frontiers and grow them insatiably, an army of behavioral scientists, interactive designers, and programmers develop libidinally charged, dopaminergic algorithms to excite an unprecedentedly hyperstimulating and compulsive media environment. The net effect is perhaps the most addictive media environment in human history: a never-ending hallucination of instrumentalized media collapsing history into an overwhelming, anhedonic, nihilistic, consumptive presentism.
Of course, every relation has its aesthetic dimension and so a latent, mutable artfulness. If neoliberal realism names the saturation of aesthetic life by market logic, “otherwise” names practices that resist total reduction to exchange value. This series of reflections will endeavor to contour the development of contemporary art as coextensive with neoliberalism by examining generalized themes and conditions, engaging particular instances and protagonists, and exploring the aesthetic, ritual, and social practices existing otherwise.
Otherwise is a series on neoliberal contemporary art and its unbounded remainders by Perry Shimon.