art: politics & value

We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his

that anything could be validated as long as one could find the correct strategies for getting and holding the attention of the media. In art, this became aggravated by the sudden rush of art investment – not yet the mania it would become in the seventies, but large enough nearly to abolish, for a time, the idea that an artist’s thought and

Fifty years ago, junk was junk, not “antiques” or “collectibles.” Almost anything could be had at the Flea Market for virtually nothing. It was like the unconscious mind of Capitalism itself: it contained the rejected or repressed surplus of objects, the losers, the outcast thoughts. There, in a real place, the sewing machine met the umbrella on

An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent,

Their definition of culture was dominated by two large facts. First, cultural alternatives were now multiple, not vertically ranked; they spread across a field of choice generated by mass production and machine reproduction, and did not rise from the corner sweetshop to the Athenaeum Club. Second, books and painting were no longer socially dominant

Only a tiny number of people today try to draw what they have seen or what has happened to them, compared to the hordes of those for whom the camera is an everyday tool.

In our time, this cult is fed by corporate gold-and-masterpiece shows,

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks only to please and amuse, and succeeds?

work accumulates “value” and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today’s politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.