Art and Capitalism

ah [Music] somewhere I will find I'm just going through all this stuff I know you are exactly a bit of loved did you know him no I don't mean anyone I used to I thought he was one of the stupidest people I've ever met in my life you are exactly what he would have loved exactly exactly exactly exactly what he would loved sixteen million dollars seventeen million [Music] revolutionary art today is an oxymoron art today is an industry absorbed by a ghoulish masquerade of celebrity publicity and billionaire hedge fund managers our works are commodities their sale is largely unregulated and their value is resilient even in the face of economic downturn it wasn't always like this avant-garde art was once seen as a revolutionary activity socially effective public disruptive here and there it still vibes but as capitalism evolves so too does the revolutionary imagination if art isn't up to the task anymore perhaps we can invest our creative energies elsewhere shadows from quarantine I don't have any access to hardware here and I don't know when I will again so here is plastic pills with no physic I collabed on this script with Mike Watson Adorno scholar and author of this book we're gonna run through a short history of revolutionary anti-capitalist art and maybe inspire you to go [ __ ] with the cathedral machine by memeing this book addresses the online left particularly in its attempts to counter the online right via memes and videos and other content according to Watson we should seize upon the wayward and unpredictable tendencies of the Internet which may serve a similar purpose as that to which avant-garde art aspired this relationship is not without precedent Picasso said my membership of the Communist Party is the logical concept of my whole life of my whole work if I am proud to say I have never considered painting as an art of simple of amusement of recreation I have wished by drawing and by color since those are my weapons to reach ever further into an understanding of the world and have been in order that this understanding might bring us each day an increase in liberation so without further ado here's some history it's 1917 and war is raging across continental Europe as ruling elites send the poor to eat machine-gun bullets but here in an alleyway in Zurich the capital of neutral Switzerland to combustible components rub up against each other yet failed to ignite these components are the leftist revolutionary Vanguard figured by vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the artistic avant-garde in the form of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire down the street while Lenin was writing imperialism the highest stage of capitalism the Dadaists were doing this we can see here an analogy of the entwined with separate trajectories of experimental modern art and the revolutionary left to Avant Garde's of Dreams that will never become concrete and concrete realities that fail to live up to dreams revolutionary art and revolutionary politics tend to rub shoulders throughout the 20th century but while both seek to disrupt the status quo their attempts often fail this frustration is both a theme of this video and this book which argues that we might overcome it by deploying expressivity to disrupt the political and esthetic sphere could the creative energies that find expression today on the internet through memes YouTube videos and twitch be used to out-weird the increasingly bizarre state of capitalism I mean the fact is the left tends to lose publicly we've already lost that hour at politics and in the mainstream media but what we can do what we might envision is develop what Deleuze calls a minor literature a subversive lexicon vocabulary of our own and maybe it's already becoming in memes of all things a minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature on minority makes in or within a major language now hold up you might say I've done my Marxist math and the proletariat is not a minority that's where their power supposed to come from and while that's true by the numbers class consciousness is very much minor relative to the major languages today that of mainstream politics media and sadly art it wasn't always so the history of avant-garde art is full of examples of artists who challenged institutional art which is virtually always entwined with wealthy cultural elites sadly though the messages of their work gets absorbed by their celebrity Picasso's critique of warfare Guernica ended up adorning the United Nations the embodiment of the cathedral machine the rest of the art world looks like this it's going to galleries meeting other collectors seeing museum exhibits and buying things commodity celebrity and a preposterous amount of money on the increase [Music] the world thereby loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin a stereoscopic illusion a rush of filmic images without density but is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience Frederic Jamison asks here's Diego Rivera a Mexican communist mentored by Picasso he saw himself as a radical hung out with Leninists in Paris and painted murals now here's the thing about murals they're formerly democratic they break out of the gallery they're public they can't be sold to private collectors Rivera's content too was anti-imperialist and pro-labor it responded to human misery and exploitation as a result he was enthusiastic about the promises of Marxism and Leninism he signed the October group's manifesto which stated that the task of art is to raise the ideological cultural and domestic levels of the backward strata of the working class and of those workers who are undergoing an alien that is bourgeois class influence these days you need to have a few million dollars lying around to own this radically anti-capitalist art now street art co-option a politically charged art rebellion against the status quo celebrity bet you know where this is going Banksy is a street artist a rebel in a punk-rock geniux sort of way as with Rudy vadas murals street art is formally democratic it's out there to be viewed for free apart from the cloistered gallery spaces and from the private collections of the rich right no he paints on a wall they cut out the wall and sell it Banksy does his best to subvert and precisely by that subversion makes six-figure numbers at Christie's auctions his works such as the print I can't believe you morons actually buy this [ __ ] are on their face critical of the privatized art world yet fundamentally supports an elite club entwined with venture capital and major investment sectors it sold us an edition of 30 prints for over a million pounds in 2019 Banksy's trajectory of successfully commercializing anti-commercial form and content from graffiti artists to the darling of the art investment sector tails an undisputed forerunner of celebrity street artist jean-michel Basquiat as a teenager of the 70s Basquiat tagged New York streets with anti-capitalist messages as one half of the graffiti duo say mo meaning same old [ __ ] Basquiat charisma and precocious talent endeared him to some notable New York persona not least Andy Warhol whom entered Basquiat rise to international art stardom producing scrawled graffiti paintings to be shown and sold in galleries commercial success Fame and overwork led to his burnout and unfortunate death he overdosed in his Manhattan art studio which figures as both suicide and resignation from an untenable dual life the superstar artist that is on one hand decrying the system its depth lessness and pomp while at the same time being celebrated by that system as so often happens the young idealist was rinsed dry his works becoming mere commodities in the market he had railed against after a certain level of success in the art world this co-option of an artist values almost seems inevitable the artist Oscar Mario who similarly enjoyed a meteoric rise and drew early comparisons to Basquiat for his scrawled style and because of how he looked though collectors looking to pick up such works at Mario's first New York show left bemused when faced with a performative installation comprising a factory line and 13 Colombian workers producing chocolate candies the collaboration with Colombian chocolate manufacturer colombina referenced Maria's personal history as his mother worked at a candy processing plant in Colombia prior to emigrating to the UK the show aimed to bring awareness to the working conditions of exploited factory workers while at the same time presenting difficult issues of exploitation and globalization to the privileged and largely white art viewing public as politically charged as it was the work was as her huge made for sale to wealthy collectors the mechanisms of global capital keep on grinding while perversely allowing the wealthy to participate in a de personal narrative of a politically critical artists aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel seeming goods from clothings to airplanes and ever greater rates of turnover now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art again Frederick Jameson so it seemed that art has become so co-opted by this financier mechanism that it can no longer generate vectors of resistance of de territorial ization to recall Toulouse once more however the basic message of media critique namely mass media is nothing but the inane repetition served up for masses by elites doesn't hold entirely true today because of the Internet Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in the dialectic of enlightenment the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims the automatic self reproduction of the status quo and its established forms is itself an expression of domination however today we have more choice than ever before hell we don't even choose the media we make the media as such there must be some cause for positivity however tentative against the overwhelming tendency towards black pilled nihilism so what is the relevance of this to us I'll call us this channel Watson maybe you those who believe in a collective Liberatore politics that is in a brief and overly simplistic label the left activist theorists irony warriors and even posters we can and I hope this is not too presumptuous insert our present skirmishes into this narrative of avant-garde history that I've laid out after all a central dream of the avant-garde is the dream of a public art and content creation and meme culture might be the closest thing we have to that right now it's about creating a new imaginary memes and left content function is something unco optimal in terms of content for now though it's not like they don't try content like this isn't associated with genius or celebrity neither can they be used as advertising in themselves the majority of anti-capitalist messaging online cannot be directly sold to anyone and while systems of monetization do exist in YouTube and twitch the possibility that an image producers anti-capitalist messages might be co-opted simply does not exist in the same way as it does in our world at least now they can't co-opt it for anything other than its intended end though data corpse do make money off our clicks still a range of left voices are being heard as a chorus it's becoming a language with effects afk indeed the sum of memory may well have contributed in these years shift to extremes in the political views of younger voters both left and right that can't be said for a Basquiat Banksy or Mario artwork if you don't want to go so far as to call these beams or YouTube videos art then fine I probably wouldn't either but we could call me Maria cultural act in defiance of the mainstream propaganda machine in defiance of it we can always be looking for new forms of mimesis now here's a bit of aesthetic theory I think it's or Bach wrote a book on this mimesis is about art accurately imitating life so when life becomes surreal art must become surreal to imitate it and when the status quo as today becomes absurd the same goes for art memes maybe a new form of mimesis a truer representation of our reality than the rest of the image complex though I wouldn't say this is difficult if you take the mass of media images from advertising to political theater to the other spectacles I've covered on this channel there's not much reality left in screens here's a long quote but Jameson predicts in the early 90s a new left art and memes may fit this bill new art forms seek to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of place in the new global system that is consciousness broadly defined for Jameson the new political art if it is possible at all we'll have to hold to the truth of post-modernism that is to say to its object the world space of multinational capital at the same time which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing it in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our social confusion that's the purpose of this channel the expressive form of post-modernism if any there be will have as its vocation the invention of a new imaginary of subversive politics that is the writing of a minor literature look we have a goal whether or not it translates to political offices but goal is to create defiance in a lexicon of symbols art memes and of course YouTube videos it's political experimentation a task for new types of thinking we have the means more than ever before to combine the potential of aesthetic and political disruption the internet provides fertile ground for the continued attempt to unite aesthetics with the political ambitions of the left still it's worth reminding ourselves that were in for an endless struggle Adorno and Horkheimer may have been referring to media forms that are more basic and structure than our own if the basic argument still holds the media monopoly is run in the interest of profit not life posting Stalin memes and guillotines won't end in the overthrow of capitalism but that doesn't mean they don't have an expressive function I feel like I'm being overly didactic here but I'm almost through in his last unfinished work aesthetic Theory Adorno wrote that the darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational radically darkened art the absurdity of the capitalist system itself is that the systems we develop to free us from irrational beliefs then turn us into objects objects of irrational belief this absurdity perhaps is best countered by an equally absurd art form maybe we see a form of this in the mass of dank Bolshevik memes shitposting vaporwave and acid communist memory I don't know what any of these things mean and they don't make much sense to me but fundamentally does the status quo make any more sense today we have the means like never before to create media outside of the cathedral outside the gallery the image complex and create a minority rien lexicography [Music] isn't it a miracle what so much money and so little ability can't reduce just extraordinary

Channel: PlasticPills

Views: 49,891

Keywords: deleuze, frederick jameson, marxist art, diego rivera, banksy, lefttube, leftist critique, oscar murillo, basquiat, basqiat, art, artworld, capitalism and art

Id: 9RtV0oO8Pmg

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020